How is Scotland doing Aid and Development?

Ducked out of my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe recently (highly recommended, as ever – highlight was being invited up on stage and asked to impersonate a Norwegian comedian’s cervix. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry….) to spend an hour or two with the Scottish Government development team. Really interesting.

In some ways, the SG is prototyping post-$ dev. With a budget of around £23m this year (rising to £26m by end of Parliament in 2026), the dev budget is that of a medium sized NGO, but it has other assets, notably the ability to trigger ‘Team Scotland’ whole of government thinking on dev (and the total Scottish government budget is much bigger, at £60bn), plus a high level of interaction with Scottish civil society, universities, media etc. Everyone knows everyone else, at least at elite levels, which means the civil servants are less likely to get trapped in a Whitehall-type bubble.

That calculus could change again if Labour takes power from the Scottish Nationalist Party at the next Scottish election, scheduled for 2026. Feels like that could go either way – the Scots dev team could try things out and influence the much bigger Westminster machine, or they could be reined in in the name of party unity.

But people don’t trust government, so they could probably be doing more to think about the figures from wider society (retired pols, public figures, respected academics etc) who they can use as messengers and defenders when things go wrong (as they inevitably will).

It also has the asset of being a government, so when it does something innovative, such as being the first to cough up £1m for Loss and Damage (rising to £10 million since) at the Glasgow Climate COP, the first global north government to do so, it can set an important precedent, with much larger donors now committing over $700m since the last COP.

To ensure that Global South voices are heard at the highest levels within SG, they have set up a Global South advisory board, of scholars etc from their focus countries of Malawi, Zambia and Rwanda, and want it to not just advise SG Ministers on their development activities, but also on SG’s role in Scotland on issues like climate and trade policies. Cool.

The lack of money means its energies are not sucked into the surprisingly difficult task of spending the dosh while minimising risk, which sucks up most of the time of staff in bigger spending donors.

So they travel light, make use of their governmental status and have good instincts on localizing power, including one former minister who was clear that she wanted that to be led only by people from the countries concerned, not northern organisations. Cool.

They also seem to have scooped up a wealth of talent from the destruction of DFID. I wonder if any other bits of the aid and dev sector have benefited in the same way?

From these discussions, they have selected a narrower number of themes on which to focus, including some of the “Cinderella” areas in dev – non communicable diseases and disability education.

But the pressures on them are also familiar: value for money, keeping overheads to a minimum, pressure for big, visible projects. They are interested in adaptive management etc, but wondering how to square it with such pressures. E.g. the kind of systems thinking, power literate approach I was proposing costs a lot more staff time and money – any shortcuts, eg by relying more on local wisdom than trying to generate it in a dev sector characterised by constant churn?

A lot of discussion about narratives: whether using ‘heroic entrepreneur’ stories of experimentation and spreading risk can get away from the Stalinist preoccupation with 100% success rates.

The Scottish aid programme has its 20^th anniversary next year – looking forward to further, deeper conversations in the run up to that.