In this article, the author explores whether the growing presence of Chinese financial assistance is decreasing the bargaining power of traditional donors vis-àvis African governments. The article ...relies on data from an original survey of high-ranking donor officials working in multiple African countries, as well as case-studies of Chinese engagement in three diverse African country contexts: Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania. It finds that claims of a ‘silent revolution’ in development cooperation due to China’s increased involvement in the region are overstated. Among donor officials, there is far from consensus that China is decreasing the bargaining power of their agency. On the contrary, evidence from Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda suggests that traditional development aid continues to play an important role and that, in practice, China rarely directly competes with traditional donors. There are, however, two important caveats to this claim. First, when China and traditional donors do directly compete—for example, on infrastructure projects—many recipient governments prefer assistance from China. Second, given China’s interest in expanding markets and acquiring natural resources, countries receiving higher amounts of Chinese official finance are likely to have lower rates of aid dependence. As a result, financing from China is likely to be correlated with a decline in the bargaining power of traditional donors, even if it is not causing such a decline.
Under what conditions are foreign aid donors willing to suspend foreign aid to punish political transgressions, such as election fraud, corruption scandals or political repression? Prior scholarship ...has emphasized that political sanctions, including foreign aid suspensions, are constrained by the geostrategic considerations of donor countries. However, foreign aid suspensions often occur in strategically important countries, and donors respond differently to different types of political transgressions within the same county. To shed light on this puzzle, in this article, I present evidence from an original survey of top-level donor representatives in 20 African countries, including a list experiment designed to elicit truthful responses about the conditions under which donors are willing to suspend foreign aid. I argue that the likelihood of a foreign aid suspension depends not only on the strategic considerations of the donor government, but also on the institutional incentives of the donor agency. A donor agency's institutional incentives are shaped by the agency's organizational design, as well as by its foreign aid portfolio in the recipient country.
For decades, many International Relations (IR) scholars did not engage in elite experiments, because they viewed it as too risky, too costly, or too difficult to implement. However, as part of a ...behavioral turn in IR, a growing number of scholars have begun to adopt the method in their own research. This shift raises important questions. Under what conditions do elite experiments add value to IR scholarship? How can scholars overcome the logistical and ethical challenges of sampling such an elusive group? This article makes an original conceptual contribution to methodological debates on the role of behavioral approaches by analyzing experiments on foreign policy elites. We analyze the method’s strengths and weaknesses, evaluate ethical considerations, and present what is—to the best of our knowledge—the most comprehensive set of implementation guidelines. Our article draws on recently published IR research and argues that the payoffs from elite experiments are well worth the effort.
•Aid withdrawals/suspensions are qualitatively different from giving no aid, and frame development.•Aid suspensions follow a long chain of understudied political calculations and decisions by donors ...and recipients.•Further research is needed on the political calculations and options used by aid-receiving states to discipline donors.
In this introduction to the special issue, “Foreign Aid Withdrawals and Suspensions: Why, When and Are They Effective,” we both summarize the current state of the literature and outline a robust new agenda for studying aid suspensions and withdrawals. A common contribution of the papers in this special issue is that they emphasize that donors and aid-recipient states have more options available to them than previous literature has allowed and that it is the creative ways in which aid-recipient governments seek to discipline their donors that make the effective use of conditionality so challenging. In this introduction, we not only summarize what we know about aid suspensions and withdrawals but also begin to unpack the complex decision-making that underlies aid suspensions, providing a simplified decision tree that can guide future research. Overall, we emphasize that, far from being a niche issue, aid suspensions and withdrawals are a fundamental part of the political economy of foreign aid and that much more work is needed to understand how recipient governments make decisions about how to respond or not to respond to (threats of) aid suspensions and withdrawals and how donors factor such political calculations into their initial or subsequent decision-making. The article highlights both the challenges and the opportunities of unpacking the complex decision-making behind aid suspensions and withdrawals.
In a book full of directly applicable lessons for policymakers, Haley J. Swedlund explores why foreign aid is delivered in different ways at different times, and why various approaches prove to be ...politically unsustainable. She finds that no aid-delivery mechanism has yet resolved commitment problems in the donor-recipient relationship; bargaining compromises break down and have to be renegotiated; frustration grows; new ways of delivering aid gain traction over existing practices; and the dance resumes.
Swedlund draws on hundreds of interviews with key decision makers representing both donor agencies and recipient governments, policy and archival documents in Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, and an original survey of top-level donor officials working across twenty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This wealth of data informs Swedlund's analysis of fads and fashions in the delivery of foreign aid and the interaction between effectiveness and aid delivery. The central message ofThe Development Danceis that if we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments over the long term.
Motivation
Budget support is the form of aid most commonly associated with recipient‐country ownership. However, a number of scholars and practitioners have criticized the approach as masking new ...forms of conditionality. Was budget support simply a guise for increasing donor influence in recipient countries? How can we explain the rapid shift towards budget support, as well as the rapid decline in its popularity after only a few years?
