Notions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ have long been intrinsic to the international development enterprise.Footnote 1 Aid programmes and interventions have clearly stated objectives, mid-term reviews, evaluation reports and ‘lessons learned’ processes built into them as standard practice in the case of most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) donors. More generally, the emergence of development paradigms and new approaches—from structural adjustment to ‘good governance ’ and ‘thinking and working politically’—has traditionally been premised upon growing expert and practitioner consensus around the ‘failure’ of current practice, in the wider context of long-standing debates on improving the effectiveness of aid and, indeed, on whether aid ‘works’ at all (Dollar and Svensson 2000; Fisher and Marquette 2016; Grindle 2004; Moyo 2009).

The purported linearity of aid programmes’ stated success mechanisms—underscored in ‘evidence-based’ programme business cases and the ‘theories of change’ which they often claim to be guided by—often obscure, however, the complex political economy of delineating measures of success or failure for many aid agencies and the shifting understandings of success attached to particular instruments and policies occurring within donor institutions over time and contexts (acknowledged formally or not). The ambiguities and, at times, contradictions that can emerge in this regard stem—as this chapter demonstrates—from the multiple audiences aid agencies must seek to serve and placate de facto in undertaking their work. For while aid recipients—for the most part, state and non-state actors in the Global South—are often presented as the primary ‘partners’ in a development initiative, in practice aid agencies must also be cognizant of the views, preferences and prejudices of their own political and financial backers, namely domestic publics and government ministers. This complex requirement to maintain accountability domestically and internationally is rendered even more acute by the almost unique vulnerability of aid agencies within Western state architectures—while all ministries may see their budgets fluctuate, few need fear institutional annihilation —particularly on the basis of public opinion trends; the last decade has nevertheless seen all but one independent aid ministry folded into another department (usually foreign affairs) (Gulrajani 2015).

In unpacking the nature of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in international development, this chapter will focus on ‘political conditionality’ (PC) —the placing by donors of political conditions upon aid, often (and as explored in this chapter) through suspending aid flows to states perceived as violating particular norms. Analyses of PC since the early 1990s have focused heavily on identifying trends in its application and answering one central question—‘does it work?’ A less common, but no less important, question, however, is ‘do policy-makers expect it to work?’ and, indeed, ‘why do they use the instrument?’ The apparent return of PC in the management of many donor–recipient relationships since the mid-2000s—particularly linked to the disbursement of General Budget Support (GBS)—provides a suitable opportunity to re-focus discussion of the phenomenon in a manner that addresses this analytical and empirical gap around objectives, expectations and understanding the instrument’s success or failure.

This chapter therefore attempts to explore donor motivations for imposing PC. In doing so, two major categories of motivations for applying PC are delineated. Developed from conceptual debates in the literature on economic sanctions these are instrumental (where PC is applied to force aid recipients to implement political reforms) and expressive (where PC is applied to signal disapproval of the recipient’s actions—for domestic or international audiences—without any clear expectation that actual reforms will follow). Establishing whether a particular PC decision is based primarily on instrumental or expressive rationales has important implications for how the effectiveness of the instrument should be assessed; if donors do not intend for a particular suspension to result in political change, should they be criticised when it does not? Should this be interpreted as a policy failure, or something else? Moreover, if dominant rationales for PC have shifted over time, this too raises crucial questions for scholars and practitioners on how they should assess the effectiveness of the instrument.

In investigating the key rationales for PC decisions the policies and perspectives of one major donor—the UK—since 1990 are reviewed and critiqued. Britain has played a particularly prominent role in promoting and employing PC in the past (particularly between ca.1991 and 1995) and in its revival since ca.2004. Britain ’s Department for International Development (DFID) has also—more than many other donors—consciously sought to explain and rationalise its usage of PC since 2005 with a view to influencing how other Western donors employ it (DFID 2006a, b). This has been a reasonable ambition given the widespread acceptance among many in the Western development community today that DFID represents a ‘thought leader’ second only to the World Bank. The UK ’s position as one of the leading aid donors—particularly in sub-Saharan Africa —and providers of GBS also provide it with a degree of influence in international development for and within ‘in-country’ cross-donor groupings that few other donors possess.

