Putting the ‘D’ into the OECD – The DAC in the Cold War Years

This chapter charts the DAC’s Cold War history. During this period the DAC established much of the institutional and intellectual scaffolding of international development cooperation. Moreover, participation in the DAC also orchestrated a quiet revolution in the identities of its members, forging them into an imagined community of donors in which the supply of development assistance came to be seen as a routine function of modern industrialised states. Although the Cold War provided the overarching backdrop, the chapter also teases out some of the other key features of the landscape inhabited by the DAC and how they constrained and enabled its influence. These include the North-South orientation of North-South development cooperation, the hegemonic role of the United States, disagreements amongst member states, and the DAC’s relationship with other component parts of the OECD