Human rights shaming through INGOs and foreign aid delivery

Abstract

Does the "shaming" of human rights violations influence foreign aid delivery decisions across OECD donor countries? We examine the effect of shaming, defined as targeted negative attention by human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), on donor decisions about how to deliver bilateral aid. We argue that INGO shaming of recipient countries leads donor governments, on average, to "bypass" the recipient government in favor of non-state aid delivery channels, including international and local NGOs and international organizations (IOs). However, we expect this relationship to be conditional on a donor country's position in the international system. Minor power countries have limited influence in global affairs and are therefore more able to centrally promote human rights in their foreign policy. Major power countries, on the other hand, shape world politics and often confront "realpolitik" concerns that may require government-to-government aid relations in the presence of INGO shaming. We expect aid officials of minor donor countries to be more likely to condition aid delivery decisions on human rights shaming than their counterparts of major donor countries. Using compositional data analysis, we test our argument using originally collected data on human rights shaming events in a time-series cross-sectional framework from 2004 to 2010. We find support for our hypotheses: On average, OECD donor governments increase the proportion of bypass when INGOs shame the recipient government. When differentiating between donor types we find that this finding holds for minor but not for major powers. These results add to both our understanding of the influences of aid allocation decision-making and our understanding of the role of INGOs on foreign-policy.

Donor Competition and Public Support for Foreign Aid Sanctions

“…More broadly, our work contributes to the literature on whether and under what conditions foreign aid can promote better governance in less developed countries by suggesting that aid policy makers may be constrained by public opinion in their ability to use the threat of aid withdrawal to bring about changes in target states’ behavior. 8 Some may still question whether the public’s preferences in donor countries affect aid policy at all, but the case for suspending aid in the face of human rights violations is more likely than not to originate from civil society pressure (i.e., to be a case where mass public opinion drives government decision making); macro-level studies show, for instance, that the impact of human rights violations on aid allocation depends on media exposure and shaming by international human rights organizations (Dietrich and Murdie 2017; Murdie and Peksen 2013; Nielsen 2013; Peksen, Peterson and Drury 2014). 9 Understanding why the public may be more or less likely to support conditioning aid on protection of human rights in recipient countries will thus help policymakers make better arguments regarding the desirability of political conditionality and/or design policies more in line with public preferences.…”

Do sanction types affect the duration of economic sanctions? The case of foreign aid

“…Previous studies indicate that senders select government-to-government aid for development purposes when they consider imposing aid sanctions (e.g. Dietrich and Murdie, 2017; Nielsen, 2013). Yet, it is not possible to empirically test whether suspension of the government-to-government aid has a systematically different effect from withdrawal of humanitarian aid or bypass aid, since the existing sanctions datasets (Hufbauer et al, 2007; Morgan et al, 2014) do not contain information on the specific contents of aid sanctions.…”

“…However, it should be noted that the purpose of economic sanctions is to draw policy concessions from target governments. Thus, when senders employ aid sanctions, they typically withhold aid provided directly to recipient governments as cash or for freeing up government resources, while continuing to fund aid delivered by NGOs (Dietrich and Murdie, 2017; Nielsen, 2013).…”

Economic sanctions and income inequality: impacts of trade restrictions and foreign aid suspension on target countries

“…However, it should be noted that when sender countries consider imposing foreign aid sanctions, they prefer to terminate the aid provided directly to recipient governments rather than withdrawing bypass aid (Dietrich and Murdie, 2017). Bypass aid is unlikely to contribute to the fundamental objective of economic sanctions – inducing targets’ policy concessions.…”