Analysis & Publications

Governments use a variety of policies to increase the impact of foreign investment on economic growth. An increasingly popular policy is to require that foreign companies provide public goods near the communities where their commercial investments are sited. This approach seeks to crowd in additional investments, create clusters of interconnected firms, and set in motion economic agglomeration processes. Post-2006 Liberia represents an ideal empirical setting to test the effectiveness of this approach. We construct a new dataset that measures the precise locations of 557 natural resource concessions granted to investors. We then merge these data with a remotely sensed measure of nighttime light growth at the 1km x 1km grid cell level and analyze it using a matched difference-in-differences strategy. We find heterogeneous treatment effects across sectors and investor types: mining (specifically iron-ore) investments projects have positive growth effects, while agriculture and forestry investment projects do not; furthermore, concessions granted to Chinese investors have positive growth effects while those given to U.S. investors do not. These patterns of heterogeneous treatment effects across sectors and investor types are consistent with the theory of change underpinning the governmentÕs development corridor strategy.

Scholars and policymakers argue that donors can pursue development goals without bolstering autocratic regimes by bypassing recipient governments and channeling aid through intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations. However, I argue that bypass aid can subsidize government transfers to citizens and thus reduce popular resistance to autocrats. By providing goods and services that benefit individuals under the status quo, bypass aid may affect citizensÕ willingness to challenge an incumbent regime. In particular, aid may lower the concessions that an autocrat needs to make to, on the one hand, deter unrest or, on the other hand, increase the opportunity costs of political resistance. As such, aid may have political effects regardless of whether or not recipient governments have managerial control over aid. Statistical tests show that bypass aid is associated with less frequent domestic unrest in autocracies. To address potential endogeneity, I use an original data set that records instances in which governments are suspected of, or actually caught, misusing aid to proxy for the distribution of aid across channels.

While there is a vast literature studying the effects of official development aid (ODA) on economic growth, there are far fewer comparative studies addressing how aid affects health outcomes. Furthermore, while much attention has been paid to country-level effects of aid, there is a clear knowledge gap in the literature when it comes to systematic studies of aid effectiveness below the country-level. Addressing this gap, we undertake what we believe is the first systematic attempt to study how ODA affects infant mortality at the subnational level. We match new geographic aid data from the AidData on the precise location, type, and time frame of bilateral and multilateral aid projects in Nigeria with available georeferenced survey data from five Nigerian Demographic and Health Surveys. Using quasi-experimental approaches, with mother fixed-effects, we are able to control for a vast number of unobserved factors that may otherwise be spuriously correlated with both infant mortality and ODA. The results indicate very clearly that geographical proximity to active aid projects reduces infant mortality. Moreover, aid contributes to reduce systematic inter-group, or horizontal, inequalities in a setting where such differences loom large. In particular, we find that aid more effectively reduces infant mortality in less privileged groups like children of Muslim women, and children living in rural, and in Muslim-dominated areas. Finally, there is evidence that aid projects are established in areas that on average have lower infant mortality than non-aid locations, suggesting that there are biases resulting in aid not necessarily reaching those populations in greatest need.

This article utilizes a newly available dataset on the geographical distribution of development projects in Zambia to test whether electoral incentives shape aid allocation at the subnational level. Based on this dataset, it argues that when political elites have limited information to target distributive goods specifically to swing voters, they allocate more donor projects to districts where opposition to the incumbent is strong, as opposed to districts where the incumbent enjoys greater popularity.

Chinese ÒaidÓ is a lightning rod for criticism. Policy-makers, journalists, and public intellectuals claim that Beijing uses its largesse to cement alliances with political leaders, secure access to natural resources, and create exclusive commercial opportunities for Chinese firmsÑall at the expense of citizens living in developing countries. We argue that much of the controversy about Chinese ÒaidÓ stems from a failure to distinguish between China's Official Development Assistance (ODA) and more commercially oriented sources and types of state financing. Using a new database on China's official financing commitments to Africa from 2000 to 2013, we find that the allocation of Chinese ODA is driven primarily by foreign policy considerations, while economic interests better explain the distribution of less concessional flows. These results highlight the need for better measures of an increasingly diverse set of non-Western financial activities.

