Between Rhetoric and Reality: Essays on Partnership in Development

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

This slim book is highly theoretical. Two authorities in international
assistance, a Canadian with experience in Guyana and Laos (Lynne Hately)
and an Indian with experience in Thailand (Kamal Malhotra), discuss
relationships between donors and recipients. Should they be partnerships
between equals, or does the one who has the gold make the rules? The
authors agree that the former is desirable, the latter too often the
case.

Surely greater specificity (it is almost totally lacking in anecdotes)
would have enhanced the book, making it more interesting and more
credible. Guyana, for example, has had notoriously bad government for
almost half a century. What reason is there to think that fewer rules
and regulations from Canadian donors and greater freedom for Guyanese to
spend Canadian money as they saw fit would have led to wiser use of the
funds in question? The book focuses on nongovernmental organizations as
well as on governments. Canadian churches gave generously to India for
decades, providing funds for schools, hospitals, and famine relief. Did
such generosity have a positive impact? Did paternalism lead to
bureaucratic complications, which made the positive impact less than it
should have been? There is no clue in these pages.

The theory may be good, but without evidence, the argument remains to
be proven.