IDRC: 40 Years of Ideas, Innovation, and Impact

IDRC

The first meeting of the IDRC board, 26–28 October 1970. Seated, left to right: Sir John Crawford, Anthony Lancelot Dias, Lila Engberg, Rt. Hon. Lester Pearson, Lady Barbara Ward Jackson, Puey Ungphakorn, Dr. Charles Bentley. Standing, left to right: A.F.W. Plumptre, Rex Nettleford, Prof. Irving Brecher, Dr. H.A. Oluwasanmi, David Hopper, Pierre Bauchet, Roberto Campos, Ralph Medjuck, John Bene. (IDRC photo)

IDRC: 40 YEARS OF IDEAS, INNOVATION, AND IMPACT

Bruce Muirhead and Ronald N. Harpelle

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Muirhead, Bruce

     IDRC : 40 years of ideas, innovation, and impact / Bruce Muirhead and Ronald N. Harpelle.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Also issued in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-301-0

1. International Development Research Centre (Canada)—History. 2. Research—Developing countries. 3. Economic assistance, Canadian. I. Harpelle, Ronald N., 1957– II. International Development Research Centre (Canada) III. Title.

ISBN 978-1-55458-316-4

Electronic format.

1. International Development Research Centre (Canada)—History. 2. Research—Developing countries. 3. Economic assistance, Canadian. I. Harpelle, Ronald N., 1957– II. International Development Research Centre (Canada) III. Title.

Cover design by Martyn Schmoll. Cover photo—showing a researcher interviewing fishermen at La Boquilla (near Cartagena), Columbia—by Richard Lord. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.

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CONTENTS

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Foreword by Barbara McDougall

Preface

Introduction: Canada and the Evolution of Development Assistance, 1945–70

Chapter 1 The Idea Bears Fruit, 1967–70

Chapter 2 IDRC Takes Shape: David Hopper Sets the Pace, 1970–77

Chapter 3 Ivan Head at the Helm, Part I, 1978–83: IDRC in High Gear: Projects, Plans, and Operations

Chapter 4 Ivan Head Redux, 1983–91: A Darkening Horizon

Chapter 5 Cutbacks and Countermeasures: Keith Bezanson and IDRC in Retreat, 1991–97

Chapter 6 Maureen O’Neil and a New Millennium, 1997–2008: On the Road Again

Chapter 7 Conclusion

Appendix

Index

Photographs follow page

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD: IN OUR PRIME

The International Development Research Centre was born in auspicious circumstances. When the act launching the Crown corporation was passed by Canada’s Parliament in 1970, the roll call was unanimous—a rare event for any sort of bill. One can hardly imagine a more ringing endorsement.

During the decades since the passage of the IDRC Act, the Centre has fully lived up to this non-partisan vote of confidence. It has pursued its mandate to foster research for development with vigour and imagination. Regardless of the domestic political climate, IDRC has always enjoyed the support of senior Canadian officials. Worldwide, especially in the developing countries, IDRC has long been one of Canada’s most highly regarded public institutions. In my view, this has been an excellent bargain, because IDRC’s draw on the public purse has never been more than about 4 percent of Canada’s official development assistance.

Paradoxically, however, IDRC remains less well known among the citizens of its home country. As the organization approached its fortieth anniversary, therefore, IDRC intensified its efforts to tell its story to Canadians. To better highlight the lasting impacts of the scientific and technical knowledge it has helped create, IDRC planned a series of events, including the publication of this important book.

Researched and written by distinguished Canadian historians, this volume was intended to provide an academic history of IDRC. As it has turned out, however, the book is more than a simple chronicle of events. For the benefit of Canadian taxpayers who have funded most of IDRC’s operations, it provides an objective assessment of the Centre’s long-term performance. Because the authors were guaranteed intellectual independence—this is not an IDRC publication—their work contributes substantially to the public accounting the organization is obliged and privileged to undertake.

Does this condemn the book to being dull and earnest? In fact, the IDRC story makes for compelling reading. These pages present a multi-generational narrative, the ups and downs of a modestly scaled global actor in shifting circumstance, and the clash of forceful protagonists. The authors are particularly convincing on the importance of strong leadership and sound governance. In detailing the influence of IDRC’s presidents—remarkably, there have been just five in forty years—and the importance of an engaged board of governors, they remind us that imaginative, decisive individuals truly can meet the challenge of steering a large organization in new directions.

