Over the past four years, it was safe to say that foreign aid and global cooperation were not high priorities of a Trump presidency that repeatedly attempted to slash funding and pull out of international partnerships. However, the United States continues to provide the highest amount of official development assistance for low-income countries while transitioning to a Biden administration that has already demonstrated its support for aid and diplomacy. The primary engine for delivering U.S. foreign aid is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which in 2019 spent just over $20.6 billion on humanitarian and development projects across 28 different sectors in 134 countries.
The U.S. looks ready to re-establish itself as a leader on the global stage as the world faces critical challenges and must do so by restoring its credibility and transforming international aid policies, according to Dr. Edward Carr of Clark University. After reading his recent piece for The Conversation on the topic, I followed up with Dr. Carr to discuss U.S. credibility as a global leader, his experience working with farmers in West Africa, how aid money flows and what all these topics mean for the future of U.S. foreign aid.
Why U.S. Credibility Matters
Drawing on his experience in academia and government work, Dr. Carr points out how the Trump era led to the loss of U.S. prestige, influence and capacity in the global aid context. Now he believes that it is necessary to restore this credibility to build back the prestige, influence and capacity of the United States and address today’s most pressing global challenges.
When it comes to climate issues, Dr. Carr sees the U.S. economy and its associated emissions as a significant force in the global approach to climate change – “a 500-pound gorilla,” in his words. This outsized influence means that decisions made by the U.S. regarding its approach to tackling the climate crisis will shape global emissions levels and impact the global economy.
In other words, reshaping the U.S. economy to meet or exceed international standards on climate mitigation and adaptation will, in turn, have spillover effects that lower emissions in economies around the world. Even if no political agreements are signed in international negotiations, Dr. Carr notes that the size and wealth of the U.S. can drive transformative change through markets in a way that no other country can.
That said, Dr. Carr also believes that it is important for the U.S. to rehabilitate its damaged international image and begin to flex its political and diplomatic muscles again. He has noticed that, “When the U.S. shows up big, people get excited about it.”
The United States has a unique responsibility to make changes domestically and advocate for changes internationally as a global leader. “We have unusual leverage,” says Dr. Carr, “ We just have to make sure we use it well.”
How Aid Happens
One of the most important themes Dr. Carr and I discussed in our conversation about aid is how exactly the money flows from the U.S. to developing countries. While it may seem like this is a rather straightforward topic, it actually has profound impacts on how humanitarian and development aid affects people’s lives.
Most development projects funded by the U.S. have operated in a “top-down” style. This means that experts in the U.S. have analyzed data or performed field research in the recipient country to determine the desired outcomes for the project, how to achieve these outcomes through specific actions, and how to measure the project’s success. Implementation of a top-down project often occurs without input from the population it is intended to help and leaves very little room for flexibility to alter the project once it is approved.
As you might imagine, decades of practical experience with top-down development has demonstrated the many problems of neglecting local knowledge when directing aid money and, as Dr. Carr notes in his piece, these projects do more harm than good in some cases. “For example, many studies have found that agricultural intensification, a common development strategy intended to sustainably boost food production, rarely benefits both the environment and local communities. Unfortunately, it can harm both the land and the people who depend on it for sustenance.”
“Bottom-up” approaches have more recently emerged as a response to criticism of top-down development and place input from recipient communities at the heart of their project design (much like the principles of human-centered design). This is the kind of approach in which Dr. Carr’s work is grounded. He believes strongly in the value of local knowledge and that the role of foreign aid or experts should be to work with communities. Understanding how communities, households and individuals make decisions, then, is what should determine the role of aid and experts.
Transformational Change
The shift to an approach that incorporates local knowledge and allows for flexibility to maximize positive impact and minimize negative impact is one element of Dr. Carr’s call for transformational change in the U.S. approach to foreign aid. Yet he sees ineffective approaches persisting in U.S. foreign aid due to institutional structures that hold projects to strict initial guidelines. Dr. Carr explains that, in practice, going back to USAID to restructure the contract of a project that will no longer be effective can take longer than the time remaining to complete it.