The World Bank provides billions of dollars in development finance to countries across the world every year. As many projects are related to the environment, we want to understand the World Bank projects impact to forest cover. However, the global extent of these projects results in substantial heterogeneity in impacts due to geographic, cultural, and other factors. Recent research by Athey and Imbens has illustrated the potential for hybrid machine learning and causal inferential techniques which may be able to capture such heterogeneity. We apply their approach using a geolocated dataset of World Bank projects, and augment this data with satellite-retrieved characteristics of their geographic context (including temperature, precipitation, slope, distance to urban areas, and many others). We use this information in conjunction with causal tree (CT) and causal forest (CF) approaches to contrast ÔcontrolÕ and ÔtreatmentÕ geographic locations to estimate the impact of World Bank projects on vegetative cover.

Concerns over the expropriation of and encroachment on indigenous communities' lands have led to greater formalization of these communities' rights in a number of developing countries. We study whether formalization of indigenous communities' land rights affects the rate of deforestation in both the short and medium terms. Beginning in 1995, the Government of Brazil formalized the rights of several hundred indigenous communities whose lands cover more than 40 million hectares in the Amazon region and provided support for these rightsÕ enforcement. We study the program's impacts using a long time-series of satellite-based forest cover data. Using both plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of formalization and matched samples of treated and comparison communities, we find no effect of these protections on satellite-based greenness measures. This is true even for communities that received support for surveillance and enforcement of these rights. Notably, we observe low counterfactual rates of deforestation on communities' lands between 1982 and 2010, suggesting that indigenous land rights programs should not uniformly be justified on the basis of their forest protection, at least in the medium term.

Foreign aid donors make themselves visible as the funders of development projects to improve citizen attitudes abroad. Do target populations receive these political communications in the intended fashion, and does the information succeed in changing attitudes? Despite the widespread use of various mechanisms to communicate information about foreign funding, little evidence exists about their effectiveness. We embed an informational experiment about a US-funded health project in a nationwide survey in Bangladesh. Although we find only limited recognition of the USAID brand, explicit information about US funding slightly improves general perceptions of the United States; it does not, however, change respondentÕs opinions on substantive foreign policy issues. We also find that information increases confidence in local authorities. While our results suggest that information about foreign donors can effect attitudinal change, they also suggest that current mechanisms for information transmission might not be sufficient to do so.

The paper presents findings from the first-ever systematic review of the causal impact of development aid on violence in countries affected by civil war. The review identifies 19 studies: Fourteen within-country studies from Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Philippines and India, and five cross-national studies. These studies investigate the impact of six aid types: Community driven development, conditional cash transfers, public employment scheme, humanitarian aid, infrastructure and aid provided by military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. The evidence for a violence-dampening effect of aid in conflict zones is not strong. Aid in conflict zones is more likely to exacerbate violence than to dampen violence. A violence-dampening effect of aid appears to be conditional on a relatively secure environment for aid projects to be implemented. A violence-increasing effect occurs when aid is misappropriated by violent actors, or when violent actors sabotage aid projects in order to disrupt the cooperation between the local population and the government.

Does foreign aid enable or constrain elite capture of public revenues? Reflecting on prominent debates in the foreign aid literature, we examine whether recipient preferences are consistent with a view that foreign donors wield substantial control over the flow of aid dollars, making elite capture more difficult and mass benefits more likely. We compare elite and mass support for foreign aid versus government spending on development projects through a survey experiment with behavioral outcomes. A key innovation is a parallel experiment on members of the Ugandan national parliament and a representative sample of Ugandan citizens. For two actual aid projects, we randomly assigned different funders to the projects. Significant treatment effects reveal that members of parliament support government programs over foreign aid, whereas citizens prefer aid over government. Donor control also implies that citizens should favor foreign aid more and elites less as their perceptions of government clientelism and corruption increase. We explore this and report on other alternative mechanisms. Effects for citizens and elites are most apparent for those perceiving significant government corruption, suggesting that both sets of subjects perceive significant donor control over aid.

Progress toward food and nutrition security (FNS) needs to be sharply accelerated in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal for ending hunger and malnutrition, especially in rural areas. The G20 should target interventions and investment opportunities to maximize impact on people and transformation of rural areas. Currently, few G20 countries map investments, technical assistance, capacity building and policy support in a data-driven way. Such tracking of needs, policies, and resources could include G20 countriesÕ domestic efforts alongside countries they support with development assistance. The G20 could develop such a methodology to identify countries and interventions where additional resources could have a lasting impact. They could then systematically track and streamline FNS actions taken across international organizations and initiatives to efforts to help ensure the SDG is achieved.

