The road map of this book

Our narrative broadly follows the three periods in the DAC’s evolution sketched above, although the timelines of individual chapters are longer.

In Part I, “Mobilising Donors and Building the Aid System”, we cover the DAC’s creation and evolution in the Cold War/decolonisation period during which it built an aid system centred on the ODA concept, as well as structures and mechanisms to monitor and review it. In Part II, “Revitalising the Aid Effort through Responsive Policy Communities”, we look at the DAC’s orientations and actions during the post-Cold War years when support for development assistance initially faltered and needed to be revitalised in the face of acute policy challenges. In Part III, “Adapting Development Cooperation to New Geopolitics and Challenges”, we address the DAC’s current adaptation to fragmentation, contestation and its own waning influence in the field of development cooperation. The “Concluding Thoughts: The DAC and the Aid System in Retrospect and Prospect” chapter draws out the dilemmas and elements of learning that can be applied to future development cooperation efforts within and beyond the DAC.

Before we begin our journey, Richard Carey’s Chapter 2, “Development and Cooperation: Epistemologies and Ambiguities”, explores the dualities, ambiguities and paradoxes that have characterised the DAC’s development thinking and practices. His epistemological overview of the wider

development community with its associated contributions and issues is designed to help the reader better understand the narratives that follow.

Leading off Part I of our history, in three successive chapters, Gerardo Bracho provides an original interpretation of the origins of the modern aid agenda down to a minute account of the birth of the DAG. In what constitutes the third chapter of the book, “The Origins of Development Aid: A Historical Perspective”, he traces and analyses the key influences and events that underlay the creation of the counterintuitive development cooperation enterprise against the background of both pre- and post-WWII drivers of the international political architecture. Chapter 4, “From an Aid Agenda to a North-South Aid Regime: The Path to the DAC” analyses the shift from a deeply militarised US aid agenda to a developmental aid focus that sought to mobilise other donors and establish an institutional home to counter the Soviet “Thaw” and charm offensive toward developing countries. Chapter 5, “Diplomacy by Stealth and Pressure: The Creation of the Development Assistance Group (and the OECD) in 51 days”, presents Bracho’s meticulously researched blow-by-blow account of the 51 days of inspired US statesmanship leading to the creation of the OECD with the DAC as an integral, foundational element. A previously unknown paradoxical picture emerges. Although the DAC came into being driven by the Cold War, some of its key members, with their own visions and interests, resisted the over-politicisation of its agenda. Without geopolitics the DAC might not have emerged; yet submission to geopolitics would have shot it in the heart. Although the DAC was born amid much speculation and polemics, it was a technical body – more “boring” but better geared to further the cause for development – that saw the light of day.

Chapter 6, “The Evolution of Aid Statistics: A Complex and Continuing Challenge”, traces the origins of aid statistics and the path to the ODA concept, followed by the structures and methods put in place to track DAC members’ development assistance and to monitor and review their performance. William Hynes and Simon Scott pose critical questions about the credibility of ODA when its essential element of concessionality disappears and the associated reputational risk. In his Chapter 7, “Putting the ‘D’ into OECD: The DAC in the Cold War years”, Richard Woodward credits the DAC with the major achievement of establishing the institutional and intellectual scaffolding of international development cooperation during that time, despite jealousies of other better-known and operationally-oriented institutions. The two final chapters of Part I relate experience from

cooperation with the Soviet Union, later with Russia (Chapter 8, “The Donor that Came in from the Cold” by Hynes and Alexandra Trzeciak-Duval), and Arab donors (Chapter 9, “Arab Donors and the DAC” by Hynes and Peter Carroll) that could show ways forward in engaging with other non-DAC aid providers. The influence of geopolitical factors and the DAC’s motivations in alternately pursuing and abandoning engagement with other players at different stages of its history are examined.

