When Does Development Assistance Succeed? Toward a Capability Doctrine for UK Development Policy

Executive Summary

The issue. UK aid spending is falling to its lowest level in decades, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has recast its strategy around four shifts: from donor to investor, from service delivery to system support, from grants to expertise, and from international intervention to local leadership. There is currently no shared standard for judging whether any of these shifts is actually succeeding.

The argument. UK development policy has grown sophisticated in what it wants to achieve. It has not grown equally clear about the principles that should govern how a programme is designed to achieve it. The gap is a governing doctrine: a discipline applied consistently to every (non-crisis) programme, so that capability transfer becomes an explicit design requirement rather than a hoped-for outcome.

Why it matters now. The FCDO’s own evidence to Parliament concedes a loss of in-house monitoring and evaluation expertise and a growing reliance on partners. Reducing the department’s own capability while asking partner governments to shoulder more of the relationship makes the case for an explicit, shared standard more urgent, not less.

The recommendation. Every programme should be able to answer four questions before it is approved: what enduring capability it is trying to create, where that capability will permanently reside once the programme ends, how it will be reproduced, and what evidence will show that external support is no longer required. None of this requires a new department or a new spending commitment. It requires the UK Government to hold instruments it already possesses to a single, consistent test.

Bottom line. The debate about British aid has long been organised around how much is spent. This Essay argues it should increasingly be organised around whether spending builds capability that outlasts it.

Governing the Shift: Toward a Capability Doctrine for UK Development Policy

Britain’s aid budget is shrinking, and the government’s response has been to promise something more sophisticated than money. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) now frames its development policy around four shifts: from donor to investor, from service delivery to system support, from grants to expertise, and from international intervention to local leadership. Each commitment is well precedented, both in the department’s own strategy documents and in decades of international development literature. Yet none of these shifts tells programme teams how to recognise whether dependency is genuinely being reduced: how does a programme officer know, at the point of design, that a given piece of assistance is building the partner government’s capability rather than simply relabelling its dependency.

This Essay argues that what is missing is not a new ambition but a governing doctrine: a discipline applied consistently across every non-crisis programme so that capability transfer becomes an explicit design requirement rather than a hoped-for outcome. Three ideas carry the argument.

Capacity building asks what capability a country needs. Capability governance asks whether the programme in front of us is actually designed to produce it. The evaluative capability required to interrogate, compare and, where necessary, decline outside advice matters as much to a government’s independence as the advice itself. And success, for non-crisis development assistance, should be measured in part by whether the need for external support is visibly diminishing over time.

None of this requires a new department, a new framework, or a new spending commitment. It requires the UK Government to hold instruments it already possesses, scattered across its strategy documents, programme rules and evaluation policy, to a single explicit standard. What follows sets out why that standard is missing, what it would look like in practice, and why the case for building it has grown more urgent, not less, as the aid budget itself contracts.

A document was tabled in the House of Commons on the last sitting day before Parliament rose for the summer of 2026. It set out the country-by-country allocation of British aid through to 2028-29, confirming reductions that had been trailed in outline for eighteen months but never before shown in full (Begum, 2026). Malawi’s allocation falls from just over fifty million pounds to five million. Ten of the seventeen African countries that receive direct support from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office will be left with barely any bilateral budget at all by the end of the decade (Cohrs, 2026). The Democratic Republic of Congo, in the midst of an Ebola outbreak, loses more than a third of its bilateral allocation; Afghanistan loses close to forty per cent (Cullinan, 2026). The timing of the report’s publication was not accidental. A change of Prime Minister followed within days, and commentators were quick to note that the figures had been released at the point of least parliamentary scrutiny (Begum, 2026; Development Policy Centre, 2026).

Total UK aid spending, on the figures reported alongside the same document, is set to fall from roughly fifteen billion pounds in 2024 to just over nine billion by 2027, the steepest reduction among the G7 economies (Cullinan, 2026). Only four countries in the world, none of them the United Kingdom, currently meet the long-standing United Nations target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid (Cullinan, 2026).

