Aid, Governance and Development
It has been recognised in more recent encyclicals that wealthy countries’ ‘development’ policies should be aimed at aiding other countries towards becoming agents of their own development – rather than be policies simply effecting a transfer of income. In previous Catholic Social Teaching, there was little recognition of the fact that unexamined government-to-government income-transfer actually strengthens those recipient-countries’ institutions which brought about the failure to develop in the first place.
The Catechism Of The Catholic Church (re-affirming Centesimus Annus) places a new emphasis on good governance in the target country : “The activity of a market economy…presupposes sure guarantees of individual freedom and private property, as well as a stable currency and efficient public services. Hence the principal task of the state is to guarantee this security”.
Foreign aid can be diverted towards rewarding the governing elites in countries where those elites keep their people poor. The aid-flow can also have the effect of persuading the local entrepreneurial classes to abandon their business initiatives – and to look instead towards central government for a share of the spoils (the right to which is often simultaneously contested by ethnic groupings). Sometimes the aid is swallowed up in crass government consumption – rather than in health and education investment. And even in cases where donors learn that the aid has indeed gone towards health and education, the local funding ear-marked for these areas may have been withdrawn.
Populorum Progressio suggested that individuals support the raising of taxes so that public authorities could expand their income-transfers to poor countries. But it is difficult to justify such statements, given the empirical and theoretical knowledge we now have on the record of development aid. The particular mix of charity and political action that is appropriate is not something which church leaders have generally laid down, and proponents of aid should be careful about drawing conclusions that ignore this practical tenet. Church leaders should rather encourage their people to try to better understand issues like : What should be the response of our government when human rights, property rights, basic freedoms and basic principles of justice are absent in poor countries ? Where, of course, an internal reform programme is already progressing within a country, outside aid can serve to complement this.
Philip Booth is Editorial and Programme Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London
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