This past November, I had the honour of attending a speech by Pakistan Climate Change Minister Musadik Malik at the opening session of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s annual conference in Islamabad. The Minister was passionate about the unique effects of climate change on Pakistan; in particular, he spoke movingly of his visit to upper Sindh following the 2022 super floods, where he saw a little girl, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, unable to find so much as a glass of clean water for herself or her family. He recounted how painful it was for him to realise that, for all the resources of the state at his command, he had no way of getting that girl the water she needed.

Minister Malik’s comments were no doubt sincere, and indeed heart-rending. Yet as I listened one fact kept troubling me: with Pakistan’s development needs so acute – not just for clean water, but also for energy, health, nutrition, education, improved agricultural practices, and a variety of what should be other public goods – why then did Pakistan and the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, return in 2019 no less than $600 million in development funds to the U.S. Treasury? These were monies appropriated for Pakistan by the U.S. Congress. Yet somehow, all their good intentions and all Pakistan’s needs notwithstanding, Pakistan and the U.S. simply could not find a way to spend these funds and had to give them back. How much clean water could those resources have provided for that little girl’s family, and for the hundreds of thousands of others who found themselves in similar straits after the flooding?

So great was the fear that some resources would be misused or wasted, and that the Agency would be criticised on Capitol Hill and by its own auditors, that we ourselves put up a phalanx of bureaucratic obstacles that made it nearly impossible to spend money quickly.

So great was the fear that some resources would be misused or wasted, and that the Agency would be criticised on Capitol Hill and by its own auditors, that we ourselves put up a phalanx of bureaucratic obstacles that made it nearly impossible to spend money........

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