The public argument that followed this publication has, understandably, centred on the number itself: whether Britain should return to spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas aid, and if so, on what timetable. Backbench MPs have pressed the new government to commit to a ten-year road back to that figure (Stewart, 2026). Charities have called the cuts a betrayal of a manifesto promise (Concern Worldwide, 2026). Commentators on the right have insisted that any restoration of the aid budget represents money better spent at home (Cullinan, 2026). All of this is a legitimate argument to those making them, and none of it is the subject of what follows. This piece asks a different question, one that survives whatever number the Treasury eventually settles on: what principles should govern how development spending is designed once the money is committed and the crisis has passed.

That the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has largely stopped pretending the old model works is now a matter of published record rather than aspiration. The 2025-26 Annual Report describes the department’s approach to development and climate policy as resting on four shifts: from donor to investor, from service delivery to system support, from grants to expertise, and from international intervention to local leadership (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2026a). This is not new language invented for a difficult budget year. It formalises a direction the department set out as far back as its 2022 strategy, which promised to act with patience for long-term change, to expand the use of British expertise through new Centres of Expertise, and to put people first by ensuring that reforms are locally owned (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2022). The instinct behind all of this, that aid should build the institutions and skills a country needs rather than simply deliver services on its behalf, is sound. It is also, by the standards of the development literature this strategy draws upon, decades old.

The idea that donor support should transfer capability rather than dependency did not begin with a spending review. The United Nations Development Programme drew a sharper version of the same distinction in 2008, separating capacity building, which it associated with a step-by-step erection of new structures on the assumption that nothing existed before, from capacity development, a process of transformation from the inside that starts from a country’s existing base of capacities and is driven by nationally determined priorities (United Nations Development Programme, 2008). The World Bank Institute made a parallel argument five years earlier, describing a shift from supply-side, donor-driven capacity building toward demand-led approaches, and naming as one of its critical areas the strengthening of a partner government’s own capacity to manage and coordinate the assistance it receives, including, tellingly, the capacity to refuse aid or projects it judges irrelevant or even harmful (Nair, 2003). The FCDO’s four shifts and the World Bank Institute’s demand-led consensus are separated by more than two decades and by an entire merger of government departments, yet they describe the same ambition in almost identical terms.

What the supplied material does not show is a single governing logic that ties these ambitions together across the design, delivery and evaluation of a programme. The Programme Operating Framework explicitly rejects the assumption that partner organisations are inherently higher-risk than a UK implementer, and commits to ensuring ‘local partners have the agency and quality funding to meet local needs’ (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2026b). The evaluation policy, reviewed in January 2025, sets out standards for how FCDO itself conducts evaluations, built around principles of usefulness, credibility, rigour, proportionality and safety (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2025). The department’s written evidence to the International Development Committee on value for money invokes, separately again, the OECD’s development effectiveness principles of country leadership, national capacity and empowered beneficiaries (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2024). Each of these documents is doing good work within its own remit. None of them is written to answer a question that only becomes visible when they are read together: how does a programme officer know, at the point of design, whether the technical assistance being procured will leave the partner government more capable of managing the next piece of assistance without it, or simply more accustomed to receiving this one.

Development policy in the United Kingdom has grown steadily more sophisticated in what it seeks to achieve. It has grown far less explicit about the principles that should govern how those ambitions are translated into the design of an actual programme. That gap, more than any single figure in the Annual Report, is what this piece sets out to close. Perhaps the more interesting question is not why the money fell, but why the doctrine to govern what remains of it never quite arrived.

Capacity building and capability governance

That question exposes a distinction worth stating plainly, because the literature this strategy draws on has been circling it for twenty years without quite naming it as a governing requirement. Capacity building, in the vocabulary UNDP set out, is the transfer of a skill, a system or a piece of infrastructure. Capability governance is the set of design rules that determines whether that transfer is structured so the recipient institution ends up able to operate, adapt and eventually replace it without external help. Put at its simplest, capacity building asks what capability a country needs. Capability governance asks whether the programme sitting on a desk in King Charles Street is actually designed to produce it. The first is a question about ambition. The second is a question about architecture, and it is the one this strategy has been slower to answer.

