1In order to guide further efforts towards environmental ‘sustainability’, policy development actors should be able to refer to historicized and contextualized lessons learned from aid-based initiatives. Contributors to the recent edited volume Aid Effectiveness for Environmental Sustainability seek to compile these lessons. By systematically asking four questions – ‘what works ? ’, ‘what could work ? ’, ‘what is scalable ?’, ‘what is transferrable ?’ –, this volume aims to determine “how foreign aid is at present with regard to capacity building, biodiversity and forest conservation, promoting sustainable agriculture, and the sustainability of the urban and energy sectors as a result of climate change” (p. 10).
2This book was written as part of the Research and Communication on foreign aid programme led by the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research. Among the volume’s nineteen contributors, the majority is based in Europe, five in China, two in the United States and two in Sudan. They work in diverse institutions – mainly as academics in national research institutions – and come from various disciplines such as Law, Environmental Sciences, Applied Systems Analysis, Economics, and Social Studies. The editors, Yongfu Huang, a Senior Fellow at the International Cooperation Center of the National Development and Reform Commission of the People's Republic of China, and Unai Pascual, an ecological economist and Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, in Spain, wrote the introducing and concluding chapters. Each of the 12 contributions contains a literature review that despite a degree of redundancy usefully retraces and disentangles the evolution of aid, aid effectiveness and relevant sectoral aid, as well as the associated instruments, actors and mechanisms involved since the 1950s. The authors formulate prudent recommendations based on their observations and analyses of the academic and grey literature, previous research, case studies, and past and current initiatives and projects. They use qualitative, quantitative and mixed methodologies.
3Overall, the contributors are rather optimistic and have confidence in the ability of international institutions, the aid system and technology to tackle environmental challenges. In that sense, their contribution is in line with the defenders of ‘sustainable development’ that do not aim to radically change the exploitative way in which we consider and interact with our natural environment, but to adapt and reorganize it thanks to market-based solutions (notably through technological innovation) and institutions in charge of awareness-raising, creation of incentives, and regulation. For example, Unai Pascual, Eneko Garmendia, Jacob Phelps and Elena Ojea erect UN-coordinated REDD+ mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) as viable despite much criticism.
4Allegedly, the book aims to fill a gap in the literature that has prioritized the study of aid effectiveness for economic growth, rather than for environmental sustainability (p. 3). However, it does not pertain to the critical strand that deconstructs and questions these concepts’ relevance as well as the implementation of the ‘Paris Agenda’. In a time when climate change is a burning issue, aid is contested and declining, and ‘traditional donors’ are losing power on the global stage as emerging ones, like China, acquire more influence, it is rather an attempt to draw conclusions on the effect of aid from impact assessments based on diverse and disputed criteria of specific aid-funded policies or projects. Thus, it consolidates a rather technocratic approach of aid and environmental issues that is detrimental to perspectives incorporating political and power issues, or to deep reflections on our consumption habits and ways of life. For instance, Yongfu Huang and Muhammad G. Quibria conclude that foreign aid fosters sustainable development in recipient countries using genuine savings, the ecological footprint/bio-capacity ratio, and sustainability-adjusted Human Development Index as indicators.
5Moreover, even if this could represent a challenge, it would be important to address more local implications and to draw on more diversified sources. If relying on donors’ reports and data is compatible with good analyses, relying heavily on them to assess aid effectiveness (itself not a self-evident concept) can make us question the impartiality and validity of the results as donors often design, fund, implement and evaluate aid projects and initiatives, and as meaningful results depend on data triangulation and the inclusiveness of multiple views, especially those of ‘aid beneficiaries’. Indeed, the participation of local actors, still often neglected, is deemed essential by several contributors. Besides, if initiatives are specifically designed to tackle environmental challenges, environmental preservation is a crosscutting issue that should be considered in every aid (and non-aid) initiative from donors for the sake of coherence.
6Furthermore, overall the contributors do not engage in conceptual, theoretical or ideological debates around aid, effectiveness, sustainability, ownership, etc. – that are contested concepts and often left to the interpretation of their user – but chose to assess the results of large, concrete aid-funded initiatives. For example, Jun Li uses three case studies to determine whether aid to create greener cities has ‘worked’ using ‘usual’ criteria (often defined by international organizations). However, the book does not question the meaning of ‘work’ in ‘what works ?’. Indeed, we could ask : ‘work for whom ? ’ or ‘according to which set of criteria, defined by whom and for whose benefit ? ’There is not much on the deeper causes of successes and failures, the global consumption and cooperation models (notably the role of rich countries in environmental destruction), or power relations. In other words, while the contributors try to answer the question of ‘what’, the questions of ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘for whom’ and ‘why’ are only touched upon.
7Indeed, the authors themselves point to some limits regarding their analyses. First, the unavailability of data by sector, as well as the complexification of the aid landscape with a growing number of actors, mechanisms and instruments, make the measurement of aid effectiveness difficult. For example, Zexian Chen, Jingjing He and David Victor note the difficulty of measuring aid effectiveness with regard to capacity building initiatives as those are recent and because of ‘the ‘soft’ and dynamic nature of capacity’ (p. 77). Victor also observes that the criteria retained to measure effectiveness in various instances such as aid, climate change-related aid, or private-funded climate finance vary (p. 35). Siddig Umbadda and Ismail Elgizouli question the relevance of the criteria retained by donors to measure aid effectiveness for recipient countries (p. 392).
8Second, some authors raise concerns around diverging interests, power issues, inclusiveness and political will. For Pascual et al., the success of the REDD+ mechanism will depend on sustainable financing and commitment, and coordination from multiple stakeholders whose interests do not always converge. Jun Li mentions that although “the objectives of ecocity development are defined along three pillars (i.e. social, environmental and economic benefits) […] a government may also pursue other goals, such as self-promotion and technological advancement” (p. 243). Pascual et al. also posit as a key challenge that rich, industrialized donor countries have the power to either amplify or to silence local voices in developing countries that wish to weigh on policy decisions at the national and international levels. Yet, for Pekka E. Kauppi, forestry programs need to involve local populations, and the development of universities in recipient countries is crucial to gather and foster the creation of local knowledge and formulate solutions in this sector. Jikun Huang and Yangjie Wang’s chapter on the role of foreign aid in developing ‘climate smart’ agriculture also tacitly calls for broad stakeholder inclusion. Finally, the only contribution by Africa-based authors – some would argue from ‘developing’ countries altogether – proves to be the most critical of the aid system. On aid dedicated to agriculture in Africa, Umbadda and Elgizouli criticize donors’ pursuit of self-interest and point to the lack and inconsistency of funding, to risk-aversion, as well as to projects’ unsustainable, short-term, uncoordinated logic. Also on political issues, Sandrine Kablan shows that aid effectiveness is correlated with political will in the efforts towards reducing carbon dioxide emission in cities.
9In sum, this book provides an état des lieux of current large initiatives in five sectors in the complex and sometimes confusing world of foreign aid targeted at environmental issues, and in that sense is strong in descriptive terms. Scholars and students interested in aid and the environment, donors, and policymakers in aid-recipient countries working on environmental sustainability would benefit from reading it. Because of its rather limited – or mainstream/UN – perspective, it should however be read alongside other research featuring critical understandings and approaches of foreign aid and human-environment relations in general.
