Donor Governments Research Articles

Fragile States: A Donor-serving Concept? Issues with Interpretations of Fragile Statehood in Afghanistan

Current conceptions and models of fragile statehood in conflict-affected contexts can serve the purposes of international donor governments over and above reconstruction and statebuilding. First, despite remaining ill-defined, the fragile state concept is widely utilized by donors to oversimplify analysis of complex political environments, such as that of Afghanistan, leading to inadequate bureaucratic responses. Second, current models of fragile statehood are unable to capture contextual or temporal dynamics, and invariably omit the contribution of international intervention to entrenching fragility. This is particularly the case in Afghanistan where the effects of international militarized stabilization responses have not been systematically included in fragility assessments, leading to increased insecurity. This article calls for a more nuanced approach to fragility and greater acknowledgement of the role donor governments can play in its entrenchment.

Transforming Silo‐Steering Into a Performance Governance System: The Case of the Finnish Central Government

AbstractThis chapter discusses efforts by the Finnish central government to reform its approach to governing and service delivery through the implementation of performance management in various forms. In this context, the implementation and utilization of performance evaluation has been fragmented and narrow, resulting in limited use of evaluative data in policy development and service improvement. The author argues that the performance‐governance model offers a framework for approaching performance management through the lens of the democratic government and even to support the use of theory‐of‐change strategies to assess government's contribution to desirable societal changes. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

AID EFFECTIVENESS AND THE PARIS DECLARATION: A MISMATCH BETWEEN OWNERSHIP AND RESULTS‐BASED MANAGEMENT?

SUMMARYAlthough recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the global aid architecture, less effort has been devoted to investigating the process of implementing those changes. By using the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as an illustrative and critical case, this article shows how a donor development priority—gender—travels from Stockholm and headquarters to a Paris Declaration‐infused aid practice in three cases with different aid modalities: Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Cambodia. More specifically, the qualitative empirical investigation conducted here shows that the implementation of the new aid architecture puts severe and competing demands on development practitioners. At the core of this tension is the fact that although all donors are supposed to promote partner country ownership, harmonize their efforts with other donors, and align themselves with partner country priorities, results‐based management simultaneously implies not only a focus on continuously measuring and reporting results but also stricter prioritizations on behalf of donor governments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Randomized Controlled Trial Designs for Operations Research in Low-Income Countries: Reality or Delusion?

Randomized Controlled Trial Designs for Operations Research in Low-Income Countries: Reality or Delusion?

Donor Ideology and Types of Foreign Aid

We examine how donor government ideology influences the composition of foreign aid flows. We use data for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960-2009 and distinguish between multilateral and bilateral aid, grants and loans, recipient characteristics such as income and political institutions, tied and untied aid, and aid by sector. The results show that leftist governments increased the growth of bilateral grant aid, and more specifically grant aid to least developed and lower middle]income countries. Our findings confirm partisan politics hypotheses because grants are closely analogous to domestic social welfare transfer payments, and poverty and inequality are of greatest concern for less developed recipient countries.

Knowledge production in the security–development nexus: An ethnographic reflection

This article contributes to the analysis of transnationalized forms of security governance in the postcolonial world by looking into the production of knowledge aimed at increasing coherence between domains of security and development in Western donor policies. The article takes an ethnographic approach to the analysis of knowledge production, using the author’s personal experience of writing a policy analysis for a donor government concerning how to ‘further improve’ the policy of ‘concerted civil–military planning and action’. This attempt to ‘study up’ and analyse upstream practices involved in transnational security governance shows the degree to which policy-related knowledge production is a negotiated, social process that involves informal practices and defensive tactics. The policy process seems to be less concerned with effects on the ground than with the problem of creating unity among the wide range of agents and institutions involved in the emerging policy field. While such an approach may have potentially destabilizing effects – both for policy narratives and for researchers’ authority – it responds to calls for reflections on the politics of representation and writing in studies of international relations.

Tertiarization, Industrial Adjustment, and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Aid1

Kleibl, Johannes. (2012) Tertiarization, Industrial Adjustment, and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Aid. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00754.x © 2012 International Studies Association This paper explains the varying degrees to which commercial interests or recipients’ development needs shape donor governments’ foreign aid allocation decisions. I argue that domestic interest group politics is a major driver of the heterogeneity in donors’ aid allocation policies. As proxy measures of donor governments’ dependence on the political support of industrial producer lobbies and their susceptibility to the demands of development interest groups, I exploit variation in the level of tertiarization and in the intensity of industrial restructuring processes across donor countries and over time. While higher levels of tertiarization increase donor governments’ relative responsiveness to the aid allocation demands of development interest groups, intense periods of industrial adjustment provide incentives for governments to allocate aid in line with the preferences of their industrial producer constituencies. Statistical analyses of a dyadic panel data set of 21 OECD donor and 124 developing recipient countries for the period from 1980 to 2001 support the theoretical predictions.