The chapter ultimately argues that while expressive motivations have always played a role in London’s PC decisions, they have become increasingly central since the mid-2000s. Likewise, where the expressive dimensions of PC impositions in the 1990s were mainly aimed at the international level, those of today are focused far more clearly on domestic, British audiences. Finally, while instrumental rationales were highly influential in the PC decisions of the 1990s, they have become largely irrelevant in the contemporary era. DFID officials do not believe that PC can force political change on aid recipients but continue to use it—in relation to GBS, at least—as a means of communicating with an increasingly aid-sceptical domestic audience. The final part of the chapter suggests several factors which have led to this state of affairs and reflect on how these changing rationales behind the instrument raise difficult questions around viewing PC as a success or a failure in its current application.

This analysis draws upon semi-structured interviews carried out with current and former DFID staff—and former staff of DFID ’s predecessor, the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) —between 2007 and 2013. Interviewees include current and former staff at varying levels based in both London and regional and country offices. Internal DFID and ODA documents released to the author under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act (UK) are also analysed together with public statements, ODA /DFID documents and media reporting.

The chapter is structured as follows: The next section reviews and critiques the existing literature on PC, highlighting in particular its reluctance to explore the intentions and perspectives of donor officials involved in imposing the modality. The literature on the purpose of economic sanctions, however, does speak to this debate and is therefore engaged with as a means to develop a set of categories for conceptualising donor PC rationales and understanding its degree of success vis-à-vis its objectives. The chapter then introduces the British case and analyses London’s employment of PC since the Cold War highlighting a significant shift in UK thinking on the modality’s efficacy from instrumental to expressive and from international norm-signaller to domestic reputational risk management tool. The next section delineates a number of reasons for this shift in the last decade linked to the domestic and international political economy of aid management in the contemporary era. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of these findings for development scholars and policymakers interested in understanding the success, or failure, of the mechanism.

Political Conditionality Under Scrutiny

The term PC has been defined and employed in several different ways by scholars and policymakers since its coining in the early 1990s. In essence, it refers to the placing by donors of ‘political’ conditions upon their aid disbursements with many scholars dividing this behaviour into ‘positive’ conditionality (where aid is released once conditions have been fulfilled) and ‘negative’ or ‘restrictive’ conditionality, or ‘aid sanctions’ (where aid is suspended when conditions have not been, or are no longer being, fulfilled) (Crawford 1997: 69–70; Stokke 1995: 11–13; Waller 1995: 401–408). Much of the PC literature has, however, tended to focus upon the latter—as this study also does.

Scholarly interest in PC has tended to focus on questions of PC’s ultimate instrumentality and effectiveness: ‘does it work? That is, does the threat of, or actual withholding [of aid] sway recipient governments into a different course of action?’ (Hayman 2011: 683; see also Crawford 1997, 2000; Levitsky and Way 2006; Molenaers et al. 2010; Moore and Robinson 1994; Smith 1998; Stokke 1995; Uvin 1993). In evaluating the success or failure of the instrument on these terms—employing McConnell’s (2010: 357) broad definition of policy failure being ‘if [a policy] does not fundamentally achieve the goals that proponents set out to achieve’—one would need to focus on whether the aid suspension prompted political reform in the recipient state within the area highlighted as the trigger for the suspension.

This approach is, however, based on a set of assumptions that represent only one way to look at the PC phenomenon. Exploring whether PC ‘works’, for example, fails to investigate the extent to which donors themselves actually apply it in the hope—or belief—that it will work, whether one understands ‘work’ as above or otherwise. The purpose of this chapter is to offer an alternative perspective—one which focuses on exploring and comprehending the motivations of officials within donor agencies for actually applying the instrument—and thus, evaluating it on these terms.

