Donor proliferation to what ends? New donor countries and the search for legitimacy

ABSTRACT

Despite aid fatigue in the Global North, the number of donor states continues to grow. This article examines the motivations and performance of New Donor Countries (NDCs). Drawing on theories of norm diffusion, we argue that an important driver is new donors’ search for legitimacy as advanced and influential states. A comparison of 26 NDCs with established donors on three metrics of aid levels and quality reveals that NDCs may be adopting the form but not the associated functions and responsibilities of traditional donors. While NDCs are contributing to the viability of global development cooperation, vigilance is required to preserve its robustness.

RÉSUMÉ

Malgré une baisse d’enthousiasme à l’égard de l’aide au développement dans les pays du Nord, le nombre d’États donateurs continue de croître. Cet article examine les motivations et les performances des nouveaux pays donateurs (New Donor Countries – NDC). En nous appuyant sur les théories de la diffusion des normes, nous soutenons que la revendication de légitimité en tant qu’États avancés et influents par les nouveaux donateurs est un facteur important. Une comparaison de 26 NDC avec des donateurs établis sur trois indicateurs de quantité et de qualité de l’aide révèle que les NDC adopteraient l’apparence des donateurs traditionnels, mais pas les fonctions et les responsabilités qui y sont associées. Si les NDC contribuent à la viabilité de la coopération mondiale pour le développement, une certaine vigilance est donc de mise pour en préserver la robustesse.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign aid
• norms
• emerging donors
• Southern donors
• OECD-DAC

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Emma Mawdsley and Sherine Eltaraboulsi-McCarthy for reviewing an early version of the paper. We also appreciated the feedback of participants in the May 2017 Aid, Norms and World Society Workshop at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research.

Notes on contributors

Nilima Gulrajani is a Senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute and Senior Research Associate at the Department for International Development, King's College, London. Her research applies theories of public management and organisational studies to investigate dynamics and challenges within elite development bureaucracies. She is currently Associate Editor of Public Administration and Development.

Liam Swiss is Associate Professor of Sociology at Memorial University. His research examines the role of foreign aid in international norm diffusion, violence against aid workers, the politics of Canadian aid policy and the causes and effects of women’s political representation in the Global South. His research has appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Science Research and World Development. His book The Globalization of Foreign Aid: Developing Consensus was published by Routledge in 2018.

Notes

1 Our sample therefore omits major non-DAC donors who choose not to report their ODA to the DAC: Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Qatar and South Africa,

2 The DAC attempts to assess the size of the 10 non-DAC donors that do not report to the DAC (Benn and Luijkx 2017) but as this underlying data is not publicly available, we are unable to cover these countries in our analysis.

3 See Fukuda-Parr and Shiga (2016) for an important recent exception.

4 The BRICS label designated five middle-income countries with growing economic weight in the world economy: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

5 Less than a third of the 26 donors in the NDC category (Liechtenstein, Romania, Malta, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Timor Leste) have been reporting aid to the DAC for less than 10 years.

6 The Online appendix can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2019.1543652.

7 This may be hard to achieve as many governments, particularly Southern ones, worry about the potential backlash against overseas spending when domestic poverty is high (Mawdsley 2014, 646).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant 435-2016-0294 (Swiss); a Research Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Universität Duisburg-Essen (Swiss); and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Gulrajani and Swiss).