UK aid to Africa: ‘nationalisation’ and neoliberalism

Abstract

This article investigates how UK aid to Africa changed in the 2010s. Based on a thematic analysis of nearly 30 key policy documents spanning 2000–2020. It concludes that the securitisation of aid to Africa, as a framework for understanding donor motivation, morphed, by the close of the 2010s, into the ‘nationalisation’ of aid. This prescribed neoliberal development in the UK national interest and ignored the way in which neoliberal development creates insecurity. Furthermore, the nationalisation of aid reflected the national populist turn across several states and was driven by and utilised particular domestic and international political agendas.