Few aid scholars have attempted to explore or unpack the reasons why donors use PC—either conceptually or empirically (though see Molenaers 2012). Similar questions have, nevertheless, been addressed within the literature on economic sanctions to some extent. Galtung argued—in a study of economic sanctions applied to Rhodesia —that sanctions can have ‘expressive functions’ as well as ‘instrumental’ ones and that ‘there is the value [on the part of an interested state] of at least doing something … of being busy in time of crisis’—that is, in imposing sanctions to make a political statement and not just to force reform (Galtung 1967: 411). Several scholars have since sought to develop this instrumental/expressive distinction at the conceptual level. Lindsay, for example, delineates five ‘aims’ of imposing trade sanctions—compliance (by the target with a stated policy), subversion (forcing the overthrow of the target government), deterrence (discouraging the target from repeating an action), international symbolism and domestic symbolism (Lindsay 1986).

In applying these frameworks to PC motivations it is useful to consider the extent to which Lindsay ’s variety of aims actually applies in reality. Thus, instrumental-based aid cuts are usually premised on compliance and deterrence but rarely, at least explicitly, on subversion. The case of Malawi in 1992, however, reveals that PC impositions can—in part—lead to subversion even if this was not part of the original rationale for the aid suspension (Brown 2004). Likewise, expressive-based cuts can rarely be said to have only domestic symbolism in mind, and many such impositions clearly seek to make a point to domestic and international audiences simultaneously. It is important to keep in mind in any analysis of donor motivations, therefore, that multiple rationales for each decision can exist at any one time and that differentiating between instrumental and expressive rationales, and sub-types within each, must be about identifying degrees and extents rather than clear-cut dichotomies.

In examining London’s motivations for applying PC since the Cold War, therefore, this chapter seeks primarily to distinguish between decisions based primarily on instrumental rationales and decisions based primarily on expressive ones (including both domestic and international symbolism). It is perhaps most helpful to view each PC decision as plotted somewhere on a spectrum between the two extremes of instrumental and expressive rationales (Fig. 10.1). At one end, the key focus is on the recipient state and influencing developments there, while at the other the focus is on domestic audiences and managing their perceptions of the donor.

Fig. 10.1
figure 1

Primary motivation spectrum for political conditionality (Source: Adapted from Lindsay (1986))

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The UK’s Use of Political Conditionality Since the Cold War: Changes and Continuities

Though the UK had imposed what might be called PC in a number of isolated cases during the height of the Cold War, those applied to Fiji in 1987, Burma in 1988 and—particularly—Kenya in 1991 represent the first examples of London doing so as part of a more systematic and enduring policy shift. Since 1987, the UK has suspended, delayed or re-directed aid away from recipient governments based on governance concerns in around 35 instances (see below) with the withholding of all GBS to Tanzania following accusations of corrupt use of Central Bank funds in October 2014 being the most recent examples at the time of writing (Anderson 2014). These 35 instances represent the universe of cases under scrutiny in this section. Before exploring trends, changes and continuities in the UK’s use of, and rationale for, PC since 1991, however, it is important to outline the changing institutional context in which the instrument has been applied and governed.

From ODA to DFID: Effects on Political Conditionality Policy

During the 18 years of Conservative government between 1979 and 1997, Britain’s aid programme was managed by the ODA—a semi-autonomous organisation within the country’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). During this period, British aid policy was frequently designed to support and defend UK foreign policy interests, particularly those linked to trade (Killick 2005: 68–83). Following the election of a Labour administration in May 1997, however, ODA was separated from the FCO becoming an independent department of state, DFID, with its own secretary of state attending as a full member of Cabinet.

