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Publications (94)
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– Finn Church Aid’s Secondment in Somalia
Donors face distinct challenges in operating in fragile states and supporting the building of state capacity. This paper explores one type of assistance – the ‘embedding’ of highly-skilled staff members within local government agencies – through a unique case study of Finn Church Aid’s experience...
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The distinction between development assistance and climate finance is driven by an optic of compensation largely derived from the ‘polluter pays’ principle. For practical as well as conceptual reasons, this principle provides a weak basis for climate finance. The distinction also cuts against the...
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Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet although Rwanda and Burundi share several important characteristics, the social, political...
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Mozambique benefits from environmental aid-related funds, but it is still unclear whether donor commitments render directly into projects that are copiously implemented for the purposes stated and what aid flows have actually been doing and are doing in the area of aid and environment in Mozambique...
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– Public Financial Management Reforms in Sierra Leone
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard to budget execution functions. The main factors...
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– The Case of Tanzania
This paper provides an assessment of what aid has actually been doing in the area of environment in Tanzania through a critical review of the flows, modalities and management of aid. Focusing on the funding for environmental degradation projects, the study notes that budget expenditure allocation to...
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– A Synthesis of Eight Case Studies
This study seeks to understand what aid flows have been doing to the environment in eight countries in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa. Total aid to these countries’ environmental sectors for the 2000s decade is about US$10.17 billion and bilateral aid has been on the rise. There seems to have...
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– Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda
A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information—e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient governments—about Chinese development finance...
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– Comparing Indonesia and Nigeria
This paper analyses the role of foreign aid to assist development in two oil-rich countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. This paper seeks to understand the way foreign aid provided assistance to transform Indonesia from a ‘fragile’ state in the 1960s into one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in the mid-1990s, and...
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– Evidence from a Panel Threshold Framework
The aid-growth literature has been explored using a wide range of econometric methodologies. The evidence of the effectiveness of aid to promote economic growth is mixed, suggesting that the link between aid and growth is complex and may not be well identified by traditional methods. We take another...
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Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This paper argues that the diverging outcomes are...
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– The Case of Botswana
Botswana has serious environmental problems which, if not addressed, will undermine the attainment of sustainable economic development. This study attempts to determine what aid flows have actually been doing with regard to the environment in Botswana. The results show that although both the...
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– The Case of Senegal
The paper reviews the dynamics of the financing based its analysis on the rich dataset of AidData ranging over 1993-2010, with around 9,077 observations on projects funded in Senegal by various multilateral as well as bilateral donors. The study started in the same year as the establishment of the...
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– The Case of Somali-Inhabited Eastern Horn of Africa
Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most effective aid to institution-building in Somalia has...
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The main objective of the paper is to determine the actual aid flows that have an environmental focus in Burkina Faso. The environment literature highlights important environment issues in air, land and water, including deforestation, desertification, irreversible negative effects on biodiversity...
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– General Lessons and Bilateral Agreements of Norway
REDD+, when it officially became part of the international climate agenda in 2007, was an idea about payment to countries and projects for reducing emission from forests, with funding primarily from carbon markets. REDD+ has since become multi-objective; the policy focus has changed from payments...
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– the Case of Kenya
We investigate allocations of foreign aid by donors to the environment sector in Kenya covering the period 2001-12. Our data are largely obtained from official government and global aid databases complemented with donor interviews. We find that donor funding remained significant with emphasis on...
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– How Past Environmental Aid Allocation Impacts Future Climate Aid
In this paper we update previous work that categorizes foreign aid projects in terms of their likely impact on the natural environment. We then document trends in the global distribution of environmental aid over time and show that environmental aid has increasingly focused on global environmental...
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– UNICEF’s Education Programme in Somalia
The failure of the Somali state from 1993 to 2012 represents one of the world’s most profound and prolonged cases of state collapse. Initially, education and other government services came to a standstill. With the halt of fighting in some areas, local communities with the support of the United...
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– Kosovo and East Timor in Comparative Perspective
Why do some states, with foreign assistance, transition from ‘fragile’ to ‘robust?’ Scholars in state-building have argued that neotrusteeship is an effective strategy by which external organizations might build post-conflict states. This working paper tests this hypothesis, and two related...
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In this paper we discuss aid and the environment in Ghana. Our analysis indicates that expenditure by the government of Ghana has increased consistently since 2000, with seven sectors weakly linked to the environment taking about 78.9 per cent of all government expenditure. Also, the rate of...
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– Bangladesh and Pakistan Since 1971
Bangladesh and Pakistan had very divergent experiences with aid after 1971. Politics in Pakistan was less inclusive in terms of opportunities for intermediate class political entrepreneurs. In this context, the significant role of military aid to Pakistan had very negative effects on its political...
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This paper examines the questions of why and how foreign assistance was utilized successfully in South Korea but less so in Ghana, with a focus on the role of aid in the process of state building and state transition in these two countries. Before the 1960s, South Korea and Ghana shared...
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– the Cases of Greece and Italy
After the Second World War, both Greece and Italy experienced a Left-Right political polarization and a reproduction of earlier patterns of political patronage. Both Italy and Greece received international aid, including emergency relief, interim loans, and Marshall Plan funds. By the beginning of...
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– Starting from Scratch? Improving Representation and Responsiveness
After its 14-year civil war, Liberia worked with multiple donors and partners to restore security. This paper explores the Liberia National Police’s innovative efforts to create a more gender-sensitive police service and describes the international and domestic support it received in doing so. In...
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Facilitadores Judiciales is a programme run by the Organization of the American States and the Nicaraguan judiciary. The main objective of the programme is to improve access to justice for the disadvantaged people in Nicaragua. From 1998 to 2010 the programme was implemented in almost all rural and...
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– Assessing the Effects of Community-Driven Development in Afghanistan
This paper describes the results of an impact evaluation of the National Solidarity Programme, a community-driven development programme in Afghanistan that created democratic village councils and funded small-scale development projects. Using a randomized controlled trial across 500 villages, we...
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The sub-Saharan Africa region recorded the fastest conversion of forest land to agriculture in the past 20 years. The region also has the widest yield gap and together with Latin America and Caribbean has the largest unused arable land. However, there are wide variations across countries and this...
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Foreign aid can contribute to sustainable forestry in many ways. The goal is to secure forest benefits of the future, without compromising the needs of the present generations. This paper elaborates on forestry aid as it has evolved in the past. Future directions are suggested, referring to short...
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– a Review and Critique of Comparative Lessons
Since 2001 international attention has focused on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and specifically on the question of whether external intervention can assist weak or fragile states in successfully making the transition to stable democracies. Despite their differences, Iraq and Afghanistan...
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– Contributing to the Global Public Good
This paper discusses global public goods related to the world’s land resources, their current provision and likely future provision, their potential impacts on the world’s poorest households, as well as prospects for using foreign assistance to enhance these outcomes. Specifically, the paper...
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After receiving at least US$20 billion in aid for reconstruction and development over the past 60 years, Haiti has been and remains a fragile state, one of the worse globally. The reasons for aid failure are legion but mostly relate to highly dysfunctional Haitian regimes, sometimes destructive US...
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