IDRC remains a work in progress, as does the process of international development itself. Its goal, like that of any development organization, should be to make itself redundant, but, of course, that task is far from achieved. The one constant in IDRC’s history has been the belief that only enhanced capacity in the developing world for economic management, public administration, agricultural growth, public health, and environmentally sustainable practices can lead to lasting progress.

As it approaches its fifth decade, IDRC is in its prime, filled with energy and with the wisdom gained from experience. It has recently engaged dynamic new leadership, and it has prepared, on the basis of many lessons learned, a fresh strategic framework to guide its activities during the coming years.

As a former Canadian Cabinet minister and lifelong student of public policy-making, I appreciate learning about institutional effectiveness, achievement, and success. The inspiring story presented in this book illustrates that good government really can improve human lives. IDRC does get the job done, and the world is a better place because of it.

Hon. Barbara McDougall

Chairman of the Board of Governors

International Development Research Centre

January 2010

PREFACE

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was conceived in the context of the need to assist the global South in developing scientific and technological skills. It also represented an interesting and untested idea, at least for a public sector organization—to provide funding to southern research partners and let them undertake work on projects that they had developed and that reflected local needs. Research imperialism, where institutions from wealthy industrialized countries determined aid priorities, was foreign to the Centre’s lexicon. IDRC’s focus was resolutely on the South and it eschewed the funding of Canadian researchers, despite demands that it do so. Indeed, the Centre began life with these very particular objectives in mind, guiding principles from which it has never really strayed. In this, and in other ways that are discussed in this volume, IDRC is pioneering and unique—a stark departure from the more usual development institutions.

While the Centre has suffered setbacks and failures in its programming—to have had none would have made it a strange creature indeed—it has also been in the forefront of change and innovation more often than not. IDRC has received international recognition both from its peers and from foreign governments, reflecting the esteem in which it is held. As this book demonstrates, it has for the most part been nimble, flexible, and willing to contemplate approaches to problems that more staid organizations could not. Unfortunately, it remains an institution of which most Canadians are woefully unaware, as unknown in the country of its birth as it is known in those parts of the developing world where it has funded such good work. Canadians should be as proud of what IDRC has accomplished over the past forty years as they should be of how it has done so.

We owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people who have been instrumental in helping us. First and foremost, Lauchlan Munro, IDRC vice-president, Corporate Strategy and Regional Management, and also our program officer, has provided us with tremendous encouragement and insight as we undertook the research and writing of this book. His attention to detail and his willingness to comment critically on drafts of chapters has saved us from errors. Not once did he attempt to guide our writing. The Centre gave us the freedom and autonomy to write as we saw fit, and its commitment to that principle was personified in Lauchlan. The same can be said of other IDRC officials interested in this project, such as Policy and Planning’s Bruce Currie-Alder, who listened patiently as we probed his understanding of events. These officials all provided advice when asked and helped us to navigate the intricacies of IDRC operation and organization. Their perceptive suggestions have proved invaluable. Similarly, IDRC interns Adriana Gouvea, Asha Jalan, and Sarah Mohan demonstrated great willingness to dig up documents for us when our travels took us far from Ottawa. Hélène St-Martin did a fantastic job in keeping our financial records straight; we owe her a debt we can never repay. Tim Dottridge, now retired but lately director of Special Initiatives at the Centre, never lost his equanimity despite that we often pestered him with questions. For that we are grateful, as we are to the Evaluation Unit’s Sarah Earl, who lives and breathes evaluations and who brought her lively, intelligent, and engaged mind to bear on the project over many lunches.

The list of people to whom we owe thanks is large, numbering in the hundreds. To all of them we are grateful. However, limited in space as we are, we would like to thank in particular Christine Hains, Sachiko Okuda, Bessem Khouaja, Raymond Vaillancourt, and, following his retirement, Alain St. Hilaire, as well as those regional directors who took time from their busy schedules to meet with us several times and submit to our questions: Stephen McGurk, Rich Fuchs, Gilles Forget, Connie Freeman, Federico Burone, and Eglal Rached. Many others went out of their way to provide us with insights into the Centre. Chief among these must be Chris Smart, a recently retired but always committed IDRC man. Gordon Smith, chair of the Centre’s board until 2008, was similarly forthcoming, as was James Pfeiffer, now head of the IDRC alumni association. Too numerous to mention are those many Centre funding recipients in many countries who took us out to view their projects and fill us in on how critical IDRC is to their country’s welfare. We were overwhelmed by their kindness and thoughtfulness.

