That is correct. I think it is pretty uncontentious to say that the people who study this in general worry less about these private charity-type interventions than they do about ODA.
This surprises me, since on-budget ODA works through government and government accountability frameworks, whereas off-budget and totally private spending does not. Is this perhaps just because private philanthropy in international development is just very small (and therefore less risky) in dollar terms compared to ODA?
In the domestic context, excessive private philanthropic funding can be seen as undermining democracy and weakening the state, in relation to education policy for example.
I’m thinking for example of the arguments made in “Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas—a book which I really didn’t like and don’t personally endorse but makes some valid points, which I think are commonly held.
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.
Thank you, Ian, for asking the question that was in the back of my mind while I was reading this well-written and accessible post by ryancbriggs. I think it would be nice if the OP could add this caveat (that the evidence concerns a specific type of aid), since I assume some of the people reading this post in the EA forum will possibly update unjustly against aid recommended by, for instance, GiveWell.
That is correct. I think it is pretty uncontentious to say that the people who study this in general worry less about these private charity-type interventions than they do about ODA.
This surprises me, since on-budget ODA works through government and government accountability frameworks, whereas off-budget and totally private spending does not. Is this perhaps just because private philanthropy in international development is just very small (and therefore less risky) in dollar terms compared to ODA?
In the domestic context, excessive private philanthropic funding can be seen as undermining democracy and weakening the state, in relation to education policy for example.
I’m thinking for example of the arguments made in “Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas—a book which I really didn’t like and don’t personally endorse but makes some valid points, which I think are commonly held.
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.
Thank you, Ian, for asking the question that was in the back of my mind while I was reading this well-written and accessible post by ryancbriggs. I think it would be nice if the OP could add this caveat (that the evidence concerns a specific type of aid), since I assume some of the people reading this post in the EA forum will possibly update unjustly against aid recommended by, for instance, GiveWell.