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Beyond Poverty? the New UK Policy on International Development and Globalisation

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Beyond Poverty? the New UK Policy on International Development and Globalisation Third World Quarterly, Vol 22, No 2, pp 291 –296, 2001 FEATURE REVIEW Beyond poverty? The new UK policy on international development and globalisation ADRIAN HEWITT Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor. White Paper on International Development Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for International Development by Command of Her Majesty December 2000, Cm 5006 It is a measure of the transformation taking place in British political life that the latest (December 2000) government policy document (or ‘White Paper’) on a matter as broad as world poverty and globalisation should emanate essentially from a department which a generation ago was just a small and somewhat marginalised ministry running the UK overseas aid programme. For Clare Short’s success has been to convert international development over the first four years of the Labour government (1997–2001) into a weighty subject. The first two of these years were, moreover, subject to a severe, inherited, but self- imposed, spending freeze. Yet the ‘Short’ cut to development prominence has even succeeded in making international development popular, fashionable and youthful— so far without much extra disbursement. Now that was difficult. Recall how aid was widely reported to be dying of fatigue in the 1980s (the ‘lost decade’ for Africa) and again in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War: of course, this was always more correctly ‘donor fatigue’ than aid fatigue itself, but development hardly ever made the ‘top table’ of meetings of presidents and government leaders in the last quarter of the twentieth century. 1 Now it does and it will. The Short approach, which includes output in preference to input targeting, consists in leading by example and shaming foreign leaders into ‘at least doing as much’. Her department, and her strong position in government, depend on the world being her constituency, not just Ladywood, the suburb of Birmingham, and it was thus appropriately from the pens and computers of her chosen officials in the Department for International Development that was Adrian Hewitt is at the Overseas Development Institute, 111 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7JD, UK. ISSN 0143-6597 print; 1360-2241 online/01/020291-06 q 2001 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10.1080/01436590120049763 291 FEATURE REVIEW written the new December 2000 policy document, Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor. White Paper on International Development (or Globalisation for short). Globalisation was the second White Paper from this government in three years and one month and, unlike the first, Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century (henceforth C21), it was not rushed out but subjected to a quite elaborate process of prior consultation, within but also far beyond government, and some broad participation at its various drafting stages. But do we need two White Papers in three years—especial ly as the first did not lead to any legislation; and especially as there had not been one for the previous 22 years, during which policy had clearly changed in several directions? The previous development White Paper, The Changing Emphasis of Britain’s Aid Policies: More Help for the Poorest (henceforth Poorest), went before Parliament in 1975, when Judith Hart was minister; and for the entire period of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and John Major from 1979 to May 1997 no White Paper on this subject was produced. Yet clearly policies changed. This obliges us to address a number of questions, with three at the core: c What are such policy documents for? c Who are they really for? c Is the new White Paper really new? For answers it helps to adopt a perspective which is retrospective. This takes us back into the wicked and depraved twentieth century, where development theory and practice was invented (at least, that not already available in Smith and Ricardo) and despite the exhortation in the penultimate White Paper to think only about the twenty-first century. For if we do not understand our development past, we shall be condemned to reinvent it—at great cost in consultancy contracts. Globalisation can be seen as the third in a series of White Papers on poverty over 25 years. The first, Poorest, was presented to Parliament in 1975 by Judith Hart. Its 1970s-vintage poverty-focus was genuinely innovatory: it adopted a ‘basic needs’ approach, identified the rural poor as the dominant group to be brought out of poverty and therefore it committed to increasing the resources devoted to the agri- cultural sector. (Donors in those days were allowed considerable commercial biases—including outright procurement-tying in their overseas spending, so infra- structure and industrial projects tended to be favoured to keep domestic contractors happy. All the OECD donors went along with this.) It even had a new instrument—its unique selling point—with which to reach the rural poor and boost their incomes: integrated rural development projects ( IRDPS). Almost equally remarkable was that this early policy document was not just about aid, there are some early glimmers of globalisation. By including a substantial section on Europe, it recognised that international trade policy decisions and invest- ment were at least as important for developing countries. Moreover, the Europe section is unmitigatedly optimistic (the UK had just joined the EEC in 1973) and the soon-to-be signed Lomé Convention was seen as a genuine opportunity for the country to extend its international partnerships. The prospect of a quarter of the UK’s aid going through EC channels—and effectively all its trade with developing countries, in goods at least—is greeted in the 1975 White Paper with equanimity and 292 BEYOND POVERTY? even enthusiasm. For all its originality, the 1975 White Paper is a modest, slightly self-effacing document:it talks of the changing emphasis and it merely promises comparatively more aid (in fact the UK aid programme peaked in 1979, just afterwards). However, it worked a practical policy change towards pro-poor growth in rural areas; it brought about organised changes which altered the character of development aid (some domestic lame ducks, like shipyards, were supported by drawing on the aid programme none the less); and it delivered additional resources over the following years. Had donors had the courage to persist with IRDPs over a large period, they might have worked. Instead a new government was elected in 1979 and Margaret Thatcher replaced James Callaghan as prime minister. For the next 18 years of Conservative government, no new White Paper on development was issued, and yet the policies changed markedly. As early as 1980 the government passed a new Overseas Development and Cooperation Act. This remark- able document, which is still law today, permits the secretary of state (who in those days, and up to 1997, was the foreign secretary, since the minister in charge of inter- national development was not even in the cabinet) to do just about anything with the aid programme so long as s/he spends the money abroad. There are hardly any constraints on his or her powers. Its opening paragraphs are: 1.—(1) The Secretary of State shall have power, for the purpose of promoting the development or maintaining the economy of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom, or the welfare of its people, to furnish any person or body with assistance, whether financial, technical or of any other nature. (2) Any such assistance may be provided on such terms and subject to such conditions (if any) as the Secretary of State may determine. Consequently, when, a dozen years later, a British NGO, the World Development Movement, took the secretary of state (then Douglas Hurd) to court for misusing the aid programme on the Pergau Dam, it was far from certain it would win: only the admission of an ‘entanglement’ with arms sales, diverting from the development purpose, won it the case. Nor did it require a White Paper to mark the shift away from poverty-focus to domestic interests in the aid programme. Instead, a minister stood up in the House of Commons and another in the Lords in 1981 and stated three lines committing the government in future ‘to give greater weight in the allocation of our aid to political, industrial and commercial consideration alongside our basic development objectives’. This unleashed the new mixed-credits element in the aid programme, the Aid–Trade Provision ( ATP), and a host of doubtful but expensive bilateral aid projects (often essentially supply contracts) ranging from steel mills, Leyland buses, Hawker- Siddley aircraft, dams and, perhaps most notoriously, Westland helicopters. The government did not have to argue for continuing poverty-focus because it had been abolished in a short statement. Nor would it have felt comfortable playing the globalisation card, for many of the beneficiaries of the ATP were in fact British lame ducks which later went into bankruptcy, unable to face international competition without subsidy. A further major development occurred in 1990, again without a White Paper, when Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd made a statement at an African symposium which I 293 FEATURE REVIEW myself organised in the House of Commons on 6 June, to the effect that, with the Cold War over, aid policy was going to change again: dictators would no longer be subsidised in their folly, and donors would in future choose to aid only governments which opted for democracy. Not only did it not require a White Paper to make this major shift from economic conditionality (or no conditionality at all) to political conditionality; other Western leaders, notably President Mitterrand at La Baule a few weeks later, made essentially the same speech subsequently. By the time the Labour government was elected in May 1997, UK international development policy had lost its focus on the poor and on agriculture and rural development, and had also lost quite a lot of its credibility (although there were improvements in the 1990s).
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