Will ‘Emerging Donors’ Change the Face of International Co‐operation?

Responding to the recent upsurge of interest in ‘emerging donors’, this article argues that the DAC share of aid is likely to decline only slowly from what is a historically high level, and at least some non‐DAC donors are likely to see DAC approaches and norms as relevant. Nevertheless, low‐income countries seem likely to have a wider range of financing options. Three key risks are that: they prejudice their debt situation by borrowing on inappropriate terms; they use low‐conditionality aid to postpone necessary adjustment; and they waste resources on unproductive investments. DAC members should develop constructive dialogue with other bilateral donors based on recognition that sustainable development and poverty reduction should be the core purpose of aid.     

Why Do Aid Agencies Exist?

This article seeks to explain the organisational set‐up of foreign aid delivery from a Coasian perspective: Why are there many and different aid organisations and not just one? Why is foreign aid not transferred directly from donor to beneficiary? With zero transaction costs and fully shared preferences between donors and beneficiaries, there would be no need for aid agencies. Their role is not so much to transfer funds or goods and services to developing countries, but (a) to reduce ex‐ante transaction costs and (b) to mediate between the diverging preferences of donors and recipients, and package aid flows in a contract that reduces ex‐post uncertainties for donors. Outcomes differ according to types of agencies and aid delivery instruments.     

Sector Approaches,Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Poverty Reduction

This article examines the relationship between sector‐wide approaches (SWAps), sustainable livelihoods approaches (SLAs) and rural poverty reduction. The authors suggest that SLAs provide one means by which SWAps can focus more effectively on poverty reduction, whilst SWAps provide an entry point via which government and donor initiatives can be made supportive of the livelihoods of the poor. The article puts forward guidelines indicating the core issues upon which donors should focus to enhance the poverty impact of sector‐wide approaches.     

The Quest for Aid Complementarity: Reforming Co‐operation between Nordic+ Donors and NGOs

Aid fragmentation is a maddening problem in the aid business. NGOs are part and parcel of this fragmentation problem; hence calls for more complementarity between Northern NGOs and (their) governments have led to a series of co‐funding reforms. This article analyses the co‐funding reforms of the Nordic+ donors and situates them within the broader evolutions that have taken place in donor‐NGO relations in these countries. It finds that these donors have interpreted complementarity in very different and even contradictory ways. Where some require NGOs to develop activities within the confines of the official bilateral strategy (intensive complementarity), others allow NGOs to do very different things (extensive complementarity).     

The Politics of Regional Inequality in Ghana: State Elites,Donors and PRSPs

Through an analysis of Ghana's HIPC Fund which was established as part of the PRSP process, this article shows how aid‐financed efforts to reduce regional inequality in Ghana have failed. Dominant political elites agreed to policies reducing regional inequality in order to have access to aid funding but, once approved, these funds were allocated on quite different criteria in ways that marginalised the poorest. This analysis reinforces the growing recognition that developmental outcomes in most poor countries are shaped not so much by the design of ‘good’ policies per se, but more importantly by the power relationships within which policy‐implementing institutions are embedded. Aid donors seem unable to grasp this important lesson fully, and so their capacity to contribute to reducing regional inequality remains limited.     

Management of the international development aid system: The Case of Tanzania

This article tries to clarify Government behaviours as to how to manage aid in Tanzania. Contrary to the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donor intentions, the development aid structure, carefully constructed under the poverty reduction regime in Tanzania, has led to Tanzanian‐owned initiatives toward a national development plan (NDP). Furthermore, this article shows that, in the process of creating an international development aid system, the Tanzanian Government has learned to manage aid in a recipient‐driven manner not only from DAC donors, but also from China.     

Attracting Micro‐Enterprises To Learning

Micro‐enterprises, i.e. firms with less than 10 employees, are traditionally the hardest to engage in learning; they are also least likely to participate in such measures as business advice and guidance provision and initiatives to support information communication technology (ICT) adoption. Through a community‐based initiative initially targeting parents (unemployed or employed) to participate in ICT, 30 micro‐enterprises were attracted to learning for the first time. These companies had carefully avoided similar initiatives taking place locally, which emphasized business success and growth; they had only participated in this ICT skills training because of their children. The paper takes a case study approach to evaluate the reasons for participation, explores barriers and implications for those organizing similar activities, and calls for a more holistic view of owners and managers of small firms as fathers, mothers, etc. rather than just as ‘entrepreneurs’.     

