title: The Impact of Shifts in Global Aid on the Development of Post-Conflict Sri Lanka: 2009-2015
Creators: name: Gunasekara, Sandya Nishanthi
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Global aid
subject: Sri Lanka
subject: Aid donors
subject: Post-conflict aid

description: How do far-reaching shifts in the global aid business impact on development priorities in post-conflict countries? This thesis addresses a deficiency in the aid literature, which recently has applauded the concept of aid for post-conflict development while rarely explaining the effects of having different aid donors for development and for the post-conflict recovery process for which the issue of aid ownership arises. Sri Lanka is selected as a case study as it experienced civil war between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for over 30 years, and which finally came to an end in 2009. Despite the endorsement in the development literature that aid is a key to successful post-conflict recovery, in the case of Sri Lanka, confusion and lack of clarity remain as to the outcomes. Aid donors, both traditional (e.g., Japan, USA, Norway) and non-traditional (e.g., China, India), have channelled their post-conflict aid to Sri Lanka using their own interpretations of development priorities. This study argues that a diversification of development priorities is now taking place in which non-traditional aid donors’ interpretation of development priorities is quite different to that of traditional donors. This study argues that such inconsistency among aid donors about significant development priorities provides new opportunities and arenas for aid recipient to make a choice among aid donors. In order to better explain the phenomenon, a post-conflict analysis of donor and recipient activities in post-conflict Sri Lanka (2009-2015) is presented. The study investigates three research questions: (1) How did donors react to post-conflict development of Sri Lanka in terms of scaling up/scaling down total aid?; (2) Was the sectoral allocation of post-conflict aid by traditional and non-traditional bilateral donors shaped by post-conflict Sri Lankan-specific needs?; and (3) What was the impact of tilting towards China and what effect has the move away from dependence on traditional aid providers had on aid ownership in post-conflict Sri Lanka? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and the International Development Statistics (IDS) online database, the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and Ministry of Planning and Finance of Sri Lanka annual reports of various years are mainly used to make an analysis based on sectoral composition of aid flows in terms of key development priorities. Based on the literature, the study identifies four types of needs-based development priorities: establishing safety and security, reconstructuring infrastructure and restoring services, stabilising and equitably growing the economy and strengthening constitutional government. This study’s results indicate that there is an inconsistency between donors over their assessment of post-conflict development priorities. That is almost all donors are typically selective when deciding what type of aid is suitable for recipients to receive. A habitual overlooking of the governance criteria and equitable growth of the economy relating to development and placing of a high priority on economic infrastructure development are dominant tendencies of non-traditional aid donors. Most strikingly is the priority given by like-minded traditional aid donors to safety and security, but which has declined as priorities in Sri Lanka since 2009. What stands out in terms of post-conflict development in Sri Lanka is the clear differentiation of aid donors’ support for distinctively different post-conflict recovery outcomes. In such a situation, given the aid donors’ difficulty of reaching agreement on a set of development priorities in post-conflict countries, the recipient will be faced with choosing between aid donors’ differing priorities. This study suggests that Sri Lanka faces the prospect, not merely of having to subordinate some of the more difficult development targets and reforms, but also to demonstrate its willingness to receive more aid: that is, Sri Lanka wants to have what is termed in this study as ‘conditionality selectivity’. Sri Lanka’s choice of China as the main aid donor, this study further argues, may be made not because Sri Lanka agrees with China over what post-conflict development priorities should be. Rather, because Sri Lanka needs to maintain a significant level of policy dialogue with China having aid conditionalities that are easy to comply with. How then does building a close dialogue with non-traditional donors, or the capacity to have ‘conditionality selectivity’ impact on aid ownership? Linked to this shift was the diplomatic support received from China, but which, indirectly weakened Sri Lanka’s ownership position. On the other hand, because Sri Lanka has not been able to wholly ignore traditional donors and their influence and because Sri Lanka needs to maintain at least a low level policy dialogue with donors having aid conditionalities that are difficult to comply with, it has resorted to implementing a number of nationally designed peace policies, although according to traditional donors, they were not sufficient. These issues clearly pose a challenge to the concept of aid ownership. Key words: shifts in the global aid business, post-conflict development, traditional donors, non-traditional donors, post-conflict Sri Lanka, conditionality selectivity.