DFID rapidly established itself, strongly supported by DFID Secretary Clare Short ’s forceful dynamism, as the antithesis of its predecessor (Vereker 2002: 136–138).Footnote 2 The Department defined its sole objective as being the ‘elimination of global poverty’ with the linking of British aid programmes to foreign or trade policy objectives not only discouraged but effectively criminalised in the 2002 International Development Act.Footnote 3 In addition to seeking to change the intellectual culture of the Department since 1997 through the hiring of staff with closer links to development, DFID managers have also attempted to decentralise development policymaking since 1997.Footnote 4 Staff in DFID Country Offices are the key decision-makers on how aid money is spent in ‘their’ countries, and this dispensation has not changed since the Labour Party ’s loss of power in 2010. An important exception to this decentralisation of authority, however, concerns the imposition of PC, a decision which has remained largely in the hands of DFID’s secretary of state and his or her London officials since 1997 (de Renzio et al. 2005: 30). Footnote 5

The UK’s Use of Political Conditionality Since 1987: The Universe of Cases

PC has been imposed by the UK around 35 times since 1987—12 times under ODA and 23 under DFID. Threats to apply PC have also been made on a number of occasions but not followed through for a variety of reasons (Crawford 1997: 75–77; de Renzio et al. 2005: 12). It is not possible to be wholly certain that these represent the entire universe of cases—although they include all examples cited in existing secondary literature (including systematic comparisons produced in 1997 and 2005), in media sources and ODA /DFID statements consulted and in interviews undertaken for this chapter.

The following tables, which delineate instances of UK aid suspensions, delays or diversions linked to concerns on democratisation, corruption, human rights abuses and security under ODA (Table 10.1) and DFID (Table 10.2)—and the stated rationales for these decisions (where available)—since 1987, represent as complete a list as possible. While Table 10.1 captures PC imposed on a range of aid modalities, Table 10.2 focuses only on PC applied to GBS disbursements—reflecting DFID ’s almost total restriction of PC decisions to this modality in the contemporary era (Hayman 2011, see also Molenaers et al. 2015, 2016).

Table 10.1 Applications of political conditionality by ODA (1987–1997)
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Table 10.2 Applications of political conditionality by DFID (1997–2014)
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A comparison of the two tables highlights a number of basic trends in the imposition of PC by London since 1987. Firstly, while PC applied during the 1980s–1990s tended to focus primarily on instances of democratic backsliding or political space (10 of 14–72%), PC since about 2001 has been directed far more towards corruption concerns (15 of 16–94%). Secondly, while some states have been consistently targeted by UK PC since 1987—notably Malawi—others have received greater attention in either the 1990s (e.g. Kenya, Zambia and Tanzania) or the 2000s (e.g. Uganda and Rwanda); all, however, have been African since 1992. This is perhaps not surprising, given both ODA ’s and DFID ’s very heavy focus on Africa in their programmes (UK Parliament 2008: 75). As noted by a range of commentators, though, many states have not seen PC being imposed upon them by London in certain periods, despite what one DFID -commissioned report called ‘the gravity and impact’ of particular government transgressions (Brown 2005; Crawford 1997, 2000; Cumming 2001; de Renzio et al. 2005; Porteous 2005). It is crucial, however, to interrogate and unpack these—and other—trends identified in greater depth in order to better understand the UK’s evolving employment of PC and evaluations of its ‘success’ and ‘failure’. The following section, therefore, analyses how far instrumental and expressive rationales have lain behind PC decisions by London across these 35 instances.

Changes in UK Political Conditionality Policy Rationales Since 1991: From Instrumental to Expressive

The UK’s use of PC has always been motivated in part by expressive objectives—particularly a desire to be seen to be ‘acting’ in the face of high-profile governance abuses by aid-recipient government—such as in Kenya in 1991, Malawi in 1992, Ethiopia in 2005 or Uganda in 2006 (Aalen and Tronvoll 2008: 117; Brown 2007: 307–313; Cammack 1998: 183–205; Fisher 2012: 421–422). ODA and DFID officials involved in these PC decisions discuss these events in terms of their being ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, the stepping over of a ‘red line’ by the recipient which made PC necessary and justifiable.Footnote 6