The Danish-led Joint Scandinavian Evaluation of Support to Capacity Development tested something close to this hypothesis directly, examining whether combining donor-supplied expertise, which the evaluators termed a push-approach, with support to the partner institution’s own capacity to demand and direct that expertise, a pull-approach, produced more durable results than either alone. It found that the balance between the two depended heavily on context and was not reducible to a single formula, though a results orientation and a genuine understanding of the local setting were consistently associated with stronger outcomes across the interventions examined (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, 2016). That finding matters, because it confirms that capability governance cannot be a checklist. It has to be a discipline of judgement, applied consistently, about what a given transfer is for and how its success will be recognised. What if a programme could satisfy every criterion in a business case, every value-for-money test and every safeguarding requirement, and still fail this one, simply because nobody asked at the outset what would count as the institution no longer needing the help.

The European Commission’s own attempt to operationalise this discipline, described in a 2013 review prepared for a UK Government evidence and helpdesk service, is instructive precisely because it shows how far the mechanics can be pushed once the principle is taken seriously. Its 2007 approach to technical cooperation, intended to increase beneficiary country ownership and to abolish the standalone implementation units that had previously bypassed national systems, required that support be demand-led rather than provided by default, that partner countries be actively involved from identification through to implementation, and, most tellingly, that partner ownership extend to ‘the procurement of TC services and the management, review and accounting of TC results’ (Rao, 2013). This is a different proposition from simply consulting a government about what expertise it would like. It is a design rule that the partner government should itself be the one commissioning, assessing and, where necessary, dismissing the technical advice it receives, rather than being the passive recipient of advice a donor has already selected on its behalf. The same review found comparable thinking in South-South and triangular cooperation initiatives, where a middle-income country acts as both learner and provider of expertise, and in efforts to build the research capacity of domestic think tanks, so that a government’s own analytical institutions, rather than an outside consultancy, can eventually test and challenge the advice a donor is offering (Rao, 2013).

Knowledge delivered, knowledge kept

A related distinction sits inside the first. Delivering knowledge to a ministry, in the form of a training course, a policy paper or a seconded adviser, is not the same as that knowledge becoming institutionalised, meaning embedded in the ministry’s own procedures, retained when the individual official who received the training moves on, and available to the next official who needs it. The 2007 literature review of knowledge and learning in aid organisations produced for the Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation is useful here because it distinguishes, following Nonaka and Takeuchi, between tacit knowledge, which is personal and transferred only through direct interaction, and explicit knowledge, which can be documented and passed on independently of any individual (Krohwinkel-Karlsson, 2007). The same review notes that much of the literature on knowledge and learning in development cooperation suffers from a weak connection between theory and practice, with donor agencies routinely accused of learning too little, too slowly, or from the wrong sources, in part because the underlying concepts have rarely been defined with enough precision to support a systematic assessment (Krohwinkel-Karlsson, 2007). Much of what passes for capacity building in practice, twinning arrangements, peer-to-peer secondments, advisory missions, operates almost entirely in the tacit register. It is valuable while the relationship lasts and tends to evaporate once it ends, unless a deliberate mechanism exists to convert what has been learned into something the institution retains on its own account. Perhaps the more useful question to ask of any training programme is not whether it was well delivered, but who in the ministry could still explain its content a year after the adviser has gone home.

The Scandinavian synthesis evaluation found precisely this pattern when it examined sustainability outcomes across dozens of capacity development interventions: results that depended on continued donor presence tended to erode once that presence was withdrawn, while results embedded in a partner institution’s own systems and incentives proved more durable, though rarely as durable as programme documents at the design stage had assumed (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, 2016). The FCDO’s own written evidence to Parliament’s International Development Committee offers an unintentional illustration of the same dynamic from the donor’s side. The department has conceded that years of budget pressure eroded its own monitoring and evaluation staff, leaving it with ‘a reduced ability to scrutinise impact and a greater reliance on partners’ (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2024). If the erosion of institutionalised expertise inside a well-resourced UK government department produces exactly the dependency the department is trying to avoid creating in the countries it supports, then the discipline of retaining knowledge is not a courtesy extended to partner governments. It is a general property of how institutions function, and any credible capability doctrine has to apply it symmetrically, to Whitehall as much as to the ministries it supports overseas.

