A large and increasing share of international humanitarian and development aid is raised from nongovernmental sources, allocated by transnational NGOs. We know little about this private foreign aid, not even how it is distributed across recipient countries, much less what explains the allocation. This article presents an original data set, based on detailed financial records from most of the major U.S.-based humanitarian and development NGOs, which allows us for the first time to map and analyze the allocation of U.S. private aid. We find no support for the common claim that aid NGOs systematically prioritize their organizational self-interest when they allocate private aid, and we find only limited support for the hypothesis that expected aid effectiveness drives aid allocation. By contrast, we find strong support for the argument that the deeply rooted humanitarian discourse within and among aid NGOs drives their aid allocation, consistent with a view of aid NGOs as principled actors and constructivist theories of international relations. Recipients' humanitarian need is substantively and statistically the most significant determinant of U.S. private aid allocation (beyond a regional effect in favor of Latin American countries). Materialist concerns do not crowd out ethical norms among these NGOs.

We develop a new methodology that allows conditional performance to be a function of information available at the start of the performance period but does not make assumptions about the behavior of the conditional betas. We use econometric techniques developed by Lynch and Wachter (2011) that use all available factor return, instrument, and mutual fund data, and so allow us to produce more precise parameter estimates than those obtained from the usual GMM estimation. We use our SDF-based method to assess the conditional performance of fund styles in the CRSP mutual fund data set, and are careful to condition only on information available to investors, and to control for any cyclical performance by the underlying stocks held by the various fund styles. Moskowitz (2000) suggests that mutual funds may add value by performing well during economic downturns, but we find that not all funds styles produce counter-cyclical performance when using dividend yield or term spread as the instrument: instead, many fund styles exhibit pro-cyclical or non-cyclical performance, especially after controlling for any cyclicality in the performance of the underlying stocks. For many fund styles, conditional performance switches from counter-cyclical to pro-or non-cyclical depending on the instrument or pricing model used. Moreover, we find very little evidence of any business cycle variation in conditional performance for the 4 oldest fund styles (growth and income, growth, maximum capital gains and income) using dividend yield or term spread as the instrument, despite estimating the cyclicality parameter using the GMM method of Lynch and Wachter (2011) that produces more precise parameter estimates than the usual GMM estimation. Our results are important because they call into question the accepted wisdom and Moskowitz's conjecture that the typical mutual fund improves investor utility by producing counter-cyclical abnormal performance.

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The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has successfully set a normative framework for global cooperation, including development cooperation. Yet, the implementation of this agenda is characterised by power struggles and unresolved contestations. Hence, it is uncertain whether the 2030 Agenda will be achieved. Therefore, a key question is how different narratives and norms in development cooperation can be reconciled to achieve the 2030 Agenda. As a response and guiding framework, this chapter explores the concept of “contested cooperation”, drawing on research on contested global governance and contested multilateralism. Applying this conceptual perspective not only yields theoretical insights but also helps in better understanding the practical challenges that development actors face in implementing the 2030 Agenda.

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