The Millennium Development Goals and Ambitious Developmental Engineering

Donor governments have been accused of not doing enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs), while the mdgs have been accused from other quarters of not doing enough for development. The former position takes the mdgs as an unquestionable good, while the latter posits them as a Western ruse for the sedimentation of core–periphery relations. This paper transcends this debate, identifying in the goals a logic of ambitious social, cultural and spatial engineering. Inspired by Foucauldian development anthropology, the paper highlights three themes implicit in mdg texts, requiring biopolitical interventions on bodies, societies and spaces, namely risk, sex, gender and family; Homo Economicus; and the city. The paper concludes with a reflection on the likelihood of resistance to such interventions.

Country ownership and capacity building: the next buzzwords in health systems strengthening or a truly new approach to development?

BackgroundDuring the last decade, donor governments and international agencies have increasingly emphasized the importance of building the capacity of indigenous health care organizations as part of strengthening health systems and ensuring sustainability. In 2009, the U.S. Global Health Initiative made country ownership and capacity building keystones of U.S. health development assistance, and yet there is still a lack of consensus on how to define either of these terms, or how to implement “country owned capacity building”.DiscussionConcepts around capacity building have been well developed in the for-profit business sector, but remain less well defined in the non-profit and social sectors in low and middle-income countries. Historically, capacity building in developing countries has been externally driven, related to project implementation, and often resulted in disempowerment of local organizations rather than local ownership. Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, there is no consensus on how to conduct capacity building, nor have there been rigorous evaluations of capacity building efforts. To shift to a new paradigm of country owned capacity building, donor assistance needs to be inclusive in the planning process and create true partnerships to conduct organizational assessments, analyze challenges to organizational success, prioritize addressing challenges, and implement appropriate activities to build new capacity in overcoming challenges. Before further investments are made, a solid evidence base should be established concerning what works and what doesn’t work to build capacity.SummaryCountry-owned capacity building is a relatively new concept that requires further theoretical exploration. Documents such as The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness detail the principles of country ownership to which partner and donor countries should commit, but do not identify the specific mechanisms to carry out these principles. More evidence as to how country-owned capacity building plays out in practice is needed to guide future interventions. The Global Health Initiative funding that is currently underway is an opportunity to collect evaluative data and establish a centralized and comprehensive evidence base that could be made available to guide future country-owned capacity building efforts.

Indicators +: A proposal for everyday peace indicators

Many of the approaches to measuring peace favoured by international organisations, INGOs and donor governments are deficient. Their level of analysis is often too broad or too narrow, and their aggregated statistical format often means that they represent the conflict-affected area in ways that are meaningless to local communities. This article takes the form of a proposal for a new generation of locally organised indicators that are based in everyday life. These indicators are inspired by practice from sustainable development in which indicators are crowd sourced. There is the potential for these to become ‘indicators+’ or part of a conflict transformation exercise as communities think about what peace might look like and how it could be realised. The article advocates a form of participatory action research that would be able to pick up the textured ‘hidden transcript’ found in many deeply divided societies and could allow for better targeted peacebuilding and development assistance.

Whose vision counts? The formulation of vision in community forest enterprises

How do external factors such as donor interventions and government policies influence the competitiveness of community forest enterprises (CFEs)? The author conducted a qualitative study on two second-tier CFEs in Mexico and Guatemala. The study consisted primarily of semistructured interviews with 125 informants, including CFE personnel, buyers, government institutions, and NGOs. It analysed the influence of the CFE's objectives and establishment process over the corporate culture, and the relationship between second-tier CFEs and affiliated CFEs. The study revealed the importance of the autonomous formulation of corporate vision. External interventions should be based on the producers’ agency rather than on the donors’ agendas. The vision of an enterprise should be guided by buyers’ values. A shift from a ‘farmer first’ to a ‘customer first’ culture is of paramount importance for support institutions as well.