IDRC’s former president, Maureen O’Neil, was the driving force behind the IDRC History Project and laid out the rules regarding intellectual freedom that guided its forward movement. Maureen is keenly interested in the Centre’s history and wanted to capture that IDRC memory from its earliest years, even as some of it was disappearing. For example, Ivan Head, president from 1978 to 1991, had died in 2004, and many other employees from the 1970s had also passed away or were in poor health. While documents stored in the Centre’s archives could tell some of the story, only interviews would flesh them out. We are grateful for Maureen’s prescience and for her commitment to the project.

Last but certainly not least, we thank our editors at Wilfrid Laurier University Press—managing editor Rob Kohlmeier and acquisitions editor Ryan Chynces. The speed with which this book moved ahead was blinding. The deadlines were very tight and the work onerous, yet neither flinched when confronted with exigencies. For that we are grateful.

This book is based on hundreds of interviews and tens of thousands of pages of documents from the IDRC archives. We have selected and interpreted from both sources. Some readers will question why we dealt with x instead of y, and that is their right. We only hope that we have provided some sense of the dynamism, the excitement, the commitment, and the path-breaking nature of much that IDRC does. If we have succeeded, this book has met its objective. Of course, given the nature of our work, any mistakes are our own.

Bruce Muirhead

Elmira, Ontario

Ron Harpelle

Thunder Bay, Ontario

INTRODUCTION: CANADA AND THE EVOLUTION OF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE, 1945–70

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is a product of a certain time, place, and philosophy, pushed by what one critic has called the North American liberal technocratic elite of the 1960s. It reflected a confidence in government and that development remained possible, both views of which were to come under increasing fire into the mid-1970s.¹ Intellectually, it also reflected the times and paralleled what was happening domestically with the very activist agenda pursued by the Pearson government. Along with publicly funded health care, a Canadian pension plan, and the Canada Assistance Plan came support for funding research for development in the South, where the researcher was not merely the vessel into which Northern projects would be poured, but who would actually determine the program of work. The Office of the Auditor General put it well when it noted, following a comprehensive audit undertaken in 1982, that The Centre’s approach to research aid is based on the premise that the best people to decide what the developing countries really need are the people of those countries and that research aimed at meeting those needs is best carried out by scientists of the developing world. IDRC acts as a catalyst, an adviser and a supporter. It monitors but does not manage the research projects it supports.²

It was truly innovative and unique—a stark departure from the more usual development practice where the South was a recipient of Western largesse and not a partner, a relationship that some characterized as neo-colonial. The IDRC Act established it at arm’s length from government, which provided it with a certain independence to plough its own furrow and which imbued the organization with certain features absent from most other official development agencies. It is, the current vice-president, programs, has noted, in some ways, like a university, like an NGO [non-governmental organization] and like a government department. Like a university, it is intellectually curious and committed to scientific excellence; like the NGO it strongly believes in its mission and in the autonomy needed to carry out that mission; and, like a government department, it uses public funds and is publicly accountable for its actions and enjoys the confidence and protection of that official status.³ This hybridization has served IDRC well.

Beginning with four divisions—Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Sciences, Information Sciences, Health Sciences and Social Sciences—and a very small budget of CAN$1 million, it committed itself to funding applied research on problems Southern researchers identified as crucial to their communities. Division-based program officers would provide expert advice to putative recipients as well as encouraging researchers in innovative and interesting areas to apply. IDRC’s focus was resolutely on the South and it eschewed funding Canadian researchers despite demands that it do so. While that was to change somewhat in the 1980s, it resulted in the Centre being much better known in developing countries than it is in Canada.⁴

Growing through the 1970s and into the late 1980s, it added divisions and personnel, at its peak employing more than six hundred staff. It also supported regional offices, eventually settling on six by 2010. IDRC was also bestowed with an innovative and unique governance system that was to prove remarkable. Established as a Crown corporation, it had the freedom to pursue its own lines of enquiry not fettered by government direction. Its board structure of twenty-one helped—eleven, including the chair, were Canadian, with ten foreign appointments. Nowhere else in the development world does this arrangement occur with respect to a public corporation. It remains true to its initial calling, even forty years on, while also very successfully navigating the hazards of a very difficult and demanding file.

