A Lost Leader? Understanding the UK’s Foreign Aid Response to Covid

Talk by Gordon Cumming, 2024-2025 Paris IAS Fellow, organized by the Center for Research on the English-speaking World (CREW) at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Attendance can be taken in person or online via this link: https://meet.google.com/dbh-ewed-bcb

Presentation

The Covid pandemic is estimated to have killed 7 million people and cost 16 trillion dollars, reversing years of socioeconomic progress across the Global South. It led to calls on donors to display ‘unity and solidarity’ (UN, 2020) and served as the ultimate test of their capacity to adhere to the ‘foreign aid regime’ (the system of norms agreed by OECD donors over several decades). How did major donors respond to Covid? This paper focuses on one such donor, the UK, which had a long-established reputation as a leader on global health. Did the UK take on a leadership, or at least a constructive international, role? Or did it look inwards and focus on narrow domestic priorities? The focus here will be on the different dimensions of its response, including vaccine nationalism, aid cuts and the merger of government departments. A deeper understanding of the approach by the UK’s Brexit-leaning government will be gleaned through a conceptual framework that includes neoliberal institutionalism and neoclassical realism. Finally, the wider implications of the UK case will be examined, particularly in relation to the OECD’s aid regime and alternative ‘regimes’ promoted by emerging powers such as China.