Dirk-Jan Koch’s Foreign Aid and Its Unintended Consequences is a robust exploration of the promise and perils of international aid to recipient countries, particularly in the Global South. Combining autoethnography with critical analysis of evaluative reports, Koch provides contextual clarity on variegated theoretical and practical concerns regarding the unintended consequences of aid.
The author intends the book as “a call to action for … students, evaluators, researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and communicators of international development” (2) to better understand and guard against the unintended and negative consequences of international aid. Although he cautions that the addressed consequences are by no means exhaustive, Koch is able to identify the most crucial “top ten effects” (9). The discussed effects are as follows: (1) backlash effects, (2) conflict effects, (3) migration and resettlement effects, (4) price effects, (5) marginalization effects, (6) behavioral effects, (7) negative spillover effects, (8) governance effects, (9) environmental effects, and (10) ripple effects.
In the backlash effect (Chapter Three), Koch explains how aid can be demonized locally when perceived as an instrument of Western exploitation or control. Pointing to public reactions in Uganda against queer rights activism, amongst other examples, the author argues that policymakers and practitioners should pay closer attention to the “undercurrents in the society in which they are working” (38). In Chapter Four, Koch examines how services or products derived from aid create hostility between communities, if not between local and international aid workers. Chapter Five discusses the migration and resettlement effects of foreign aid, pointing out how aid funding induces resettlement due to land acquisition for building physical structures in communities. In Chapter Six, he explores the price effect of foreign aid, reckoning that the influx of aid items may drive down prices and local production capacity. Conversely, aid can also have unforeseen positive effects, which Koch conceptualizes as ripple effects in Chapter Twelve.
Some illustrative frailties are seen in the latter sections of the book. For example, discussing the behavioral effects in Chapter Eight, Koch recalls an incident observed by his student on a food aid monitoring mission in northern Nigeria. While there, the student notes that “some mothers deliberately malnourished one of their children as to receive food aid for the entire family” (110). Desperation to access aid may, indeed, trigger such regrettable acts among recipient communities or beleaguered beneficiaries. In this particular case, however, there was no mention of the specific town or state in northern Nigeria or the period the observation was made. The lack of verifiable context to this anecdotal evidence is an avoidable scientific lapse.
Further, while the author’s sound grasp of aid problems in the Global South draws from his long diplomatic career in Africa, he misdiagnoses a few issues nonetheless. For lack of space, I would focus on two. First, in Chapters Seven (marginalization effect) and Ten (governance effect), Koch notes that aid can breed corruption because there aren’t enough safeguards to prevent local political elites from misappropriating donor funds (92). In reality, this is rarely an unintended consequence. Aid agencies can sometimes function as agents of color revolutions or related forms of foreign influence by Western countries in the Global South. In certain situations, therefore, the personalization of aid by local elites is not always unknown to donors and may, in fact, be ignored if the donor’s broader geopolitical goal(s) are achieved. After all, ostensibly authoritarian states like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, looking to exert their influence in the international arena also offer aid to poor and middle-income countries whose local elites are widely perceived as corrupt. When we view effective aid distribution as not the end goal of certain donor funding but as an opportunity for local elite capture by hegemonic interests, the governance effect no longer feels unintended.
Secondly, Koch identified Ghana as a case study on the perils of aid corporatization (funding to expand export capacity for fruit processing) and its adverse environmental effects (Chapter Eleven). But this underplays what should truly count for societies grappling with economic precarities. Should countries with barely industrialized economies subscribe to lofty climate goals and reject the expansion of their industrial capacity? The rolling power cuts that set off in the wake of the foreign aid-backed energy transition in South Africa partly answer the question. A hasty phase-out of coal escalated energy poverty in the country, weakening its industrial capacity and collapsing small businesses, especially in mining communities. Surely there’s a debate to be had on why aid that improves the industrial capacity of people in the Global South should be considered a negative, unintended consequence. Lastly, Koch’s adoption of complexity thinking as a theoretical framework for contextualizing aid problems could’ve done with more clarity. Although he justifies the use of this framework for its ability to enable us to observe “the mechanisms through which unpredictable, unknowable, and emergent change happens” (16), it is unclear how his utilization of the framework adds to the theoretical literature.
These concerns notwithstanding, Koch’s book is an important text for students, experts, and policymakers interested in international development. It is a helpful introductory guide for students because it goes beyond theoretical conversations of aid problems and prescribes actionable pathways of responding to the different unintended effects. Equally, the book would find appeal among policymakers and practitioners, given how Koch’s analysis of foreign aid problems combines academic rigor with personal narrative and practical advice.
