Richard Mallett

The Future of Foreign Aid

The landscape of foreign aid has changed. When she served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1991 through 2000, Ogata said the issue at the time was a “gap between humanitarian and development communities.” At a past UNHCR co-sponsored presentation at Brookings with James Wolfensohn, then President of the World Bank, she questioned how to address the transition from war-torn societies into a much more sustainable development phase and to how eliminate the transition gap.

Livelihoods, conflict and aid programming: is the evidence base good enough?

In conflict-affected situations, aid-funded livelihood interventions are often tasked with a dual imperative: to generate material welfare benefits and to contribute to peacebuilding outcomes. There may be some logic to such a transformative agenda, but does the reality square with the rhetoric? Through a review of the effectiveness of a range of livelihood promotion interventions--from job creation to microfinance--this paper finds that high quality empirical evidence is hard to come by in conflict-affected situations. Many evaluations appear to conflate outputs with impacts and numerous studies fail to include adequate information on their methodologies and datasets, making it difficult to appraise the reliability of their conclusions. Given the primary purpose of this literature--to provide policy guidance on effective ways to promote livelihoods--this silence is particularly concerning. As such, there is a strong case to be made for a restrained and nuanced handling of such interventions in conflict-affected settings.

Forced migration trajectories: an analysis of journey- and decision-making among Eritrean and Syrian arrivals to Europe

Abstract In 2015, Europe’s so-called ‘migration crisis’ hit the headlines. In one of the first pieces of research-based examination into the journeys of refugee arrivals around that time, this article explores the decision-making processes of (mainly) Syrians and Eritreans recently arrived in Germany, Spain and the UK. We investigate the dynamics underpinning trajectories towards Europe, placing particular emphasis on the factors that shape the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of journeys. A number of factors, already established within the broader literature, feature strongly in the decisions made by refugees: financial capital, social networks and the role of smugglers. But so too do refugees’ and other migrants’ own perceptions and feelings about where to go, when to do it, and how. Ultimately – and for our sample – we find that refugees’ journeys are on the one hand the product of a profoundly contextual and subjective decision-making process, and on the other deeply transformative phenomena, guiding as they do perceptions and choices regarding destination and trajectories.

Post-War Recovery and the Role of Markets: Policy Insights from Six Years of Research

Markets and private sector development are considered central to the recovery of economies and peoples livelihoods after conflict. But the specific ways in which they shape this process, and the question of how governments and development partners might best support market resuscitation, are patchily evidenced and poorly understood. The Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium was established in 2011 as a cross†country research programme tasked with asking and answering questions about state†building, service delivery and livelihoods in conflict†affected situations. As part of its broad agenda of livelihoods research from 2011 to 2017, the Consortium undertook a specific investigation of the role that markets, and peoples engagement with them, play in processes of post†conflict livelihood recovery, ultimately with a view to informing policies and programmes that are fit for purpose. This Policy Insights paper summarises the main findings and policy recommendations emerging from a synthesis of the Consortiums market studies, drawing also on key evidence and insights from the wider literature.

What Does ‘Aid 2.0’ Look Like?

This chapter proposes what a fresh terms of engagement between donors and middle-income countries might look like, outlining in particular four key aspects of this new relationship. First, engagement to support policy coherence across areas such as migration and trade. Second, engagement to support inclusive policy processes in middle-income countries and to reduce marginalisation by working with civil society in middle-income countries. Third, engagement to support the production and co-financing of global public goods. And fourth, engagement to support research and knowledge transfer across different country contexts.

What Makes Aid Effective

This chapter focuses on the mediating factors that determine the outcomes of aid. The last twenty years or so have seen the publication of a bewildering array of academic studies into aid effectiveness, yet there remains considerable debate as to whether, and under what conditions, aid can be effective. The chapter reviews the findings of a range of selected studies (which are also summarised in Table A1 in the Annex) and closes with a number of conclusions to inform a new vision for aid.

A New Vision for Aid

The starting point for this chapter is that the nature of the global poverty ‘problem’ has changed and continues to evolve. We discuss future poverty projections and growth scenarios, and outline the implications of a new geography of global poverty for donors and international development more broadly.

What Is Aid

In this opening chapter, we argue that the aid system can be usefully viewed as a market characterised by a series of factors which determine the supply of and demand for aid. Such an approach helps us identify the multiple, overlapping (and sometimes competing) objectives of aid. The chapter also explores the wide range of aid instruments on offer and traces recent shifts and evolutions in the landscape of aid.

What Is Aid for

Aid is assigned multiple objectives. Whilst not always complementary or mutually reinforcing, many of these objectives revolve around the core task of promoting poverty reduction (usually via economic growth) in the Global South. This chapter reflects on the findings of a range of academic studies into the drivers of allocation decisions and, in so doing, highlights the complex, multi-layered nature of aid systems.