Chapter 6 transitions to the case of the Philippines to provide a comparative analysis of regime complex effectiveness. The chapter begins with a political economy analysis of the domestic actors and interests involved in the energy sector in the Philippines, then delves into the history of geothermal development with an analysis of the impacts of the clean energy regime complex actors on barriers to geothermal development over time. The major findings of this chapter indicate that early domestic political support for geothermal development under the Marcos and Ramos regimes was a response to the exogenous shocks of energy crises. This response to exogenous shocks opened pathways of change that were key in catalyzing geothermal development in the country that later placed the Philippines as the world’s second largest producer for several decades. In the Philippines, an embrace of the energy transition enabled the positive impact of the clean energy regime complex on geothermal development. In Indonesia, domestic political resistance to the energy transition limited regime complex effectiveness.

Chapter 4 first outlines the Indonesian case study and summarizes key regulations and actors affecting renewable energy development, and then examines the influence of the regime complex and its impacts on domestic policy adoption and reform in Indonesia in further renewable energy development. This chapter reveals evidence of Indonesia’s adoption of climate mitigation and emissions reduction policy resulting from the clean energy regime complex, specifically social learning, policy diffusion and international pressure on the Indonesian government to reduce emissions in the wake of the COP-13 in Bali.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to the impacts of the regime complex – particularly financial and technical assistance (utility modifier and capacity-building mechanisms) coupled with policy advising (social learning mechanism) – on the removal of barriers to geothermal development in Indonesia. The chapter provides a political economy analysis of the domestic actors and interests involved in the energy sector in Indonesia, and then recounts the history of geothermal development in Indonesia with a focus on the impacts of the clean energy regime complex on the dynamics of barriers to geothermal development. This analysis reveals that the clean energy regime complex, through financial and technical assistance combined with policy advising, is critical to impacting geothermal development in Indonesia by filling gaps in financing for high-risk exploration and early-stage development. This chapter provides insights on how the regime complex impacted domestic politics and geothermal barriers despite the absence of a legally binding framework. It also sheds light on the narrow pathway of change in the face of domestic political barriers and energy security concerns affecting political will.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

Turning to the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Chapter 10 explores the challenges Bonn faced amidst the turmoil of the early 1970s. Tightened budgets, occasioned by worries about inflation, hampered efforts by aid minister Erhard Eppler to follow through on Brandt’s promises of expanding development aid to the Global South. Karl Schiller insisted that trade, not aid, was the better path forward. Bonn’s liberal, free-trade approach drew criticism from African leaders, as West Germany invested heavily in apartheid South Africa; Brandt’s government did, however, enact tighter restrictions on weapons exports outside NATO. German officials frowned upon Global South demands for a more balanced world trading order, but they played a mediating role at UNCTAD III, a global trade and development conference in Santiago, Chile. Confronted with a rash of kidnappings in Latin America and Palestinian terrorism on German soil, Brandt’s government opted repeatedly to appease the hostage-takers rather than prosecute them. This passive response contributed to the disaster at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when Israeli athletes were captured and murdered.

This chapter unpacks the critical relationship between African peacekeeping and the continent’s international relations, tracing peacekeeping’s evolution from the periphery to the heart of many bilateral and multilateral relationships. In the aftermath of the failed 1993 UN/US-led intervention in Somalia and 1994 Rwandan genocide, the authors argue, Western powers sought to disengage from direct military involvement on the continent, increasingly relying on African states and militaries to provide ‘African solutions to African problems’. This dynamic has evolved into Western (and, increasingly, Chinese and Russian) underwriting of African peacekeeping missions, from Somalia to the DRC, and the growing subsidising of African security states by international partners. The chapter examines this development and how it has enabled a range of African governments, from Chad to Ethiopia, to carve out greater room for manoeuvre in their (often aid-dependent) relations with international actors. This has, the authors argue, had profound implications for domestic politics in a number of instances.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

This chapter examines the lessons of the NGO moment for how we write the history of globalisation. It suggests that we need to think more deeply about the boundaries of the ‘global’, and of where and how ‘global’ narratives are constructed. By looking beyond states and international organisations to NGOs, churches and civil society groups – and, indeed, to the Third World and the experiences of small and middling powers in the West – we can render visible the world system on which ideals such as humanitarianism, human rights, justice and development rested. That process, like the story of post-war globalisation, has three layers. First, the NGO moment helps to illuminate the places (physical, intellectual, and ideological) where globalising ideals were made. Second, it allows us to explore the patterns that underpinned those relationships: the connections between individuals, groups and institutions through which global compassion was constituted. Finally, by tracing how and where NGOs operated, this chapter argues, we gain a much fuller appreciation of how power was distributed in purportedly ‘global’ movements. Taken together, these elements allow us to paint a more nuanced picture of how outwardly ‘global’ ideas were understood, assimilated, rebuffe, and reframed in a variety of social and political contexts.

This chapter describes how NGOs adapted the language of scientific rationality – here labelled ‘humanitarian modernity’ – to construct a sustainable model of intervention based on the idea of universal needs. It does so by examining the sector’s response to the conflict that created independent Bangladesh in the early 1970s and the refugee crisis that it created. In South Asia, the need to negotiate access, first to refugees, then to the welfare systems of the new state, created the conditions of what this chapter terms a ‘compassionate space’ that would have long-term consequences for how NGOs were embedded in Third World contexts. This was a unique type of association, which could not be shoehorned into conventional categories of Western domination or neocolonial influence. As this chapter shows, collaboration with Third World authorities became a vital currency in convincing supporters of the NGO sector’s legitimacy, based on its ability to reach those in need, while in the field it paved the way for long-term engagement with postcolonial governments. It also became integral to the concept of protection that emerged in this period: the tropes it employed, the problems it faced and the communities of practice that flourished in that context.

