Greening Aid?: Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance

by Robert L. Hicks, Bradley C. Parks, J. Timmons Roberts

Every year, billions of dollars of environmental aid flow from the rich governments of the North to the poor governments of the South. Why do donors provide this aid? What do they seek to achieve? How effective is the aid given? And does it always go to the places of greatest environmental
need?

From the first Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972 to the G8 Gleneagles meeting in 2005, the issue of the impact of aid on the global environment has been the subject of vigorous protest and debate. How much progress has there been in improving environmental protection and clean-up in the developing
world? What explains the patterns of environmental aid spending and distribution - is it designed to address real problems, achieve geopolitical or commercial gains abroad, or buy political mileage at home? And what are the consequences for the estimated 4 million people that die each year from
air pollution, unsafe drinking water, and lack of sanitation?

All of these questions and many more are addressed in this groundbreaking text, which is based on the authors' work compiling the most comprehensive dataset of foreign aid ever assembled. By evaluating the likely environment impact of over 400,000 development projects by more than 50 donors to
over 170 recipient nations between 1970 and 2001, Greening Aid represents a unique, state of the art picture of what is happening in foreign assistance, and its impact on the environment. Greening Aid explains major trends and shifts over the last three decades, ranks donors according to their
performance, and offers case studies which compare and contrast donors and types of environmental aid.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2008

Reviews

[Brooke Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very technical book about how much aid is given to environmental issues. I didn't understand all of it as I majored in neither environmental studies nor international affairs, but I got the gist. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues are problems, and developed countries and groups like the World Bank have started providing more aid to developing countries to address these problems. However, every hypothesis or conclusion the authors made felt like a "well duh" moment for me, even though I have no background in the subject. Of course donor countries are going to give more money to their trade partners, and of course they're going to do it in a way that most benefits them. Aid is about helping others, but that doesn't mean politicians and governments aren't looking out for themselves first.