Evaluative capability: the capacity that governs all the others

Of every capability a partner government might be asked to develop, one deserves more weight than this literature has generally given it, because it governs the effectiveness of all the others. A ministry can absorb excellent technical assistance, retain its lessons faithfully, and still remain dependent, if it has never developed the capacity to evaluate what it is being offered in the first place. The clearest illustration of this asymmetry sits in the practice of evaluation itself, and it is worth dwelling on, because it is where the argument of this piece moves furthest beyond the existing capacity-development literature rather than simply restating it.

The FCDO’s evaluation policy is a serious document. It defines evaluation with precision, drawing on HM Treasury’s Magenta Book, as a systematic and objective assessment of the design, implementation and outcomes of an intervention, and it sets out standards of usefulness, credibility, rigour, proportionality and ethical conduct that any evaluation FCDO commissions must meet (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2025). The department’s 2025-26 Annual Report describes a new Evaluation Strategy built around four further shifts, including ‘wider use of internal expertise and evaluative thinking to support continuous learning and adaptation’ (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2026a). This is programme evaluation: a discipline FCDO applies to its own spending, to hold itself accountable to Parliament and the taxpayer. It is worth noticing how much institutional effort has gone into building that discipline inward, and how little of the same effort, on the evidence assembled here, has gone into building its mirror image outward, in the governments that receive FCDO’s programmes.

That mirror image is a distinct exercise from programme evaluation, and the literature on capacity development has approached it from several directions without quite fusing it into a single requirement. UNDP names the capacity to evaluate as one of a small set of core functional capacities a government needs, alongside the capacity to engage stakeholders, to formulate policy and set priorities, and to budget, manage and implement, and defines it as including the ability to measure results, codify lessons and ensure accountability to stakeholders (United Nations Development Programme, 2008). UNDP’s own case material makes the point concrete. In 2006 and 2007, UNDP supported Jordan’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation to build its capacity for monitoring and evaluating progress against the Millennium Development Goals, working through a series of workshops on measurement methodology and results-based approaches. The outcome was not simply a better set of indicators. For the first time, Jordan’s National Plan was drafted consultatively, bringing civil society and line ministries into a process previously confined to a small technical team, and senior officials became more alert to why monitoring and evaluation capacity mattered in the first place (United Nations Development Programme, 2008). That is evaluative capability doing exactly what this piece argues it should do: not producing better reports for a donor to read, but changing who in government is equipped to ask the harder questions.

The World Bank Institute’s 2003 brief reached a similar conclusion from a different angle, arguing that donor support to evaluation capacity had historically focused on donors’ own need to track their disbursements rather than on building the partner government’s general capacity to evaluate anything, including advice the donor itself was offering. It pointed to Uganda’s experience of internalising a demand-led approach to monitoring and evaluation within its own poverty reduction strategy as an illustration of what a government-owned evaluation culture, rather than a donor-commissioned one, could look like in practice, while cautioning that no straightforward route exists to building the underlying performance culture on which that demand ultimately depends (Nair, 2003). Put together with UNDP’s Jordanian experience, these findings describe a government that can do more than absorb an evaluation report handed to it: one that can interrogate the assumptions behind imported advice, compare the recommendations of competing advisers, recognise when a model built for a different context has been applied without adjustment, and decide, on its own evidence, that a piece of proposed assistance should be declined or adapted.

It is worth pausing on why this particular capability has received comparatively little sustained attention in the literature this piece has drawn on, given how much weight it is being asked to carry. Most of the material assembled here treats evaluation as something a government eventually needs more of, in the way it might need more trained economists or better payroll software: useful, additive, worth building over time. What the Jordanian and Ugandan examples suggest instead is that evaluative capability behaves differently from an ordinary technical skill. A ministry with strong procurement capacity but weak evaluative capability will still procure well, most of the time. A ministry with strong policy capacity but weak evaluative capability will still write policy, most of the time. But a government that cannot evaluate the assistance offered to it has no reliable way of knowing whether any of its other capabilities are being strengthened or quietly substituted for. Evaluative capability is not one item on a list of things a government might develop. It is closer to the instrument that tells a government whether its list is the right one at all, which is precisely why a partner government’s capacity to evaluate deserves a claim on donor attention at least equal to a donor’s own evaluation of itself. Nor is aid the only setting in which this now applies. The same governments FCDO supports are increasingly expected to engage with sovereign credit assessment, environmental, social and governance frameworks, and new obligations around climate disclosure, each running to its own evaluative logic and its own timetable, largely indifferent to whether the government on the receiving end has the standing capability to engage with it on equal terms.

