Why We Lie About Aid: Development and the Messy Politics of Change

Foreign aid is about charity. International development is about technical fixes. At least that is what we, as donors, are constantly told. The result is a highly dysfunctional aid system that mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation and gets attacked across the political spectrum: those on the right claiming we spend too much, those on the left that we don’t spend enough. The reality, as Pablo Yanguas argues in this highly provocative book, is that aid isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—about levels of spending, nor interventions shackled to vague notions of accountability, ownership, and harmonization. Instead, a different approach is possible, one that acknowledges aid as being about struggle, about taking sides, and about politics. It is an approach that has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world, providing political coverage for local reformers to open up spaces for change. Drawing on a variety of convention-defying stories from aid practitioners across the world, from Britain to the United States and Sierra Leone to Honduras, Yanguas provides an eye-opening account of what we really mean when we talk about aid.