Political Conditionality in Swedish Aid (

Abstract

Political conditionality is when certain conditions concerning democracy, the respect for human and civil rights, and the rule of law are to be met by the recipient country either as a prerequisite for, or for keeping up aid. It may seem impossible to ethically justify aid without these kinds of conditions, but they can bring about severe complications that have to be taken into consideration in foreign bilateral aid policy. The aim of this thesis is to examine Swedish bilateral aid policy in relation to political conditionality. The use of conditioned aid has been severely criticised for being ineffective, for increasing asymmetric power relations and for violating the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. The method has been modified with consideration taken to the critique, but political conditionality is rarely mentioned in Swedish aid policy, even though I wish to show that it actually is used. It has received a bad tone, which is hard to wash off even though the core meaning is completely in line with Swedish foreign aid policy. Poverty reduction, democratisation and human rights are top priorities of the Swedish aid agenda why support to foreign governments must be given with some demands on these issues.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.