The Origins of Development Assistance

International development is a contentious issue, a fact demonstrated by the millions of words devoted to plumbing its depths, and the titles of the various articles and books staking out authors’ positions in support of or against current development practices.⁵ In the twenty-five years following the end of the Second World War, growth theory was the dominant paradigm, reflected by the fact that the terms development and economic growth became virtually synonymous.⁶ Even Dag Hammarskjöld’s United Nations targeted economic development as the objective of Southern policy. As well, most development planners over the period believed Northern country experiences were transferable to the South, and if the latter followed the planners’ prescriptions, they, too, would prosper. For example, Walt Rostow, who influenced a generation of development experts with his anti-communist modernization theory, offered that It is possible to identify all societies, in their economic dimensions, as lying within one of five categories: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption.⁷ While by 2010, high mass consumption is viewed more skeptically than it was in 1960, it was then seen as the end point of civilization.

Given this belief in the perfectibility of humanity and the linear and forever upward conception of what might be called progress, nascent development agencies directed their effort toward these ends. The first international agency constituted for the express purpose of providing help to those perceived as less fortunate, through the provision of loans, was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).⁸ One of the so-called Bretton Woods twins, the other being the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it had come out of the conference of the same name held in the New Hampshire town in July 1944. Seen from the perspective of those from what would be called the developing world, the IBRD was much more interested in reconstruction than development; Europe lay in ruins after May 1945 and the Bank would do its part to help revive it at the expense of its other mandate. It was not until 1950 that it provided its first loan to a developing country, Colombia. The IBRD was also from its inception a Western club, controlled by the United States through a quota system with an American-appointed president. While the IBRD is usually cited as an example of Western interest in development, it was clearly not so in its early years.

The idea of official development assistance (ODA) in the form that we know of it today dates from the late 1940s.⁹ President Harry Truman’s point four program, announced in his Inaugural Address on 20 January 1949, is the precise date usually ascribed to the beginning of a program of modern official development assistance.¹⁰ Its first three bullets reflected late 1940s American foreign policy: (1) support for the United Nations; (2) continued funding for the European Recovery Program, commonly known as the Marshall Plan; and (3) backing for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Western Europe, soon to be established by treaty as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Point four followed a different trajectory and was a radical departure from past practice when judged in the context of the times. The president exhorted his fellow Americans to:

embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are the victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

With that humble beginning lay the foundation stone for the whole modern development enterprise.

It also quickly became a casualty of the Cold War being waged between the world’s superpowers, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While many developing countries aligned themselves with one or the other, some, like India, chose non-alignment following its independence in 1947.¹¹ Adherence to the non-aligned movement remained, for the most part, the exception rather than the rule, although a meeting of Asian and African states, which took place from 18 to 24 April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, did profess a commitment to non-alignment. Attended by twenty-nine countries representing more than half the world’s population, it was also true that not many of them could afford to remain neutral as between 1945 and 1989, the Cold War was the fact of global life that influenced aid appropriations and defence and foreign policy formulation.

Ottawa, while less enamoured with the idea of official development assistance than its continental partner might have been, was encouraged to become involved through the Commonwealth and the much-vaunted Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia. Usually touted as an early flagship program for Canadian ODA, according to political scientist Peyton Lyon, the country’s interest really began as a desire to assist the United Kingdom in meeting its post-war obligations to past and present members of the British Empire.¹² It was also intended as a means of helping countries in South Asia with their transition to independence and to check the spread of communism in the region. Indeed, Keith Spicer, the author of one of the earliest scholarly treatments of Canada’s aid program, felt the whole thing was launched with virtually no policy aim beyond a lively anti-Communist instinct and an exhilarating vision of a free, multi-racial Commonwealth.¹³

Despite these early steps, development efforts remained largely ad hoc, reactive, small in scale, and unfocused. Indeed, ODA’s global beginnings were lurching and slow, with the US contributing about 50 percent of the total by 1950. That would change over the next half decade, partly a function of the quickening pace of decolonization, especially in Africa, where in 1960 there were nineteen independent states as compared with three a decade earlier. Partly as a reflection of that, the decade culminated, at least in the ODA sense, in the establishment of the International Development Association (IDA), a subsidiary of the World Bank and the largest single channel of concessionary aid to very poor countries, a group to which most newly decolonized African countries belonged. The IDA had not been established without a fight, however, and in one sense it was ironic that it became a part of the World Bank, given its strenuous opposition to such an organization, and its ongoing fight with the United Nations, which wanted an institution focused on concessional aid and managed by itself.¹⁴ The result was a defeat for Southern efforts.

