A growing portion of aid directed through multilateral channels is earmarked for specific recipients and purposes, giving donors greater control, also known as multi-bilateral aid. This project ...examines competing explanations of donors’ use of this multi-bilateral aid for different problems within the same sector, specifically development aid for disease control. Using explanations from the literature on multilateralism and principal-agent dynamics, I compare donors’ use of multi-bilateral and bilateral delivery of disease-specific foreign aid. The results suggest that while donors deliver a greater portion of aid through multi-bilateral channels for larger, more complex problems, they are reluctant to delegate issues that most affect their populations.
Politicians in developing countries misuse foreign aid to get reelected by fiscally manipulating foreign aid resources or domestic budgets. Our article suggests another mechanism that does not ...require politicians to have any control over foreign aid in order to make use of it for electoral purposes: undeserved credit claiming. We analyze the conditions under which local politicians can undeservedly take credit for the receipt of foreign aid and thereby boost their chances of reelection. We theorize that politicians can employ a variety of techniques to claim credit for development aid even when they have little or no influence on its actual allocation. Using a subnational World Bank development program in the Philippines, we demonstrate that credit claiming is an important strategy to exploit foreign aid inflows and that the political effects of aid can persist even when projects are designed to minimize the diversion or misuse of funds.
Corinna R. Unger, International Development: A Postwar History, London, Bloomsbury, 2018; 272pp; 6.99; ISBN 9781472576293. David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India, ...Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018; 512 pp.; {28.95; ISBN 9780674659599. Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019; 296 pp.; {25.00; ISBN 978-0691 180151. Amy C. Offner, Sorting out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall ofWelfare and Development States in the Americas, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2019; 400 pp.; 04.00; ISBN 9780691 1 90938. Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela (eds), The Development Century: A Global History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 20 18; 366 pp.; {21.99; ISBN 9781 108453479.
Caribbean islands that are highly dependent on tourism are facing compounding crises from climate-related disasters to the Covid-19 pandemic travel disruption. The rebuilding of tourism ...infrastructure has often been one of the main aims of international development aid and regional government responses to natural disasters. This article seeks to identify other ways in which Caribbean small island states and non-independent territories might rebuild more sustainable ecologies and economies as they come out of the pandemic within the ongoing climate crisis. The first part shows the historical grounding of climate change vulnerability in colonial histories, neoliberal capitalism and ongoing practices of "extractive" tourism. This analysis of the "coloniality of climate" centers on a critique of disaster tourism during these "unnatural disasters," and allows for re-framing the ethical and political implications of tourism recovery when other human im/mobilities (such as migration) are severely curtailed. The article then elaborates on the theoretical concept of "mobility justice" as a way to think through the problem of sustainability transitions in relation to tourism mobilities, climate change and disaster recovery. The final section considers alternative visions for disaster reconstruction in the Caribbean centering food sovereignty, agroecology and regenerative economies, as promoted by community-based organizations and people's assemblies.
Abstract
The majority of the world’s ultra-poor live in conflict-affected environments. Poverty reduction efforts are increasingly attempting to target the most vulnerable inhabitants of these ...settings. Few studies have so far examined their impacts. Against the backdrop of one of the largest humanitarian crises in recent years, survey data from the Central African Republic demonstrates that a year after the conclusion of a large social safety net program, the poorest female participants did not benefit proportionately to other women and men. We draw on 257 in-depth qualitative interviews in extremely difficult-to-access conflict-affected sites across the country to explore the puzzle of why the most vulnerable inhabitants of conflict-affected settings may fail to benefit equally from poverty reduction programs. We demonstrate that conditions of social isolation—rather than poverty itself—create two specific barriers to long-term benefits. First, social isolation means that the poorest women recipients lack the social support networks that permit others to respond to conflict-related shocks without draining all their new income on emergency spending. Second, small social networks create a shortage of labor and higher start-up costs for new revenue-generating activities, thereby preventing spending on investment opportunities. These factors highlight the social barriers to poverty reduction, which are often intensified by shocks born from war, that material aid alone fails to redress.
Motivation
China does not participate in the development co‐operation reporting mechanism of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development's (OECD) development co‐operation reporting ...mechanism, nor does it voluntarily publish overseas development finance data. Despite recent quantitative research on China's foreign aid to other sectors, such as health, no precedent exists for quantifying China's international education co‐operation (IEC).
