| Summary: | This article focuses on the changes in British economic assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, its historic logic, policy and practice. The study also analyzes the two main contextual factors, namely, Cold War concerns and pressures from the international donor community. There have been a number of shifts in Britain's development agenda since the fall of the Berlin Wall. These include the merging, in 1994, of the budgetary lines for aid to traditional developing countries and the new assistance programme to the former Soviet bloc; the dilution of the development programme by unprecedented levels of spending on environmental protection, gender issues and population control and the increasing share of the budget devoted to emergencies, peace-keeping and above all multilateral assistance. Clearly a shift--towards political conditionality--did take place in the British development agenda in the early 1990s. Ultimately, however, as neither of these factors were central to aid policy formulation, they were insufficient in themselves to bring about any sudden overhaul of the program or to overturn the forces for continuity shaping that program since the Cold War period. It could perhaps be argued first that, as the Government's rhetoric has not been matched by actual practice and as sanctions were initially more visible than rewards. Whatever happens, Britain's aid relations with Africa cannot now, after political conditionality and democratization, return to the status quo ante. Clearly then the future of Britain's Africa program is hard to predict.
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