The Political Economy of Aid Failure in Zambia

Despite a huge amount of foreign assistance and close economic guidance by international donors throughout the past decades, Zambia today still suffer from a high level of aid dependency and the absence of sustainable economic development. In this study, I investigate the factors that resulted in aid (and development) failure in Zambia, focusing on institutional/historical contexts. I propose that in Zambia, government has largely failed to implement (or even produce) effective economic policies that could lead to successful use of foreign assistance for long-term, sustainable development. In particular, I focus on the nature of state and politics in Zambia, and argue that failed politics is one of the main causes of development and aid failure in Zambia and highlight colonial legacies and other contextual/institutional factors to understand the nature of politics and state in Zambia. In particular, this paper proposes that the Zambian case demonstrates that foreign aid and donor influence could worsen the situation directly by simply providing wrong guidance and also by further weakening the state (and institutional) capacity of the recipient country.