The humanitarianisation of the foreign aid programme in the Netherlands

Although internationally regarded as a humanitarian aid donor, the central thesis of this article is that The Netherlands has only very recently earned the reputation of being a generous donor. This article traces the emergence of an aid policy in the 1960s and discusses the ways in which the interests of Dutch trade and industry and the Ministry of Economic Affairs played a prominent role in its formulation. Subsequent official policy pronouncements would seem to point to three further turning points in the history of Dutch development aid. However, the article questions the depth of these changes. While the Dutch aid programme has become less influenced by commercial considerations, it is argued that the shifts observed in the 1970s and 1980s are more at the level of discourse than actual changes in policy. © 1999 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.