Find Me the Money: Financing Climate and Other Global Public Goods

The global community faces a number of critical challenges ranging from climate change to crossborder health risks to natural-resource scarcities. Many of these so-called global commons problems carry grave risks to economic growth in the developing world and to the livelihoods and welfare of their people. Climate change is the classic example. Despite the risks involved, donor governments have funded programs addressing global challenges such as climate change at far lower levels than traditional programs of country-based development assistance. The prospects for dealing with such global challenges will depend at least in part on new collective financing mechanisms. In this paper, we examine four categories of existing resource-mobilization options, including (1) transportation levies; (2) currency and financial transaction taxes; (3) capitalization of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); and (4) the sale, mobilization, or capitalization of IMF gold. In the end, we recommend that willing governments utilize a modest portion of their existing SDR allocations to capitalize a third-party financing entity. This entity would offer bonds on international capital markets backed by its SDR reserves. The proceeds would back private investment in climate-mitigation projects in developing countries that might otherwise lack adequate financing. This approach could mobilize up to $75 billion at little or no budgetary cost for contributing governments. Any limited budgetary costs could be offset by using excess proceeds from recent IMF gold sales. In our view, capitalizing a small portion of existing global assets — SDRs with a small back-up reserve of the income from gold already sold — to finance programs that deal with global public goods and bads makes eminent sense.

Photo Essay: Unsettled

Photo Essay: Unsettled Hannah Mintek (bio) In 2008, 28,000 people were ethnically cleansed from the breakaway province of South Ossetia during a brief but brutal war between Georgia and Russia. Their villages were bombed, burned, and in some cases bulldozed to ensure they could never return, and the entire province was occupied by Russia’s 58th Army. Because return soon was unlikely, the Georgian government, acting in concert with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and more than ninety-five nongovernmental organizations and donor governments, chose to resettle them in thirty-six hastily built settlements in which they were to rebuild their lives. However, because the aid system was so chaotic, and because most aid agencies were acting in improvised ways, the internally displaced persons were housed in bleak and isolated settlements, unemployed and left to sit in poorly built homes that soon began to decay. Hannah Mintek’s photographs offer a window into this scenario. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Tserovani settlement, one of thirty-six new camps for victims of ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia. Click for larger view View full resolution Skra settlement. Despite aid agencies’ intermittent delivery of firewood, the trees have been chopped down for fuel. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution Skra settlement. This woman lost her son in the 1993 war in Abkhazia, another breakaway province, and her husband in the 2008 war in South Ossetia. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Prezeti settlement, where, in the absence of quality infrastructure, IDPs must rely on makeshift and possibly dangerous solutions. [End Page 29] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolution Metekhi settlement, where Georgian families traditionally live in multigenerational households, but where resettlement into different camps has broken many IDP families apart. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Berbuki settlement, where the feeble heaters installed in the cottages were no match for the cold seeping through gaps in the floorboards. [End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution Tserovani settlement, where the confusion and stress of the aid process was bewildering to many IDPs. Click for larger view View full resolution Prezeti settlement, where the chaos of aid appeared in material form, as the newly built cottages began disintegrating almost immediately. [End Page 33] Hannah Mintek Hannah Mintek is a freelance photographer based in Boulder, Colorado. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Mintek has spent five years living in the Republic of Georgia. She received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin. Her documentary and art photography is available online at www.hannahmintek.com. Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe? Institutional Portfolios and Delegation to Multilateral Aid Institutions

This paper develops a theory of governments’ strategic choice in delegating aid between multi-lateral aid institutions (MAIs). Although delegation of aid to multilateral institutions increases the overall value of development aid, governments do not benefit from this efficiency if the de facto MAI development strategies do not fall in line with the government's own allocation interests. We argue that governments can mitigate this problem by building an institutional portfolio of aid. In other words, governments take into account the existence of various, oftentimes over-lapping, aid institutions and contribute varying amounts to these institutions such as to maximize efficiency and similarity of allocation policies between government and MAI. The closer the MAI's aid allocation reflects the development goals of the donor and the greater the MAI's efficiency, the more likely it will delegate aid to that MAI over others. We use data on financial contributions of 23 OECD states to MAIs from 1977 to 2008 to analyze a donor government’s strategic choice. The empirical analyses robustly support the main theoretical claim. Governments make strategic choices and build institutional portfolios that aim at mitigating the problem of power diffusion in MAIs.

