How Australians want their aid spent. Hint: Not via localization

Australians strongly oppose giving foreign aid recipients control over how the money is spent. Yes, you read that right.

Few concepts are more fashionable in global development theory these days than localization — shifting decision-making and implementation to the places and people where aid work happens — and cash transfers — the push to provide more assistance in the form of digital or physical cash, rather than blankets or food, in order to build local markets, and promote localization.

Yet when researchers at Monash University in Melbourne recently asked a representative sample of 1,523 Australian adults to choose from a range of hypothetical aid packages, their priorities lay elsewhere.