My claiming it’s uncontentious is based on working in this research area and talking to lots of researchers about it. When asked, most say they’re less worried about charity than ODA causing these sort of governance issues. Now I get that your question is “why?” and my answer here is more tentative, because I don’t know what is going on in their heads.
I do think “size of flow” is a big part of it. I’d guess “large flow” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for governance issues, and absent something like a big GiveDirectly UBI-type thing the size of charity flows is often not that large compared to e.g. recipient government budgets.
In terms of the theory, I honestly just think our theory is pretty weak. We’ve often expected flows to cause harm when it looks like they didn’t. I don’t want to say theory isn’t important here, but I think we should be at least as cautious about theory as we are about empirics (very). Maybe it’s worth pointing out that my title was that we don’t have good evidence for harm, which I strongly stand by, not that we have good evidence that these flows are benign (we don’t). This is just a very hard area to study.
My claiming it’s uncontentious is based on working in this research area and talking to lots of researchers about it. When asked, most say they’re less worried about charity than ODA causing these sort of governance issues. Now I get that your question is “why?” and my answer here is more tentative, because I don’t know what is going on in their heads.
I do think “size of flow” is a big part of it. I’d guess “large flow” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for governance issues, and absent something like a big GiveDirectly UBI-type thing the size of charity flows is often not that large compared to e.g. recipient government budgets.
In terms of the theory, I honestly just think our theory is pretty weak. We’ve often expected flows to cause harm when it looks like they didn’t. I don’t want to say theory isn’t important here, but I think we should be at least as cautious about theory as we are about empirics (very). Maybe it’s worth pointing out that my title was that we don’t have good evidence for harm, which I strongly stand by, not that we have good evidence that these flows are benign (we don’t). This is just a very hard area to study.