In a secularised, yet postsecular world, myths have again found a new refuge.

While a myth seems opposed to truth or reality according to the everyday understanding, myths bear the potential to intermediate between both, or else create new (re)interpreted realities in the eyes of the beholder.

Thus, myths acquire a productive and creative quality, most visible in their potential to create, fuel, and uphold grand narratives. For the field of International Relations (IR), a reading of political rationalities as myths allows for a deconstruction and reflection of familiar assumptions. Furthermore, it stimulates epistemological and methodological debates in poststructuralist and constructivist IR theory. While myths’ function lies in the ‘transformation of what is particular, cultural and ideological (like a story told by an IR tradition) into what appears to be universal, natural and purely empirical’ (Weber 2010, 7), a critical understanding of

F. Müller

Sub-division Globalisation and Politics, Kassel University, Kassel, Germany

E. Sondermann (S)

Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

B. Bliesemann de Guevara (ed.), Myth and Narrative in

International Politics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53752-2_13 IR would imply to explore, unveil, and interrogate IR myths in order to reveal their ideological and deeply political purposes.

Mythical notions (as well as the need to demystify them) also come to mind when thinking about international development cooperation. In fact, the development myth has been mobilised during a number of recent debates about development and development aid, albeit mostly as a counterpart to reality (e.g. Moyo 2009). By contrast, we regard collective beliefs as an important part of reality, insofar as myths bear the discursive power to create effects here and now. Thus, in recalling ‘myths of the near future’, we understand development as a collective belief.

Development is understood as a core part of the Western and modern ‘religion’ which unites diverse societies and groups around the globe (Rist 2008). Facing this unquestionable and omnipresent belief in the possibility of collective linear ‘progress’ towards a positive future, differences and contradictions recede into the background. Moreover, the belief in development is performative in the sense that it ‘compels those who share it to act in a particular manner’ (Rist 2008, 22). Myths inspire and encourage development actors in their activities, as they offer them ‘something to believe in’ (Hirschman 1967). Obviously, ‘development’ works as a powerful myth which can appear in different forms and foci—be it the project of modernisation, be it a mythological story of caring, selfless, and cooperative women as a yet-to-be-unleashed potential for development (Cornwall 2008, 159), or be it the postmodernised versions of ‘sustainable development’ or ‘poverty reduction’. In all cases, the mythological notion works as an empowering, productive, and disciplining force.

Thus, our contribution is dedicated to identify and analyse myths of international development with particular attention to the ongoing debate on aid effectiveness, which is in fact as old as the institution and ritual of postcolonial development cooperation (Hayman 2006). It dates back to

1960, when the OECD’s Development Assistance Group (DAG) [as of

1961, Development Assistance Committee (DAC)] was established. In one of its first resolutions, the ‘Resolution of the Common Aid Effort’, the DAG promised not only to increase aid resources but also to ‘improve their effectiveness’. After the end of the Cold War, the hitherto predominant security and strategic rationales for aid gave way to broader discussion about aid levels and aid effectiveness.

Empirically, we begin our analysis with the DAC’s Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which was signed in 2005 by more than 100 donors and recipients.

The Paris Declaration marked a milestone of the aid effectiveness discussions, which had picked up speed at the end of the 1990s and had been debated already at a High-Level Meeting in Rome in 2003. We regard the Paris Declaration as an important reference of what is presented as the current collective belief in development cooperation. We critically examine the developmental terminologies and various myths that have been brought up in the declaration and unfolded during the follow-up process. Therefore, we rely on structuralist understandings of myths bearing silencing, harmonising, depoliticising, or emancipatory functions (Barthes 1972), as well as on the reception of political mythology in poststructuralist IR theory. This allows us to critically assess to what extent development reform rhetoric nurtures a mythical imagination of aid-giving.

Our first step is a reading of the Paris Declaration’s central norms (ownership, accountability, harmonisation, alignment, and managing for results), which organise relationships and practices of international development cooperation. With a focus on the DAC’s Busan summit (November 2011), where emerging donors from outside the DAC played an important role, we finally analyse to what extent the myths have been retold and diversified. The year 2015 was an important year in international development cooperation as all attention focused on finding and endorsing a framework. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have served as the overall framework of development objectives since 2001 (the what-to-achieve), while the Paris Declaration provided principles for the how with reference to one important tool of development financing (aid). By establishing the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC), the Busan High-Level Forum was able to respond to a changing aid landscape and refashion the aid effectiveness myth accordingly. However, as we will discuss in our conclusion, by opening a new chapter in the tale of aid effectiveness, the future of aid is not secured but remains rather uncertain.

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Source: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit. Myth and Narrative in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan,2016. — 329 p.. 2016

In a secularised, yet postsecular world, myths have again found a new refuge.

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