Purpose
We use a bargaining framework to explain the rise and fall of budget support. Contrary to explanations that suggest that budget support was a normative decision by donors designed to increase aid effectiveness by fostering ownership, a bargaining framework emphasizes that aid policy is the result of sustained negotiations between donors and recipients. These negotiations, however, are constrained by donors’ inability to deliver aid as promised.
Approach
We use a Nash bargaining framework to formalize the predictions of a bargaining model. From the model, two testable predictions emerge: (1) in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments are willing to selectively offer donor agencies greater access to and influence over domestic policy decision‐making; and (2) in exchange for such influence, donor agencies are willing to exert less pressure on recipients to be politically inclusive. We then test the implications of the model using case‐study evidence from Rwanda and Tanzania.
Findings
The empirical data, based on over 80 interviews with practitioners over several periods of research in both countries, provide substantial evidence in support of the model’s core assumptions and predictions. Contrary to claims that budget support increased recipient‐country ownership, interviews (identified as personal communications) suggest that, in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments were willing to grant donors greater access and influence. In return, donor agencies reduced demands on the recipient government regarding political inclusivity, tacitly accepting arrangements that centralized decision‐making and excluded civil society. When donor agencies could no longer provide budget support as promised, these negotiated arrangements broke down.
Policy Implications
The findings challenge a common narrative that donors embraced budget support because of a normative commitment to ownership. They also demonstrate the value of a bargaining framework. To understand why particular forms of aid, like budget support, rise in popularity only to quickly fall by the wayside, we need to understand what donor agencies and recipient governments bargain over and why.
Theories of ethnic conflict predict that between-group inequality should be associated with a greater likelihood of violent conflict, but empirical results have been mixed. One reason might be that ...different types of inequalities have opposing effects on the likelihood of conflict. In this article, we posit that educational inequalities are likely to incentivize collective action by inducing grievances, while economic and demographic inequalities may actually dis-incentivize collective action by limiting opportunities for disadvantaged groups to engage in rebellion. We test these hypotheses on a new ethnic dyad database, incorporating 1,548 dyads formed by 290 ethnic groups living in 29 Sub-Saharan African countries. The analysis reveals that educational inequalities are indeed positively associated with conflict incidence, while this is not the case for economic and demographic inequalities. The association between educational inequality and conflict is stronger if the groups are wealthier. A higher joint educational level of the groups is associated with less conflict, particularly under more autocratic regimes. These findings demonstrate that to better understand the relationship between inequality and conflict, it is important to disaggregate the effects of inequalities according to the underlying mechanisms and the political context with which they are associated.
Research and policy circles often emphasize the importance of social capital in achieving social transformation and economic development. There is also, however, potentially a ‘dark side’ to social ...capital. This study investigates the relationship between two different types of social capital—structural and cognitive—using two different measures of political violence: self-reported support for political violence and self-reported participation in political violence. We theorized that cognitive social capital will facilitate social cohesion within a community, enabling particularized trust between neighbours and a shared identity. On the other hand, structural social capital, or associational membership, potentially facilitates the diffusion of grievances and facilitates collective mobilization. Accordingly, we predict that higher levels of structural social capital will be associated with support for and participation in political violence, whilst higher levels of cognitive social capital will be associated with less support for and participation in political violence. We then test these predictions using Afrobarometer data on 40,455 individuals living in 27 African countries. Multivariate regression analysis confirms that indicators of structural and cognitive social capital have contrasting relationships with support for and participation in political violence. While particularized trust and national identity are negatively associated with political violence, religious and community associational membership are positively associated with political violence. In addition, we find that strength of attachment to a social identity, regardless of whether to an ethnic or national identity, is an important indicator of political violence.
Budget support has given rise to vigorous debates among practitioners and academics. Scholars have sought to analyse why this aid modality was adopted (e.g. Clist et al., 2012; Dietrich, 2013); ...whether or not it is effective (e.g. Dijkstra, 2018; Koeberle et al., 2006; IDD and Associates, 2006; Ronsholt, 2014); and under what conditions it is likely to be abandoned and/or suspended (e.g. Koch et al., 2017; Molenaers et al., 2015). Beyond budget support itself, these debates raise important questions about why donors and recipients favour specific aid modalities, and the impact of their choices on development policy. Dijkstra critically engages with our article “The rise and fall of budget support: Ownership, bargaining and donor commitment problems in foreign aid” (Swedlund & Lierl, 2020), published as a part of a special issue on “Ownership in a post-aid effectiveness era: Comparative perspectives”, guest-edited by Niels Keijzer and David Black. We appreciate the discussion of our work and the evolving debate, which will help to advance our understanding of different aid modalities and their implications for development policy. In Swedlund and Lierl (2020), we argue that the key to understanding the implications of budget support for development policy priorities is the underlying bargaining logic between donor agencies and the governments of recipient countries. Our premise is that foreign aid, regardless of whether it is provided in the form of budget support or project aid, always involves political bargaining between donors and recipients. In other words, aid never comes without political strings, and those strings are not unilaterally determined by the donor.
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