Memo: International Aid Architecture at the Crossroads (2011)

Full Title: International Aid Architecture at the Crossroads

Author: Jiajun Xu

Type: Memo

Abstract

On December 1st, 2011, the World Bank organized a side event in Busan entitled “The New Aid Architecture: Trends and Opportunities” where delegates from  Netherlands, China, Russia, Brazil, Gates Foundation and Liberia shared their views on the changing nature of international aid system from three camps—traditional donors, emerging donors, and NGOs. The conventional wisdom in this debate has portrayed a landscape with two polarized claims: (a) emerging donors with “new” ideas and aid instruments have “undermined” norms and standards of the existing aid architecture; (b) emerging donors have brought viable “alternatives” to the DAC-led donor club. Yet such simplistic judgment has masked blurring boundaries between so-called traditional and emerging donors and neglected a more fundamentally transformative potential in aid architecture.