Effective Aid: the poetics of some aid workers' angles on how humanitarian aid ‘works'

Raymond Apthorpe

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 8, 1545-1559

Abstract: International aid workers are invisible in the absence of data as to who cleaves to what knowledges and practices about how aid works to be effective. When it is similar or different best practice positions that are taken is another unknown, despite what this could tell us about aid effectiveness. This paper identifies through their everyday poetics two of the angles on ‘how aid works’ that aid workers take. One angle displays a programmatic, or ‘like clockwork’ aesthetic about how aid is said to ‘work' through causal mechanisms, provided only that the right policy and ‘the tools we have' are put in place and implemented. The other, a ‘like an artwork’ aesthetic, puts constitutive institutions and new interpretative understandings to the fore. The aid effectiveness issues and reforms associated with the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and subsequent meetings, the latest in Busan in 2011, do not address many, if any, of the issues raised in this paper. They should.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.698141

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