One world, big society: a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development

Abstract

This article offers a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development, published as part of the closely fought election campaign of 2010 that culminated in a UK coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. The article examines the paper in comparison with the discursive shifts represented by the first Department for International Development (DfID) white paper, published by the outgoing Labour administration in 1997. In contrast with the optimistic and globalist developmentalism that characterised Labour's development discourse, the green paper sounds a more cautious note, using empire to focus on Britain's leadership role in poverty alleviation rather than on global progress, and brings back the full force of developmentalism only at the point where it seeks to legitimate spending on security concerns as a development concern. The article then moves on to examine the green paper's most explicit discursive move, the signalling of a ‘post‐bureaucratic age’. This move towards increased information provision to promote transparency and accountability is likely to signal greater control by powerful donors in securitised times, albeit with a potential re‐scaling of responsibility for poverty alleviation to the poorest local communities. Finally, the article looks briefly at information technologies in relation to the transnational spatiality of civil society, arguing that attention needs to be paid to the more embodied forms of transnational association encouraged by the green paper, and to the selection and impacts of information, which need to be seen in the discursive context of wider Conservative constructions of the ‘big society’.

National interests and the paradox of foreign aid under austerity: Conservative governments and the domestic politics of international development since 2010

“…Surveys and studies repeatedly show that public understandings of aid in the UK are dominated by the construction of it as ‘charity’: whether this is considered to be noble (benefitting poor people in poor countries) or naïve (wastefully benefitting corrupt leaders, business people and bureaucrats). This is an attitude that enrols a longer imperial and post‐imperial mind set (Duffield and Hewitt ; Noxolo ). At a global policy and governance level, since the late 1990s/early 2000s, the anti‐poverty and aid effectiveness agenda has strongly promoted principles and mechanisms by which donors are meant to eschew narrow self‐interest.…”

“…Regrettably, there is no evidence that guilt is motivating the current official provision of UK aid. Indeed, in the 2009 Green Paper, the Empire is invoked with some pride (Noxolo ; see also Biccum on earlier iterations), while at no point have David Cameron, Justine Greening, Priti Patel or any official UK development‐humanitarian spokesperson on the refugee crisis or the situation in Syria, for example, framed aid in terms of reparation for the UK's foreign policy misadventures. While there are plenty of claims around the morality of aid, these are couched in terms of ‘doing right’, and not as historical obligations or acknowledgement of guilt for more recent disastrous policy decisions.…”

A ‘post‐aid world'? Paradigm shift in foreign aid and development cooperation at the 2011 Busan High Level Forum

“…; Breman ; Mawdsley et al . ; Noxolo ). Second, there has been an extraordinary explosion in the number of state and non‐state aid actors and programmes (Acharya et al .…”

Unsettling responsibility: postcolonial interventions

“…It is not a simplified call for self‐determination, always a tricky demand in an uneven world. It also resists the individualisation of responsibility through notions of self‐reliance and self‐help (Noxolo 2011). Nor is it to claim that pre‐colonial relations were innocent – rather responsible refusal recognises that the past too was uneven, riven with injustices.…”