The diminishment of global Britain: Applying the PCR framework to the changing relationship between the UK and some of its largest aid recipients

Since the 1950s, the UK has been one of the largest bilateral donors of development assistance globally. Between 2013 and 2020, it was one of a few countries in the world to spend more than 0.7 percent of its Gross National Income (GNI) on development aid. The Department for International Development (DFID), UK agency for the disbursement of development assistance established in 1997, was widely held up as a leader in the provision of transparent and effective development aid. Through DFID and the disbursal of development assistance, the UK thus exercised significant soft power across the global South long after the loss of its global empire. This has changed recently. Despite political promises to embrace ‘global Britain’ in the UK’s external relations post-Brexit, DFID was in 2020 subsumed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), to better align UK aid with UK foreign policy goals. Even more starkly, UK’s development-aid commitment was cut from 0.7% GNI to 0.5% and all refugee-associated costs began to be funded through development aid, leading to a situation in 2022 when more UK bilateral development aid was spent domestically than abroad. As a result, many of the largest recipients of UK aid, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, lost between 2020 and 2021 more than half the aid flows traditionally received from the UK. Patron-client relations (PCR) constitute one possible theoretical framework for understanding the enduring relationships between some lower-income countries in the global South, predominantly former British colonies, and the UK. Since the dissolution of the empire, the UK has provided the countries with significant flows of development assistance; in exchange, the aid-recipient countries have tolerated and sometimes even embraced the UK’s interference in their security, political, and economic sectors, without significantly challenging the harms they had incurred through usually forceful inclusion in the former empire. The relationships have arguably displayed, albeit to different degrees, the four elements underlying PCRs in state-relations – asymmetry, reciprocity, compliance, and affectivity (Carney, 1989). Can the PCR framework also act as a good framework for understanding the changing relationship between the UK and these aid-recipient countries? My interviews with the UK’s aid field offices in 2022 indicated a great degree of disappointment with the UK’s recent and sudden closure of many aid programmes. At least one of the key elements of the PCR with the UK, affectivity, seems to have been damaged or even lost. Will this lead to the dissolution of the PCRs with the UK and if so, what will that mean for the UK’s global as well as domestic standing? My proposed paper for the workshop will investigate the applicability of the PCR framework to enlightening the evolving relations between some of the UK’s largest aid recipients (specifically, Nigeria, Kenya, Nepal, and South Sudan) and the UK. Furthermore, it will hope to shed light on the repercussions of the change in aid policy on the UK’s economic, political, and reputational standing in the world.