The more interesting question, then, is not whether a government has received good advice. It is whether the government was ever equipped to tell good advice from bad. None of this requires a partner government to become a technical rival to the donors it works with. It requires the kind of evaluative capability a well-run finance ministry already needs for its own domestic purposes, applied outward to the assistance it receives as well as inward to its own spending. A ministry that can only receive advice, without a matching capacity to test it, remains structurally dependent regardless of how sophisticated the advice itself becomes, and regardless of how many training courses have been delivered to its staff along the way. What if the sharpest test of a mature development relationship is not what a government has learned to accept from its partners, but what it has learned to decline.

The proposition worth testing

Sovereign credit assessment offers a narrow but concrete illustration of what capability governance can look like once it is deliberately designed rather than left implicit. I proposed in 2025 a toolkit that would help finance ministry reform teams understand how credit rating agencies interpret public policy decisions, so that governments could sequence and communicate their own reforms more effectively, explicitly framed as reducing dependence on external consultants and supporting what the briefing termed sovereign narrative control (Cash, 2026). The proposal is deliberately narrow: it does not attempt to influence how credit rating agencies assess a country, only to ensure that the government being assessed understands the evaluative logic well enough to engage with it on its own terms. That is capability governance in miniature, applied to one evaluative system among the many that developing-country governments now have to operate within, alongside donor evaluations, multilateral safeguard reviews and, increasingly, environmental and climate disclosure requirements.

Generalising from that example produces a proposition worth stating carefully, because it is easy to overstate and the evidence base does not support overstatement. For non-crisis, institutional development assistance specifically, and not for humanitarian or emergency response, where the calculus is entirely different, successful support should progressively reduce the need for the external expertise that originally supplied it. This is close to what the exit strategy and graduation literature has argued for years, and the UK’s own 2022 strategy gestures toward exactly this outcome when it sets a vision for Small Island Developing States to graduate from ODA with sustainable economies by 2030 (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2022). The Scandinavian evaluation is more cautious, finding that the relationship between capacity development support and eventual self-sufficiency was real but highly uneven across the interventions it examined, shaped as much by domestic political will and institutional continuity as by the design of the support itself (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, 2016). The World Bank Institute reached a similar note of caution as early as 2003, observing that institutional capacity built through years of patient investment could still wither away if the surrounding system of governance remained weak (Nair, 2003). The question worth asking, then, is not whether a given programme reduced dependency in every case, since the evidence will never support so tidy a claim. It is whether the programme was designed, from the outset, with that question in mind at all. A programme built to reduce dependency will not always succeed in doing so. A programme not built with that orientation in mind is very unlikely to succeed in doing so by accident.

What should govern the four shifts

Returning to the four shifts with which the FCDO’s current strategy is framed, the honest observation is that each of them already has a champion within the existing policy architecture. The shift from grants to expertise sits behind the Centres of Expertise promised in 2022 (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2022). The shift from service delivery to system support sits behind the Programme Operating Framework’s insistence on strengthening national systems rather than bypassing them through standalone project units, an instinct the UNDP practice note had already identified as a basic principle of good capacity development two decades earlier (United Nations Development Programme, 2008; Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2026b). The shift from international intervention to local leadership sits behind the Framework’s locally led principle and behind the development effectiveness criteria the department cites in its value for money evidence to Parliament (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2024; 2026b). What does not yet exist, across any of the documents this piece has drawn on, is a single instrument that holds every one of these shifts to the same standard at the point of design.

A workable doctrine need not be elaborate. It could, in practice, be reduced to four questions asked of every programme before it is approved:

1. What enduring capability is this programme trying to create?

2. Where, precisely, will that capability permanently reside once the programme ends?

3. How will it be reproduced, so that the departure of a single official or adviser does not take it with them?

4. What evidence, agreed in advance, will show that external support is no longer required?

These are not new principles competing with the ones the FCDO already holds. They are diagnostic questions, drawn directly from the commitments already scattered across the Programme Operating Framework, the evaluation policy and the 2022 strategy, and applied with the same rigour to every programme rather than left to the judgement of individual teams. A programme officer who can answer all four with confidence has, in effect, already satisfied the spirit of capacity building, capability governance, knowledge institutionalisation and evaluative capability at once. A programme officer who cannot is not yet ready to call the programme locally led, whatever the business case says.

