ABSTRACT
The chapter traces the parallel histories of two Development Finance Institutions: the Danish Industrialisation Fund for Developing Countries (IFU) founded in 1967 and the Swedish Fund for Industrial Cooperation with Developing Countries (Swedfund) established in 1978. Both institutions, still operating today, have served as an official means by which to promote the increased flow of private capital, trade, and investments between their respective home countries and the Global South. We argue that by increasingly emphasising the role of venture capital, politicians, international organisations, and business leaders have gradually pushed ideas about neoliberal market-based business development to the forefront of national conversations. Venture capital has been discursively constructed as the future of aid – in contrast to implied past naïve failures of Cold War state-sponsored internationalism. In this way the Nordic aid regime on the whole remained largely intact by actively being reconceived as the progressive internationalist face of the competition state rather than, as it once had been, the logical humanitarian extension of redistributive welfare states.
