The Foreign Service Journal, May 2010

M A Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45 early all readers of this magazine know that the Marshall Plan was a four-year, $12.5 billion effort to accelerate Euro- pean recovery fromWorldWar II. Put in terms of 2008 dollars (as all expen- ditures in this article are), this comes to $120 billion, or $30 billion per year. Announced in June 1947, the program is often viewed as the start of U.S. foreign development cooperation. But a 1794 appropriation of $304,000 for the welfare of several thousand refugees fleeing from Saint-Domingue, Haiti, ac- tually set the precedent for a federal role in assistance. America’s current foreign assistance and cooperation ef- forts have evolved through a long struggle for coordination, institutionalization and capacity-building. Waves of innova- tion have been especially pronounced during times of con- flict and social adjustment to globalization. In many of these periods, the private sector innovated and expanded re- sources allocated to foreign humanitarian relief, gradually increasing the focus on long-term development cooperation. For 150 years, U.S. foreign humanitarian relief and devel- opment cooperation evolved under primarily private-sector leadership. However, the public sector has experimented with coordinating private efforts since the Monroe Doctrine, and has often innovated by helping scale up ideas developed by the private sector. Important legal and regulatory reforms in- clude those that enabled the formation of private associations and national franchises in the early 1800s, the creation of gen- eral purpose foundations in the early 1900s (such as Carnegie and Rockefeller) and subsequent systemic U.S. government engagement through tax policy and funding. The Roots of U.S. Private Overseas Assistance American humanitarian disaster relief and development cooperation grew out of the Elizabethan poor laws and our Bill of Rights, which in effect mandated a voluntary system of private-sector religious and charitable giving. The U.S. tra- dition of local religious organizations and businesses joining together for relief efforts and development cooperation over- seas built on this foundation. There are numerous examples of citizen-led foreign assis- tance throughout our nation’s history. Famine relief was the most common, although concern for victims of war, political violence and urban fires also stimulated American relief ef- forts. In 1816 and 1825, merchants, churches and synagogues in Boston and New York aided victims of fires in Canada. While Congress declined to authorize assistance to Greek vic- FS H ERITAGE A L ONG -T ERM P ERSPECTIVE ON U.S. F OREIGN D EVELOPMENT C OOPERATION B UILDING ON TIME - TESTED MODELS IS THE BEST WAY TO CREATE DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION INSTITUTIONS THAT CAN MEET FUTURE CHALLENGES . B Y G LENN R OGERS N Glenn Rogers, a USAID Foreign Service officer, served in Kin- shasa and Abidjan supporting field missions across West and Central Africa (1987-1997) and in Cairo (1997-2004). A member of the AFSA Governing Board, he currently works in USAID’s Europe and Eurasia Bureau guiding social sector and governance programming. His grandparents served with the Rockefeller Foundation from 1919 to 1924 in China, which helped lead him to join the Foreign Service. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of USAID or the U.S. government.