The department’s own internal experience with capability frameworks offers a caution about how difficult this consistency is to achieve even when the intent is genuine. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s review of the Programme Operating Framework found the framework’s underlying principles credible and its core approach, built on the idea of empowered accountability for staff closest to a programme, well suited to agile delivery. Yet the Commission also found that Centre for Delivery’s associated Capability Framework for Delivering International Programmes, designed to set out the skills and competencies staff needed at foundation, practitioner and expert levels, was not well understood by many of the programme staff it was meant to serve, and that senior leaders in particular struggled to see what it meant for them personally (Independent Commission for Aid Impact, 2023). A framework that exists on paper but has not been embedded in how people are trained, appraised and promoted is not yet a doctrine. It is an aspiration awaiting implementation, and the same risk would attach to any capability governance framework applied to partner governments unless FCDO first demonstrates that it can hold its own staff to the standard it proposes to extend outward.

There is a case, visible in the material assembled here, that the absence of this doctrine is now a matter of some urgency rather than academic tidiness. The same written evidence in which FCDO acknowledged its own weakened development capability also confirmed a growing reliance on partners to fill the resulting gap (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2024). A government reducing its own capacity to manage aid relationships, while simultaneously asking partner governments to take on more responsibility for managing those relationships themselves, has every reason to make sure the principles governing that handover are explicit rather than assumed. Journalists covering the 2025-26 Annual Report have already noted the risk of the shift being read as opportunistic rather than principled. One columnist pointed out that the new terminology arrived in the same document as the cuts to frontline clinics and schools it was meant to make sense of, and asked whether the language was doing more to soften the reduction than to describe what would take its place (Begum, 2026). A published doctrine, applied consistently and assessed transparently, is the clearest answer available to that scepticism, because it would let Parliament, the National Audit Office and partner governments themselves judge whether the shift toward expertise and system support was actually building capability, rather than simply relabelling a smaller budget.

None of this is a case for a new department, a new framework document, or a new set of headline commitments. The ingredients already sit inside the Programme Operating Framework’s principles, the evaluation policy’s standards, the capacity development literature this strategy has drawn on since at least 2008, and the government’s own value for money evidence to Parliament. What has been missing is the discipline of holding all of it to a single, explicit test at the point every programme is designed. The current UK Government, and future UK Governments, whatever fiscal envelope they eventually settles on, has the chance to supply that discipline. Picture a Ministry of Finance reform team, three years into a UK-funded public financial management programme, that can draft its own reform sequencing, brief a visiting delegation of advisers on why one recommendation fits its context and another does not, and set, without being asked, the date on which the programme’s external technical assistance will end because the ministry’s own staff can carry the work forward. That is what capability governance is for.

Read in this light, the argument here is not really a story about aid at all. Aid is simply where the question happens to be easiest to see, because the money and the mandate both belong, however briefly, to someone else. The underlying question, of how much independent judgement an institution is allowed to develop and exercise over the systems that assess it, applies well beyond a finance ministry’s dealings with its donors, but it is in development policy that the UK Government has the clearest opportunity to demonstrate what answering it consistently would actually look like. It would not need to invent new ambitions. It would need only to insist that the ambitions it already holds, that knowledge transfer, institutional ownership and eventual self-sufficiency are made explicit requirements of every programme’s design, rather than outcomes it hopes will follow from good intentions and a well-chosen case study.

If the next phase of British development policy is genuinely to be characterised by systems, expertise and local leadership, then those ambitions deserve a governing doctrine every bit as explicit as the fiscal rules that determine how much is spent. The debate about British aid has long been organised around quantity, and will likely remain so for as long as the headline figure keeps falling. Increasingly, though, it may need to be organised around capability as well, because a government that cannot say what a programme was for, where its lessons now live, and when its help is no longer needed, has not yet answered the question that actually determines whether the money worked, whatever number appears in the next spending review.

References

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