International development aid and the politics of scale

ABSTRACT

Much international development assistance has been delivered in the form of statebuilding interventions over the past 20 years, especially in post-conflict or fragile states. The apparent failure of many international statebuilding interventions has prompted a ‘political economy’ turn in development studies. This article critically assesses the key approaches that have emerged to address the interrelations between interveners and recipients, and advances an approach that places the politics of scale at the core of the conflicts shaping the outcomes of international intervention. Different scales privilege different interests, unevenly allocating power, resources and political opportunity structures. Interveners and recipients thus pursue scalar strategies and establish socio-political alliances that reinforce their power and marginalise rivals. This approach is harnessed towards examining the uneven results of the Aceh Government Transformation Programme, financed by the World Bank-managed Multi Donor Trust Fund following the 2005 peace agreement and implemented by the UNDP and the Aceh provincial government.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of scale
• international interventions
• development aid
• Aceh

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the comments and suggestions made by the journal's editors and anonymous reviewers, which have greatly benefited the article. We would also like to thank Dr Lee Jones for his considerable contribution to the development of our project. We were fortunate to receive excellent research assistance from Ririn Sefsani and Fahmi Yunus in Jakarta and Aceh, respectively. Ryan Smith ably helped copy-edit the manuscript. As always, responsibility for the final draft is our own. This paper and the wider project of which it is part has been generously funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP130102273 ‘The Politics of Public Administration Reform: Capacity Development and Ideological Contestation in International State-building’, as well as Murdoch University's Strategic Research Fund, for which we are grateful.

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For insights into further fractures within GAM and the problems of former rebels’ integration into Aceh politics see Stange and Patock (2010) and Sindre (2014, 2016).

2. The Indonesian civil service comprises of four echelons. Echelon I officials are the heads of national government departments and the Regional Secretary of a province; echelon II are followed by the more junior echelon III and IV.

3. Here we focus on the OTSUS, as it was, by far, the most contested.

4. http://p2k-apba.acehprov.go.id/v1/index.php. Accessed 15 September 2016.

Additional information

Funding

Australian Research Council [grant number DP130102273].

Notes on contributors

Shahar Hameiri

Shahar Hameiri is an associate professor of International Politics and Associate Director of the Graduate Centre in Governance and International Affairs, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. His latest books, both published by Cambridge University Press, are International Intervention and Local Politics (2017), co-authored with Caroline Hughes and Fabio Scarpello, and Governing Borderless Threats (2015), co-authored with Lee Jones. He tweets @ShaharHameiri.

Fabio Scarpello

Fabio Scarpello is a lecturer at the Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex and a research associate at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. His research focuses on the security-development nexus in the Asia Pacific. He is co-author of International Interventions and the Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017).