Reciprocity in Aid Revisited

The growth of commercially oriented instruments and actors in development work may be impacting moral understandings of aid (Sundberg, forthcoming). Guarantee experts, DFI staff and also some consultants, based in Sweden and Kenya, perceive profit-making in aid, and especially in development finance, as at once amoral, immoral and moral. Their arguments center on the relationship between economic stakes and self-interest (where the ‘self' often transgresses individual and institutional lines). That relationship is alternatively dismissed, praised or seen as less significant than the superior capacity of commercial models of assistance, compared with grants, to promote equality and reciprocity in aid partnerships. The latter rationale construes development investments as relational in nature, where risk-taking and profit-seeking serve alternative purposes beyond those inferred by conventional, capitalist logics. Just like philanthropy, the idea holds, market exchange can bring about socially imbued relationships. However, unlike charity, it can do so in ways that empower rather than disempower partners in aid recipient countries. These claims can (and will) be questioned on empirical grounds. But they also inform anthropological thinking on economic morality in neoliberal capitalism and aid as a gift, as theorized by Marcel Mauss.