We explain why international development organizations have had so little success building and reforming public sector institutions in developing countries. They often fail despite their apparently strong commitment to achieving measurable results and extraordinary amounts of time, money, and effort. We demonstrate that, when donors and lenders make access to financing contingent upon achievement of performance targets, recipient countries tend to choose easy and shallow institutional targets. These targets measure the organization of public sector institutions, rather than their effectiveness at addressing public problems. Such targets provide countries with low-cost opportunities to signal commitment to institution-building to international development organizations. We demonstrate the explanatory and predictive power of our argument in the context of a sector of World Bank lendingÑenvironment and natural resource managementÑthat focuses heavily on improving public sector institutions.

Is foreign aid effective in reducing terrorism? The existing evidence is mostly negative. We argue that this pessimistic outlook on the efficacy of aid as a counterterrorism tool is partly a function of focusing on only one type of aid: economic aid. Governance and civil society aid can dampen the participation in and support for terrorism by altering the political conditions of a country. We expect countries that receive high levels of governance and civil society aid to experience fewer domestic terrorist incidents than countries that receive little or none. Using a sample of aid eligible countries for the period from 1997 to 2010, we find that governance and civil society aid is effective in dampening domestic terrorism, but this effect is only present if the recipient country is not experiencing a civil conflict. Our findings provide support for the continued use of democracy aid as a counterterrorism tool.

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open-source methodology (AidData's TUFF Methodology, Version 1.2) for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance (OF) to Africa from 2000 to 2011 (AidData's Chinese Official Finance to Africa Dataset, 2000-2012, Version 1.1). 

We find that China’s commitments amounted to approximately US$73 billion, of which US$15 billion are comparable to Official Development Assistance following Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development definitions. We provide details on 1,511 projects to fifty African countries. We use this database to extend previous research on aid and conflict, which suffers from omitted-variable bias due to the exclusion of Chinese development finance. Our results show that sudden withdrawals of ‘‘traditional’’ aid no longer induce conflict in the presence of sufficient alternative funding from China. Our findings highlight the importance of gathering more complete data on the development activities of ‘‘nontraditional donors’’ to better understand the link between aid and conflict. We provide our replication package for this article at http://aiddata.org/replication-datasets.

An earlier version of this article, China's Development Finance to Africa: A Media-Based Approach to Data Collection, is available as a working paper from the Center for Global Development.

Since 1945, over $4.9 trillion dollars of international aid has been allocated to developing countries. To date, there have been no estimates of the regional impact of this aid on the carbon cycle. We apply a geographically explicit matching method to estimate the relative impact of large-scale World Bank projects implemented between 2000 and 2010 on sequestered carbon, using a novel and publicly available data set of 61,243 World Bank project locations. Considering only carbon sequestered due to fluctuations in vegetative biomass caused by World Bank projects, we illustrate the relative impact of World Bank projects on carbon sequestration. We use this information to illustrate the geographic variation in the apparent effectiveness of environmental safeguards implemented by the World Bank. We argue that sub-national data can help to identify geographically heterogeneous impact effects, and highlight many remaining methodological challenges.

No abstract available

Earmarked aid to international organizations has quadrupled over the last two decades and now represents almost 20% of total aid. This paper introduces a new dataset on earmarked aid, which alternatively has been referred to as multi-bi, restricted, non-core or trust fund aid. The data make it possible to track the rise of the new aid channel over an extended time period and in greater detail regarding, e.g., the implementing multilateral organizations. The data include more than 100,000 earmarked projects of 23 OECD donors to 290 multilateral institutions from 1990 to 2012. We graphically illustrate the patterns in earmarked aid for all actors: donor governments and their aid-providing agencies, multilateral organizations, and recipient countries. We also highlight promising research questions that can be analyzed with the multi-bi data. In a first empirical application of the data, we analyze four suggested donor motives for earmarked aid at the donor-recipient level. Contrary to donor claims, we find that earmarked aid and bilateral aid target the same recipients. We also find evidence that some donors use earmarked aid to bypass recipient countries with weak governance. Overall, our explorative analysis suggests that earmarked aid serves many purposes and that donors use it in different ways. This calls for more fine-grained research on the reasons and implications for earmarked aid.