Indeed, geopolitical factors lead to the discussions in Part II. The assumption of the triumph of democracy and the “end of history” that immediately followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union were expected to usher in a new era of international cooperation, with, for a time, just one superpower left. Quickly, there developed a lull in DAC members’ commitment. Efforts to incentivise and mobilise renewed commitment took form through the DAC’s shaping development priorities for the 21st century, which led to the MDGs, the story related by J. Brian Atwood and Carey in Chapter 10: “The DAC and the MDGs”. This era was marked by greater attention to aid effectiveness and partnerships, recalled by Richard Manning and Atwood (Chapter 11, “DAC High Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness”), and growing attention to those – previously overlooked – left behind in fragile states and situations, researched by Trzeciak-Duval (Chapter 12, “Under the Gun: Fragile States and Development”). In all these areas, liberated from polarising Cold War competition, within the relevant communities of practice, the DAC took a prominent and well-recognised leadership role.

During the same period, via involvement in initiatives elsewhere, notably in the United Nations (UN), the DAC worked to advance issues of gender equality and women’s empowerment and the evolution of an active voice for women in their own communities and countries, and in the UN, on the one hand, and environmental protection and sustainable development, on the other. Chapter 13, “The Innovative Politics of Influence: Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment” focusses mainly on the strategies and innovations it took against all odds to position gender equality high on the developmental agenda within the DAC and internationally. Trzeciak-Duval, nonetheless, cautions against complacency in the face of gender violence, economic discrimination against women, their political exclusion and unequal power structures, not only COVID-19-induced but also intensified by the global rise of politically and socially conservative forces and political violence. Powerful global alliances are essential to defeat

these same forces and to address the climate-related, water supply and other environmental challenges that have reached a tipping point in international decision-making. The substantial contributions by the DAC working hand-in-glove with its OECD environmental counterparts to address these issues are discussed in Chapter 14, “Tipping Point: Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development”.

As demonstrated through the development-environment partnership, the OECD seemed the obvious place to move forward on numerous issues of policy coherence for development explored by Trzeciak-Duval in Chapter 15,

“Left Hand, Right Hand: The Shifting Truths about Policy Coherence”.

As examples of incoherence became more uncomfortable to address, but also more complex, the definitions of policy coherence for development became more flexible. One striking irony emerges. Despite being chastised for incoherence in its development policy, the US, thanks to its open market access policies and falling savings rate, had huge positive impacts on poverty alleviation and economic development, notably in export-oriented East Asia and China. Equally ironically, this powerful transformation has in turn contributed to current geopolitical tensions.

All the formidable policy areas selected for Part II of this volume were chosen because they remain at the fore of future development cooperation challenges. For the DAC, all these narratives illustrate, among other things, the essential role of individual DAC members in leveraging often exceedingly modest OECD secretariat resources, especially for gender equality and women’s empowerment, and the need for wide-ranging cooperation with other actors to achieve progress, especially the developing countries most affected. Examining the measurement issues connected to each of these policy areas underscores the DAC’s critical role internationally in developing and reporting reliable statistics and thereby holding countries accountable for honouring their policy commitments.

The third part of the book highlights the shock to the system created by the road to the SDGs, as described from first-hand involvement by Olav Kjørven in Chapter 16, “The Sustainable Development Goals: The World We Want and the Return of Development Processes”. The process to agree on the SDGs was a model of inclusiveness, often missing from the DAC’s approaches. Universality was key in a world in which the notion of ‘north-south’ has long since become detached from reality and, as Kjørven puts it,

“sustainable development had finally emerged as the only acceptable way

to do development.” The SDGs call into question many of the assumptions on which development cooperation had previously relied, indeed its very existence. Victoria Gonsior and Stephan Klingebiel take it from there in Chapter 17, “The Development Policy System Now and in the Future”, by examining the disconnections between the why (narratives), how (strategies) and what (operational approaches) of the development policy system.

They pose and offer answers to existential questions about the future of development cooperation that are further discussed in the final “Concluding thoughts: the DAC and the aid system in retrospect and prospect” chapter.