From Aid Dependency to Generative Reciprocity: Rethinking Development Assistance in a Relational Framework

The debate over dependency in development assistance is stalled for want of a criterion. Practice doctrine holds an aspiration, expressed as capacity building, ownership, sustainability, and exit, and supplies no operation by which a given arrangement is assigned to one side of the distinction that aspiration invokes. This paper supplies such an operation. It first establishes that the general dependency claim stands without support in the randomised and review evidence, so that dependency is treated as a property of the design of an arrangement, and it concedes that the distinction between maintaining and capacitating support is already held in five independent literatures, none of which supplies a test. The test proposed is the fading test, drawn from the fading component of instructional scaffolding: a support is generative where its withdrawal leaves the supported relation intact, and extractive where its withdrawal collapses the relation it sustained. Three features of an arrangement are shown to settle the result, namely the routing of the coupling a transfer creates, the visibility of the transfer to the supported party, and the position the arrangement assigns to that party, while the volume of the transfer, its medium, and the supplier's intention stand inert. The prevalence of extractive arrangements is then explained through the asymmetric enforcement of accountability in the assistance sector, which moves each of the three determinants in the extractive direction. One axis of return, arriving at a level of organisation above that of the transfer, is entered as an observation. The paper closes by establishing the constraint under which the criterion is employed: it classifies arrangements, confers worth on no party, and supplies grounds for redesign in place of grounds for allocation.