Whose Aid Is It Anyway? Politicizing Aid in Conflicts and Crises

The effectiveness of international aid, both in meeting urgent needs and in tackling entrenched poverty, is being undermined in
some of the world's poorest places. While effective aid has helped save lives, protect rights and build livelihoods, some donors'
military and security interests have skewed global aid spending; and amidst conflict, disasters and political instability have too
often led to uncoordinated, unsustainable, expensive and even dangerous aid projects. Skewed aid policies and practices
threaten to undermine a decade of government donors' international commitments to effective, needs-focussed
international aid. This paper sets out how these commitments are being disregarded, and how this trend can be reversed.

Effective aid helps save lives, protect rights and build livelihoods. Yet in conflicts and politically unstable settings from Afghanistan to Yemen, lifesaving humanitarian assistance and longer-term efforts to reduce poverty are being damaged where aid is used primarily to pursue donors' own narrow political and security objectives. This is not only undermining humanitarian principles and donors' development commitments; it impacts on the lives of some of the most vulnerable people affected by conflicts and natural disasters.

• Some donors are increasingly concentrating both humanitarian and development aid on countries and regions seen to threaten their own immediate security interests, while neglecting other equally insecure, impoverished and conflict-afflicted places. Since 2002 one-third of all development aid to the 48 states labelled ‘fragile' by the OECD has gone to just three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.During this period aid to Iraq and Afghanistan alone has accounted for over two-fifths of the entire $178bn global increase in aid provided by wealthy countries.
  
• From Afghanistan to Kenya, poorly conceived aid projects aimed at winning ‘hearts and minds' have proved ineffective, costly, and have sometimes turned beneficiary communities and aid workers into targets of attack. Such practices are growing: US aid funds allocated to front-line military commanders to win ‘hearts and minds' in Iraq and Afghanistan are now almost as large as the worldwide Development Assistance budget of the US government's aid agency USAID.
  
• In Afghanistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Somalia and elsewhere, donors and military forces have made aid conditional on the political and military cooperation of communities and aid organizations; and have used aid to buy information or compliance with military forces.
  
• While military assets and logistics have played vital roles in emergencies and natural disasters, aid inappropriately delivered using military forces themselves has sometimes led to wasteful and costly aid, while overlooking the real contribution that military and police forces can make to vulnerable communities' security needs. For instance, the Spanish army's high-profile vaccination programme and water distribution following the Haiti earthquake cost over 18 times that of comparable civilian efforts, which the Spanish military partly duplicated.
  

These problems are not new, but the impact of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as more recent aid policy shifts, have increased the trend. Both in Europe and North America, aid policies and programmes skewed by donors' foreign policy and national security interests are beginning to be formally embedded in international development strategies and humanitarian practices. Foreign policy biases have since 2001 been written formally into aid policies and funding decisions in the USA, Canada and France. Elsewhere, including in the UK, Australia and the European Union, such priorities are at risk of being formally embedded in new international development strategies.

Policy coordination across foreign, defence and development departments can help better address common obstacles to
development: for example, tackling climate change and capital flight; protecting civilians in conflict; preventing irresponsible arms transfers. But recruiting aid and aid institutions for donors' own national security objectives risks undermining the effectiveness of aid in meeting humanitarian needs and maximizing poverty reduction. Not only does this damage impartial attempts to provide aid and tackle poverty, but it often fails to build long-term security for recipient communities, their
governments and donors themselves.