From integrated cooperation to new forms of linked cooperation

For a long time, we had a concept aligned to the project-aid perspective: there was a project for a new school for a town in the African countryside and a group of developers, for the most varied of reasons, including humanitarian ones, would get together and work toward its realisation.
A new concept of cooperation has emerged more recently, based on an integrated and integrative approach, according to which it only makes sense to provide development aid to a country if there is consensus between donors and beneficiaries on the policies to be undertaken in seven distinct areas and at four well-characterised levels of action. This is the CDF (Comprehensive Development Framework) approach.
The seven areas are: Good Governance; a strong and independent judicial power; a consistent financial system; a coherent education policy; an efficient hospital system; a set of good framework infrastructures; and an energy policy suited to the needs of the aid receiving country and the challenges facing our planet.
The four levels of action are: a satisfactory negotiation of the existing debt (public and/or external); the implementation of a consistent macroeconomic policy; the introduction of structural adjustments in the functioning of the aid recipient country’s economy; and, lastly, institutional reforms.
The CDF approach was - and still is - the most logical, seeking to find a concerted set of multi-sectoral measures to ensure the genuine development of the most deprived economies.
The latter approach - labelled pro-system or even pro-Western - has been countered by another that some consider to be of progressive inspiration, namely that of a «new linked cooperation» devoid of demands on human rights issues.
Strategic infrastructures are financed, which will then be paid for by the recipient countries with raw materials. There is no transfer of technology, the human resources used in the investment projects come from the financing countries and neither goods nor services are used from the aid recipient countries. If the new debt-holding nations are unable to repay these loans, there will always be a port, airport or other strategic infrastructure to negotiate, which will pass into the control of the lender. Even a military installation could be transferred to the financier. This financier wants nothing from the debtor country in terms of human rights, «respecting national sovereignty».
And this is how a new global cooperation strategy is being created: «A Union Belt, A Link Road».
Nothing more, nothing less...