Development Impact

Abstract

The stated mission of the Department has been summarised as reducing poverty in the poorer developing countries and it is against this that it should primarily be judged. In the early years this was largely about the use of aid and, later, the policy dialogue that went with it. More recently the Department has had a remit beyond aid to influence a wider range of development issues which government as a whole seeks to address. In exploring impact, one is immediately confronted with the fact that the Department is just one player among many: aidrecipient developing countries, other donors, and more recently other Whitehall departments. This makes it difficult to assess the development impact of the Department itself but does not, of course, reduce the importance of accountability for the resources it is provided with. It is not possible here to provide a detailed and comprehensive assessment of the Department’s impact on development over nearly half a century, but rather to offer some guide as to how the subject might be approached. Nor is the author best placed to offer an objective assessment. For a fuller study of the impact of foreign aid more generally the reader is referred to the recent work by Roger Riddell.¹⁰⁷