The Procurement System, the Myth of Neutral Expertise, and the Monopolization of Country Knowledge
The foreign aid industry’s compulsion to incessantly move money (the imperative to spend, Post 2) requires a sophisticated, yet self-defeating, mechanism of control. This countervailing obsession with control dictates that funds are disbursed only through processes that are sanitized, auditable, and firmly managed by the donor, not the recipient. The primary vehicle for enforcing this control—and for generating the massive volume of documentation that defines development—is the procurement system. David Sims contends that procurement, particularly the acquisition of “expertise” through opaque consulting networks, does more than just spend money; it effectively colonizes the recipient country’s intellectual space, monopolizing knowledge and shaping the national development narrative to fit external, donor-driven agendas.
This post dissects the ’little-known world’ of procurement, the paradoxical tyranny of the terms of reference (TOR), the creation of a marketplace for self-serving Western expertise, and the ultimate effect of this system: suppressing endogenous development paths by ensuring that outsiders own the recipient country’s development story.
The Control Obsession and the Counter-Bureaucracy
The drive to spend is constantly compromised by the donor’s need for strict, auditable control. This need has resulted in the creation of a “counter-bureaucracy”—a system of compliance, communication, and oversight built specifically to sanitize the ponderous delivery mechanisms and guarantee that only “proper, unassailable outcomes result”.
This obsession with control has serious consequences for the effectiveness of aid, leading to chronic risk-aversion. Donors inherently fear any “whiff of favoritism” or corruption, leading them to abandon efficient practices, such as single-source contracting, in favor of overly complicated and rigid competitive bidding. This risk-aversion leads to a preference for low-risk, easily measurable kinds of service delivery, often in sectors like health, rather than more “transformative” development work such as policy reform or institution building.
The risk-averse mentality, coupled with the need for quantifiable results, can reach “absurdist limits,” such as an investment project in India designed to incorporate the recruitment of close to 300 internal financial auditors just to monitor how the funds would be spent. Andrew Natsios, criticizing this system, pointed out that compliance can become counterproductive, consuming donor staff time and resources and prioritizing bureaucratic requirements over actual program implementation in the field. This entire control apparatus effectively forces development agencies into choosing between “irrelevance and subterfuge,” designing low-risk projects that politicians favor or obfuscating the political realities of development to comply with accounting demands.
Procurement: The Core Mechanism of Control and Expenditure
The development industry’s core expenditures, accounting for approximately ninety-some percent of development funding, flow through competitive procurement processes for expertise, management, and other services. This flow generates “intense interest and competition” among businesses seeking “slices of these varied flows,” confirming the aid sector’s nature as a massive industry.
Procurement in the modern aid era is characterized as a “little-known world of bureaucratic rules, regulations, and oversight”. While the stated aim is noble—to ensure funds are spent economically and contracts are awarded through fair and transparent competition—the procedures imposed by donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) on recipient countries are rigid, complicated, and highly detailed, even for loans that must be repaid. This inevitably creates an “intrinsic bureaucratic and procedural burden” that makes any notion of genuine recipient ‘ownership’ a “joke”.
The volume of activity is staggering: one list of top ten development agencies published over 14,000 tenders in the first quarter of 2020 alone.
The typical procurement process for consulting firms involves five complex steps:
Preparation of the Tender: Donor or recipient executing agencies (often with external help) prepare the terms of reference (TOR) and estimate the required expertise and budget.
Expression of Interest (EOI): A prequalification step.
Request for Proposals (RFPs) or Requests for Appointments (RFAs): Sent to a shortlist, these documents are extremely detailed, including mandatory CVs and tight deadlines, often demanding a “huge amount of work” from bidders within a short timeframe (usually only a month or two).
Review and Negotiation: Technical and financial proposals are scrutinized.
Contract Signing: Frequently involves signing contracts that are overly complicated or contain contradictions, relying on “naïve faith” that issues will be overcome by goodwill, though this often evaporates into “cascading misunderstandings, disputes, held-up payments, and even recourse to legal action”.
This intense process means that successful consulting firms must dedicate a substantial portion—often “more than half of its staff and management efforts”—simply to tracking announcements, negotiating consortia, and assembling teams to navigate these bureaucratic steps. This leads firms to specialize in “proposal writing and other ‘process’ jobs” rather than substantive development solutions.
The Tyranny of the Terms of Reference (TOR)
The terms of reference (TOR) is the “bedrock document” from which practically all development work flows. Its evolution mirrors the institutional pathologies of the industry itself. In the comparatively innocent days of the 1970s, TORs were short (perhaps three or four pages even for large team efforts) and focused simply on aims, tasks, and products, leaving obligations and payments for later negotiation.
Since the 1990s, however, TORs have become voluminous and complex due to a significant structural shift: the curtailment of new staff hiring by almost all donors. As the funds disbursed, and the scope and complexity of international development instruments, have grown substantially, donor in-house capacities have shrunk. Consequently, the TOR has been forced to serve as the prime vehicle for ordering, structuring, and controlling the inevitable explosion of outsourced services.
