Gordon Cumming
Research Interests: French, British and wider international development and security policies; Northern NGOs and civil society building; fragile states and military ad hoc coalitions.
Understanding foreign aid responses to Covid-19
In 2020, a UN report predicted that Covid-19 would slash global economic output by 8.5 trillion US dollars, forcing millions into extreme poverty and undoing years of socio-economic progress in the Global South. The UN urged donors to display ‘unity and solidarity’ by increasing foreign aid and ensuring an equitable dissemination of vaccines? Yet did they? Or did they turn inwards, reduce aid and favour vaccine nationalism? These questions are central to this project which compares and explains the aid responses of three key donors: France, the United Kingdom and the United States. To do so, it adopts a novel conceptual framework combining regime complexity, which allows for the possibility that donors were acting in their collective self-interest as per the mantra ‘No-one is safe until everyone is safe’, and blame avoidance, which points to a more self-interested, parochial approach.
This project offers the first theoretically driven, in-depth comparative study of donor approaches to Covid. It advances public policy theories in ways that cut across conventional dichotomous thinking on cooperation versus nationalism. It also tells us more about how we in the Global North react to crises elsewhere and how our governments behave when regime hegemons (in this case, the USA and World Health Organisation) fail miserably. Finally, it makes concrete recommendations and identifies alternative forms of donor leadership that should build resilience in the event of future global crises.
Gordon D. Cumming is a professor of language-based area studies at the School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Learned Society of Wales and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
His research is both policy-oriented and theoretically underpinned. His British Academy, ESRC, FMSH and Leverhulme-funded research focuses on French, British and wider international development/security policies, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.