Search

In 2013, the government abolished the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which had been Canada’s flagship foreign aid agency for decades, and transferred its functions to the newly renamed Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD). As the government is rethinking Canadian aid and its relationship with other foreign policy and commercial objectives, the time is ripe to rethink Canadian aid more broadly. Edited by Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black, this is the first book on Canadian foreign aid since CIDA was folded into DFATD. Designed to reach a variety of audiences, contributions by twenty-one scholars and experts in the field offer an incisive examination of Canada’s record and recent changes in Canadian foreign aid, such as its focus on maternal and child health and on the extractive sector. Many chapters also ask more fundamental questions concerning the intersection of the moral imperative that underpins aid and the trend towards greater self-interest. For instance, what are and what should be the underlying motives of Canadian aid? How compatible are altruism and self-interest in foreign aid? To what extent should aid be integrated with Canada’s other policies and practices? The portrait that emerges is a sobering one. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Canada’s changing role in the world and how it reflects on Canada.

Introduction Before 2013, Canadian government officials often cited Afghanistan as an example of successful whole-of-government engagement in fragile states. Official Ottawa lauded the Afghanistan taskforce system, with its extensive coordination of Canadian efforts from Ottawa down to the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, as the gold standard for joined-up approaches (GOC 2012a). The peer review of Canada’s development cooperation, carried out by the Development Assistance Committe...

This article bridges global and Haiti-specific debates on statehood, the political economy of state and state (de)formation, as well as the conceptualization and measurement of those phenomena. Drawing on data sets and secondary literatures from Haiti and beyond, it argues that despite the unique features of the extremely weak state in Haiti, that case can usefully be compared to the range of weak to fairly strong states in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the process, the article makes a case for considering degrees of sovereignty as an integral dimension of statehood in the region and elsewhere. It demonstrates the relevance of concepts used in other articles in this volume, such as 'weakness by design', in the Haitian case. The article ends by suggesting that it would be useful to look beyond neo-Weberian theories, for example by incorporating critical feminist analysis, to understand the different faces of state weakness and their social construction in the region. El presente artículo tiende un puente entre los debates globales y específicos de Haití sobre estatalidad, la economía política de la (de)formación del Estado y la conceptualización y medición de dichosfenómenos. Basándose en datos y literatura secundaria sobre Haití, pero sin circunscribirse a este caso, el presente artículo sostiene que a pesar de los rasgos característicos del Estado extremadamente débil de Haití, dicho caso puede ser comparado productivamente con una serie de otros estados, que van desde estados débiles a relativamente fuertes, en América Latina y el Caribe. En el proceso, el artículo sugiere considerar a los niveles de soberanía como una dimensión integral de la estatalidad en la región, pero también en otras partes del mundo. El artículo demuestra la relevancia de conceptos utilizados en otros artículos de este volumen, como el de "debilidad por diseno", para el caso de Haití. El artículo concluye sugiriendo que sería útil ir más allá de las teorías neoweberianas, por ejemplo incorporando análisis críticos feministas, para entender las diferentes caras de la debilidad estatal y su construcción social en la región.