The rise and demise of European budget support: political economy of collective European Union donor action

Abstract

This article uses the example of European budget support to show the differences in applying principal-agent and collective action analysis to the donor-recipient relationship and the incentives of European donors. Our results show that the Paris Declaration, while formulating the 'right' principles, carries a number of assumptions regarding the (cap)ability of donors to act collectively. This assumption, however, fails to include the political economy of European donors and their own political, institutional and individual incentives that undermined this capability substantially. In other words, the domestic political costs and incentives for European donors to implement the Paris agenda, and in particular aid modalities such as budget support, were not given enough consideration when the aid effectiveness agenda was formulated.

Human Rights Violations, Political Conditionality and Public Attitudes to Foreign Aid: Evidence from Survey Experiments

“…This article considers the relationships between coverage of rights abuses in recipient states and public attitudes, and between donors' framing of aid decisions and public opinion, in one major OECD-DAC member state -the United Kingdom. The results are of relevance to the UK context, although they extend to other Western donors who employ PC with domestic public opinion in mind -notably the so-called Nordic Plus group (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands) and the EU (Koch et al, 2017). The choice of the United Kingdom reflects its dominant role within the international development community: it is the third largest OECD-DAC bilateral donor worldwide; a key driver of norms and aid policy across the OECD-DAC community, promoting itself and being considered by many donors, as a 'trailblazer'; and opinion-leader on issues such as tied aid and GBS (Carothers and de Gramont, 2013; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2014; Owa, 2011).…”

The Implementation of the SDGs: The Feasibility of Using the GPEDC Monitoring Framework

“…In recent years, the relevance and political interest in the effectiveness agenda have largely vanished (Abdel-Malek 2015;Mawdsley et al 2018). According to Koch et al (2017) and Booth (2012), the main reason for the agenda's lack of success was its sophisticated technocratic character, which failed to address the political economy in which development cooperation is embedded. Hence, when assessing the feasibility of a significant contribution of the monitoring framework to the implementation of the SDGs, it is crucial to assess not only technical aspects, in terms of the indicators, for instance.…”

“…Given the voluntary nature of the original commitments, traditional development partners have often shied away from the exercise and demonstrated a lack of consequential attention to the results. In particular, political challenges at headquarters are largely responsible for the lack of progress in those areas where development partners' efforts were most required (see Koch et al [2017] for a discussion on the reasons why the backing for budget support has largely vanished in the last decade). Changing domestic politics have further contributed to the lack of progress.…”

European aid and health system strengthening: an analysis of donor approaches in the DRC, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mozambique and the global fund

“…As was discussed in the dissertation, European donors were the earliest supporters of the pooled funds and SBS in Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique. By the end of the 2000s, however, the international support for ownership, alignment and harmonization started to wane and increasingly got ousted by a strong focus on value-for-money and quick results that can directly be attributed to individual donor activities and which can be easily communicated to the public [32]. This tendency has very clearly manifested in the health sector, where practices are being measured and evaluated using quantitative indicators such as the amount of bed nets provided, the amount of people vaccinated, andultimately -'the amount of lives saved' [33,34].…”