The rise of China as a "non-traditional" development partner has been one of the most important phenomena in the field over the past decade. The lack of transparency in Chinese development projects, coupled with an uninterested stance towards governance, lead many to wonder if Chinese engagement will contribute to or undermine existing development efforts. This paper adds to the debate by inquiring as to the relationship of Chinese development efforts with perceptions of, and experiences with, corruption when projects are closely-located to those from a traditional donor, the World Bank. Taking advantage of spatial data, the paper evidences an association between the location of a larger number of Chinese projects and higher experiences with and, to some extent, perceptions of corruption when accounting for co-located World Bank projects. Likewise, while World Bank projects are associated with lower levels of corruption in the absence of Chinese projects, this relationship disappears when Chinese projects are nearby. However, these relationships only hold for Chinese projects which are not "aid-like," suggesting that the differentiation of Chinese overseas flows is an important consideration when studying China as a development partner.

How China assumes its position of superpower is one of the most important questions regarding global order in the twenty-first century. While considerable and sustained attention has been paid to ChinaÕs growing economic and military might, work examining how China is attempting, if at all, to influence the ecosystem of global norms is in its earlier stages. In this article we examine ChinaÕs actions in an important venue for the development of global norms, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Using a unique dataset that captures how other countries move into or out of alignment with China on UNGA resolutions that are repeated over time, we find statistical evidence that China used diplomatic and economic means in an attempt to subtly alter international norms. We further illustrate these findings by examining four states that made substantive moves toward China on resolutions concerning national sovereignty, democracy, international order, non-interference, and human rights.

The emergence of satellite sensors that can routinely observe millions of individual smallholder farms raises possibilities for monitoring and understanding agricultural productivity in many regions of the world. Here we demonstrate the potential to track smallholder maize yield variation in western Kenya, using a combination of 1-m Terra Bella imagery and intensive field sampling on thousands of fields over 2 y. We find that agreement between satellite-based and traditional field survey-based yield estimates depends significantly on the quality of the field-based measures, with agreement highest (R2 up to 0.4) when using precise field measures of plot area and when using larger fields for which rounding errors are smaller. We further show that satellite-based measures are able to detect positive yield responses to fertilizer and hybrid seed inputs and that the inferred responses are statistically indistinguishable from estimates based on survey-based yields. These results suggest that high-resolution satellite imagery can be used to make predictions of smallholder agricultural productivity that are roughly as accurate as the survey-based measures traditionally used in research and policy applications, and they indicate a substantial near-term potential to quickly generate useful datasets on productivity in smallholder systems, even with minimal or no field training data. Such datasets could rapidly accelerate learning about which interventions in smallholder systems have the most positive impact, thus enabling more rapid transformation of rural livelihoods.

Cross-national studies provide inconclusive results as to the effectiveness of foreign health aid. We highlight a novel application of using subnational data to evaluate aid impacts, using Malawi as a case study. We employ two rounds of nationally representative household surveys (2004/2005 and 2010/2011) and geo-referenced foreign aid data. We examine the determinants of Malawi's traditional authorities receiving aid according to health, environmental risk, socioeconomic and political factors. Traditional authorities with greater proportions of individuals living in urban areas, more health facilities and greater proportions of those in major ethnic groups were more likely to receive aid. Difference-in-difference models show health infrastructure and parasitic disease control aid reduced malaria prevalence by 1.20 and 2.20 percentage points, respectively, and increased the likelihood of individuals reporting healthcare as more than adequate by 12.1 and 14.0 percentage points. Aid was targeted to areas with greater existing health infrastructure rather than areas most in need, but still effectively reduced malaria prevalence and enhanced self-reported healthcare quality.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cites poverty eradication as both the Ôgreatest global challengeÕ and an Ôindispensable requirementÕ for sustainable development (UN, 2015). Unfortunately, the path between discourse and practice is rarely clear. This is especially true for the estimated one billion people with disabilities around the globe who face barriers and challenges to inclusion in mainstream development efforts; and for whom disability-specific projects and interventions are far and few between. This paper responds to the lack of available data focused on tracking the inclusion of persons with disabilities in mainstream poverty reduction efforts. It reports on work by a multidisciplinary research team in developing and piloting a methodology measuring disability inclusive investments in the World BankÕs active portfolio. The paper focuses specifically on the World BankÕs social protection portfolio, aligned with SDG 1 (End Poverty), and outlines a methodology for analysing project-level documentation, using key word searches, and codes aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals to determine the inclusion of persons with disabilities. Findings indicate that only a small percentage, 5%, of the World BankÕs active social protection portfolio explicitly include persons with disabilities as target beneficiaries. It goes on to argue that this dearth in disability inclusive development efforts exposes a vital need to systematically include the needs of this population in the planning for, provision of, and assessment of development assistance efforts. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for ensuring future projects are inclusive from program development and implementation through to assessment of outcomes.

