The rise of multi-bi aid and the proliferation of trust funds

Which Donors, Which Funds? The Choice of Multilateral Funds by Bilateral Donors at the World Bank

“…On this basis, Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer (2015) track the evolution of multi-bi aid after the Cold War, discussing its underlying motives and testing some widespread hypotheses on its implications for aid effectiveness (Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer 2015).…”

“…These academic studies are complemented by a large body of agency reports (for a review, see Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer 2015). These reports suggest a variety of different donor motives behind multi-bi aid, and their outcomes show the need for more systematic analysis of the tradeoffs across various types of multi-bi aid.…”

“…With a volume of 19 billion USD in 2012, multi-bi aid today comprises about 20% of bilateral aid and is almost 60% as large as the total volume of multilateral aid (Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer 2015). At the World Bank, annual trust fund contributions quadrupled within five years shortly after the millennium.…”

“…This is precisely the question we seek to answer in this paper. There is a large number of agency reports and related case studies on which we can draw (for a review of these studies, see Reinsberg, Michaelowa, and Eichenauer 2015), but, to the best of our knowledge, the question has never been empirically addressed. Generally, despite its undeniably strong relevance, multi-bi aid has so far remained widely neglected in the academic literature.…”

Multi‐bi Aid in European Development Assistance: The Role of Capacity Constraints and Member State Politics

“…Since the early 1990s, donor governments have increasingly channelled their development assistance through trust funds hosted at international development organizations (IDOs) . They did so on a voluntary basis (i.e., without long‐term international commitments) and without generally dismissing their rights to determine the concrete project specification or geographical or sectoral allocation, which they enforced through various degrees of earmarking (Reinsberg et al., ; Graham, ). To many donors, this so‐called ‘multi‐bi aid’, which is situated somewhere in between bilateral and multilateral assistance, appears to be an ideal strategy to implement the requirements of the Paris Declaration calling for donor cooperation and harmonization (Barakat, : 108; Woods, : 394; Barakat et al., : 2f.…”