This chapter examines the lessons of the NGO moment for how we write the history of globalisation. It suggests that we need to think more deeply about the boundaries of the ‘global’, and of where and how ‘global’ narratives are constructed. By looking beyond states and international organisations to NGOs, churches and civil society groups – and, indeed, to the Third World and the experiences of small and middling powers in the West – we can render visible the world system on which ideals such as humanitarianism, human rights, justice and development rested. That process, like the story of post-war globalisation, has three layers. First, the NGO moment helps to illuminate the places (physical, intellectual, and ideological) where globalising ideals were made. Second, it allows us to explore the patterns that underpinned those relationships: the connections between individuals, groups and institutions through which global compassion was constituted. Finally, by tracing how and where NGOs operated, this chapter argues, we gain a much fuller appreciation of how power was distributed in purportedly ‘global’ movements. Taken together, these elements allow us to paint a more nuanced picture of how outwardly ‘global’ ideas were understood, assimilated, rebuffe, and reframed in a variety of social and political contexts.

This chapter sets out three claims about the NGO moment. First, it argues for viewing the history of non-governmental aid in terms of moments of acceleration: bursts of activity that refreshed the sector while carrying with them the baggage of what had come before. While the specific dynamics of the period between Biafra and Live Aid were vital in facilitating the sector’s emergence, the moral frameworks that guided those organisations were equally the product of a much longer formative process. Second, this chapter explains how those dynamics helped non-governmental aid to supplant other forms of compassion in this period to become the dominant expression of popular benevolence towards the Third World. The broad remit of those organisations’ activities not only subsumed ‘aid’ under a single umbrella; its ideological underpinnings gave it an unprecedented justification to intervene anywhere there was suffering in the world. Finally, this chapter suggests that the story of the NGO moment provides us with several lessons for the writing of global history. It argues for describing globalisation as a constructed, context-contingent process that can only be understood as the product of the interactions between individual, organisational, national and supra-national actors.

This chapter sets out three claims about the NGO moment. First, it argues for viewing the history of non-governmental aid in terms of moments of acceleration: bursts of activity that refreshed the sector while carrying with them the baggage of what had come before. While the specific dynamics of the period between Biafra and Live Aid were vital in facilitating the sector’s emergence, the moral frameworks that guided those organisations were equally the product of a much longer formative process. Second, this chapter explains how those dynamics helped non-governmental aid to supplant other forms of compassion in this period to become the dominant expression of popular benevolence towards the Third World. The broad remit of those organisations’ activities not only subsumed ‘aid’ under a single umbrella; its ideological underpinnings gave it an unprecedented justification to intervene anywhere there was suffering in the world. Finally, this chapter suggests that the story of the NGO moment provides us with several lessons for the writing of global history. It argues for describing globalisation as a constructed, context-contingent process that can only be understood as the product of the interactions between individual, organisational, national and supra-national actors.

This chapter describes how NGOs adapted the language of scientific rationality – here labelled ‘humanitarian modernity’ – to construct a sustainable model of intervention based on the idea of universal needs. It does so by examining the sector’s response to the conflict that created independent Bangladesh in the early 1970s and the refugee crisis that it created. In South Asia, the need to negotiate access, first to refugees, then to the welfare systems of the new state, created the conditions of what this chapter terms a ‘compassionate space’ that would have long-term consequences for how NGOs were embedded in Third World contexts. This was a unique type of association, which could not be shoehorned into conventional categories of Western domination or neocolonial influence. As this chapter shows, collaboration with Third World authorities became a vital currency in convincing supporters of the NGO sector’s legitimacy, based on its ability to reach those in need, while in the field it paved the way for long-term engagement with postcolonial governments. It also became integral to the concept of protection that emerged in this period: the tropes it employed, the problems it faced and the communities of practice that flourished in that context.

This chapter analyzes how competing notions of conditionality – primarily tensions between efficiency and solidarity – have played out in debates and discourses on development aid since the 1960s in one Scandinavian country and a small, yet highly profiled donor – Sweden. Repeated and shifting demands for accountability and transparency serve as a probe into the complex, competing, and often fluctuating aims, goals, and motives of international development aid. The chapter argues that current debates on “the end of aid” are informed by a historical and unresolved tension between “unconditional solidarity” on the one hand and “conditional efficiency” on the other: Demands for openness elucidate competing aims of aid, indicating a paradox in the transparency paradigm in contemporary development aid discourse, whereby efficient aid – as manifested in economic growth – eventually leads to the end of aid while its alleged inefficiency – as evidenced in social inequality – ensures its continued legitimacy.

This chapter analyzes the significant changes that have taken place in Danish aid since the 1990s. The historical analysis shows that Denmark forms an exception to “Scandinavian exceptionalism,” with its approach historically much more characterized by pragmatism, mercantilism and subservience to international trends. Though sometimes presented as such, Danish aid today appears neither altruistic, idealist, nor driven by exceptional motives of humanitarianism. We thus show that Danish aid is less a reflection of a political ambition to brand Denmark internationally as a humanitarian frontrunner, and more a by-product of unfolding domestic political priorities influenced by international events and contingent changes. More so than the end of aid then, today is what we may call a new time of pragmatic ambiguity, drawing on “old” ideas, whether self-interest, tied aid or (domestic) political instrumentalization of aid.