ABSTRACT
In 2011, the Fourth High-level Talks on Aid Effectiveness were hosted by South Korea at the port city of Busan. At the conference, a number of side-panel questions raised, particularly by NGO representatives, were whether aid effectiveness was to be seen as a part of an evolutionary aid trajectory, a supplementary to previous aid policies, or a break with previous aid policies. For some delegates, aid effectiveness was an indication of what a post-2015 MDG agenda might look like (Fernandez 2013). More recently, terms such as‘development effectiveness’ and‘capacity building’ have become increasingly prominent. For sceptics, however, aid or development effectiveness continues (and reinforces) an exclusionary and hierarchical tradition of elite-led‘neoliberal technocracy’.