Following a recent trend towards disaggregation in studies of foreign aid and political violence, we evaluate the determinants of foreign aid sub-nationally. We focus our attention upon political violence as a key subnational determinant of aid commitments and argue that donors commit aid to areas with recent political violence in the hope of ameliorating need and bolstering stability. This being the case, however, we contend not all areas experiencing violence are equally likely to receive aid commitments. This is because potential donors are faced with a dilemmaÑbalancing risk and rewardÑthat leads them to question whether they can effectively deliver aid to areas under conditions of extreme violence. We test these two hypotheses and provide confirmation for them in the context of bilateral aid commitments to local areas within Sub-Saharan African states experiencing civil war between 1990 and 2007.

In the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era of financing for development, the international community is placing substantial emphasis on the mantra ‘leave no one behind.' To meet this commitment, an improved ability to assess disability inclusive development efforts of development agencies is required. This study piloted a methodology to monitor the inclusion of people with disabilities in development efforts of the World Bank and aligns findings against progress towards the SDGs by asking two research questions: 1) Are active World Bank projects inclusive of persons with disabilities (PWDs)? and 2) What areas of development and which SDG do disability-inclusive projects focus on? While disability inclusive projects make up only a small percentage of the overall active World Bank portfolio (2.0%), preliminary analysis indicates an investment focus in several areas, such as social protection systems and measures, technical assistance and partnerships, education, health, and affordable housing. The article closes by considering implications for future efforts to track the inclusiveness of development finance as we move forward in implementation of the SDGs.

Many argue that autocratic regimes allocate revenues from foreign aid with the aim of stabilizing their rule rather than serving economic and social development. However, donors often condition foreign aid on reforms in recipient states. We argue that when those conditions for reform focus on participative processes and government accountability, they positively affect democratization. We evaluate our claim based on different types of World Bank and IMF lending programs for a panel of 100 low- and middle-income countries over the years 1980Ð2011. Our results suggest that aid positively affects democratization when it strengthens domestic accountability mechanisms and thereby reduces its fungibility for recipients. The World Bank and the IMFÕs poverty reduction strategy programs provide a notable case of this effect.

Can foreign aid be used to promote democracy in Asia? Because liberalization is costly for the autocratic recipients, they can be expected to resist donor pressure to reform politically. The recipients who have the strategic and commercial attributes that donors value should have an easier time getting aid offers and hence leverage against donors who seek liberalization. By contrast, the recipients who lack such attributes have less leverage. This group of ÒsecondaryÓ recipients can be nudged towards political liberalization. I test this argument using foreign aid from AidData and regime-type information from Polity IV. The evidence bares out the argument even after correcting for the threat of reverse causality. I conclude with policy prescriptions for effective aid allocation.

A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we create and field-test a replicable Ôground-truthingÕ methodology to verify, update, and improve open-source data with in-person interviews and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally reveals close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded projects. Our findings suggest that open-source data collection, while limited in knowable ways, can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance.

This paper examines the effect of education aid on primary enrolment and education quality. Using the most recent data on aid disbursements and econometric specifications inspired by the general aid effectiveness literature, we find some evidence that donorsÕ increase in funding has substantially contributed to the successful increase in enrolment over the last 15 years. The most robust effect is obtained by aid for education facilities and training. In addition, we find complementarities between aid for primary and secondary education. Our qualitative comparative analysis of education quality also highlights the relevance of a balanced mix of educational expenditures.

Do international donors penalize coups dÕŽtat by reducing aid? How significant is the impact of coups on aid flows? These questions have become increasingly important over the past three decades as the concept of political conditionality has gradually permeated the donor community, pushing for stringent actions to be taken against democratic transgressions like coups. I argue that the end of the Cold War was a historical juncture that reshaped the international donor communityÕs aid-based sanctioning policy toward coups. However, I also posit that the U.S. does not comply with the growing international norm of political conditionality due to its geopolitical interests trumping its rhetorical commitment to penalizing coups. This paper exploits exogenous variation in the success and failure of coups to estimate the causal effect of coup-led regime change on aid flows. My empirical evidence supports the preposition that since the end of the Cold War, the donor community on average has reduced the amounts of aid disbursements in response to coups dÕŽtat although the U.S. has been inconsistent in applying aid sanctions against coups both during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. While demonstrating a genuine shift in the international communityÕs collective responses toward coups since the end of the Cold War, my findings also attest to potential heterogeneity across major bilateral donors, which may undermine the overall effectiveness of aid and political conditionality.

