The Development Dance Redux: How Mutually Reinforcing Dependencies Guarantee the Status Quo
The development industry, characterized by its sheer scale, self-perpetuating spending compulsion, and obsession with control, operates in an environment of institutional tension with the governments it purports to serve. This tension, the “development dance”, is not merely a dysfunctional accident; it is a symbiotic trap where both donor and recipient governments develop mutually reinforcing dependencies that ultimately ensure the continuity of the aid system while perpetually postponing difficult, transformative change. David Sims asserts that the industry’s malaise is “more than the sum of its individual parts”, primarily because the systemic connections between the donor world and the recipient governments lock both into an increasingly self-referential cycle of ‘processism’.
This post examines the nature of this symbiotic dependency, exploring the donor’s existential need to keep money flowing and the recipient’s calculated strategy to exploit this need, thereby guaranteeing the continuation of the “show”.
The Symbiotic Dependency: A Mutual Need for Continuation
A key finding of Sims’ anatomy is that the development industry creates a symbiotic dependency. This unique ecosystem of institutions is formed around distinct streams of external public funding, and virtually all system components are motivated, above everything else, by the need to “carry on carrying on”. This overriding penchant for self-preservation is rarely criticized in development discourse, existing mostly at the margins.
The justification for this endless continuation is fueled by the constant repetition of the argument that global issues are becoming more complex and new challenges are always rising, justifying mission creep on a colossal scale.
Donor’s Existential Need: I Spend Therefore I Exist
The donor agencies, facing existential angst and institutional insecurity in Western capitals, are governed by the cardinal rule: ‘spend it or lose it’. If earmarked funds are not spent or committed within a budget cycle, justifying future funding becomes difficult. This imperative to spend (MMS) is so intense that donor staff are promoted by disbursing money, “not withholding it”, and face professional risk for pulling the plug on a failing project.
This perpetual need to disburse funds creates a vital vulnerability that recipients exploit. The donor needs the recipient to sign up for projects and programs to keep the pipeline full. This necessity ensures that the donor is primarily concerned with generating “easily observable outcomes”—documents, conferences, and superficial results—rather than long-term, politically contentious policy change.
The donor obsession with appearances leads to constant efforts to reaffirm legitimacy:
Isomorphic Mimicry: Donors exhibit a serious herd instinct, conforming to fads and fashions (like political economy analysis, or resilience) to show they are “on the same page” as everyone else, thereby self-justifying their actions.
Aura of Engagement: Donors produce immense volumes of texts and sponsor countless events that project an aura of selfless engagement, lifting their organizations into the “concerned stratosphere” and ensuring a prosperous future for development players. These frivolous activities are ideal forums for donor self-referential aggrandizement.
Recipient’s Strategic Need: Maximizing Inflow, Minimizing Change
Governments in the rest, frequently plagued by weak institutional capacity, bloated bureaucracies, and issues like nepotism, cronyism, and corruption, strategically engage with donors to secure essential financial inflows while simultaneously protecting their internal policy and political space.
The core strategies of “the rest strikes back” are designed to navigate the excessive donor presence and extract maximum financial benefit:
Exploiting Donor Competition: Recipient governments recognize the “prisoner’s dilemma” faced by donors. They know that if one donor balks at an arrangement due to conditionality or scruples, another donor, desperate to keep its pipeline full, will “gobble it up”. This competition allows the recipient to leverage access and maximize financial inflow.
Postponing Difficult Reforms: The rush of donor money often allows recipient governments to avoid difficult domestic reforms and “continue business as usual”. This was demonstrated in Egypt following the Camp David Accords, where a rush of $1 billion in grant aid annually allowed the government to postpone challenging reforms while enjoying American-financed projects.
Creating Facades (Dissembling): Recipients adopt postures of feigned compliance or create superficial structures that give the “appearance of having the issue in hand”. For instance, in Egypt’s struggle with informal settlements, donors financed small pilot upgrading projects for two decades. The government responded by creating an Informal Settlements Development Fund that only removes “the odd eyesore and dangerous slum,” making ignoring and dissimulating the massive underlying problem “much easier” due to the presence of donor activity.
The Ultimate Weapon: Patience: Local officials, unlike time-bound foreign staff, possess “great abundance” of patience. They know that donors, projects, personnel, and fads are temporary. If a donor’s approach is unwelcome, the strategy is simply to “wait and put things on hold,” knowing the clock is ticking faster for the donor manager pressured to meet disbursement schedules.
The Resulting Dysfunction: Processism and Irrelevance
The mutual dependence—donors needing to spend and recipients needing the money without the accompanying prescriptive change—results in the system becoming locked into an increasingly self-referential ‘processism’.
The Rise of Processism
Processism is the phenomenon where formulaic procedures and compliance are raised to stratospheric heights by donors. This is particularly evident in the bureaucratization of procurement systems and the obsession with technical objectivity:
Make-Work and Box Ticking: The development industry thrives on outsourced “make-work”. Requirements for bidding on contracts have become bureaucratic and “dumbed down,” creating a market for experts whose main skill is navigating these processes and metrics—excelling in “formulaic box ticking”.
Logical Frameworks (Logframes): Tools like logical framework analysis are used to present projects as having “logical conceptualizing and planning, sequencing and managing of inputs and tasks, and measurable results”. These tools sideline the “politics and messiness of development itself,” reinforcing a mechanistic view where inputs are assumed to lead automatically to specified outputs.
The Cost of Control: Donors’ obsession with “squeaky-clean control of operations” and risk-aversion leads to systems like the value for money (VFM) agenda. This forces agencies to choose between irrelevance (designing low-risk projects that avoid political issues) and subterfuge. The goal is to sanitize the delivery mechanisms and achieve “unassailable outcomes”.
The Distance from Real Development
This processism drowns out any understanding of “what matters in development”. Technical work and studies commissioned by donors, even when critical or relevant, rarely lead to policy breakouts or logical conclusions. The fear of antagonizing donor management, embarrassing partners, or exposing “deep disconnects between conclusions and action” keeps these potential ‘virtuous circles’ “safely ‘on the shelf’”.
The ultimate cost of this symbiotic trap is that development cooperation “cannot function even as donors themselves would wish” because the process guarantees that the primary goals—spending the money and maintaining institutional stability—override genuine, country-led transformation.
The symbiotic trap is like two business partners running a failing theater company. The director (the donor) insists on constantly creating new, elaborate productions (projects and fads) to attract investors (taxpayers), not because the shows are good, but because the actors and stage crew (consultants and staff) must be paid, and the director’s budget must be fully spent. The stage manager (the recipient government) agrees to every show, but only ever manages to build decorative facades and rehearses passively, knowing that as long as the director keeps needing to launch new productions, the stage manager will keep receiving the necessary funds to maintain the theater building (the state bureaucracy), regardless of whether the audience sees a successful play or not. Both partners are rewarded for continuing the process of production, not for achieving artistic success.
The next post will tackle a huge, often ignored reality within this system: informality, the massive extralegal economy where most people in the rest actually live and work, and which the formal development industry cannot accommodate.