Abstract
Since the 1990s, and accelerating with the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the goals for development aid in donor-government development policies have proliferated. Goal structures have also become complex. It is, therefore, often difficult to read a given donor’s intentions from officially declared policy: what exactly it claims being committed to accomplishing with aid in recipient countries and through what means? Furthermore, when goals and means for aid are non-transparent, it becomes more difficult to evaluate or assess donor development policies as officially promised action plans. Related to but not identical to Hall’s policy paradigm concept [Hall, P, 1993, ‘Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: The case of economic policymaking in Britain’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 275–296] this study aims to develop an analytical framework for reconstructing given donor’s aid logic of goals and means. The framework keeps attention on tracking everywhere two elementary answers from direct or implied statements in official policy documents: what change or changes exactly a given donor claims to promote in recipient countries and through what actions or measures? With interest in Finnish development policies, all the main policy documents for three decades (1993–2023) were analysed. The finding was an apparently enduring core of policy understanding used in Finnish development policies, giving similar stated logic for aid for three decades.
Published Version
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