Gendered Leadership: The Effects of Female Development Agency Leaders on Foreign Aid Spending

This article examines the effects of gender on the leadership of bilateral development aid agencies, particularly their official development assistance (ODA) allocations toward gender‐related programming. Drawing on earlier research on gendered leadership, the article tests the hypothesis that female director generals (DGs) and ministers responsible for aid agencies will allocate more ODA than their male counterparts toward gender programming. This existing literature on gendered leadership is divided: some scholars argue that women and men have distinct leadership styles on account of their gender, while others argue that the only distinguishing factor is the institutional context in which they lead. Drawing on data collected on aid flows and agency leadership within the major Western aid donors of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) over the period from 1995 through 2009, we use pooled time series analysis to examine the effects of gendered leadership on aid allocation. Our analysis reveals a tendency for female DGs and ministers to focus ODA on gender‐mainstreaming programs, while male DGs focus ODA on gender‐focused programs. We argue that these divergent priorities reflect the women's desire to reform gendered power structures within their respective aid agencies, and the men's desire to maintain existing gender power structures from which they benefit.     

After the Paris Declaration: Taking on the Issue of Power

The new approach to assisting developing countries inspired by the Paris Declaration emphasises greater recipient control over the funds provided, thus confining donors’influence to upstream points in the policy process, where political aspects of development co‐operation become more important. Understanding better the role that power plays in the aid relationship will be critical to the implementation of the Declaration. This article shows how the political science literature can inform this set of issues. It argues that an understanding of aspects of power illuminates the challenges involved in transforming relations between donors and recipient governments as well as between governments and civil society organisations.     

Payment by results in international development: Evidence from the first decade

Payment by results is a relatively new way of giving development aid, where a recipient's performance against pre‐agreed measures determines the amount of aid they receive. Advocates for the mechanism argue it provides donors with both a ready justification for maintaining aid budgets and better results through innovation and autonomy. It has proved popular, with most bilateral aid donors having at least experimented with the mechanism and the variety of measures stretching from individual health workers being paid for each procedure, to national governments being paid for students' test scores. However, there has not been a robust assessment of whether Payment By Results (PbR) achieves its aims for greater effectiveness. I synthesize the evidence from eight projects fully or partially funded by DFID, the recognized world leader on PbR. This represents the best evidence currently available, and is critically analysed using the leading theoretical framework that breaks each agreement into its constituent parts. I find no evidence that PbR leads to fundamentally more innovation or autonomy, with the overall range of success and failure broadly similar to other aid projects. This may partly be due to the current use of Payment by Results, with no readily identifiable examples of projects that truly meet the idealized PbR designs. Advocates of PbR may thus conclude the idea is yet to be tested. I argue PbR does not deal with the fundamental constraints that donors face, and so it is unsurprising that PbR is subject to the normal pressures that affect all aid spending.     

Implementing legislative strengthening programmes: Who is in control?

Over the last few decades, international development (also known as Official Development Assistance (ODA)) has been under attack for its lack of effectiveness. Critiques reflect two conceptual challenges, the nature of expert knowledge and the centrality of local ownership of development initiatives, bounded by the practical constraint of how politically controlled resources from bilateral and international donors will be used. This article examines five implementation strategies, including their strengths and weaknesses, keyed to the level of control asserted by the donor agency. We illustrate our argument through a review of legislative strengthening projects, most of which were funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) in the case of one of the models.     

Piloting external peer review as a model for performance improvement in third‐sector organizations

Peer review is used widely in the United Kingdom as a means of engendering performance improvement in the statutory sector and is being used increasingly to address the needs of specific networks of third‐sector organizations. The project on which this article is based sought to develop a peer review model that could be applied by any third‐sector organization to improve performance. The article reviews existing initiatives and details elements of models that the research sought to replicate. It describes the approach taken to develop the model, including details of three pilots, and summarizes the associated guidance. Finally, it incorporates a commentary on some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the model as a means of securing continued performance improvement by third‐sector organizations.     

Do Aid Donors Specialize and Coordinate within Recipient Countries? The case of Malawi

Acknowledging that aid proliferation and a lack of coordination impair aid effectiveness, donors have repeatedly promised to specialize and better coordinate their aid activities, notably in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We exploit data on the exact location of aid projects in Malawi to assess whether the country's bilateral and multilateral donors have acted accordingly at the district and sector level. We do not find compelling evidence for increased aid specialization after the Paris Declaration, and the regional division of labour among donors may even have deteriorated. Our within‐country evidence thus broadly corroborates what previous studies have found at the national level of recipient countries.     

