Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal: A Case Study
Eugene Bramer Mihaly.
2002.(Originally published by Oxford University Press 1965).
It is a moot point whether Nepal consumes aid or aid consumes Nepal. Hard research on the aid economy of Nepal is negligible. Barring the routine claims of multilateral and bilateral donors, and the shrewd suspicions of independent sceptics, there is no empirically rigorous and analytically sophisticated assessment that can furnish a conclusive answer to a question that ought to have been answered decades ago. So long as donor slogans remain the only source of development wisdom, the shrewd suspicions will persist. In the meanwhile, both believers and sceptics alike will have to be content with the existing meagre stock of literature, including the 2002 reprint of Eugene Mihaly´s 1965 title, Foreign Aid and Politics in Nepal.
This relative absence of detailed empirically grounded inquiry as a proportion of both the total volume of aid and the extent of donor influence on government, itself merits scrutiny as an exercise in the sociology of institutional academics. It remains one of the most persistent and debilitating paradoxes of intellectual activity in the country that the anthropology of Nepal is as overdeveloped as its economy and the study of it is underdeveloped. While Nepal´s social organism has been so intrusively and exhaustively scrutinised, the extraordinary role of foreign bodies in the polity and economy of the kingdom remains a quasi-mystical trend that is left largely well alone. Perhaps it is a sign of the overwhelming power of hard currency that aid manages to insulate itself from systematic academic study.
It is perhaps a measure of the lack of interest among the Kathmandu intelligentsia in scrutinising the processes of aid that it took three and a half decades between the first edition of Foreign Aid and Politics and its second edition. In the interim there have been few other works to complement it. Strictly speaking the only reason the book qualifies to be called a second edition is the introductory chapter by the sociologist Sudhindra Sharma, which is a broad survey of aid flows and priorities in the interim. Contrary to the view that there is a paucity of research on the ´assistance´ economy, Sharma argues, in the context of what exactly aid has achieved, that inadequate research is not an issue.
However, his introduction itself seems to point, in at least two instances, to a very different conclusion. According to Sharma, it is difficult to be conclusive about the total volume of aid Nepal receives because of the wide variance in the estimates given by different sources. He cites the wide discrepancy between government of Nepal´s Economic Survey for the year 1999, which indicates total assistance of USD 251.4 million and UNDP´s Development Cooperation Report which estimates it at USD 416 million for the same year. Likewise, he points out that whereas the UNDP figures show a total of 21 INGOs disbursing about USD 24.1 million in aid in 1999, the Social Welfare Council lists 96 INGOs providing funds to the tune of USD 19.8 million in the year 2001.