This chapter analyzes how competing notions of conditionality – primarily tensions between efficiency and solidarity – have played out in debates and discourses on development aid since the 1960s in one Scandinavian country and a small, yet highly profiled donor – Sweden. Repeated and shifting demands for accountability and transparency serve as a probe into the complex, competing, and often fluctuating aims, goals, and motives of international development aid. The chapter argues that current debates on “the end of aid” are informed by a historical and unresolved tension between “unconditional solidarity” on the one hand and “conditional efficiency” on the other: Demands for openness elucidate competing aims of aid, indicating a paradox in the transparency paradigm in contemporary development aid discourse, whereby efficient aid – as manifested in economic growth – eventually leads to the end of aid while its alleged inefficiency – as evidenced in social inequality – ensures its continued legitimacy.