Health aid for states with dissimilar foreign policy preferences, a tool for peace?

Abstract

Due to its exigency and humanitarian nature, health aid is less political and thus less vulnerable to domestic and international criticism than other types of foreign aid. Ironically, this makes health aid an effective policy tool for donors to cultivate or improve relations with recipients that have divergent foreign policy preferences from donors. This implies that health problems caused by pandemics/epidemics and associated health aid can create an opportunity to ameliorate historically troubled relationships between states. By examining the link between bilateral health aid flows and differences in foreign policy preferences between 24 donors and their recipients from 1990 to 2017, this paper presents findings that support this claim. The theoretical arguments and empirical findings of this paper offer novel insights into the politics of health aid.