Development aid affects more than its beneficiary countries – it also influences the public policies of donor countries retroactively. In the UK and France, under the Blair and Jospin eras respectively, development aid provided a reservoir of ideas that governments drew on for their own domestic policies. By following the “circulation of public policies” over the last twenty years, we see that the notion of “the poor,” previously used only to refer to people in developing countries, now inspires domestic social policy.