Agencies in Foreign Aid: Comparing China, Sweden, and the United States in Tanzania. Goran Hyden and Rwekaza Mukandala (eds.). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 256 pp. Cloth: $ 69.95.

Foreign aid researchers have endured a frustrating decade since the Cold War. It was widely expected in the early 1990s that the many problems associated with foreign aid, particularly its manipulation by donors and recipients in the East-West ideological struggle, would give way to a new era of "sustainable development." Unfortunately, the aid regime confronted a new set of obstacles during the decade: widespread cynicism and resentment stemming from the Cold War experience, cutbacks in aid budgets among most OECD donors, and regional economic crises that shifted attention from development aid to damage control, largely in the form of massive IMF bailouts. At the same time, neo-liberal calls for private investments to replace government transfers fueled the backlash against aid while only selectively bringing foreign capital into the world's poorest economies.

Among other lessons of the 1990s, the need for effective development aid was again made clear in areas that could not attract large-scale private investment. This included much of sub-Saharan Africa, which was still reeling from the "lost decade of development" in the 1980s. As many African governments struggled to implement democratic reforms, along with market-driven economic reforms recommended by the OECD and other international organizations, the reduced aid flows hampered their efforts to lay the groundwork for long-term development. Education programs went unfunded, technical assistance to farmers was cut back, environmental reforms were delayed or canceled, and steps to reduce population growth fell victim to religious debates among donors and within some recipient governments.

Into this morass comes the informative, if not uplifting, edited volume by Goran Hyden and Rwekaza Mukandala, Agencies in Foreign Aid: Comparing China, Sweden, and the United States in Tanzania (New York: St. Martin's, 1999). Their comparative case study brings well-deserved attention to Tanzania, the "darling" of aid donors during the Cold War whose government somehow managed to attract large-scale aid from such diverse sources as the communist government of China, the kingdom of Sweden, and the hotbed of global capitalism based in Washington.

This volume succeeds in several ways. First, its focus on Tanzania is justified for the reasons already noted. Second, the cross-national approach offers a wide variety of lessons for all members of the current aid regime, including donors and recipients. Scrutiny of the Chinese program is especially illuminating given the lack of attention previously paid to China as an aid donor. Third, the longitudinal coverage allows readers to assess the successes and more common failures of aid programs to Tanzania during an extended period (1965-1995). Finally, the volume goes beyond the "macro" level of aid as a foreign-policy instrument and explores the role of government agencies in devising and implementing aid programs. This is particularly helpful because, as we learn in reading the six chapters, these agencies often played a crucial independent role in determining the shape and outcome of aid projects.

The case study on U.S. development aid to Tanzania most aptly makes this point. Stephen L. Snook examines the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and finds that the agency's work in Tanzania often departed from the government's general foreign policy goals, which were based on the realism of the Cold War. "Much altruism came from within," notes Snook (p. 107). The AID mission throughout this period was "replete with expressions of humanitarian concerns. AID's officials and the private contractors and consultants who work for the agency do not appear to be driven by narrow self-interest."

The point here is not to exonerate the U.S. government, whose aid program frequently rewarded military dictators at the expense of development. Snook instead illustrates the book's central thesis that aid agencies serve not merely as conduits of aid, but as vital instruments of aid policy development and delivery. A similar lesson is advanced by Ole Elgstrom, who describes how the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) enjoyed "considerable freedom of manoeuvre" (p. 122) and frequently changed direction in administering aid to Tanzania. Specifically, SIDA's early emphasis on solidarity with social democracies yielded in the 1990s to concerns for efficiency and market reforms that had become central to IMF, World Bank, and OECD officials. In this respect SIDA moved from the "solidarity trap," as outlined earlier by Hyden and Mukandala, to the "coordination trap." In neither case, however, was the success of SIDA-funded projects adequately safeguarded.

The Chinese case provides a less convincing example of bureaucratic autonomy. According to Ai Ping, China's government initially viewed development aid as a vehicle for exporting its program of "proletarian internationalism" (p. 158). In the 1980s and 1990s, however, Chinese aid to Tanzania, as elsewhere, became infused with enhancing its own economic self-interests and integrating the PRC into the "donor community." The evidence put forward in this case suggests a more determinant role by Chinese government officials, and less flexibility for the agencies involved with delivering the aid to Tanzania. But again, the results for development were disappointing. "By first and foremost transplanting its own experience from home, Chinese aid did not have much incentive to develop a full understanding of Africa's social formation and economic characteristics" (p. 200).

In the concluding chapter Hyden is joined by Kenneth Mease, a colleague at the University of Florida. They review the diverse experience of the three donors and argue again for the central role of aid agencies as "front-line organizations" in the struggle for Tanzanian economic and political development. Taken together, the case studies reveal the agencies to be "part not so much of the solution as the problem" (p. 228) either by falling into the two traps noted above, or by succumbing to the "accountability" and "insularity" traps outlined in the introductory chapter. Hyden and Mease conclude that not all of the blame for Tanzania's poor economic performance should be directed toward the donors. Tanzania's government routinely failed to make use of the massive inflows of aid that came from almost every developed country during the three decades under review.

Taken together, this important volume sheds much-needed light on one of the world's most complex networks of aid delivery. Although instructive, the depiction of foreign aid to Tanzania as a "tainted enterprise" (p. 232) may only add to the cynicism that provoked rampant withdrawals of aid from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s. In the years to come, one hopes that temptations to let the Africans "fend for themselves" are overcome by leading members of the aid regime. The humanitarian disasters that have plagued Africa in recent years--from Somalia and Sudan across central Africa to Nigeria and Liberia-make it painfully clear that the world's affluent states can and must seek a more constructive role in this embattled region.

Steven Hook
Department of Political Science
Kent State University