Soft Criteria in Danish Development Aid. An Essay on Post-Materialist Values in Practice

The largest and most altruistic development aid programs are the ones of a group of countries known as the Like-Minded Countries. The LMC's are the small rich NW-European countries and Canada. The LMC's have developed a distinct ?soft' aid ideology that differs from the ?hard' ideology of other donors. We shall use the Danish program as an example. The explanation starts from a dual markets hypothesis, (a) aid policies are formed at the LMC markets, where the voters demand post-material altruism, and (b) projects are made on a market between the LMC-bureaucracy and the LDC's demanding development. In addition, the softness is a consequence of the normal behaviour of a bureaucracy demanding power and slack