It also represented what would only become more clear over the next two decades—the North’s total rejection of a certain development paradigm. As has been pointed out by Jean-Phillipe Thérien, the history of international development has been dominated by the conflict between the Bretton Woods model (the IMF, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and that of the UN (the Economic and Social Council, the UN Development Program, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development): Tightly controlled by the developed countries, the Bretton Woods institutions champion economic growth and the free functioning of markets—values traditionally associated with the Right. The UN agencies, more attuned to developing countries’ interests, tend to stress social justice and the need for political regulation—ideas associated with the Left. The (neo)liberalism of the Bretton Woods institutions has thus consistently opposed the more social democratic views of the UN agencies.¹⁵ And by the early 1980s, the former had triumphed over the latter.

Still, broad Canadian experience with international development remained quite limited throughout the 1950s; instead, the action lay with unofficial groups. Protestant missionaries were keen to go abroad to proselytize as they had done in Canada. They were educators who had faith in progress and were intent upon applying progressive principles to the 1950s in locations as diverse as China and Latin America. Catholic missionaries were similarly active, particularly in Latin America.¹⁶ Who better, or so it seemed, than these Canadian missionaries, representing a variety of denominations and with experience in remote regions of the world, to join in Canada’s international development efforts.¹⁷ Given this impulse, it is not surprising that the Catholic Church in Canada founded Development and Peace, its official international development organization, at the Conférence des Eveques Catholiques du Canada in 1967, which followed closely upon the heels of the Second Vatican Council, held between 1962 and 1965, itself a gathering that promised fundamental change in the Church.¹⁸ At one point, in proportion to its size and resources, Canada had more missionaries at home and abroad than any other nation in Christendom and in the absence of formal diplomatic relations with much of the world, the missionary movement represented the country’s ties to many developing nations.¹⁹

Other Church-affiliated development organizations were established, like Operation Crossroads Africa, which moved into Canada in 1959 with the support of the United Church, in the process becoming Canadian Crossroads International.²⁰ It joined one of Canada’s more famous non-governmental organizations, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC), which had been established by Lotta Hitschmanova, a refugee from Czechoslovakia who had fled the Nazi advance, arriving in Canada in 1942. By the 1950s, in parallel with Canada’s efforts to assist the poor in other parts of the world, the USC emphasized international development assistance. Wearing a trademark army nurse’s uniform with a military-style hat, and tirelessly working with missionary zeal to raise funds for the organization, Hitschmanova became a household name in Canada for a certain generation of baby boomers who, a half-century later, are able to recite her name and the USC’s Ottawa address, 56 Sparks Street.

As well, organizations like the Canadian Save the Children Fund (1946), World University Services of Canada (1957), and the Canadian University Service Overseas (1961) worked in the South in various ways. In the spring of 1962, these groups came together in the Conference on Canadian Overseas Aid, sponsored jointly by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the University of Western Ontario (UWO) with officials from the UN secretariat, the World Bank, Canadian universities, the External Aid Office (EAO), and representatives of several federal government departments in attendance. It was one of the first such meetings to consider Canada’s ODA policy in a multilateral setting; one part of the discussion focused on the role of NGOs in the aid process and it was decided that it was useful because it increase[d] the total aid effort and because it involve[d] the Canadian community more directly in the process.²¹ And that was seen as increasingly important for those concerned about Canada and its ODA effort as, according to the then-secretary of state for external affairs, Paul Martin, Canadians generally are not convinced of the importance of foreign aid.²²

Clearly, these NGOs were increasingly important in the context of the mid- to later 1960s as Canada, if not Canadians, became increasingly aware of international responsibility. Part of this realization had to do with the celebration of Canada’s 100th birthday in 1967, and the inauguration of the Miles for Millions walks, which one of the authors of this volume remembers well, ending a long day with very sore feet propped up in the old train station in Ottawa. With the energetic Maurice Strong as director-general of the External Aid Office, NGO programs were established in November 1967, and the idea of incorporating them more into the Canadian effort received a push. A year later, CAN$5 million had been allocated to help fund non-governmental organizations, with Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO) receiving the largest share. As well, Strong and others at EAO encouraged volunteers from that organization and others to apply to work in the official ODA effort, which they did; staff numbers increased from 350 to nearly 600 by 1970. Those organizations were to become important training grounds for a revitalized aid component that was to emerge during the second half of the 1960s.

