Overseas Aid or Domestic Expenditure? The New Zealand Government and the Problem of Justifying Trade-Offs Between Domestic Scarcity and Obligations to the Pacific

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_48How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Official Development Assistance; Justification; Fiscal Scarcity; Trade-off; Obligation

Abstract

The modern foreign aid debate is predominantly consequentialist, centring on the outcomes of aid and whether it promotes development or creates dependency. While questions of justification are not absent, they are often treated as secondary to those of effectiveness and outcomes. This paper examines how New Zealand should justify aid to Pacific Island Countries under conditions of domestic fiscal scarcity. It treats the aid debate as a problem of public and moral justification, evaluating four frameworks - liberalism, communitarianism, cosmopolitanism, and economic analysis - against four normative criteria. This study concludes that the strongest justifications for New Zealand are those grounded in communitarian and economic principles, recognising that no single framework, or possibly combination of frameworks, will fully resolve the tension between domestic obligation and external duty. This study reframes Pacific aid as a question of both political efficiency and the legitimate reasons for maintaining or changing aid policy under scarcity.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zexin Lu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Overseas Aid or Domestic Expenditure? The New Zealand Government and the Problem of Justifying Trade-Offs Between Domestic Scarcity and Obligations to the Pacific
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 436
EP  - 446
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_48
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_48
ID  - Lu2026
ER  -