How do development and foreign policy connect?, ODIOverseas Development Institute (London) Opinion 93, December 2007

'For a long time, the development aid community has worked to ring-fence aid and ensure that it is used specifically for 'poverty reduction'. Historically, this has its roots in the often well-founded fear that ‘they’ would use ‘our’ money to further geo-strategic political or commercial interests that could only loosely be described as developmental – supporting some states, punishing others, using aid money to fund repression, diverting aid money to help rich country companies, and so on. Specific cases have been central to the aid debate for a generation – from US aid to Israel, Egypt and South Vietnam, through the scandal of the Pergau Dam, to EUEuropean Union aid for the ‘ring of friends’ in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Administrative and legislative instruments have been used to reinforce the stockade – whether restrictive rules on what can legitimately be claimed as official development assistance (oda), agreed by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), or the passage of the International Development Act in the UK, which limits the use of aid to poverty reduction................. (see link in title for full article)