Key TORs are typically overseen by mid-level managers who, being “far too busy,” delegate the actual writing to short-term consultants, leading to drafts shuffled around for review, accumulating “more layers and steps, and more opportunities for spurious add-ons”. The complexity is demonstrated by the European Commission’s Procurement and Grants for European Union External Actions – A Practical Guide (PRAG), which, despite its title, is anything but “practical,” running to 210 pages with 194 separate annexes.
The procurement system presents a fundamental paradox: donors may spend several years conceiving their complicated, often “dreamy” projects, but once the RFP is released, the clock runs fast, putting the contractor/consultant “under the gun” to prepare a full strategy and negotiate pricing, usually within a month.
The Expertise Market: Opaque Mediocracy Triumphant
The development industry requires a massive supply of specialized personnel, feeding into a “hallowed submarket for experts”. At the heart of this market lies the pervasive, well-maintained myth that expertise is purely technical and neutral, easily transferable into any location provided it adapts to “local conditions”. This myth conveniently allows donors to sidestep messy local realities and the inherent political and economic dimensions of development.
Today’s experts fall into two categories: [“Sustainability and Future”]
The central document used for marketing expertise is the curriculum vitae (CV), an “easily manipulated summary” that must be constantly revised and circulated to feed the industry’s hunger for thousands of specific short-term opportunities.
Vendorism and the Consolidation of Corporate Power
Consulting and contracting firms employ various strategies, but the key is “vendorism”: anticipating and reacting to donor desires and fads, lining up consultants who fit the RFPs, self-promoting “to death,” and preparing countless bids. This strategy drives an inevitable trend towards “bigger, more complex, and more process-oriented companies”.
The dominance of large “body shop” companies—firms that operate as pure recruiting posts, specializing only in proposal writing, attaching plausible CVs, and slavishly meeting TORs—is evident in the distribution of major contracts. For instance, USAID, the world’s largest bilateral donor, saw its top ten awardees capture contracts valued at over USD 6.14 billion in 2019, nearly 40 percent of total awards. These large entities consolidate power, often prioritizing health and operational support services contracts.
This market dynamic creates a situation where consulting firms and other service providers are not merely neutral implementers; they have become “enthusiastic cheerleaders for ever more development business,” creating a self-perpetuating ecosystem where institutional survival and market share dictate activities. The overall effect of these procurement structures and the consultants they employ is the “increasing confusions, contradictions, and even dumbing-down of the development industry”.
Monopolizing Country Knowledge: Decision-Based Evidence Making
The intellectual component of this process is particularly corrosive to endogenous development. Donors, through their extensive funding of studies, analyses, and knowledge products (a form of “product development” via the procurement process), generate much—often most—of what is known about a recipient country’s economic and developmental challenges and prospects, effectively monopolizing country knowledge.
This knowledge base is not neutral. Its framework is typically conceived and designed around donor priorities and specific globalist agendas, often steered towards interventions the donor wishes to fund. This contrasts sharply with the donors’ stated goal of “evidence-based decision making.” Instead, the system often engages in “decision-based evidence making”: where the donor’s pre-existing global consensus dictates what evidence is selected and applied to individual countries.
Consequences of this knowledge colonization include:
Devaluation of Local Input: The vast accumulation of country knowledge is primarily aimed at donor managers and their supporting cast of Western experts, advisors, and academics. Since this knowledge is provided for free, defined by foreign entities, and perceived as serving these entities, it is often devalued in-country.
Marginalization of Local Experts: Government officials often have little or no technical role in these studies, their involvement being limited to procedural matters like approval. This contributes to the brain drain phenomenon, where national professionals trained in development skills (like logical frameworks and results indicators) realize that their best career path is to move “out and up” into the international industry rather than staying to serve their home government.
Suppression of Local Pathways: The ultimate outcome of this donor-dominant knowledge paradigm is that local creativity, locally generated knowledge, and genuine endogenous development are easily forgotten.
The monopoly on knowledge is a key component of the overall donor overload phenomenon, keeping recipients in a state of confusion, constantly subjected to “ever more complicated concepts of new paradigms, new agendas, new financing mechanisms, and lots and lots of new jargon”. The imposition of the donor’s will—disguised as rigorous procurement or technical standards—ensures that control over planning and assessment remains firmly outside the countries and people most concerned.
The procurement process acts like a giant, specialized publishing house operating under frantic deadlines. Its writers (consultants) produce vast volumes of texts (TORs, technical reports) that rigorously follow the required style guide (donor control and compliance rules), but the content often reflects the priorities of the publisher (the donor organization) rather than the actual needs of the subject matter (the recipient country), ensuring the external entity always owns the final, sanitized version of the story.
The next post will examine the proclaimed centerpiece of development rhetoric—the idea of “partnerships”—and expose why this concept, when overlaid with the structural realities of control and procurement, is mostly an illusion.