Download This PaperAiding War or Peace? The insiders’ view on aid to post-conflict transitions
79 Pages Posted: 8 May 2020 Last revised: 24 Jun 2021
Date Written: June 24, 2021
Abstract
International aid donors now allocate the majority of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to help fragile and conflict-affected countries break out of the conflict-poverty trap. Aid scholarship largely classifies this sub-set of recipients as poorly-governed countries where donors simply bypass the government and give aid directly to third-party implementing agencies. We contend that a further disaggregated analysis of aid allocation in post-conflict countries explains how donors attempt to use different aid types---humanitarian, transitional, development, and budgetary aid---to support these countries' dynamic post-conflict transitions. We expect that when a post-conflict country signals progression toward peace, donors will give transitional, development, and budgetary aid that support the government and withdraw humanitarian aid; when it signals regression toward violence, donors will give humanitarian aid that supports the population and withdraw development and budgetary aid. To capture this previously unobserved donor behavior, we use an original survey-embedded experiment completed by 1,130 aid experts around the globe. Our findings generally align with our expectations, although they show that aid experts are more certain about how donors will aid post-conflict peace than how they will halt a country's return to war. Overall, these findings show that donors play a larger and more dynamic role in post-conflict transitions than previously captured by the aid allocation or civil war literature.
Keywords: International Aid, Civil War, Post Conflict, Development, Humanitarian, Peacebuilding
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