As someone who knows well the importance of flexibility and adaptability in this field, Dr. Carr is hesitant to describe exactly what these critical changes to institutional structures will look like, but he has some ideas. One is “something as mundane as doubling the amount of staff at USAID who are contract officers” to enable flexibility and adaptability in aid projects, thus speeding up contract mechanisms and removing constraints on the effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid. Others entail a shift of focus away from seeking to immediately solve a problem with aid and toward enabling locally-led change.
Finding immediate solutions to problems is something that the U.S. currently does very well – think vaccinations or flood relief – and generally does not entail much of an impact outside the scope of the project itself. This kind of work is funded by humanitarian aid, and the U.S. is probably the best in the world in this regard.
Dr. Carr’s work with farmers in West Africa, on the other hand, involves development aid that is intended to have a longer-term effect through a project with a wider scope – think projects that try to improve agricultural systems and affect entire societies and environments.
In his work, Dr. Carr says that every individual he has spoken to has a plan for what he/she would be doing with resources that are currently tied up in hedges against risks. These people know what works in their contexts and how to make the best use of resources because they have been living there for years, decades, or generations. Yet opportunities to improve their lives and better their communities are limited by the need to sacrifice resources or potential income to survive in contexts where risks like natural disaster, disease and famine, political and economic instability, etc. can be ever-present.
Dr. Carr sees the opportunity to enable locally-led change in the intersection of the two types of aid. Closing the gap between humanitarian and development aid in U.S. foreign aid efforts can help achieve this goal through risk reduction because, by lessening this risk burden for people in developing countries, individuals can improve their own lives in the most effective, resource-efficient manner possible.
In his words, the guiding question should be: “How do you enable people to do the things they would do if they weren’t dealing with all these risks?”
The obstacle to this is, again, structural. With the current focus on quantifiable results, USAID funding structures are understandably skeptical of proposals for projects that will lessen risk burdens to some unknown extent, allow people receiving funding to use it however they wish, and improve lives over a period of time longer than the duration of a project’s contract. These are goals that are extremely hard to justify to someone in charge of funding at USAID in Washington, D.C., but Dr. Carr’s point is that they make total sense to a farmer in West Africa.
Transformational change under this new focus on local empowerment is not the sort of directive change that is built into our current aid structures – a vestige of the era of top-down development approaches. Effectively synchronizing humanitarian and development aid is similarly prevented by the structural barriers between the two efforts.
Takeaways and Outlook
At one point, Dr. Carr said, “It’s talented people, it’s bad structures.” I walked away thinking this statement could be the mantra for the entire U.S. foreign aid apparatus. However, as he pointed out, this apparatus has the potential to be a tremendous force for good in the world if we can refocus aid to enable locally-led change, change its structures to match this new focus and close the gap between humanitarian and development aid. If you are interested in learning more about the impacts of foreign aid, check out Emma’s takeaways from “The Last Hunger Season”.
To Dr. Carr, it is an exciting time to be in and around this kind of work despite the many challenges it presents. He believes that the U.S. is in a position to reassert itself on the world stage and must seize the opportunity to do so while significantly improving its foreign aid efforts. He also sees students coming into his classroom with more and more awareness of and passion for these critical issues who then move on to make this positive impact in many different areas of the field.
To those of you reading this with an interest in one day making such an impact, here are some pieces of wisdom and advice from Dr. Carr:
- “This is really hard work, it goes slower than you want, there are a lot of days it’s frustrating, but when you can move something like this forward, it’s just incredibly impactful and rewarding.”
- “It’s a space for idealists, but you gotta have a thick skin… It’s never going to go as fast as you want.”
- “You need to understand how the world works now if you plan to turn the world into something else.”
- “Learn how to engage with the people doing the work now, and think about how to turn all those efforts so that they’re better in the future.”