Foreign aid from China is often characterized as “rogue aid” that is guided by selfish interests alone. We collect data on Chinese project aid, food aid, medical staff and total aid money to developing countries, covering the 1956–2006 period, to empirically test to what extent self-interests shape China's aid allocation. While political considerations shape China's allocation of aid, China does not pay substantially more attention to politics compared to Western donors. What is more, China's aid allocation seems to be widely independent of recipients' endowment with natural resources and institutional characteristics. Overall, denoting Chinese aid as “rogue aid” seems unjustified.

Different theories about the impact of aid make distinct predictions about citizensÕ attitudes toward foreign aid in recipient countries. We investigate their preferences toward aid and government projects in order to examine these different theories. Are citizens indifferent between development projects funded by their own government versus those funded by foreign aid donors, as aid capture theory suggests? To address this, in an experiment on a large, representative sample of Ugandan citizens, we randomly assigned the names of funding groups for actual forthcoming development projects and invited citizens to express support attitudinally and behaviorally. We find that citizens are significantly more willing to show behavioral support in favor of foreign aid projects compared to government programs, especially if they already perceive the government as corrupt or clientelist or if they are not supporters of the ruling party. They also trust donors more, think they are more effective, and do not consistently oppose aid conditionality. This experimental evidence is consistent with a theory that we call donor control which sees donors asbeing able to target and condition aid so that it is not fungible with government revenues and thus to be able to better direct it to meet citizensÕ needs.

Over the last ten years, an increasing quantity and quality of data regarding migration and climate risk has become available, leading to a broad body of research examining the relationships between climate impacts on livelihoods and corresponding migratory patterns. This research has provided evidence that migration can serve as an adaptive strategy if local livelihoods are threatened. However, little research has examined the response Ð or lack of Ð from the international aid and donor community in response to these shifts. In this paper, we take the first step toward examining this relationship, utilizing a recently produced database on the sub-national spatial allocation of international aid from 1998 to 2012 in Malawi. We examine the research question: what is the sub-national relationship between international aid and migratory patterns? To analyze this question, we integrate sub-national micro-census information with satellite-derived measurements of climate and the spatial location and amount of international aid. We find evidence that (1) aid does not reduce the likelihood of migration from a location and (2) increased levels of migration do not increase the likelihood of aid being sent to a location.

nternational conservation donors have spent at least $3.4 billion to protect biodiversity and stem tropical deforestation in Africa since the early 1990s. Despite more than two decades of experience, however, there is little research on the effect of this aid at a region-wide scale. Numerous case studies exist, but show mixed results. Existing research is usually based on community perception or focused on short-term donor objectives rather than specific conservation outcomes, like deforestation rates. Thus, the impact of billions of dollars of conservation aid on deforestation rates remains an open question. This article uses an original dataset to analyze the effect of international conservation aid on deforestation rates in 42 African countries between 2000 and 2013. We first describe patterns of conservation aid across the continent and then assess its impact (with one to five-year lags), controlling for other factors that may also affect deforestation, including rural population, protected areas (PAs), governance, and other economic and commodity production variables. We find that conservation aid is associated with higher rates of forest loss after one- or two-year lags. A similar result holds for PA extent, suggesting possible displacement of deforestation from PAs. However, governance quality in high forest cover countries moderates these effects such that deforestation rates are reduced. Rural population is the most consistent factor associated with forest loss, confirming previous studies of this driver. Our results suggest that in heavily forested countries, development projects designed to support conservation work initially in conditions of good governance, but that conservation aid alone is insufficient to mitigate larger deforestation drivers.

