The Poverty Industry: Dr. Emily Brearley on Why Foreign Aid Keeps Failing

Is foreign aid charity — or one of the cheapest instruments of power a country has?

Dr. Samantha Nutt, physician and founder of War Child, has spent thirty years working in Somalia, Sudan, eastern Congo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Michael Brown has spent fifty on land and natural resource governance in many of the same places. In this conversation they take on the questions the aid debate usually avoids:

— Should NGOs be working themselves out of a job — and why is it still so rarely national staff running them? — Being at the table isn't enough. Why local communities need leverage, and what happens to their voice without it — Is civil society making progress anywhere at war? — The resource curse, and whether the US–China competition over Congo's minerals changes anything for Congolese people — Aid as soft and hard power: something to fight, or something to accept? — Why gutting USAID isn't charity withdrawn — and what it has to do with the next pandemic — Can the current cynicism about foreign aid be overcome — and what's actually in everyone's best interest?

The Unpopular View challenges assumptions and takes positions many in the aid and development world don't like. Host Michael Brown is the author of Redeeming REDD+ and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South.

Dr. Samantha Nutt is the author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid.

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USAID has been dismantled. The World Bank's own evaluations keep finding what its projects don't achieve. So the question is no longer whether the aid architecture is broken — it's whether anything should replace it.

In the final segment of my three-part conversation with Dr. Emily Brearley — development economist, 25 years at the World Bank and other international institutions, and author of Aid Inferno: How to Reduce Poverty, Combat Global Warming, and Be a Good Person — we each put a blueprint on the table.

We agree on some fundamental issues and disagree on some important details.

Emily's answer is what she calls Solution 42: sharply narrow what institutions like the World Bank attempt. Stick to the sectors they demonstrably do well. Build in transparency and citizen involvement in project selection and evaluation. Fund a small number of high-impact projects chosen by people in recipient countries themselves. It rhymes with Esther Duflo's evidence-first approach.

We also agree that a social contract is a fundamental missing piece — clear goals, trade-offs and obligations that people on the ground can actually hold institutions to that are negotiated. In 40+ years of fieldwork I never saw one written, and neither USAID nor the World Bank has ever framed a project in those terms. Emily agrees that's a major gap.

Where we diverge somewhat is on who does the work. Should nationals do everything, or is there a place for foreigners with unique capacity building contributions to make?

ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Emily Brearley is a development economist and former World Bank economist with ~25 years across the World Bank and other international institutions, leading programs in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Aid Inferno is a case-study-driven critique built on World Bank evaluation data arguing that development finance rewards spending and institutional survival over outcomes and accountability.

ABOUT THE SHOW The Unpopular View is for the exhausted middle — evidence over outrage, and criticism that doesn't spare either orthodoxy. Hosted by Michael Brown, international development consultant and author of Redeeming REDD (Routledge, 2013) and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South (Routledge, 2026).

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Views on foreign aid have rarely been this polarized — whether American taxpayers should fund health, education, governance, agriculture, and conservation programs aimed at uplifting the poorest of the poor, and, in conservation's case, protecting planetary resources for everyone. This conversation doesn't resolve that debate, but it grounds it: a development professional's account of four decades in the field — a World Bank rangeland project vilified in Graham Hancock's "Lords of Poverty", a Mali irrigation project that worked because farmers wanted it, an NGO program shut down after seven years of success "because we can," and a $20M initiative that began as an 8-country program, was already whittled down to 4, and then died outright when a D.C. bureaucrat used a (purposeful) mix-up with Kazakhstan as the reason to deny it moving forward. The verdict: appropriateness and feasibility, not funding levels or good intentions, determine whether aid succeeds. This of course considers whether the governance framework is enabling to begin with.

Michael and guest Emily Brearley — a former World Bank economist and author of Aid Inferno — agree on the goal: aid needs a real social contract to work at all. Where they differ is on scale and on the fix, especially whether big-vision programming at scale is worth attempting in the first place. Both agree the pre-DOGE aid model hasn't shown evidence of working, and that whatever comes next has to change. This is Segment 1 of 3: what's gone wrong, and what could come next.

Michael's own arguments are laid out at greater length in Redeeming REDD and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South: Making it Work for People and Planet. Emily's case is made in Aid Inferno.

Segment 1 of 3. Coming next: Segment 2 — Can Aid Scale? — weighing the small, proven Mali project against the big, negotiated institutional model. Then Segment 3 — Can Aid Be Fixed, or Should It Be Scrapped? — two competing paths to a possible new social contract.

00:00 The Central Rangelands project and Graham Hancock's critique 01:44 Mali: motor pumps, ownership, and why farmers made it work 02:37 Seven successful years, shut down "because we can" 03:08 Founding Innovative Resources Management 03:39 From 8 countries to 4 to zero — the "Kazakhstan" excuse that killed it for good 04:09 Verdict: money isn't the problem — appropriateness is 04:49 Introducing Emily Brearley, former World Bank economist and author of Aid Inferno