From Cargo Cult to Public Entitlement?

David Sogge, analyst and sometime staff member in the aid industry since 1970. He recently published Give and Take - What's the Matter with Foreign Aid?

Foreign aid is a large, middle-aged and troubled industry with few successes to its name. Yet it is expected to respond to new and frighteningly complex problems. Can it do so? Aid is supposedly about transfering material goods and services - that is, cargo.

But major donors/lenders have commonly used aid to transmit selected ideas -- in a word, the cult. How can aid participants displace the industry's current technocratic and market fundamentalist cults? Can the aid industry be replaced by a system based on principles of emancipation and entitlement? That is, an aid system democratic in its execution, effective in its impact, adequate in scale, just in its consequences?