BACKGROUND: There is growing awareness that the necessary solutions for improving nutrition outcomes are multisectorial. As such, investments are increasingly directed toward "nutrition-sensitive" approaches that not only address an underlying or basic determinant of nutrition but also seek to achieve an explicit nutrition goal or outcome. Understanding how and where official development assistance (ODA) for nutrition is invested remains an important but complex challenge, as development projects components vary in their application to nutrition outcomes. Currently, no systematic method exists for tracking nutrition-sensitive ODA. OBJECTIVE: To develop a methodology for classifying and tracking nutrition-sensitive ODA and to produce estimates of the amount of nutrition-sensitive aid received by countries with a high burden of undernutrition. METHODS: We analyzed all financial flows reported to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee Creditor Reporting Service in 2010 to estimate these investments. We assessed the relationships between national stunting prevalence, stunting burden, under-5 mortality, and the amount of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive ODA. RESULTS: We estimate that, in 2010, a total of $379á4 million (M) US dollars (USD) was committed to nutrition-specific projects and programs of which 25 designated beneficiaries (countries and regions) accounted for nearly 85% ($320 M). A total of $1.79 billion (B) was committed to nutrition-sensitive spending, of which the top 25 countries/regions accounted for $1.4 B (82%). Nine categories of development activities accounted for 75% of nutrition-sensitive spending, led by Reproductive Health Care (30á4%), Food Aid/Food Security Programs (14á1%), Emergency Food Aid (13á2%), and Basic Health Care (5á0%). Multivariate linear regression models indicate that the amount of nutrition-sensitive (P = .001) and total nutrition ODA was significantly predicted by stunting prevalence (P = .001). The size of the total population of stunted children significantly predicted the amount of nutrition-specific ODA (P < .001). CONCLUSION: The recipient profile of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive ODA is related but distinct. Nutrition indicators are associated with the level of nutrition-related ODA commitments to recipient countries. A reliable estimate of nutrition spending is critical for effective planning by both donors and recipients and key for success, as the global development community recommits to a new round of goals to address the interrelated causes of undernutrition in low-income countries.

Assigning land title to collective landholders is one of the primary policies land management agencies use to avoid deforestation worldwide. Such programs are designed to improve the ability of landholders to legally exclude competing users and thereby strengthen incentives to manage forests for long-term benefits. Despite the prevalence of this hypothesis, findings about the impacts of land titling programs on deforestation are mixed. Evidence is often unreliable because programs are targeted according to factors that independently influence the conversion of forests. We evaluate a donor-funded land titling and land management program for indigenous communities implemented in Morona-Santiago, Ecuador. This program offers a close to best case scenario for a land titling program to reduce deforestation because of colonization pressure, availability of payments when titled communities maintain forests, and limited opportunities for commercial agriculture. We match plots in program areas with similar plots outside program areas on covariates that influence the conversion of forests. Based on matched comparisons, we do not find evidence that land titling or community management plans reduced forest loss in the five years following legal recognition. The results call into question land titling as a direct deforestation strategy and suggests land titling is better viewed a precursor to other programs.

Humanitarian assistance is intended to ameliorate the human costs of war by providing relief to vulnerable populations. Yet the introduction of aid resources into conflict zones may influence subsequent violence patterns and expose intended recipients to new risks. Here we investigate the potential negative externalities associated with humanitarian aid. We argue that aid can create incentives for armed actors to intentionally target civilians for violence. Aid encourages rebel violence by providing opportunities for looting and presenting challenges to rebel authority. It potentially encourages state violence where it augments rebel capabilities or provides rebels a resource base. We evaluate both arguments using spatially disaggregated data on aid and conflict violence for a sample of nearly two dozen postÐCold War African countries. The results of multiple statistical analyses provide strong support for the argument that humanitarian aid is associated with increased rebel violence but less support for the relationship between aid and state violence.

This paper brings the aid effectiveness debate to the sub-national level. We hypothesize the non-robust results regarding the effects of aid on development in the previous literature to arise due to the effects of aid being insufficiently large to measurably affect aggregate outcomes. Using geo-coded data for World Bank aid to a maximum of 2,221 first-level administrative regions (ADM1) and 54,167 second-level administrative regions (ADM2) in 130 countries over the 2000Ð11 period, we test whether aid affects development, measured as night-time light growth. Our preferred identification strategy exploits variation arising from interacting a variable that indicates whether or not a country has passed the threshold for receiving the International Development AssociationÕs concessional aid with a recipient regionÕs probability of receiving aid, in a sample of 478 ADM1 regions and almost 8,400 ADM2 regions from 21 countries. Controlling for the levels of the interacted variables, the interaction provides a powerful and excludable instrument. Overall, we find significant correlations between aid and growth in ADM2 regions, but no causal effects.