However, for the present, John Diefenbaker’s government oversaw the significant organizational change that resulted in the creation of the External Aid Office in place of the old shotgun approach to ODA disbursement as it sought to rationalize and systematize Canada’s slowly growing aid program. The prime minister, a committed Commonwealth man, was keen to promote policies that promised closer links with those partners, at least as long as they did not create expectations among the developing Commonwealth that Canada would find difficult to fulfill. For example, the results of a Commonwealth finance minister’s conference held in Montreal in September 1958, when seen in the context of the time, were not insignificant. First, Ottawa agreed to increase its annual contribution from CAN$35 million to CAN$50 million to the Colombo Plan. As well, it would provide CAN$500,000 in technical assistance to Commonwealth territories in Africa, and would provide help to the West Indies to the tune of CAN$10 million over five years. Finally, along with the United Kingdom, the country launched a scheme of Commonwealth scholarships and fellowships. With this kind of aid money being discussed and glibly promised, and with a careful eye on the Canadian penchant for frugality and rectitude, the government did give some thought to how it should proceed.

Responsibility for Canada’s economic assistance programs had been divided between the Department of External Affairs and the Department of Trade and Commerce, with the Department of Finance playing an important role, particularly with respect to questions of policy and financial administration. That structure was now seen as less than ideal.²³ But more to the point, as the 1960s dawned, the Department of External Affairs was intent on bringing the provision of development assistance under its sole control—the under-secretary of state believed aid to be an integral part of … foreign policy.²⁴ To that end, the EAO was established as of 24 August 1960, which promised to consolidate all aid-related matters under one roof. Still, it was not to be much; along with its director-general, Herbert Moran, External allocated only three full-time officers to the EAO who were responsible for Canadian ODA, as well as a number of others whose remit lay with administration of the new department. Nor would others be hired; austerity measures following a late 1961 financial crisis/economic downturn had the civil service in its grip for several years, with the consequent freezing of EAO numbers.

However, that administrative shift did not change the fundamental disinterest most Canadians and their government expressed toward providing resources for Southern development despite the Commonwealth connection and the aid work done on that file to date. Canada devoted only .21 percent of its GNP to aid in 1960, a paltry amount that ranked far below the average of other industrial countries. Indeed, the chief of the US delegation to a meeting of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had commented on this: against the wishes of almost all other members, Canada did not want the 1962 DAC deliberations published because the country had the lowest official assistance flow in relation to GNP [among all OECD members and] feared the domestic political effects of such implied criticism.²⁵ While Canadians might not be fervent supporters of ODA, neither did they want to know that their country ranked dead last with recovering states like Belgium, Italy, and Portugal well ahead of them.

Given the climate, Moran and the External Aid Office languished despite the United Nation’s declaration of the 1960s as the First Development Decade. Reflecting this official unconcern were the miserly amounts of aid devoted to newly free francophone African countries as well as the government’s admittedly cautious approach toward ODA and the Commonwealth. The former proved increasingly difficult following the election of the Jean Lesage government in Quebec in July 1960 and the beginning of the Quiet Revolution; it changed the nature of the relationship between the province and the rest of Canada, which began to ask with increasing urgency What does Quebec want? One of those demands was for greater equality both in Canada and abroad, which meant that some development assistance should be given to those African countries thus far ignored. Certainly, the deputy under-secretary of state for External Affairs (and soon to be under-secretary), Marcel Cadieux, a crusty and conservative Québécois, took that position as did the very influential André Laurendeau, editor of Quebec’s Le Devoir, who thundered in its pages that Le Commonwealth n’est pas toute l’humanité.²⁶

However, that was easier said than done; as Moran was to point out, he did not have any French-speaking personnel on his staff who could handle such a program. Only following Cadieux’s agreement to take it on was the tiny amount of CAN$300,000 allocated to that part of the initiative out of a total bilateral grant budget in 1963–64 of CAN$50 million. Clearly, francophone Africa was not a vital part of any Canadian aid program, remaining that way until Maurice Strong was named as EAO’s director-general in 1966; until 1964, although the budget for that part remained a measly CAN$300,000 annually, over the three years from 1961 to 1964 only CAN$539,000 of the CAN$900,000 allocated had been spent. While in 1964–65, the first full year of the new Pearson government, which had been elected in April 1963, the figure for francophone Africa had been increased to CAN$4 million, an uncommitted balance of roughly CAN$2.8 million remained at year’s end.²⁷ And while the ability to disburse funds to that region had improved with the opening of Canadian embassies in Senegal and Tunisia in 1966, it remained a poor aid cousin to the developing Commonwealth.

