The irony of choice in the “New Development Financing Landscape”

Abstract

Hyperbole and optimism abound in popular interpretations of the so-called "New Development Financing Landscape" (OECD, 2014). Since the early 2000s, there has been a dramatic increase in the quantity and diversity of development finance available to developing countries. To some, the increased quantum of finance provided by a variety of South-South Cooperation (SSC) providers, in combination with the diverse financial flows from the private sector, has heralded a "Post-Aid World" (Mawdsley et al., 2014). While for much of the formative decades of post-war development finance came predominantly in the form of foreign aid or official development assistance (ODA), the landscape is now characterised by significant heterogeneity "beyond ODA" (Severino & Ray, 2009). For major development institutions such as the OECD (2014, p. 28), "countries have more funding options and more policy space." The financing context has become, for Greenhill et al. (2016), an unprecedented "Age of Choice" for developing countries.We challenge the idea that a more pluralised development landscape equates to an abundance of available finance, greater "choice" or room for manoeuvre in policy terms, or diversity in development ideology. While there are important questions to be asked about the "agency" of policy actors in recipient countries, agency is not always enlarged and expanded by a greater diversity of development finance. Rather, we observe that states seeking to attract finance are