Coding Error or Statistical Embellishment? The Political Economy of Reporting Climate Aid

To benefit from a wide-spread public support for climate policy, aid agencies strive to show the climate relevance of their development activities. Using project-level aid data and country-level political data for 21 DAC donors from 1995 to 2007, we test whether this may lead to politically motivated misreporting. Through keyword search in individual project descriptions and complementary hand-coding we assess all aid activities for their actual climate change-related content, and thereby construct our most relevant control variables. Econometric results reveal that indeed, project coding is influenced systematically by the donor governments’ ideological orientation as well as by national voters’ environmental preferences.

Dodging Adverse Selection: How Donor Type and Governance Condition Aid’s Effects on School Enrollment

Summary We employ AidData to test the effects of primary-education aid on school enrollment. We argue that the problem of adverse selection complicates both the allocation and the effectiveness of aid. We hypothesize that bilateral donors ought to have greater freedom to condition aid on recipient governance quality than multilateral donors, which are often bound by institutional rules to provide aid more impartially. Compared to their multilateral counterparts, bilateral donors may have advantages in overcoming adverse selection, resulting in bilateral aid’s boosting enrollments to a greater degree. AidData’s extensive coverage of multilateral aid enables this analysis for up to 100 low- and low-middle-income countries from 1995 to 2008. Latent growth regression analysis suggests that, compared to multilateral donors, bilateral donors indeed condition their primary education aid on recipient control of corruption and that bilateral aid is significantly related to improved enrollments.

Player or referee? Aid effectiveness and the governance of health policy development: Lessons from Viet Nam

Viet Nam is one of the brightest stars in the constellation of developing countries. Its remarkable achievements in reducing poverty and improving health and education outcomes are well known, and as a result it has enjoyed generous aid programmes. Viet Nam also has a reputation for taking a strong lead in disciplining its donors and pushing for more efficient and effective forms of aid delivery, both at home and internationally. This article discusses how efforts to improve the effectiveness of aid intersect with policy-making processes in the health sector. It presents a quantitative review of health aid flows in Viet Nam and a qualitative analysis of the aid environment using event analysis, participant observation and key informant interviews. The analysis reveals a complex and dynamic web of incentives influencing the implementation of the aid effectiveness agenda in the health sector. There are contradictory forces within the Ministry of Health, within government as a whole, within the donor community and between donors and government. Analytical frameworks drawn from the study of policy networks and governance can help explain these tensions. They suggest that governance of health aid in Viet Nam is characterised by multiple, overlapping ‘policy networks’ which cut across the traditional donor–government divide. The principles of aid effectiveness make sense for some of these communities, but for others they are irrational and may lead to a loss of influence and resources. However, sustained engagement combined with the building of strategic coalitions can overcome individual and institutional incentives. This article suggests that aid reform efforts should be understood not as a technocratic agenda but as a political process with all the associated tensions, perverse incentives and challenges. Partners thus need to recognise – and find new ways of making sense of – the complexity of forces affecting aid delivery.

Fall in donor governments funding for AIDS

Fall in donor governments funding for AIDS

The New Aid Architecture in Ghana: Influencing Policy and Practice?

This article explores the relationships between the new aid architecture, influenced by the Paris Declaration, and exemplified in Ghana by its new Aid Policy and Strategy, and the much longer policy history of donor–Government of Ghana relations in the fields of education and training. The Aid Policy hierarchy of preference for general budget support, unearmarked sector budget support and then project aid confronts a very different reality in the education sector where the project approach is very much alive and well. The issue of donor and political influence on Ghana's education policy is traced from the 1990s up to the new Education Strategic Plan (2010–2020). But it is noted that the process of aid influencing education policies is very different from changing educational practice in ordinary classrooms and training centres.

Encouraging Trade Liberalization: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Foreign Aid as Prize

We examine how foreign aid can be used to induce a recipient country to engage in trade-policy reforms. First, we develop a two-country and two-period theoretical model where the donor's promise of aid in period 2 depends on the recipient's chosen tariff in period 1. Without aid, optimal tariff is positive because of the presence of lobbying in the recipient country. We consider three variants of the model depending on whether the donor government is passive or active, and, when the donor government is active, whether the two governments move simultaneously or sequentially. When the donor government is active, it optimally chooses the degree of ex-post conditionality on aid. We find, inter alia, that if a passive donor government increases the level of ex-post unconditional aid, or decrease the degree of ex-post conditionality, optimal tariff goes up. Using a panel data, we then examine if there is any evidence for the ex-post conditionality of aid, and how this conditionality has affected the effectiveness of aid. We find some positive evidence on both counts.