A Political Economy of Foreign Aid: The Case of India

In the Darwinian race for survival and for relevance to government policy that confronts the genus social science, political science (the frailest species) has turned to "political development" as its newest means of adaptation. By using an analogue from economics, many political scientists hope that their discipline will thus be able to understand and cope with the new environment of social and economic change. But the adaptation may be too late. In the history of ideas of the twentieth century, political science might well go down as a modern equivalent of the saber-toothed tiger. The tendency of the other social sciences has been to preempt the political variable and to assume that while politics may be temporarily independent, "change" will make it and us dependent upon the more vigorous specieseconomics and sociology. While some are consoled that public officials are increasingly sensitive to political problems in aid-giving, and others see hopeful signs in the titles if not necessarily the content of a series of recent volumes, I suspect that political scientists, even with their concept of political development, are voices crying in the wilderness, or worse yet, to each other. This wilderness, which exists by virtue of its distance from relevance to public policy, may well be warranted. Let us look at those reasons that make political science irrelevant to foreign aid-giving as a factor in social and economic change. Two general models of change and its political implications are prevalent. True to their Western intellectual origins they both partake of the prophetic tradition. One, the Jeremiah model, argues that economic and social change, by disturbing the equilibrium of the status quo, unleashes forces that will produce either a traditionalistic reaction or a modernizing military or civil dictatorship.' Foreign assistance, very little of which is "real" or used for planned social and economic change, the Jeremiah prophets argue, cannot bring about the conditions for its own "progressive" use; therefore, political intention contributes to the destabilizing