A 10-Part Series Examining the Global Development Sector Through the 50-Year Lens of David Sims
The foreign aid industry, frequently referred to as the “development community” to impart a “cuddly glow”, is a complex global behemoth that warrants comprehensive investigation. This 10-part series draws upon the critical insights presented by economist and urban development specialist David Sims in his book, Development Delusions and Contradictions: An Anatomy of the Foreign Aid Industry. Sims’ analysis, forged over 50 years of direct professional experience in the field, aims to expose the entrenched contradictions and systemic pathologies that render international development cooperation profoundly ineffective, and often, actively counterproductive.
For seven decades, the development era has persisted, involving extremely intelligent and committed technical staff, endless discussions, initiatives, and vast sums of funds intended to “fertilize the landscape”. Yet, Sims poses the fundamental question: why has it not been possible to “get things right,” and why does the future seem destined for “more of the same”? Sims contends that answering this requires a detailed “anatomy” of the many aid structures and modalities that have been created, along with the extensive “posturing” that has evolved in poor countries to accommodate them.
The Author’s Unsparing Lens: 50 Years Inside the Beast
David Sims brings half a century of life and work in development contexts to this analysis. He progressed through the ranks from a junior specialist to a senior expert, eventually becoming a “dinosaur in demand”. His experience spanned numerous Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries, working for a wide array of bilateral and multilateral agencies and the consulting firms they employ. This intimate, close-up view led him to an early realization that the industry was riddled with serious contradictions, achieved little positive impact, squandered vast amounts of money, was “pompously self-important,” and frequently caused significant negative impacts on the countries receiving aid.
This realization crystallized during his time in Nepal in the early 1990s. He observed that the sheer weight of donors in practically everything that could be considered developmental was causing counterproductive overload and confusion in Kathmandu and across the country—a reality that donors either failed to perceive or chose to ignore. This experience spurred his exploration into the paradoxes of the industry, finding that specific critiques regarding the development industry’s contradictions and unintended consequences were often obscured by an overwhelming deluge of “mind-numbing technical and prescriptive output”. Sims found that donors generally avoided any inward critique, preferring instead to thrive on “objectifying the rest as something detached and out there,” thereby justifying new paradigms and warmed-over agendas to keep the business of development moving.
The author’s specialized professional background as an economist and urban development specialist provides a unique, yet comprehensive, perspective. His work has focused primarily on urban development issues, including housing, urban expansion, industrial growth, urban poverty, informal settlement upgrading, municipal finance, and infrastructure, as well as fashionable cross-cutting issues. He notes that focusing on “things urban” grants familiarity with virtually every development issue conceivable. Furthermore, Egypt holds a certain pride of place in the book, having constituted half of Sims’ professional life and serving as a valuable point of reference for concrete examples of how the aid system and its “partnership” principles often proved counterproductive.
Anatomizing the Development Industry
Sims deliberately labels this complex global ecosystem an “industry”. This classification is justified by several measurable and structural attributes:
Quantifiable Turnover: The industry is a “behemoth” with a quantifiable turnover that exceeded $200 billion per year in 2021.
Massive Employment: It employs or otherwise occupies a “cast of hundreds of thousands”. Thomas Dichter, in 2002, tossed out a conservative global estimate of roughly half a million people making their living from the industry, a number which is likely larger now.
Profit Generation: It generates substantial revenues for companies, international NGOs (INGOs), and individuals. The core of the industry is represented by competitive procurement processes, which account for almost all aid industry expenditures and generate intense competition among businesses eager to acquire slices of these flows.
Conceptualizing Organizations: More than any other global industry, the development industry includes an inordinate number of organizations focused on conceptualizing, measuring results, tracking fund flows, and justifying the myriad of activities undertaken.
Perception by Players: It is universally treated as an industry by a wide range of stakeholders, including donors, academics, foundations, journalists, politicians, think tanks, private contractors, and NGOs.
The industry lacks market feedback, making it incomparable to normal corporate entities where success is measured by profits or market share. Instead, it is primarily in the business of spending already earmarked funds, and success is gauged by the ability to spend them, and vaguely, on time.
