Download This PaperDonor political economies and the rise of performance-based aid through trust funds
34 Pages Posted: 15 Apr 2019 Last revised: 13 Dec 2021
Date Written: December 9, 2020
Abstract
The globalization of market norms has contributed to the proliferation of performance-based indicators that are used to evaluate the behavior of states and the success of international organizations. In international development, performance-oriented aid delivery is on the rise, leading to greater levels of outsourcing to non-state actors at the expense of government-to-government aid. This article explores why donors have made trust funds central for performance-oriented aid delivery, highlights the costs of this development strategy, and demonstrates that donors differ in their use of trust funds based on domestic political considerations. We argue that donors who place a high premium on performance in their domestic bureaucracies are more likely to fund organizations operating according to performance-based principles than those who do not assign the same importance to performance assessments. We find robust support for our argument through multilinear regression on a data set of World Bank trust funds. Our project contributes to the understanding of international development cooperation by mapping donor political economies to the rise of trust fund usage. We also contribute to a better understanding of the global diffusion of performance-based evaluation.
Keywords: International organization; performance; foreign aid; trust funds; World Bank
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