Abstract
International headlines often make mention of side effects of international cooperation, ranging from aid-fuelled corruption to the negative side effects of volunteer tourism. The OECD Development Assistance Committee, an international forum of many of the largest providers of aid, prescribes that evaluators should consider if an intervention has unintended effects. Yet the little that is known suggests that few evaluations of international cooperation projects systematically assess their unintended effects. To address this gap in assessing unintended effects, this study develops an operational typology of 10 types of unintended effects of international cooperation that have emerged in the literature and applies this to all 644 evaluations of the Netherlands’ development cooperation between 2000 and 2020 using structured text mining with manual verification. The results show that approximately 1 in 6 evaluations carefully considered unintended effects and identified 177 different ones. With the exception of 5, these could be classified in 9 of the 10 typologies, indicating that this typology can guide international development cooperation to systematically consider and assess its unintended effects. International development planners, researchers and evaluators are recommended to henceforth make use of and improve this operational typology.
Highlights
In only five cases (2.8%) were unintended effects found that fell outside our proposed typology. These findings suggest that the typology is neither overly broad or overly narrow
Major international development agencies represented in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) DAC have been stipulating since the early 2000s that evaluations of development programmes should include unintended results
A common challenge to its inclusion in evaluations has been the lack of a common framework—a typology—around unintended effects that is both rigorous and operationally meaningful
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. International headlines occasionally make mention of the negative side effects of international cooperation, ranging from abusive behaviour by aid workers [1] to aid-fuelled corruption [2]. While there are positive side effects of aid, such as deworming programmes leading to increased educational participation [3], these make it less often to the front pages. Because unintended effects can be sizeable, the OECD Development Assistance
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