Following money, mapping ‘development’: The opaque geographies of UK aid flows across the outsourcing assemblage

Abstract

This paper brings ‘follow the money’ approaches in economic geography into dialogue with perspectives from critical accounting to develop a methodology for opening the ‘black box’ of private sector development finance. Specifically, we engage with the infostructures that shape access to data around Official Development Assistance by the UK government. We focus on the impact of recent cuts to the aid budget, and large scale re-allocation of development spending through the Home Office towards ‘In-Donor Refugee Costs’, or asylum seeker and refugee support. Our methodology shows how development finance is channelled through the Home Office, becoming part of the reproduction of the UK’s outsourced hostile environment, at the same time that development contractors turn back to the UK to seek work in the context of a declining aid budget. As such, development capital becomes spatialized through the UK’s geographies of deprivation and asylum dispersal, while outsourcing giants are able to capture ‘excess profits’. Based on our methodological contribution, we also highlight how specialist development contractors are able to traverse the UK’s borders in the pursuit of aid-funded business, finding new domestic markets opening up in response to hardened borders and a declining overseas aid spend.