Can advocacy change the views of politicians about aid? The potential and limits of a presence-based approach

ABSTRACT

Advocates of foreign aid in OECD countries navigate a unique form of politics. The beneficiaries of foreign aid spending have little voice in elite level decision-making about aid commitments from OECD countries. Thus foreign aid spending has a form of politics unlike other areas of policy where there is more direct budget accountability with citizens. Scholarly attention has increased on this unusual domestic politics of aid spending yet there remains little examination of the opportunities, challenges and tensions for aid organisations in advocating to elected officials. This article focuses on the case of Australian foreign aid, and the Australian Aid and Parliament project, an initiative of Save the Children. This initiative facilitates exposure visits to aid recipient countries for Australian parliamentarians. Most aid advocacy projects in OECD countries rely on mobilising citizens of those countries to act as a proxy, advocating on behalf of aid beneficiaries. This project reveals the potential of advocacy efforts that focus on the direct ‘presence’ of aid beneficiaries in the experience of elected officials (from donor countries). Yet it also reveals several challenges, and tensions between advocates, about how aid commitments change, and the most effective role for advocacy groups to play.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign aid
• advocacy
• Australia
• parliament

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tamas Wells is a research fellow in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on aid and politics in Southeast Asia and Australia. He worked for aid organisations in Myanmar from 2006 to 2012.

ORCID

Tamas Wells http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5604-7081

Notes

1 Of particular interest in the literature on the politics of aid commitments is the seeming anomaly of Nordic countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – who maintain much higher levels of aid (as a percentage of GNI) than Australia, Canada or the United States (Gates and Hoeffler 2004; Bodenstein and Kemmerling 2015; Lundsgaarde 2012; Van der Veen 2011; Noël and Thérien 1995). Noël and Thérien (1995) argue that while high domestic welfare spending in Nordic countries is associated with high levels of foreign aid, it is more specifically the extent to which the state embodies socialist values that determines the high spending in Nordic countries. Bodenstein and Kemmerling (2015) make the novel argument that targeting of welfare spending in domestic realm, and in foreign aid, is in fact associated with lower levels of resourcing. The more targeting of ‘the poor’, such as in both Australian domestic welfare and foreign aid, is associated with lower levels of aid spending. Broader analysis of this is beyond the scope of this paper, yet this example is relevant in highlighting powerful institutional and ideological contrasts between foreign aid decision-making in Nordic countries and Australia.