In an effort to enhance the impact of development aid, recipients are called on to provide democratically sustained ‘ownership’ for development policies, and donors to align their interventions with these ownership‐dictated strategies of their partners. This article illustrates the weaknesses of such an approach. From a political‐economy perspective, severe tensions exist between concepts of democratic ownership, on the one hand, and the experimental and iterative organisation of a society's encompassing interests in democratic settings, on the other. These tensions are even more pronounced in emerging democracies, making democratic ownership as a prerequisite for aid effectiveness an illusion, and provoking the re‐emergence of traditional donor‐recipient problems.

This article argues that a new generation of Political Conditionalities has emerged during the last decade. This requires an expansion of the original definition and research agenda. Beyond the traditional questions of use and effectiveness however, there is also a need to dig deeper into the dynamics surrounding political conditionalities, particularly the bargaining processes and outcomes along the aid chain -from domestic donor politics, donor harmonization fora, policy dialog spaces to the political economy of recipient institutional reform and donor-coping strategies-because they influence the set-up, use, follow-up, purpose, and effectiveness of PCs.

This special issue of Development Policy Review reflects on European Union (EU) efforts to build a more effective global development policy amid a rapidly changing international context. As 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals have made clear, global development challenges require collective action if they are to be resolved. Contributions to the special issue explore the ways in which the EU approaches collective action challenges in different development cooperation frameworks and policy settings. Themes explored include strategies for overcoming collective action problems, the impacts of these interactions on EU and member state aid policies, coherence between development and other policy fields, relations between European and other development actors, and the reception of the EU's efforts in developing countries.

We provide evidence on the individual and country‐level determinants of citizens' support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi‐level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right‐cleavage has been dominant in politics.

Does foreign aid prop up authoritarian regimes or is it conducive to democratic reforms? We use a two‐level perspective that takes the domestic incentives of both the recipient and the donor into account to review the existent literature respecting this question. By bringing together research on democracy and autocracy with the literature on aid effectiveness and the political economy of aid provision, we provide a political economy perspective against which the mixed effects of foreign aid on political regimes can plausibly be explained. Against this background, research on aid effectiveness may give more attention to incentives in recipient countries and may take on a more comprehensive perspective on international relations. At the same time, the debate on authoritarianism may also gain insight into authoritarian strategies by investigating aid negotiations.