Tracking a Craze

Chapter 6 charts the rise and fall of budget support as a popular aid delivery mechanism. Because budget support promised to reduce donor commitment problems, it opened up the possibility for a new, more favourable bargaining compromise between donor agencies and recipient countries. However, ultimately neither donor agencies nor recipient governments were able to enforce the promises made by the other side. Consequently, the negotiated compromise that enabled the emergence of budget support was not sustainable past an initial period of enthusiasm.

The Future of the Development Dance and Why We Should Care

Chapter 7 articulates why both academics and policymakers should care about the development dance, summarizing the key theoretical implications and policy recommendations of the book. The chapter also looks forward into the future to consider how donor-government relations maybe affected by declining rates of aid dependence in some African countries, as well as the influence of ‘new’ donors such as China.

It Takes Two to Tango

Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical arguments of the book. The chapter first provides a theoretical framework for understanding aid policy bargaining between donor agencies and recipient governments. Then, drawing on theories of institutional economics, the chapter articulates how commitment problems in foreign aid are theorized to influence choices in aid delivery and the sustainability of aid delivery mechanisms over time. The chapter argues that the sustainability of a aid delivery mechanism depends on its ability to incentivize both donors and recipients to uphold their commitments over the long term.

The Development Dance

Chapter 1 summarizes the core arguments of the book and introduces the significance of the project both theoretically and practically. The chapter argues that scholars and practitioners too often focus on aid effectiveness, ignoring how choices regarding aid delivery mechanism are made to being with. The chapter then provides a brief historical look at foreign aid, demonstrating that the history of foreign aid is a history of fads and fashions. Finally, the chapter summarizes the core theoretical argument of the book, which is that commitment problems constrain the policy compromises reached by donors and recipients. If we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments.

A Halfhearted Shuffle

Chapter 5 provides evidence of commitment problems on both the donor and the recipient sides. Donor agencies and recipient governments must manage competing interests in a complex and ever changing environment that is far from immune from global shifts and politics. This makes the measurement and enforcement of both donor and recipient commitments difficult, straining relations between the two parties.

May I Have This Dance?

Chapter 4 provides a summary of how donor-government relations are organized at the recipient-country level (i.e., the aid architecture), explaining why policy dialogue is so important for both recipient governments and donor agencies. The chapter articulates that far from being dictated by donors, aid policy is a compromise between donors and recipient reached via policy bargaining between the two parties.

Studying the Dance

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the book’s methodology and the research design used to test the observable implications of the theoretical framework laid out in chapter 2. The chapter summarizes the extensive fieldwork and original, cross-national survey carried out by the author. Finally, the chapter provides brief historical summaries of foreign aid and donor-government relations in each of the four country case studies: Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.