It is also clear, nonetheless, that ODA officials in the 1990s—and their political masters—viewed PC as a credible and potentially effective means to force political reform upon intransigent, semi-authoritarian regimes. Senior decision-makers involved in the aid suspensions to Kenya, Sudan, Somalia (all 1991), Malawi (1992) and Nigeria (1993) have privately stressed their ‘genuine belief’ at the time that PC could ‘bring democracy’ to Africa.Footnote 7 These statements are supported by the public and private behaviour of ODA personnel during this period. PC was applied with specific guidance and recommendations given to the regimes in question as to how the aid relationship might be restored—usually the abolition of one-party states and/or a return to constitutional government (Crawford 1997; Cumming 2001).

Internal ODA discussions on the re-establishment of aid programmes in states subjected to PC focused heavily on assessments of whether the regime in question had responded in a ‘positive’ or ‘satisfactory’ manner to the specific conditions demanded by London (ODA 1992a, b, c). Likewise, the publicising of decisions and on-going discussions on PC to the British media and general public appear to have been frequently opposed in order, as one internal document on Malawi produced in June 1992 puts it, ‘to encourage as positive a response as possible [on political reform] from the Malawi Government’ (ODA 1992b).

Early impositions of PC by the UK, therefore, appear to have been informed, at least in part, by an ‘instrumental’ understanding of the tool’s efficacy. Overall, this appears to have been mainly based on Lindsay ’s logic of compliance—attempting to force aid recipients to introduce political reforms—rather than subversion or, at least explicitly, deterrence, and policymakers often expressed clear guidance on what such reforms should entail. This sentiment on the instrumental efficacy of PC appears to have been echoed, to some extent, in contemporary scholarly analysis of the phenomenon which largely focused on reviewing the circumstances under which PC ‘could be effective’ (Crawford 1997, 2000; Levitsky and Way 2006; Moore and Robinson 1994; Smith 1998; Stokke 1995).

More recent applications of PC by London, however, do not seem to have been informed by quite the same logic. With some exceptions—such as the 2001 aid suspension in Tanzania linked to Dodoma’s purchasing of an air traffic control system in dubious circumstances—contemporary impositions of PC have rarely been accompanied by any clear guidance on what reforms the recipient government in question should make to restore the aid relationship (de Renzio et al. 2005: 42–44). Indeed, in some instances—such as Uganda in 2006—recipient governments have not even been clearly informed that a decision to suspend aid has been made beforehand (FCO 2011). Most impositions of PC since the early 2000s have been declared as a response to a transgression (such as a corruption scandal) but not linked to any recommendations on what policy changes DFID would like to see introduced or what policy response it would interpret as the instrument operating successfully.

Unlike those few statements made to explain PC decisions by ODA /FCO in the early 1990s, more recent such government statements, including those on Malawi in 2011 and 2013, have emphasised the extent to which protecting ‘UK taxpayers’ money’, ensuring that ‘taxpayers’ money is safe’ (Laing 2013) and satisfying the expectations of ‘British taxpayers’ have influenced the decisions of senior policymakers. DFID officials have also followed how their spending decisions have been portrayed in the British media increasingly closely since the mid-2000s (West 2012; see also Anderson 2014 on Tanzania ). This emphasis on managing how its PC decisions are framed in the British media indicates a much stronger focus on the domestic expressive nature of the instrument among UK officials in recent years.

It is crucial to note, nonetheless, that this change in tone has been accompanied by a clear loss of faith on the part of most DFID officials in PC’s instrumental effectiveness. One DFID official has claimed, for example, that the 2010 and 2011 GBS suspensions to Uganda were not expected ‘to make any actual difference to the situation on the ground’.Footnote 8 Indeed, DFID officials have held quite negative views of conditionality as an instrument since the early years of the Department, describing it as the ‘old’ way of engaging with developing states to be contrasted with a new approach based around donor–recipient ‘partnership’ (DFID 1997: 22–49). Clearly influenced by the largely critical conditionality literature produced during the 1990s, DFID declared in 2009 its belief that ‘attempts to “buy” policy reform from an unwilling partner [through conditionality] have rarely worked’ (DFID 2009a: 19).

