Written evidence submitted by Dr Youngmi Kim, University of Edinburgh, Mr Aung Ko Ko and Ms Naw Grace Thalay Pay, Mosaic Myanmar, and Dr Matteo Fumagalli, University of St Andrews

UK aid to Myanmar: this submission addresses the UK Parliament’s call for evidence related to the future of UK aid and development assistance
1. The changing nature of warfare in the opening decades of the 21st century, away from inter-state to internationalised intra-state wars has made current approaches to aid and development assistance obsolete. Existing approaches both fail to capture the complexities and intersecting dimensions of current crises and use categories and tools no longer adequate, if they ever were, to capture evolving dynamics on the ground.
2. Among so many of the contexts where the UK provides aid and development assistance, the state has become the problem, not the partner and conduit to the solution. In Myanmar the state has fragmented, and different territories have distinct governance arrangements, some consolidated over decades and with state-like institutions (health, education, justice, public administration).
3. Localising aid and ‘making aid work better’ means recognising these realities on the ground. There is strong capacity in the form of both hard and soft infrastructure in key Myanmar borderlands, though this is unevenly present across the borderlands depending, in part, on the extent to which Myanmar’s neighbours are willing to allow cross-border aid operations to function.
4. The UK should work with its partners in Southeast (Thailand) and South Asia (India, Bangladesh) and those ASEAN members such as Malaysia and Indonesia that are keener to see an end to violence in Myanmar to step up efforts and scale up the cross-border air organizations that has existed in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands for decades.