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The motives for providing development assistance change according to historical and political trajectories but always combine varying degrees of altruism and selfishness. Currently, we are witnessing disruptive change in development cooperation as political leaders forward an increasingly self-regarding rationale for international assistance. In an empirical analysis of Northern donors’ narratives and aid allocation strategies, we define the meaning of the “national interest” in development cooperation and distinguish its principled and parochial formats. Our empirical analysis suggests Northern donors continue to allocate based on principled norms, though there is a noticeable deterioration in their public spiritedness as they simultaneously seek short-term domestic benefits from overseas giving. Calls for a principled national interest narrative may, however, enable normative collaboration across Northern and Southern actors.

Ian Bremmer published a treatise on the stability of states built on the notion that states fall along a curve resembling a slanted "J" when plotting their stability against openness. States in the turnover process are considered unstable, and are at risk of either reversing to a closed and stable system or even collapsing. Our paper shifts the J curve's associated conditions to a model to more accurately specify the causes of reversal in which crises of instability and backsliding occur. We define stability as a function of two state dimensions: authority and capacity, and apply the remaining state dimension of legitimacy as a proxy for openness. We find that transitions can reverse, oscillate, or simply stall, which are exemplified in the different types of states we categorize. The paper concludes with implications for policy and the application of the model to conflict prediction.

This study provides the first systematic inquiry into the determinants of aid agency structure and change across the five organizational models used by OECD-DAC donors from 1962 In recent years, several donors have reorganized their bilateral aid agencies, sparking debate on the efficacy of different organizational models. Despite such interest, little is known about aid agency structure and the reasons why donors adopt various organizational models and engage in organizational change.This study develops a multidisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding the factors that contribute to the choice of aid agency structure and change. Using a mixed-method, sequential explanatory research design, this framework is tested in two parts. First, this study conducts a multinomial logit and rare-events logit estimation to identify the main determinants of aid agency structure and change across all OECD-DAC donors since the emergence of aid programs. Using a unique dataset, I find that the purpose of aid programs, political ideology of donor governments, size and structural factors contribute to the choice of aid agency structure, while changes in ODA budget size and structural changes within donors typically precede organizational change.Second, findings from the quantitative analysis are supplemented with six in-depth case studies, which explore organizational choices and changes in Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Germany. Building on results from the prior section, the case studies highlight the importance of political factors, administrative efficiency, and substantive purposes as determinants of structural choice and change.A key finding from this thesis is that the size of aid agencies influences structural choice and change through efficiency, showing that smaller donors have tended to adopt, ii and may be better suited, to merged organizational models. This finding represents a first step towards identifying optimal organizational models based on donor characteristics and has the potential to inform the organizational decisions of new and current OECD-DAC members. Overall, this study sheds light on the concept of aid agency structure and provides a starting point for future analysis.

The analysis of official development assistance has always struggled with the contradiction between its more altruistic motivations for global development and its easy adaptation as an instrument for the donor's pursuit of self-interested foreign policy objectives. In the international system foreign aid may thus become a forum for both cooperative and competitive interactions between donors. This chapter explores the interdependence of aid by reviewing the literature on donor interdependence, with a particular focus on donor competition for influence in recipient states. We then present a simple theoretical framework to examine donor competition, and provide some preliminary empirical testing of resulting hypotheses. We conclude that while the evidence about competition is mixed, the behaviour of some donors is consistent with their pursuit of influence in certain recipient states.