This revised position on the purpose of PC emerged from a departmental reassessment of the role, purpose and effectiveness of applying the instrument between 2004 and 2005. This process ultimately fed into the release of a 2005 policy paper— Rethinking Conditionality —which formally laid out the UK’s approach to PC and the ‘circumstances in which the UK will consider reducing or interrupting aid’ (DFID 2005: 3). Importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, the paper stressed that PC decisions ‘will be based on an assessment of the long term impact on poverty of the overall programme of the [recipient] government … not on failure to implement any specific policy’ and that ‘the UK will seek to talk the issues through with partner governments before taking a decision’ (DFID 2005: 10). These sentiments and guidelines have been repeated and expanded upon in several other more recent DFID practice papers on ‘implementing DFID ’s conditionality policy’ where, the form of ‘breaches’ in the UK-recipient aid relationships meriting PC are outlined (DFID 2006a: 10–11).

The last decade has therefore seen an explicit rejection of compliance-based, instrumental PC among UK officials. It has also seen a growing focus by DFID on the domestic symbolism aspect of applying PC—assuring domestic audiences that their tax money is not being ‘wasted’ on corrupt governments (DFID 2005: iii, 2009b: 20).

Political Conditionality and Domestic Politics

Two primary reasons can be advanced for this shift in thinking on PC among UK officials. These are both linked to a certain extent and are best categorised as (1) changes in intellectual thinking on the efficacy and normativity of PC in Western donor agencies since the late 1990s and (2) an increasingly fraught economic climate in the West since 2007 leading to greater scrutiny of aid budgets. The first of these might be classed as a ‘negative’ influence on this shift in that it has undermined donor confidence in the instrumental logic of PC, while the latter might be seen as more ‘positive’ in that it has encouraged donors to embrace the expressive features of the instrument.

The Rise of Ownership and the ‘Failure’ of the ‘Old Conditionalities’

Conditionality (political or otherwise) as a feature of the aid relationship came under heavy attack from commentators during the late 1990s for being both ineffective and fundamentally counter-productive for fostering long-term recipient commitment to good governance and other development goals (Killick 2004: 12–14). A number of donors consequently sought to discredit what a 1997 DFID White Paper refers to as ‘the old conditionalities’ of the past, instead proposing a new form of donor–recipient engagement based around ‘partnership’ (DFID 1997: 22–49) and respect for ‘[recipient] leadership and ownership’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1998: 82). At the heart of this focus on ‘ownership’ has been the commitment by donors to work in partnership with recipient governments, using the latter’s budget and policy framework as the basis for aid interventions, and the formal acknowledgement of the past failure of conditionalities—as interpreted through an instrumental lens (DFID 2009b: 19).

Within this dispensation, conditionality has been rejected as highly damaging, problematic and ultimately ineffective for the fostering of continued partnership and recipient ownership of policies; ‘dialogue’ is to be the preferred method for resolving donor–recipient disagreements on issues of democratisation, corruption and human rights (though see Maxwell and Riddell 1998: 262–267; Hayman 2011: 679). Donor officials themselves, however, clearly perceived moves towards ownership, partnership and budget support in the late 1990s/early 2000s as directly counter to the PC approach taken in the early 1990s. Clare Short, whose 1997–2003 tenure at DFID had profound and enduring consequences for British development policy, held this perception very strongly and viewed PC as a relic of an era of UK aid policy dominated by geostrategic and economic interests rather than concern for eliminating global poverty.Footnote 9 Short’s determination to instil a wholly ‘pro-poor’ culture at DFID —in contrast to its ODA predecessor—together with the Department’s enthusiastic investment in, and engagement with, academic development research made the UK one of the earliest donors to wholly lose faith in PC as an appropriate and effective instrument to promote developmental change. Though the UK has continued to use PC since this time, it has still not formally retreated from this position on the tool’s instrumental efficacy and former ‘failure’ (see above).

