Among the arguments that the Trump administration has put forward for its review of its foreign aid programs – including very large funding cuts and the dismantling of its principal international development agency, USAID – has been an apparent lack of “alignment” of these programs with US national interests. Even though implementation arrangements have varied, similar claims regarding the need for greater alignment between development and other foreign policy objectives have underpinned the abolition of stand-alone development agencies in New Zealand (2009), Canada (2013), and the United Kingdom (2020), as well as major changes to aid policy and budget settings in other Western donors.
The alignment justification also underpinned the abolition of Australia’s aid agency, AusAID, by the Abbott government in 2013. But there were some notable contradictions. In Opposition, then Coalition foreign affairs spokesperson Julie Bishop repeatedly criticised the Labor government’s alleged use of the aid program to help secure developing country votes as part of the Rudd/Gillard governments’ campaign for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But as was pointed out at the time, this campaign was run out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) into which AusAID was subsequently merged. This critique therefore seemed to imply there was too much “alignment” between aid and wider foreign policy goals, rather than too little.
The truth is that the nexus between the provision of development assistance and the national interests that aid helps serve has always been complex, contingent and contested. As others have argued, “if there ever was a contested concept in politics, it is the ‘national interest’.” The circles of the Venn diagram through which we might depict the relationship between Australia’s aid and its various national interests can range from the very broad and unmeasurable (i.e., encouraging “stability, prosperity and resilience”) to the very narrow and unmentionable (i.e., transactional deals involving the use of aid to achieve specific diplomatic quid pro quos), and everything in between. They can also encompass the wider “public interests” of Australian society and economy, broadly conceived, or those of narrower domestic constituencies, like Australian business interests. The explicit focus on aid’s role in advancing Australia’s “economic diplomacy” under Bishop’s tenure as foreign minister is an example of the latter.
The nexus between the provision of development assistance and the national interests that aid helps serve has always been complex.
For around 20 years (1997-2020), this ambiguity was partially solved by directly equating “poverty reduction and sustainable development” with Australia’s “national interests”. This was reflected in the various policy statements of both major parties when it came to articulating aid’s purpose, albeit in different combinations. This gave the aid program some kind of anchoring in a clear overarching and measurable set of outcomes. Moreover, they were the kind of outcomes that could be justified in terms of a wider, public interest shared by most Australians.
But even this rendering did not prevent tensions between Australia’s interests in a particular development outcome and our other foreign policy goals. For example, the tensions between Australia’s long-standing assistance to Nauru to host the offshore processing of people arriving by boat and the tangible deterioration in governance in that country, which is heavily reliant on this assistance, have endured. While this assistance may have helped achieve Australia’s “interests” when it comes to deterring people-smugglers, it has arguably come at the expense of Australia’s other regional objectives, our human rights record, and Nauru’s own long-term development.
While government has invoked “all tools of statecraft” as a framework for thinking about these relationships, none has been willing to subject progress on those foreign, trade and security policy goals that aid is supposed to advance to the same level of scrutiny as that which surrounds the performance and impacts of our development programs, obscuring trade-offs.
Usefully, some have suggested alternative frameworks that could help untie these policy knots. These frameworks highlight the potential advantages of thinking about aid as a form of national and international “problem solving”, which involves “shift[ing] our focus from things we want to do and towards things that most significantly impede our welfare”. Others have similarly suggested the value of “mission-driven approaches”, emphasising the articulation of clear policy goals and the empowerment of development agencies, partners and experts with the resources, flexibility and autonomy necessary to achieve them. And there are other frameworks and paradigms around international development cooperation and finance that start from what a future, reformed development sector that achieves multiple, reinforcing goals – enabling global public goods, such as poverty reduction and climate action, and meeting shared policy objectives – might look like.
None of these frameworks requires making Australia’s development program less “aligned” with Australia’s “interests”. Instead, they would bring a much-needed definition and clarity to the relationship between its sometimes-competing interests, help it navigate the inevitable trade-offs that will arise and, in doing so, further strengthen Australia’s development partnerships.
