The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015: legislative spending targets, poverty alleviation and aid scrutiny

Manji, Ambreena ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2536-4137 2016. The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015: legislative spending targets, poverty alleviation and aid scrutiny. Modern Law Review 79 (4) , pp. 655-677. 10.1111/1468-2230.12204

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Abstract

With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom became the first member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to enshrine an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) on aid every year. This paper has two aims. Firstly, it assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It connects this to recent moves to set targets for specific areas of spending more generally. The UK’s decision to adopt a legal spending target for aid is important because other donors are likely to follow its lead. Secondly, this paper argues that commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target (section 1) and that it is in fact the mechanisms for scrutinising development assistance contained in section 5 of the new Act that will be important in future. This is because judicial scrutiny of aid spending is a remote possibility as a result of the International Development Act 2002, introduced in response to the Pergau Dam case. The paper provides an analysis of the new legislation in the context of the UK’s now detailed legislative framework for international development aid and concludes that this framework is far from satisfactory.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Cardiff Law & Politics Law
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0026-7961
Last Modified:	31 Oct 2022 09:33
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/81495

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