Purpose
This article will use AidData's Chinese Official Finance Dataset (AidData 2.0) to estimate the IEC using the OECD's internationally standardized definitions of development finance and frameworks for classifying IEC projects.
Approach and methods
We thoroughly examined all types of IEC projects, including official finance projects other than those that meet the definition of official development assistance (ODA). In our comparative analysis of educational aid between China and traditional donors, we focused on ODA‐like projects and examined the number of projects and funding amounts to determine China's IEC priorities.
Findings
The result shows that, between 2000 and 2017, China's IEC commitments totalled 1,524 education‐related international projects, representing 12% of the total international finance project portfolio, most of which are in Africa. Compared to the OECD framework, China prioritized higher education (n = 784, 51%) and education facilities and training (n = 244, 16%). An estimate of cumulative funding between 2000 to 2017 showed that China was the 10th largest donor of education aid to African countries, behind France, the World Bank, Germany, the United States, the EU, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the Netherlands.
Policy implications
The findings of this study help our understanding of China's IEC finance. With China's involvement in education development aid growing in recent years and donors looking for solutions to developing countries' debt crises, this will allow for more effective collaboration, co‐ordination, and resource mobilization for both donor and recipient countries.
Volunteering for development is a long-standing form of development assistance. Vision Aid Overseas is an international NGO that works to enable people living in poverty to access affordable ...spectacles and eye care. Volunteering has been at the core of its interventions since its formation in 1985. In 2019 the organisation undertook a comprehensive review of its approach. A literature review and stakeholder consultation on volunteering for development were undertaken. A number of best practice recommendations were made, which were accepted by the Board of Trustees and have been used to inform a new volunteering strategy for the organisation.
In this introductory essay to the special issue, we introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance, AidData, that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing ...datasets while also improving project-level information about the purposes and activities funded by aid. We utilize that data to provide a brief overview of important trends in foreign aid. Contributors to this special issue draw on AidData as well as other sources to analyze aid transparency, “new” donors (not previously described or analyzed), aid allocation, and aid effectiveness. Our recurring theme in this introductory essay is that AidData and these initial academic projects refine rather than revolutionize our understanding of aid. The database has added significant numbers of new projects, dollar amounts, donors, and details about those projects, though there is much more yet to add. We worry that aid debates have been driven by too little information, and that many claims are based on limited or very poor evidence. Rectifying these problems will not be instantaneous: refining knowledge takes a lot of time and hard work. The common feature of the papers in this special issue is their careful attention to nuance and detail. In spite of what some recent authors have claimed, aid is neither a simple solution nor a sufficient cause of most problems in developing countries; its motivations, distribution, and effects are complex, and shifting. Capturing this complexity requires detailed data, careful thought, and sophisticated methods that allow scholars to make conditional causal and descriptive inferences.
•Climate change adaptation is an inherently political problem.•Mainstreaming adaptation into existing development aid structures depoliticizes the issue.•Three specific dimensions of the politics of ...adaptation are proposed as an analytical perspective.•Avenues for engaging with power and justice in climate research and practice are proposed.
Under the threat of climate change and with disproportional impacts expected for the world’s poorest, the adaptation imperative confers renewed justification to development aid transfers, while the urgency of the problem lends itself to the uncritical application of existing solutions. Yet, an emerging body of work has raised critical questions about how adaptation is being conceived and implemented in the global South. We systematize and contribute to this critical scholarship by distinguishing three fundamental political dimensions of the adaptation problem, related to differential responsibility, the global uneven production of vulnerability, and unequal relations of power in adaptation decision-making itself. Further, based on research from across the global South, the paper suggests that the current program of ‘mainstreaming’ adaptation into existing development logics and structures perpetuates an anti-politics machine, obscuring and depoliticizing rather than addressing the political dimensions of the adaptation problem. Mainstreaming risks not only reproducing development-as-usual, but in fact reinforcing technocratic patterns of control. The three-dimensional view of the politics of climate change adaptation is offered as an analytical perspective to sharpen and systematize future critical adaptation scholarship. In the conclusion, we highlight avenues toward enhanced attention to power and justice in climate change research and practice.
PDF
