Unpacking Foreign Aid Effectiveness:
Examining Donor Dynamics
*NOTE: This workshop is now over. The website now contains information about what happened at the workshop and next steps planned.*
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
London School of Economics and Political Science
This one-day workshop invited papers that access the topic of international aid effectiveness by examining the political, organisational and institutional dynamics within and among donor agencies to both unpack the contemporary logic of aid effectiveness and inform its future. The aim of the workshop was to explore the relationship between donor-related processes and structures, aid quality and development impact in a way that presents a richer understanding of donor dynamics than offered by international rankings of donor performance (Easterly and Pfutze, 2008, Birdsall and Kharas, 2010, Knack et al., 2010). For this reason, fine-grained comparative empirical studies of donor structures, processes and practices were especially welcome.
While the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and its five principles define contemporary discourses on aid quality, this has not stopped it from coming under policy and academic scrutiny (Hayman, 2009, Hyden, 2008, Stern et al., 2008, Eyben, 2010, Riddell, 2007, Whitfield 2009). It would appear there is tenuous causal evidence linking aid delivered in accordance with the Paris principles and improved development outcomes. This suggests there may be important differences between the current discourse of aid effectiveness and actual aid quality that delivers development results. At the same time, aid effectiveness policies, while having some implications for donor agencies (for example, by encouraging joint missions and joint analytical work or eliminating parallel project units), has not delved deeply into the complex ways donor organisation, management and governance impinge on and influence aid quality and development results. There are good reasons to believe that a more sophisticated understanding of what happens in the ‘black boxes’ of donor agencies can help us make sense of the real drivers of aid quality (Bebbington et. al, 2007, Birdsall 2004, Gibson et al. 2005, Tendler 1975).
This conference was squarely focused on examining donor dynamics in situ with a view to unpacking and re-imagining the contemporary aid effectiveness debate. Relevant papers considered the following themes in relation to aid quality and development impact among others:
• Donor governance systems, including the formal institutional arrangements that relate development ministries and agencies to other government actors in development policy;
• Organisational behaviour and incentives within donor agencies and among aid professionals;
• The role of management tools and techniques expected to usher in aid quality;
• The relationship between emerging and traditional donors as both grapple with rival definitions of aid quality;
• Institutional legitimacy, survival and isomorphism as dynamics of donor reform
We are now in the process of working on a post-conference publication. We hope this can be out sometime in 2012. Many of the papers and recordings of presentations are available however on this website.
References:
Bebbington, A., Lewis, D., Batterbury, S. P., Olson, E. and Siddiqi, M. S. (2007) ‘Of Texts and Practices: Empowerment and Organisational Cultures in World Bank-funded Rural Development Programmes’, Journal of Development Studies, 43(4): 597-621.
Birdsall, N. and Kharas, H. (2010) ‘Quality of Official Development Assistance Assessment’. Centre for Global Development, Washington, D.C.
Birdsall, N. (2004) ‘Seven Deadly Sins: Reflections on Donor Failings’. Working Paper Series No 50. Center for Global Development, Washington DC.
Easterly, W. and Pfutze, T. (2008) ‘Where does all the money go? Best and worst practices in foreign aid’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(2): 29-52.
Eyben, R. (2010) ‘Hiding Relations: The Irony of ‘Effective Aid”, European Journal of Development Research, 1-16.
Hayman, R. (2009) ‘From Rome to Accra via Kigali: ‘Aid Effectiveness’ in Rwanda’, Development Policy Review, 27(5): 581-599.
Hyden, G. (2008) ‘After the Paris Declaration: Taking on the Issue of Power’, Development Policy Review, 26(3): 259-274.
Knack, S., Rogers, H. and Eubank, N. (2010) ‘Aid Quality and Donor Rankings’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. Washington, D.C.
Riddell, R. (2007) Does Foreign Aid Really Work?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stern, E. D., Altinger, L., Feinstein, O., Marahon, M., Schultz, N.-S. and Steen Nielsen, N. (2008) ‘Thematic Study on the Paris Declaration, Aid Effectiveness and Developent Effectiveness’. Cophenhagen, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark.
Tendler, J. (1975) Inside Foreign Aid, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Whitfield, L. (ed) (2009) The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For more information please contact:
Nilima Gulrajani
London School of Economics and Political Science
N.Gulrajani@lse.ac.uk
www.aidconference.wordpress.com
