Icebergs melt slowly, deceiving us with their appearance of stability. Dial-up internet, with all its whirring and beeping, was a melting iceberg: Even after the advent of broadband, it took more than a decade before this clearly inferior technology effectively disappeared.
“Old Aid,” as I termed it in my 2019 book “The Business of Changing the World,” is much the same. Even the fiercest defenders of international cooperation have long been frustrated with the project-based, risk-averse, bureaucratic approach endemic to development and humanitarian institutions.
But they’ve often voiced those frustrations in hushed tones — afraid that even constructive criticism could undermine the carefully constructed coalition that has led to the highest foreign aid budgets and some of the biggest development successes in history.