A Changing International Economic Climate

The 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis and its consequences have placed heavy pressure upon most European governments to curtail public spending where possible and to better justify ‘non-essential’ expenditure to constituents. Development budgets have been hit particularly hard within this process and a range of states, including Ireland and the Netherlands, have substantially reduced their aid spending in recent years—the latter by nearly 20% between 2011 and 2012 (De Los Reyes 2011; McGee 2013). Moreover, in this environment, Western development agencies have felt under increasing pressure to defend and justify any aid spending to sceptical domestic audiences—particularly in terms of its ‘value for money’. This changing environment has, to some extent, led to a re-calibration of donor standards of evaluation—with domestic (Western) perceptions of ‘waste’ or ‘value’ becoming increasingly significant measures of success or failure.

Since the late 2000s, therefore, most have incorporated ‘value-for-money’ criteria into many or (in the case of the UK) all of their spending programmes with ‘economy’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ representing central considerations in this regard (OECD 2012). Andrew Natsios, US Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator between 2001 and 2006, recounts a similar phenomenon in Washington in his reflection on the growth of a ‘counter-bureaucracy’ in the country’s aid management (Natsios 2010). The corollary of this approach has been to curtail or limit spending on states and programmes where funds are likely to be ‘wasted’ (e.g. through corruption) or seen to be bolstering authoritarian regimes. Given the difficulties of tracking GBS expenditure and demonstrating direct value versus potential for diversion or ‘waste’, this modality has been a particular victim of that dynamic and has frequently been cut by the UK and other donors on the basis of such concerns (Hayman 2011; Maxwell 2011).

The impact of the Global Financial Crisis in this regard has been felt particularly heavily within DFID given the Department’s rising budget under the Labour government (1997–2010) and protection against cuts (‘ring-fencing’) under the 2010–2015 Coalition government and the current majority Conservative government. DFID became the first donor to build ‘value-for-money’ considerations into its programmes comprehensively and its approach has been adopted by a range of other governments since this time (OECD 2012: 3–4).Footnote 10 Protecting the Department from accusations that funds are being ‘wasted’ has become a central feature of DFID ’s bureaucratic culture and DFID officials now privately bemoan how acutely conscious they are of the negative consequences that will befall their careers should they ‘take their eye off the ball’ on particular aid interventions and end up being perceived as responsible for continuing support to a regime which is then reported to have committed human rights abuses or sanctioned the syphoning-off of aid funds for political cronies.Footnote 11 This political culture of evaluating success or failure in light of domestic perceptions of the integrity of DFID spending decisions has been further enhanced by the arrival, in July 2016, of right-wing Conservative MP Priti Patel as DFID Secretary. Patel had previously argued in favour of DFID ’s abolition and soon after her appointment was reported—via a source cited by the Daily Mail, a newspaper she granted her first interview to as Secretary of State—to be critical of DFID ’s prior ‘spending spree [s]’ (Owen 2016). The use of PC has therefore flourished in this environment, given its ease of application (at least in relation to GBS ) as well as its high profile and immediate impact; DFID officials note that they feel increasingly incentivised to use PC to demonstrate to their superiors—and, indirectly, to domestic audiences—that they are firmly committed to ‘protecting UK taxpayers’ money’ from abuse.Footnote 12 The instrument’s ‘success’ in this regard has therefore come to be seen as demonstrated in its domestic, expressive functions.

