The aid effectiveness agenda : OECD DAC and World Bank strategic agency in foreign aid politics

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of two international organisations (IOs), the OECD DAC and the World Bank, in shaping the international aid effectiveness agenda, a policy agenda encouraging reforms of foreign aid policy to improve foreign aid. With particular emphasis on a period in the 1990s, when both IOs faced criticism and the need to adapt to changing geopolitics, it argues that the OECD DAC and the World Bank contributed to shaping the aid effectiveness agenda, and specifically the policy problems the agenda highlights and the policy solutions it recommends, in ways tied directly to these IOs’ specific fields of expertise and their unique institutional interests at the time. In doing so, both IOs adapted, evolved, and expanded the mechanisms by which they exercise their authority as international expert bureaucracies, and both strategically expanded the way in which they interact with their political environment. As a consequence, both IOs helped shape the present-day ideational framework among foreign aid experts and policymakers on how more effective foreign aid is achieved, which, in turn, favours the authority of both these IOs to advice and to act in the efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid. Helping to shape the aid effectiveness agenda thus allowed the OECD DAC and the World Bank to strengthen their authority as expert bureaucracies in this specialised field of policy. Data and other extra material available on disc stored with hard copy. Please see Official URL for details of how to access this.

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