Global Poverty and Foreign Aid
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO GRADUATE SCHOOL IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES PH. D. PROGRAM IN POLITICAL STUDIES - XXIX COHORT PH. D. DISSERTATION GLOBAL POVERTY AND FOREIGN AID DISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC SECTOR: SPS/04 TUTOR: PROF. MARCO GIULIANI PH.D. CANDIDATE: PH.D. PROGRAMME COORDINATOR: ASIER ERDOZAIN GONZÁLEZ PROF. FRANCESCO ZUCCHINI ACADEMIC YEAR 2015-2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Before embarking on the doctorate, I was quite surprised by the frequent comments of several of my co-workers at the time who told me how the doctorate had been for them one of the most solitary periods of their lives. Like some sort of lonely ride, they used to tell me. I of course thought they exaggerated, since between classes, seminars, workshops, conferences, fieldtrips etc., it seemed to me that doctoral students have a lot of opportunities to interact with professors, experts, researchers, students, etc. And indeed, it may be that this is the case but once the thesis is finished, I have no choice but to admit that my former colleagues were right. Nevertheless, although I have spent most of the time during the last two years confined with books and articles at the public libraries of Turin and surroundings, which I know better than those at my own home city, Bilbao, there is some people to whom I own too much. I will start with Professor Francesca Pasquali, who gave me a course in Political Philosophy at the beginning of the Ph.D. in 2014, a period in which I slept very little commuting between my little town in Turin and Milan everyday. Professor Pasquali, to whom I am particularly grateful, owns a great deal of the merit of my thesis since without she knowing it, her understanding of philosophy and the way in which she teaches it, aroused in me an enormous curiosity for political and moral philosophy and for those thinkers —practically unknown to me until then— who have marked the way in which we today understand principles and values such as justice, solidarity and freedom. Without her, I would not have been able to scrutinize a discipline that I consider fundamental today to understand the problems of the world —especially those related to global poverty— and face them adequately. Respecting the temporal sequence of the doctoral period, the next one on the list of people to whom I am immensely grateful is Professor Marco Giuliani, who have not only contributed substantially to my learning of another discipline, compared politics, but also supported me in all the inclinations that I had in relation to how to conduct my Ph.D., preferences that sometimes deviated substantially from the conventions of the University, such as following a multidisciplinary approach or undertaking a fieldwork in a country such as Rwanda, where the University of Milan had no previous institutional relations. Professor Giuliani with great respect and determination guided me through the process and gave me the confidence necessary for this thesis to be completed. Now it is time for two Rwandan scholars: Professor Bititi Gisaro and Professor Mbonyinkebe Déo. After formalizing the corresponding arrangements with the University of Rwanda, Professor Gisaro was assigned by the University of Rwanda as my tutor or local coordinator for the research that I was conducting in Kigali. His instructive explanations about the workings of the Rwandan institutional framework as well as the dedicated support he offered me in arranging the interviews with the national authorities was priceless. Thanks to his personal contacts and his determination and commitment, I was able to conduct interviews with high-level authorities of the country that I could not otherwise been able to access. Professor Déo´s help was also of immense value. He was one of the first scholars that read carefully the draft of the article I wrote about the relationship between the government and the donors of Rwanda. His observations were crucial in order to properly focus the article, so that its conclusions were strictly derived from the methodology applied, avoiding biases and baseless assessments that would have eroded the paper´s credibility and robustness. Beyond that, Professor Déo was a great help to understand a little more about the recent history of a country that has suffered the unimaginable and whose authorities since the genocide have been the object of both, great praises and acid criticisms. During the last three years and some months, I have not only benefited from professors and academics. The group of colleagues of the 29th cohort of the Ph.D. on Political Studies is really fantastic. Both our laughter and enthusiastic discussions helped me to survive the large amount of intensive and sometimes intense courses at the beginning of the doctoral period. In particular, I want to thank Niccolò Donati, Pierre Van Wolleghem and especially my good friend Goran Filic for their friendship and for making me recall this period also for the fun we had. 4 Now my family. My mother Mari Carmen, who has been following closely my progress and day-to-day challenges, she above all is my accomplice in that innate rebellion against the status quo that we both share, which, despite her advanced youth, emerges in almost every conversation that we have. She possesses the rare gift in our days of challenging energetically current establishments and institutions that, as we both think, could infinitely be more helpful to the poor and the vulnerable. My father, Josu, is another rebel, although perhaps he is not aware of it yet. While he has been a professor of ethics and moral philosophy for around 40 years, today at his mid 70s, he voluntarily devotes a full working day —except when I interrupt him to discuss philosophy— leading the NGO that he founded years ago to support immigrants in the city where he lives. Moreover, our long debates on morality and justification have been absolutely crucial to approach adequately and develop the main arguments of the normative chapter of this thesis. Both my parents cannot be but an inspiration for my work. My brothers Iñigo and Josu have also been a great stimulus for me, as working hard in the things one believes represents a motto that they have applied in their lives in a silent but persistent way, showing to the ones that are close to them that going against the current is as hard as it is gratifying in the end. Finally, my wife Itziar is the person to whom I wish to dedicate this thesis. The work I´ve done has benefited endlessly from her devotion and experience in the world of international cooperation; and her intuitions and common sense —infinitely more developed than mine— have helped me to shape several of the arguments that I put forward in the thesis in such a way that they keep displaying strength and determination but objectivity and sobriety at the same time. I think that her patience and support in many ways cannot be compensated in a live time. She and my sons, Eneko and Ander, are the engine of my work. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................... 9 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 11 Quantitative approach ................................................................................................ 22 Qualitative approach .................................................................................................. 28 Normative approach ................................................................................................... 39 CHAPTER 1. OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE (ODA): CONCEPT, ORIGINS, EVOLUTION AND LATEST CHALLENGES .................................................................. 49 ODA´s Definition ........................................................................................................ 49 ODA´s Origins ............................................................................................................ 54 ODA´s evolution .......................................................................................................... 60 ODA´s Challenges ....................................................................................................... 79 CHAPTER 2. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE (ODA) — QUANTITATIVE APPROACH ..................................................................... 93 “Aid effectiveness during the MDG period: human development perspective” CHAPTER 3. RWANDA, A SUCCESS CASE FROM THE AID-EFFECTIVENESS PERSPECTIVE — QUALITATIVE APPROACH ................................................................................ 139 “Rwanda´s foreign aid system: a blend of exemplarity and guilt” CHAPTER 4. MORALITY AND GLOBAL POVERTY — NORMATIVE / PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH .......................................................................................................... 181 “Overcoming the paradigm of the do-no-harm motto: the nonsensical individualistic moral framework to global poverty” CONCLUDING REMARKS ....................................................................................... 207 APPENDIX. INTERVIEWS’ TRANSCRIPTS. ................................................................ 215 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACU Aid Coordination Unit (ACU) AEL Aid Effectiveness Literature BSHG Budget Support Harmonization Group CEM Coarsened Exact Matching CEPEX Central Projects and External Finance Bureau (CEPEX), CPAF Common Performance Assessment Framework