Evaluating the Selfish-Selfless Framework

The still-dominant framework pioneered by McKinlay and Little answers the question ‘why do states give aid’ by seeking to understand whether selfish or selfless motives dominate the foreign aid allocations of a given state (Palmer, Wohlander, and Morgan 2002, 8). Once this distinct approach to responding to this question gained supremacy in the determinants of aid literature, a Manichean approach to analysing aid-giving behaviour infused the study of aid in International Relations. The development of fresh analytical perspectives has been hindered because of the inadvertent focus on resolving the incompatibility between the visions of the traditional international relations paradigms (Feeny and McGillivray 2008, 516; Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998, 320). The determinants of aid literature, via its foundations in the donor- interest versus recipient-need model, has reified a pair of incompatible metatheoretical understandings of how the world works as our principle conceptual categories for understanding why states give aid. As Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor (1998, 297) have explained, “scholars hold a priori assumptions that lead them to create and adhere to competing paradigms about which interests motivated donor involvement in the foreign aid regime of the cold war era.”

The selfish-selfless formulation may be a parsimonious analytical framework for understanding aid policy that continues to dominate the public (and even some professional) discourse. But for the advancement of scholarly understanding of how aid policy is formulated, it has an obvious shortcoming: it is overly simplistic32 _{(Breuning 1995, 236; Heinrich 2013, 433; Riddell 1987,}

Chapter 4). The persistence of the artificial selfish-selfless dichotomy as the key framework for explaining aid allocation has meant that the literature prioritises categorisation at the expense of understanding and examines outcomes at the expense of process. Riddell (2007, 92) cuts to the heart of what this means in practice when he observes that “while no one seriously doubts

32 _{Of course, part of the reason the dualistic selfish-selfish framework remains so dominant, especially in the realm}

of public discourse, is precisely because it is so simple. It conveys a substantial degree of information that allows for a rapid assessment or predication of state behaviour. And as explained earlier, the categories on offer readily align with most people’s philosophical predilections. In short, the selfish-selfish framework is a powerful heuristic for understanding why states give aid—one that even the most sophisticated analysts of aid policy commonly resort to. Finally, given the limited public and political understanding of aid policy, coupled with the inherent complexity of this aspect of foreign policy, it is unlikely to expect this heuristic, which already dominates the way debates on aid policy are conducted, will be discarded any time soon. This is especially the case in a sound-bite driven media culture in the West that increasingly rewards politicians who engage with the type of either-or lens offered up by the determinants of aid literature.

Literature Review

Page35 that donor commercial pressures and national self-interest have been and continue to be important to the allocation of aid, the precise way in which this influence is manifested remains contested.” What Riddell is expressing is that the literature remains overly wedded to a framework that explains what factors influence aid allocation. This comes at the expense of adequately explain why, how, or when these factors impact aid allocation33_{. We are left unsure}

of exactly how or why changes in aid policy occur. Tobias Heinrich (2013) drew attention to this fundamental oversight in the literature by titling his recent article ‘When is Foreign Aid Selfish, When is it Selfless?’

To be clear, the claim I am forwarding here goes beyond simply highlighting the need for more work to be done in fleshing out the existing framework. My charge is that—whatever other limitations it has—the selfish-selfless framework can only ever provide a partial explanation of state behaviour. This is because the determinants of aid literature assumes that the “locus of cause” (Waltz 1959, 13) of a state’s aid allocation decisions relates to the international system. To state this another way, while the realist and liberal/idealist paradigms disagree about the potential and scope for cooperation in the international realm, they share fundamental assumptions about the nature of the context states operate within. A shared commitment to rationalism means both paradigms treat “the identities and interests of agents as exogenously given” (Wendt 1992, 391). In an anarchical world where states are the highest authority, international society represents a strategic realm “in which individuals or states come together to pursue their pre-defined interests” (Reus-Smit 2005, 192). These interests, in line with orthodox approaches to International Relations that have been ‘baked in’ to the determinants of aid literature, are exogenously determined, largely by material structures (Mielniczuk 2013, 1076).

The way the donor-interest—recipient-need model is formulated means quantitative studies in the determinants of aid family inherently “treat the state as a unitary, utility maximizing agent” (Lightfoot and Szent-Iványi 2015, 13). The various indicators of state behaviour incorporated into the model are aggregated at the level of the state. The state is the actor whose behaviour is examined. And the behaviour of a donor state, whether ultimately found to be selfish or selfless, is assessed based on their interactions with other states. All of this means that second image factors are ‘black-boxed’ by the model (Lightfoot and Szent-Iványi 2015, 13). The donor-

33 _{For example, Lightfoot and Szent-Iványi (2015, 13) record how it is common for quantitative researchers in this}

tradition to “find that a certain donor gives more aid to its trading partners, but they will usually not go into details explaining which domestic constituency this benefits, how they lobbied for this, or why the government decided to support these particular interests as opposed to others, which may, for example, favor allocating aid along poverty reduction criteria.”

Chapter 2

Page 36

interest—recipient-need model’s ability to explain nuanced state behaviour is further cast into doubt given aid allocation motives are inferred from proxy variables (Breuning 1995, 236). Most notably, per capita income is the most regularly employed proxy for recipient need (Neumayer 2003, 19)—a problematic assumption given that recent research is showing that the majority of the world’s poor people are now found within middle-income countries (Kanbur and Sumner 2012; Sumner 2012)34_.

The selfish-selfless framework has a limited ability to explain policy change. Like other traditional utility-maximising models in international relations, the selfish-selfless framework explains outcomes by looking at variations in capabilities and constraints (van der Veen 2011). Van Belle is among those who have acknowledged that third image explanations, while inherently important, provide inescapably incomplete accounts of foreign policy decisions. Such accounts “can establish the limits that the international area and the attributes of the state impose upon the leader’s menu of available choices” but are incapable of uncovering the domestic forces motivating the decisionmaker (Van Belle 1993, 151). Increasingly aware of this reality, aid scholars from the late 1980s onwards began to pay much more attention to how within-state factors influenced aid policy choices, much like their colleagues in the broader discipline.

§§§