The so-called UN Development Decade, despite the fanfare with which it was launched following the proposal made by President Kennedy in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1961, did not have significant impact on development discourse. This was the situation even though the new secretary-general appointed in 1961, U Thant, a Buddhist and socialist from Burma, saw the world through different glasses than had his predecessors and he set his sights on improving the condition of those billions who lived below the poverty line.²⁸ While raising the prestige of the organization, the reality fell short of what were always optimistic targets and exaggerated expectations. Indeed, a case could be made that during the earlier 1960s, countries like Canada and international organizations like the United Nations were still feeling their way in terms of development strategies and plans despite more than ten years of devotion to that cause.

That also held true for the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which established new aid organizations, as had Canada, in the early 1960s. The US created the Agency for International Development in 1961, while in the UK, the Ministry of Overseas Development was set up with much fanfare in October 1964. Multilaterally, the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was created in September 1961 with a mandate to coordinate the aid efforts of member donors. However, support in Britain and the United States dissipated over the rest of the decade as public interest cooled and aid appropriations declined as a percentage of gross national product. The First Development Decade could not escape the ennui at best, or hostility at worst, that was now common with respect to the issues it promoted. As President Kennedy stated in a November 1963 press conference when asked about congressional reluctance to vote aid appropriations, I don’t know why we are suddenly so fatigued.²⁹ By the later 1960s, any development in that decade was construed largely as a failure even as planning for a Second Development Decade was under way.

Why was that so? Egon Glesinger, assistant director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, perhaps put it best in 1970: Among a number of serious errors of judgment, the most significant was the excessive optimism created by the Development Decade’s announcement, creating expectations that could not be met. Further, the North "made the great mistake … of thinking of their own pattern and their own problems and believing that these could be transposed. Today … we are deeply convinced that development can be planned and conceived only in the developing country itself—that it is from its point of view that you determine the requirements, and then see where foreign assistance can fit in."³⁰ He was prescient; the International Development Research Centre, established by an Act of the Canadian Parliament in May 1970 to fund research for development, was designed to accomplish just that. Still, in a 1969 article, William Clark, then the director of information at the World Bank, suggested that The Development Decade is dying of political inanition. Among the rich countries the will to assist development has faded and, partly as a result, in the poorer countries the will to develop is shriveling.³¹

But while the provision of aid to the South was increasingly a zero-sum game in the North, the countries of the former were more intent than ever on organizing themselves into some sort of coherent bloc to influence or badger their wealthier colleagues. For example, the non-aligned movement that emerged from Bandung had formally established itself at Belgrade in 1961. Further, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) came into being in 1964 and was the favoured platform of the Group of 77, a loose coalition of developing countries whose mandate remains to promote their economic development. It was to represent the only major international institution created out of the experience of the First Development Decade.

Soon after its establishment, the UNCTAD identified the need for special attention to ‘the less developed among the developing countries’ and intended to create new policies of co-operation in the field of trade and development.³² Those would be firmly based on an acknowledgement of the economic and political inequality of nations.³³ Four years later a resolution was passed on the needs of those least developed countries, while in 1971, twenty-four countries were identified and placed on the original list of what became least developed countries. All of this activity made for a distrustful North and Colin Legum, the British editor of The Observer, suggested just that—the UNCTAD had set itself up to confront Western interests, leading the latter to regard it with suspicion and resistance.³⁴

So where did all this leave Canada’s aid program by mid-decade? Certainly not in a good space as Canadians shared most of the sentiments expressed above and aid fatigue was already beginning to set in, partly caused by the perception that it was doing no good and might even be working against development. A German newspaper did nothing to dispel those doubts when it suggested to wide publicity in the West that the poor in rich countries were helping the rich in poor countries.³⁵ Increasingly, the country was torn by domestic squabbles with Quebec, and political scandal had wounded the first Pearson minority government as it was to do to the second, elected in November 1965. Further, the prime minister was very busy with a national program that included the implementation of programs of publicly funded health care, enhanced social services, a national pension plan, a new flag, and a royal commission to study the issue of bilingualism and biculturalism. It was an activist and expensive agenda that left little time for other things that did not immediately further his domestic program. Perhaps that was why Pearson convinced Maurice Strong, the president of Power Corporation and one of the most powerful private sector operatives in Canada, to take over a floundering EAO as of September 1966, as well as to absorb an 85 percent cut in salary. Meanwhile, Herb Moran happily packed his bags and left for the peaceful confines of the Canadian embassy in Tokyo.

