The Role and Responsibility of Foreign Aid in Recipient Political Settlements

Abstract

This article revisits the basic concept of political settlement by using an incumbent–challenger ideal type, and defines the mechanisms through which a settlement is influenced by foreign aid: diffusion, legitimation and brokerage. The new framework illustrates how aid may support continuity or change and allows for an interrogation of the ethical implications of donor choices. Challenging the implicit utilitarianism prevalent in current agendas and practices in the development community, this analysis highlights the inescapable value judgements that must guide international assistance, despite the significant structural incentives to focus on supposedly calculable risks and results. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Impact of Official Aid on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence From Nigeria (1981-2014) Using the Ardl and Bound Test Approach

“…Such motive, argues Yanguas, 2016), has serious adverse effect on the developing country. According to Bourguignon and Leipziger (2006) one common view is that aid has a positive effect on growth, but only if recipient countries demonstrate certain characteristics, such as good policy and reforms, good institutional environments and political and economic stability.…”

Gendering Political Settlements: Challenges and Opportunities

“…The apparent absence of reflexivity from political settlements research (see further, Yanguas, ) reinforces the exclusion of gender in two critical respects. First, in the determination to engage with the world as‐it‐is and not as‐it‐would‐be, political settlements research fails to recognise the scholar's role in constituting ‘elites’ and ‘non‐elites’ through naming them as such.…”

“…Thus, we know that non‐elites matter, but the specifics of how these groups can inform, leverage or influence the political settlement is unclear. As Yanguas () notes:

[B]eyond the broad‐brush understanding of power relations underlying institutions, the emerging literature on political settlements is somewhat inconsistent, with little clarity about what actors are relevant for the settlement, how their interests are formed, what their patterns of interaction look like, or how they interact with lower and higher levels of analysis.

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“…The commitment, therefore, to 'work with the grain' (Levy, 2014) of prevailing distributions of power and to focus on securing marginal policy gains, underpins political settlements research (Bell, 2015). Yanguas (2017) helpfully explicates the implicit normativity in this approach. Political settlement approaches-like much of the political economy of development-highlight the political underpinnings of policy and institutional choices.…”

“…Moreover, the prevailing operationalisation of the framework points to structural obstacles at multiple levels to the integration of a gender analysis.The political settlements framework proceeds with problems of definition, both in theory and in practice (Ingram, 2014: 2). Yanguas (2017) helpfully distinguishes between two definitions commonly applied. In the first more conceptual one-with its intellectual origins in North et al (2009) 'limited access orders' (LAO) theory of development, in which the LAO creates limits on access to political and economic functions as a way to generate rents and allows a society to solve the 'problem of violence' through politics (Khan, 2010(Khan, , 2013-the configuration of the limited access order is the political settlement.…”