ABSTRACT
Foreign development aid, as the preceding chapters have made clear, is a controversial issue. In order to alleviate poverty on a global scale, strong arguments have been put forward, and are still being put forward, for increasing the level of development aid. It was (and is still being) argued that, if the Millennium Development Goals (and now, since 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals) are to be met, there will have to be a larger volume of aid, together with a change in its focus.1 However, there are other voices that take a rather dim view of increased levels of development aid, pointing to its lacklustre performance in terms of both poverty alleviation and sustained economic growth over the past six decades (Easterly 2006b; Verweij and Gyawali 2007). Even in Nepal, a country that relies heavily on development aid for capital investment, foreign aid (both bilateral and multilateral) is being seen as a mixed blessing. To put this issue into proper focus from the perspective of a Nepalese citizen, I will proceed in four distinct steps. First, I will outline the relationship between aid and development as it has evolved over the past 60 years. Second, I will set out a ‘multiple perspective model’ with which to analyse the conditions for aid effectiveness. Third, I will use that model as a heuristic device in order to discover where we have succeeded and where we have failed in achieving the oft-stated goals of national development. Fourth, I will make some suggestions for Nepalese planners on a strategy for getting off the aid bandwagon in the years to come.
