The information experts helped enable a broad-based appreciation of the Colombo Plan’s unusual qualities. Through their efforts, the Colombo Plan gestured towards ideals of regional co-operation within a broader internationalism in ways that continued to attract its regional members even as they were clear-eyed about its practical limitations. State-making was such a high priority for regional members that region-making often came second, even as it retained its appeal. One of the reasons for the Colombo Plan’s embrace during the long 1950s and its persistence in popular remembering in more recent decades was, and still is, this shape-shifting quality. Greater than the sum of its component parts when needed for publicity and promotional reasons, it could also dissemble easily into discrete bilateral relationships or forms of aid such as iconic projects or the flows of sponsored students. As critiques of foreign aid programs accumulated from the mid-1960s onwards, its benign character and fading significance spared it from becoming the subject of the sharpest attacks.