Comment on Mosley (2010): Trust and conditionality, or can the World Bank Leopard change its spots

Abstract

The core argument of the paper, that establishing trust between donors and recipients is central to successful aid conditionality, is plausible and convincing. While sympathetic to the lines of argument and analysis, I have reservations. First, there would be value in trying to distinguish between notions of trust and reputation. Although these may appear very similar, they are not identical; building a reputation for compliance can be seen as a means to establish trust and what we can observe (in an empirical context) are indicators of reputation. Second, while there is merit in the combination of case study and quantitative analysis to find evidence, I find the case studies more convincing; the econometric analysis is very unlikely to be robust. Another, perhaps minor, observation is that if there is trust, why then should there also be conditionality? White and Morrissey (1997) argue that in cases where donor and recipient preferences over reform are actually aligned conditionality is of no benefit, and indeed can generate the wrong signal if reformist recipients are asked to do too much. One could suggest that in circumstances of preference alignment, which would be expected to reflect trust, conditionality of the standard form (more strictly, tight conditionality) may be damaging, hence undermines the trust. The paper appears to appreciate this in reflecting on new forms of conditionality based more closely on ownership than ‘demands’ for policy reform, although the argument is not developed in terms of conditionality under trust. Rev Int Organ (2011) 6:453–456 DOI 10.1007/s11558-011-9117-6