Foreign Aid in Australia's Relationship with the South: Institutional Narratives.

In identifying the determinants of Australia's foreign aid relationship with developing countries (sometimes labelled 'the South'), this article examines the institutional history of official Australian development assistance since the Second World War. Several, often competing, narratives are delineated. These include: an ongoing questioning within the aid 'policy community', such as it is, of the purpose of foreign aid and the nature of its relationship to foreign policy; bureaucratic contestation over access to foreign aid resources; the desire of Australian foreign aid decision-makers to ensure their control, increasingly via managerialist methods, of aid delivery; and an avoidance by decision-makers of viewing the South as a politically relevant entity. Taken together, these narratives portray an aid programme that has become more 'professionalised' over time, but which finds itself institutionally inhibited from engaging meaningfully with the political nature of international development relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]