For the purposes of this analysis, the term “donors” is used as shorthand for all entities in the West that dispense funds, advice, or knowledge aimed at the “rest”. This definition is broad, encompassing government agencies, international institutions, and development foundations. Significantly, it includes multinational financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF, even though much of their funding consists of loans that must be repaid, because their funds originate from Western country pledges, their goals are similar to bilateral agencies, they use the same “development-speak,” and they frequently coordinate their programs. Dozens of UN agencies, often serving as specialized conduits or “talk shops,” and private foundations/charities based in the West are also included as donors.
The Inherent Conflict: Donor Self-Interest as the Original Sin
The central argument of Sims’ anatomy is that the overall malaise in the industry is “more than the sum of its parts”. To lay bare the pathologies, it is necessary to look beyond rhetoric and political correctness and identify the systemic motivations that drive industry players and the obsessional themes that riddle the business.
A critical background context that readers must bear in mind is that donor governments provide development assistance for reasons “that have nothing to do with helping countries develop economically or with alleviating the poverty of their citizens”.
These reasons fall into two main categories of self-interest:
Strategic Interests: These are pursued chiefly by more powerful donor countries and represent “totally un-subtle forms of self-interest”. Aid programs, sometimes intertwined with military assistance and weapons sales, are offered as “sweeteners” to advance diplomatic and security interests in specific regions or countries. Aid is thus utilized as a classic tool of statecraft, aimed at buying goodwill or encouraging recipients to adopt positions they might otherwise reject.
Economic Interests: A significant portion of development funding remains formally or informally “tied,” meaning that recipient countries must spend the funds on goods, services, and expertise sourced from the donor country. International agencies, including multilateral banks, tend to procure the majority of their services from firms and individuals located in Western countries.
Attempts to control or mitigate these particular donor interests have been largely ineffective. Indeed, some pessimists argue that these self-interests are so dominant that “development itself is simply an elaborate sideshow”. These interests inevitably influence how aid is financed and delivered. The necessity of constantly asking, “who will end up getting the work, and who ultimately benefits?” is paramount when scrutinizing new initiatives spun out by the industry.
The conclusion of Sims’ entire investigation is that the development industry’s fundamental failing—its “original sin”—is the belief that “outsiders can do what country insiders can’t or won’t”. No country has ever successfully developed solely through the “charity or good intentions of another country”. When good intentions obscure pervasive self-interests and carry “absurdist and arrogant baggage,” they cease to be helpful.
Structure of the Series
This 10-part series will follow Sims’ structure, dissecting the key traits and behaviors that prevent effective development assistance and make real, endogenous development “well-nigh impossible”. The book structures its analysis around twenty root themes or traits, organized into three primary parts:
Part I: Inside the Donor World: Explores the motivations and imperatives driving donor behavior, including the obsession with spending, the proliferation of initiatives, bureaucratic control mechanisms, and the pervasive “herd instinct”.
Part II: When the West Meets the Rest: Details the effects of donor operations on recipient countries (“the rest”), the predictable nature of weak governments in these contexts, and the largely negative counter-posturing adopted by recipients.
Part III: Conclusions: Synthesizes how the cumulative problems are “more than the sum of its individual parts,” drawing eleven main conclusions, and examining the industry’s prospects for the future.
The series will tackle these themes in depth:
| Post | Key Theme |
| :— | :— |
| Intro | Anatomy of the Foreign Aid Industry: Setting the stage with David Sims’ 50-year critique of the industry’s contradictions and self-serving nature. |
| 1 | The $200 Billion Industry That Never Goes Out of Business |
| 2 | The Imperative to Spend: When Moving Money Matters More Than Results |
| 3 | Death by Missions: How Donors Suffocate the Countries They Help |
| 4 | The Knowledge Colonizers: When Outsiders Own Your Story |
| 5 | The Partnership Illusion: When ‘Help’ Comes with Handcuffs |
| 6 | The Pay Gap That Kills Development |
| 7 | When the Rest Strikes Back: The Art of Playing Donors |
| 8 | The Symbiotic Trap: Why Both Sides Need Each Other to Fail |
| 9 | Informality: The $200 Billion Elephant in the Room |
| 10 | Can Less Be More? A Radical Rethinking of Foreign Aid |
The subsequent post in this series will delve into why the massive foreign aid complex operates more as a self-perpetuating industry than a genuine instrument of transformative change.