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Publications (41)
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Medicine theft is a leading cause of inadequate healthcare. Audits of public health supply chains suggest that up to a third of medicines go missing in low-income countries, disproportionately affecting those facing greater health risks and poverty. Despite much investment, policy-makers struggle to...
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Although the provision of security to all their citizens is a state’s fundamental duty, over 50 countries experienced armed conflict in 2021. The international development community has identified armed conflict as an impediment to development and provides considerable resources to reduce armed...
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Education is associated with a range of positive micro and macro effects. It is hence no surprise that donors have recently increased the amount of official development aid specifically focused on restoring and maintaining education in less-developed states. While much attention has been paid to the...
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– The role of civic participation in fostering impartial bureaucracy
The growing body of research on the relationship between the state and democracy has remained inconclusive both in terms of causal direction and sign. One key factor contributing to this inconclusiveness is the lack of precision in the conceptualization and measurement of democracy and state...
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– The case of Germany’s P4P programme
Bridging the gap between humanitarian assistance and development cooperation has been a contentious issue in academia and development practice for decades. Drawing on an evaluation of Germany’s ‘Partnership for Prospects’ initiative, this paper argues that, whilst the supplement of ‘peacebuilding’...
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– Evidence from aid effectiveness data
The Principles of Effective Development Co-operation provide an important reference point for foreign aid and international development assistance. Although the principles—country ownership, focus on results, inclusive partnerships, and transparency and mutual accountability—are framed to support...
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Aid beneficiaries know very little about development interventions in their own communities. This lack of transparency and information is likely to reduce beneficiaries’ ability and willingness to become active in local development. It may also dampen intended aid effects on beneficiaries’ political...
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The principle of inclusive development lies at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular Goal 16, with its focus on inclusive societies backed by inclusive institutions. Yet despite its ubiquity across the SDGs, inclusivity not only remains ill-defined, but is both...
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International development cooperation has evolved since the 1960s. The effectiveness of aid is still topical, but studies have not paid adequate attention to the relationship between sectoral aid, politics, institutions, and aid effectiveness in fragile states. Using data from 2002 to 2020, this...
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– A window of opportunity missed
European official development assistance to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries increased sharply after 2011, ostensibly in support of the social, economic, and above all political changes demanded by the Arab uprisings. The subsequent turn to development policies driven by security...
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– The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive...
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– The case of Afghanistan
The aid effectiveness principles have limits if the recipient is fragile. The problem of relevance exists if the recipient has an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. In situations of weak statehood and fragility, a large portion of aid would likely bypass the state because of high demand for...
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Development effectiveness is an ever-growing concern for development partners. Particularly in a world of increasing budget constraints and trade-offs, it is crucial for development partners to maximize the results of any development intervention.While the importance of a locally-led approach is...
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– Insights from development studies
This paper explores how the concept of resilience has been used in development studies. Set amidst the rise of resilience in sustainable development, it offers insights for scholars and policy-makers, alike. Sampling 419 resilience-oriented journal articles from 2017–22, it uses Kuhnian paradigms to...
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Development finance institutions (DFIs) foster sustainable development through financing, advisory services, and technical assistance. They complement public investments in developing and underserved markets to unlock development opportunities and deliver development results. Whereas DFIs’ missions...
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– Investigating the effectiveness of COVID-19 aid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Drawing from a growing body of literature on development aid in fragile contexts, this paper investigates the effectiveness of COVID-19 aid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The paper uses the OECD’s Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations to...
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– Perspectives of Southern recipients
‘Country ownership’ continues to grow more as an idealized requirement than an operational concept for effective development co-operation. Provider countries often shy away from taking onboard recipient countries’ development priorities, public financial management and procurement systems, results...
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– The cases of Rwanda and Cambodia
This paper examines previously under-explored links between two aid-nurtured ideals. ‘National ownership’ and ‘local participation’ both aim to increase recipient influence and thereby address the inherent inequality of the aid relation. Questioning the common assumption of synergy, we analyse the...
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– Lessons from more than two decades of research
The objective of this paper is to focus on fragility research findings and examine what works or does not work in development aid and development cooperation in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. We draw on our own research findings as well as country-level studies. We examine questions of aid...
– Findings from an international research conference
This policy brief draws on the studies presented at the International Research Conference on the Effectiveness of Development Cooperation on 17–18 November 2022, in Brussels, Belgium and jointly organized by UNU-WIDER and the European Commission (DG INTPA) under its capacity as the leading entity of...
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– A synthesis of three systematic reviews of aid to Afghanistan, Mali, and South Sudan, 2008–21
This working paper provides a summary of three systematic reviews on the effectiveness of aid in Afghanistan, Mali, and South Sudan between 2008 and 2021. These three countries, like all other highly fragile countries, suffer from bad governance, lack of capacity, and violence. The systematic...
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– Reflections on implications for the global effectiveness agenda
This paper argues that the crisis facing the development effectiveness agenda is fundamentally derived from limited collective commitment to a singular model of development, one where a developed North serves as model and funder for a developing South. This is partly the reason for the lacklustre...
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This study posits that pandemics should be regarded as complex, open-ended phenomena that cannot be reduced to biology and epidemiology. The research assesses Ghana’s effectiveness in governing the COVID-19 pandemic contrary to apocalyptic predictions. This paper critiques Ghana’s responses to the...
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– Evidence from household panel data in Uganda
Empirical studies on the effectiveness of aid to the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector (WASH aid) have focused primarily on access to these services as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of aid in this sector. Given the importance of WASH services for public health outcomes, the...
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This paper investigates whether the current effectiveness agenda—agreed during the 2011 Busan High Level Forum on Development Effectiveness—continues to define best practice in development amidst a rapidly changing development landscape. To do so, we surveyed officials from development agencies and...
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– Consequences for donor interventions
Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative assessments in Somalia. This paper uses the framework...
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– An analysis of the aggregate welfare effect of aid fungibility
In this paper, we explore the relationship between foreign aid fungibility and aggregate welfare. Using panel data from 35 low-income and lower-middle-income countries, we first check the presence of sectoral aid fungibility in our sample and find evidence for it. We then use econometric methods to...
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– Interrogating capacity and response to COVID-19 in West Bengal
COVID-19 has brought to the fore the issue of state preparedness in mitigating health emergencies. This paper problematizes the received wisdom of greater state capacity in mitigating the severity of the pandemic. Based on a case study of West Bengal, a subnational state of India, it shows that...
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– The role of evidence-based governance and structural violence
Why does a state like Peru, dedicated to fulfilling development goals and sustained good macroeconomic performance, appear incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic? Using the case of maternal mortality, this paper argues that the tremendous impact of the pandemic is rooted in the adoption of...
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– Strongman leadership, weak state capacity, and the politics of deployment in the Philippines
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic undermined the populist legacy of Philippine president Rodrigo R. Duterte. Despite implementing one of the longest and strictest lockdowns globally, the country has struggled with controlling the pandemic. While Duterte looks to have triumphed in his attack on...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
Government effectiveness has played an important role in tackling the crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This paper discusses the different aspects of government effectiveness in explaining the variation in the COVID-19 confirmed cases and death levels in Viet Nam. We use the...
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– Uttar Pradesh’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
A rich and growing literature illustrates the paradox of COVID-19 responses by governments across the world. States with higher levels of authority and capacity have struggled to respond effectively to COVID-19, while states with low capacity and authority have been more effective in containing the...
Displaying 32 of 41 results