David Morrison notes that Strong was an excellent choice, injecting a new vigour and enthusiasm into EAO deliberations. Indeed, he recruited some remarkably able people from the private and public sectors to take on senior responsibilities—and, as the establishment virtually doubled, returned CUSO volunteers and others injected youth, commitment and enthusiasm into the organization.³⁶ But his sense of place was similarly good; the 1960s was a decade of experimentation and change. External Aid, prompted by Strong but also pushed by those eager young officials, began to swim against the current including in its considerations, for example, the social dimension of development, a marked departure from past practice. Similarly, influential books were published in support of development by influential people with traction at the highest levels. Barbara Ward’s celebrated Spaceship Earth in 1966 began to popularize the issue of underdevelopment and its effects in a way that had not happened before.³⁷ Similarly, R. Buckminster Fuller put out Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969, which imagined the human species as a crew, united by a shared fate, on a tiny spaceship travelling through infinity; clearly, or so Canadians were increasingly told, we were all in this together.³⁸

Still, those considerations and the appointment of Strong did not mean that aid’s path was suddenly clear of obstacles; Ottawa turf wars continued to infect the process. Should External Aid post its own officers overseas? Not if James Langley, an assistant undersecretary of state, had any say in the matter. Should EAO be permitted to offer independent policy advice to the minister? Not if J.R. Francis of the undersecretary’s office had any sway with his boss; his take was that more precise ground rules for cooperation with the External Aid Office should be developed in order to ensure that our thinking coincides with theirs or the other way around. There was also a certain degree of mistrust from both sides [that] must be resolved, noted Thomas Carter, the head of the African and Middle Eastern division at the department.³⁹ Strong was also very aware of the potential of departmental regulars to hold up his advance.⁴⁰ While international development might be a very slow process so, too, was forward movement in Ottawa.

And development was slow and largely dependent on the activities of the people so affected, or so Lester Pearson believed. He articulated that on a number of occasions; indeed, it became his mantra and would find expression in IDRC as the organization funded research in the South undertaken by Southerners designed to address important issues. For example, asked by the British Broadcasting Corporation to present the 1968 Reith Lecture, he did so calling it Peace in the Family of Man. It focused on uneven development and the necessity of helping those who would help themselves. As he noted, in external aid for development there should be maximum participation on the part of the receiving country. To the greatest possible extent we should place responsibility on the governments and the people of the country.⁴¹ Similarly, when presenting the 1969 Russell C. Leffingwell Lectures sponsored by the influential US Council on Foreign Relations, he asserted that Aid is no fairy godmother touching everything with her magic wand so that, presto, the little mice and pumpkins of local effort are turned into large luxury carriages. Development is a long, slogging, grinding effort by the people themselves of each country.⁴² In his lecture to a crowd at Scarborough College of the University of Toronto in 1970, he raised the same theme: No country will be able to go ahead except by its own effort and its own policies and the wise use of its own resources, human and material. All that external aid can do … is to help the country help itself. The final responsibility rests at home. However, if a country is trying to go forward, to help itself, then we who are more fortunate have an obligation to assist in that process.⁴³

Pearson, too, had become much more active on the aid front than he ever had been as prime minister. Following his resignation from office in April 1968 he was asked by Robert McNamara, then only recently appointed to head the World Bank, to lead an independent effort by a group of international development experts and assess past practice and determine why donor countries had scaled back on contributions; in 1968, for the first time, there had been a reduction in ODA. Known as the Commission on International Development, it was equally perceived as the Pearson Commission so closely was his style and personality reflected in its work, which was published as Partners in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development. While not influencing the debate in the way that it had hoped, especially with respect to its recommendation that Northern governments devote 0.7 percent of their GNP to ODA, it did raise the issue of Southern development.⁴⁴ Still, by 1970, aggregate official aid had fallen to 0.33 percent of gross national income, compared with more than 0.5 percent at the beginning of the 1960s and was to fall even further, to 0.22 percent of GNP on average among OECD countries in the late 1990s.

The Pragmatic IDRC

So, where does this bring us in our pending consideration of the history of IDRC? First, that this pragmatic Pearsonian conception of development permeated his ideas about what was to become the International Development Research Centre. Certainly he remained in close contact with Maurice Strong following his return to private life and was instrumental in the hiring of the very pragmatic David Hopper as IDRC’s first president. Pearson was also able to influence the Centre’s very early development as first chair of the board following the passage by Parliament of the International Development Centre Act on 13 May 1970. In