Aid and Development

The decisions taken by the new Labour government to amend the Sinclair settlement opened a new era, since they allowed CDC to accumulate reserves through its operating account. Meanwhile the planning framework settlement allowed both for growth and an intention for funding stability, notwithstanding Britain’s own budgetary problems. It followed a lengthy period of thirteen years under the Conservatives when CDC had struggled to establish its basic viability and its credibility as a development agency. As we have seen, CDC had had to fight a long battle to be allowed to operate in the newly independent nations of the Commonwealth, against an attempt to marginalize it with a preferred private sector institution. In the twenty years since the war, opinion on development had had to digest the phenomena of the real experience of societies undergoing rapid change, many of them in the wake of emergence from colonial rule, as well as the difficulties of institutional development at the international level, the politics of international trade, and the imperatives of alliance building in the Cold War. CDC had originally been a creation of Labour and of the optimism of early post war thinking on economic reconstruction. How was the evolving debate on development likely to affect its role?