Aid Relationship

Abstract

The Pearson Commission (1968–69) was born out of a sense of crisis and despair about development assistance. From its modest beginning in the early 1950s, foreign aid had increased to substantial proportions by the middle of the Development Decade. For the poorer two-thirds of mankind, the decade and a half before the establishment of the commission was a period of rapid awakening and sizeable progress towards modernisation and a sense of national identity and purpose. And yet, the concept of international co-operation for building stable and self-reliant societies began to lose its shine before it had gained any wide-spread currency. Among donors and recipients alike, there was frequent talk of a crisis of confidence, and a feeling of disenchantment with foreign aid. It was against this background that a ‘grand assize’ of internationally eminent persons was summoned to ‘meet together, study the consequences of twenty years of development assistance, assess the results, clarify the errors and propose the policies which will work better in the future’.

Prepared for the Columbia University Conference on International Economic Development, Williamsburg, Va. and New York, February 1970, and reproduced with slight editorial changes in Barbara Ward, J. D. Runnalls and Lenore D’Anjou (eds), The Widening Gap — Development in the 1970’s (Columbia University Press, 1971) pp. 295–311. This paper was prepared as a comment on Lester B. Pearson et al., Partners in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development (New York: Praeger Publications, 1969). It appeared originally under the title Aid Relationship for the Seventies.