• Security and development policy

Security and development policy

Through case studies of select bilateral development agencies (USAID, AusAID, DFID and SIDA), this paper explores changing policy and practice on civil society since 9/11. It identifies some emerging patterns and points out distinctions related to the security priorities of different governments, the bureaucratic architecture, and the historical backdrop to aid.

The authors explain that in the field of development the 'global war on terror regime' has highlighted the strategic relevance of aid to the pursuit of global and national security interests at a time when its ideological rationale in the post-Cold War era had almost disappeared. Concerned about the perceived threat to global markets and global security, the paper asserts that UN leaders, politicians in Europe and the USA have articulated a discourse that links security more firmly with development. The key argument is that the "global war on terror regime” has contributed towards the increasing securitisation of aid policy and practice. It has accelerated and consolidated trends in the direction of development thinking, and aid policy and practice that already were emerging during the 1990s.

Conclusions and implications include:

• it is evident that in all four cases, development and aid policy, institutions and operations have been affected in similar but also diverse ways by the shifting global politics driven and legitimated by the ‘global war on terror’
  
• the ‘global war on terror regime’ has cast suspicion on civil society, and on specific sub-groups such as Muslim communities. On the one hand it has fuelled a trend towards tightening up and exerting control over charitable institutions, NGOs and Muslim organisations. On the other, it has brought Muslim organisations and groups into the policy gaze of development agencies, creating opportunities for dialogue, and new funding
  
• the absorption of security narratives into development policy and the concomitant recruitment of development into national security strategies should alert development actors to the need to  maintan organisational independence so as to protect the prioritisation of goals such as poverty reduction
  
• the ‘global war on terror regime’ has accelerated a process of donors seeking to tidy up their relations with civil society actors. It has also highlighted the need for the development-focused parts of civil society to re-examine their own positions in the aid process and to reflect more deeply and strategically about their location in global and national political processes.
  
  

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