In the discussion on NLAID, contributors such as Voorhoeve, Grotenhuis, Dietz and Luyten offer a number of arguments in favour of a new agency:

• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already lost a great deal of expertise, so this would offer an opportunity to professionalize development policy (Hassing, Coumans, Ukpabi, Holtland).
• The lack of knowledge within the embassies is also recognized by contributors who oppose NLAID (Molenaar).
• Country offices would improve the continuity and depth of knowledge of the local context, as staff would be deployed for longer periods than the four-year career carousel (Holtland).
• Aid would be separated from diplomacy (Coumans, Holtland, Dietz).
• The management of aid would be shifted to the recipient country (Coumans, Holtland).

Other commentators offer a variety of arguments against NLAID

• Detaching aid from diplomacy might result in the disappearance of political leverage, making it more difficult to pursue a coherent policy, with the result that the Netherlands would speak with two voices (Barry, Berendsen, Hoebink, Hirsch, Wolvekamp).
• Focusing on countries might mean ignoring new realities and global approaches (Nijland, Bruggeman).
• NLAID would create a new bureaucracy (Willems).
• The examples of USAID or DFID are not entirely positive.
• It is doubtful whether NLAID would be able to direct local NGOs and thus partly take over the task of Dutch NGOs (Nijland).

Other comments cannot clearly be categorized as being either for or against NLAID:

• Making sure that global development considerations are given precedence would lead to other choices in relation to NLAID (Rijniers).
• Maybe it would be better to operate country offices together with other donors, or to establish one platform per country (Nienhuys, Opschoor).
• Separate the development (DGIS) and foreign affairs branches of the ministry not in the recipient countries, but in The Hague (Hassing, Smaling).
• The name NLAID would muddy the discussion due to its associations with old-fashioned aid and USAID, for example (Van der Sleen). This may mean that potential benefits might be ignored. Perhaps it would be better to use a different name, such as ‘strategic hubs’ (Dietz suggests ‘hub agencies’), which also opens up the possibility of a policy not strictly aimed at countries: should they be country offices, or is the region a more appropriate scale?
• We should examine the experiences of SNV, which has been working under a variety of guises for four decades (Zevenbergen, Elsen).