Implications for the ‘Success’ or ‘Failure’ of Political Conditionality

This chapter makes an important contribution to literature on PC and the nature of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in international aid policy by turning around the oft-asked question ‘does PC work?’ to investigate whether aid officials themselves believe it can work and, if not, why they continue to use it and how they assess its effectiveness. Drawing on concepts discussed in the literature on economic sanctions, two broad sets of motivations have been delineated as a framework for understanding applications of PC: instrumental (focused on compliance and deterrence) and expressive (focused on domestic and international symbolism). The chapter has focused in depth on the UK’s experience with PC and argues that while expressive rationales have always informed London’s use of PC, they are far more central now that they were a decade ago and are largely concerned with domestic (UK) rather than international perceptions. Moreover, while instrumental rationales played a very important role in decisions to impose PC by UK officials in the early 1990s, the expectation that the instrument can actually force reform abroad is now largely absent from the calculations of DFID staff—thus this is no longer taken as a yardstick for the successful application of the instrument by policymakers.

These findings raise some interesting and challenging questions around hierarchies of failure in the policy world and how analysts should interpret this move towards prioritising reputational success over instrumental success among UK international development policymakers. From one perspective, a re-calibration of PC policy involving protecting against ‘failure’ in the domestic sphere represents a welcome re-focusing of policy agendas around accountability mechanisms; UK taxpayers fund UK development aid and thus their views should arguably take priority. As this chapter has shown, though, it is unclear how far DFID is aware of the nuances of public opinion in this regard, beyond a reading of media headlines. Moreover, development is one of few policy spheres where domestic audiences are not posited as the primary beneficiaries; UK aid policy is still governed by an act of parliament (2002) mandating all provision of development assistance to ‘contribute to a reduction in poverty’ ( International Development Act 2002: Part 1, Point (1)). It is unclear how the prioritisation of assumed domestic views on DFID ’s reputation meets this obligation.

Indeed, the findings of this study raise a broader set of questions for development scholars, as well as for donor officials themselves on how assessments of success or failure evolve in response to changing domestic and international political contexts. Most critically, how should the effectiveness of PC be assessed and measured to take into account its expressive purposes? If PC’s instrumental efficacy is no longer a major factor in its employment, then clearly analyses which evaluate its ‘success’ or ‘failure’ only from this perspective (e.g. whether PC results in greater democratisation or political reform) require reconsideration. Moreover, if donor usage of the instrument is increasingly premised on managing the perceptions of domestic audiences, then should donors themselves look more closely at how PC impositions are interpreted by Western citizens in measuring their degree of success and how, if at all, this affects general opinions on the value and integrity of the development enterprise?

The chapter also highlights the complex nature of evaluating policy successes and failures for scholars and analysts such as those in this edited volume. Policies around issues such as PC, for example, may be driven by multiple—and, critically, shifting—motivations and goals, and seek to address—sometimes competing—concerns from multiple audiences, domestic and international. This complicates the scholarly task considerably, since to evaluate, in McConnell ’s words, whether a policy such as PC ‘fundamentally achieve [s] the goals that proponents set out to achieve’—one can answer both in the affirmative and the negative depending on the time period being analysed and the perspectives and mindsets of officials concerned—both often heavily influenced by changes in the domestic and international political environment in a manner not always obvious in formal, political statements around how policies are to be evaluated.

Moreover, the chapter demonstrates the difficulties of even delineating the de facto tools of success/failure evaluation employed by policymakers in particular contexts. DFID has never conducted (or funded any) surveys on whether public perceptions of aid effectiveness shifts (or not) in response to well-publicised aid suspensions aimed at tackling ‘waste’. Moreover, several DFID officials interviewed for this study have privately noted that their perceptions of ‘public opinion’ on aid are often largely based on reading newspaper articlesFootnote 13 rather than any more comprehensive measure of the impact of PC on public opinion—seemingly how PC’s success or failure is now primarily understood by DFID officials. Given the profound and often long-lasting impact of PC cuts on developing states and on relations between such states and donor governments, there is a strong argument for ensuring that stronger evidence exists on its success or failure vis-à-vis domestic opinion to make such cuts worthwhile.