Is There a Place for Virtual Poverty Funds in Pro‐Poor Public Spending Reform? Lessons from Uganda's PAF

Various developing countries with weak public expenditure management systems are establishing virtual poverty funds (VPFs), drawing on the experience of Uganda's Poverty Action Fund. As a mechanism for tagging and tracking the performance of specific poverty‐reducing expenditures in the budget, a VPF can be useful. However, this article argues that such devices should be treated from the outset as transitional, and as part of wider processes of strengthening public expenditure management; otherwise, they can seriously distort public expenditure allocations and management systems, potentially undermining growth. Emphasis needs to be placed on identifying the right balance of expenditures in the entire budget; improving the effectiveness and efficiency of existing allocations; and developing better public‐sector policies for promoting pro‐poor private sector growth.     

Different or Equal Treatment? Donor Priority Strategy and Fundraising Performance Assessed by a Propensity Score Matching Study

Many nonprofit organizations apply a priority strategy to their donors instead of treating donors equally. The underlying assumption of this strategy is that different and preferential treatment of donors according to their donation amount positively affects fundraising performance. We conducted a propensity score matching study to analyze the fundraising strategies of seventy‐three cultural organizations in Germany. The empirical findings are discussed and complemented by qualitative data from twenty interviews with fundraising managers and private donors. The results show that, in terms of fundraising performance, nonprofit organizations that apply a donor priority strategy outperform organizations that treat donors equally. A donor priority strategy ultimately leads to a 125 euro higher total revenue per donor and an 87 euro higher profit per donor due to cost savings via better use of fundraising resources.     

Fidelity in philanthropy: Two challenges to community foundations

Two recent court cases have raised doubts about how faithful community foundation officials must remain over time to the donor's charitable intent. For trustees of community foundations, nonprofit managers, and potential donors, the two cases discussed in this article raise three critical questions: Under what conditions can and should a donor's charitable intentions be modified? Do nonprofit organizations have legitimate claims to funds in community foundations earmarked for their organizations by donors? Should donors consider disbursing their philanthropic funds themselves rather than seek to have them held in perpetuity in a foundation? In addition to addressing these questions, the author suggests that the two court cases examined here reveal something important about the broader evolution of philanthropy over the past three decades.     

CM,only effective treatment for stimulants,on the ropes as methamphetamine surges

Contingency management (CM), which means rewarding drug users not to use drugs, is the only known effective treatment for stimulant use disorder, but it has become caught up in anti‐kickback initiatives. At the heart of the problem is a misunderstanding: CM payments are not kickbacks — they are part of treatment. But “safe harbor” initiatives from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are interpreting them as such, and not allowing Medicaid to pay for them (only $75 a year per patient).     

Debt‐Relief Effectiveness and Institution‐Building

This article provides new evidence on the effects of recent debt‐relief programmes on different macroeconomic indicators in developing countries, focusing on the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). The relationship between debt relief and institutional change is also investigated to assess whether donors are moving towards ex‐post governance conditionality. Results show that debt relief is only weakly associated with subsequent improvements in economic performance but is correlated with increasing domestic debt which undermines the positive achievements in reducing external debt service. There is also evidence that donors are moving towards a more sensible allocation of debt forgiveness, rewarding countries which have better policies and institutions.     

The past and the future: Austria facing a new stage of RTD co‐operation with its neighbours

In comparison with other countries, and considering its size, Austria spends a significant amount of funds on RTD co‐operation with its neighbouring countries to the East. This eastward orientation is not specific to the science and research collaboration field, but a more general characteristic of the Austrian policy framework and political culture, with strong historical roots. The research collaboration between Austria and its neighbours builds upon a long‐standing tradition, having obtained a strong impulse in the first years of transformation in the CEECs, through the establishment of (bilateral) research programmes.     

Corporate philanthropy in South Africa: lessons for local development initiatives

Beginning in the late 1970s, US multi-nationals and South African business both supported local development initiatives in Soweto. Comparison of two of these projects reveals significant differences in approach and effectiveness. American businesses supported a secondary school, Pace, which experienced critical problems related to organisational difficulties unforeseen by the donors. South African business supported an educational centre, the Funda Centre, which developed more gradually and was more deeply rooted in the community. Examination of these two cases produces some lessons that can be of use to other donors giving support to local development initiatives. This research was supported by a grant from the Aspen Nonprofit Sector Research Fund.