The final deathblow to development planning? A comparative book review of Easterly’s ‘The Tyranny of Experts’ and Ramalingam’s ‘Aid on the Edge of Chaos’

When New York University Professor William Easterly released his best-seller The White Man’s Burden, it was described by Simon Maxwell, then director of think tank ODI, as the only book in a chain of recent works that dared to go against what he called ‘the inevitable social-democratic consensus… that aid is a worthwhile undertaking but could be better’ (Maxwell, 2007). The year was 2007 and the aid community was still head-in-clouds after the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness had given it a new sense of direction and purpose. Cautious optimism about aid and other forms of external support for development was reflected in a series of critical but generally uplifting publications by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs (2005), Stephen Browne (2006) and Roger Riddell (2007), which shared their respective views on how to achieve greater aid effectiveness.