Official Development Assistance at the Age of Consequences

Official Development Assistance (ODA) was introduced in the 1960s as a temporary instrument to respond to a phase in world history involving decolonization, the Cold War, industrialization and flagrant inequalities between the “North” and the “South”. Fifty years later, in an influential text, Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray (2009) noted that ODA had become a “global public policy”, while pondering its imminent demise. ODA seems to be both an instituted, supported, financed global policy – and thus resilient in a constantly changing world – and at the same time does not escape recurrent criticism.