As recently as 1999, 13 million measles cases and 500,000 measles-related deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa per year. Over the past decade, vaccination coverage across the continent has improved dramatically, largely as a result of the Measles Initiative, an international effort coordinating and funding national mass-immunization campaigns. We estimate the reduction in all-cause child mortality after initial countrywide measles vaccination campaigns using variation in the timing of the campaigns across countries and subnational regions. This framework accounts for competing and complementary risks as well as for contemporaneous trends in mortality rates that may have biased case-based estimates. We use birth and death history data compiled from multiple Demographic and Health Surveys for 25 countries and control for country-specific trends in child mortality and time-varying factors that were associated with campaign timing. Our findings show that the Measles Initiative campaigns raised the probability of a childÕs survival to 60 months by approximately 2.4 percentage points for cohorts treated by the campaign. The campaigns cost approximately $109 per child life saved, remarkably low in absolute terms as well as relative to other interventions to reduce global child mortality.

Over the past two decades, donors increasingly link foreign aid to democracy objectives in Africa. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid influences specific outcomes associated with democratic transition and consolidation. Using an instrumental variables approach for the period from 1989 to 2008, we show that economic aid increases the likelihood of transition to multiparty politics, while democracy aid furthers democratic consolidation by reducing the incidence of multiparty failure and electoral misconduct. However, we find little evidence that either economic or democracy aid influences opposition support in multiparty elections. These findings have implications for understanding how donors allocate aid and the political consequences of foreign assistance in Africa.

We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism, by analyzing whether aid targeted at specific sectors, such as education, is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorism, AidData and ITERATE, rather than the relatively small samples used in most previous studies, and provide a series of statistical tests. Our results indicate that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted towards sectors such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism, if targeted in the right ways.

In 2010, the international community, under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed on 20 biodiversity-related ÒAichi TargetsÓ to be achieved within a decade. We provide a comprehensive mid-term assessment of progress toward these global targets using 55 indicator data sets. We projected indicator trends to 2020 using an adaptive statistical framework that incorporated the specific properties of individual time series. On current trajectories, results suggest that despite accelerating policy and management responses to the biodiversity crisis, the impacts of these efforts are unlikely to be reflected in improved trends in the state of biodiversity by 2020. We highlight areas of societal endeavor requiring additional efforts to achieve the Aichi Targets, and provide a baseline against which to assess future progress.

A large portion of foreign assistance for climate change mitigation in developing countries is directed to clean energy facilities. To support international mitigation goals, however, donors must make investments that have effects beyond individual facilities. They must reduce barriers to private-sector investment by generating information for developers, improving relevant infrastructure, or changing policies. We examine whether donor agencies target financing for commercial-scale wind and solar facilities to countries where private investment in clean energy is limited and whether donor investments lead to more private investments. On average, we find no positive evidence for these patterns of targeting and impact. Coupled with model results that show feed-in tariffs increase private investment, we argue that donor agencies should reallocate resources to improve policies that promote private investment in developing countries, rather than finance individual clean energy facilities.

The 2013 BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, attended by the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, produced a joint declaration that simultaneously heralded a new ÒBRICS Development BankÓ and demanded the reform of existing Òinternational financial institutions to make them more representative and to reflect the growing weight of BRICS and other developing countriesÓ (eThekwini Declaration 2013). As they had at previous summits, the BRICS demanded reform of Òthe prevailing global governance architectureÓ that was conceived over six decades ago. As Edward Mansfield (this issue) explains, international relations theory suggests that rising powers may seek to reform existing institutions or create new ones to challenge the prevailing system (Gilpin 1987; Hawkins, Lake, Nielson, and Tierney 2006). In the area of development finance, the BRICS appear to be attempting both. However, their rhetorical consensus obscures serious differences that make it unlikely we will observe sudden or substantial changes in the global development finance regime that was designed to set standards and enhance cooperation among Western donors. Further, while BRICS donors will become more important sources of development finance, they show little interest in joining the existing regime.

There is little systematic knowledge about the nature, extent, and trends of international aid for projects that link biodiversity conservation and development goals. This study uses a new dataset to analyze spatial and temporal patterns of such aid globally over the past three decades. Results reveal significant donor selectivity in aid allocation, though linked conservation and development aid comprised more than two-thirds of all biodiversity-related assistance. Biodiversity aid generally was directed to biodiversity-rich, well-governed countries, but countries able to exert greater political leverage secured more linked aid than aid targeted to conservation without a stated development objective.

The best available data thus suggest that Western governments and China are taking very different tacks in Africa. In terms of official government financing, China provides considerably more support than do Western counterparts for the “hardware” of economic development.  The range of its true aid or ODA activities appears to be quite similar to that of Western aid programs. The high proportion of Beijing’s assistance that takes the form of OOFlike flows does open China to the critique that its interest in the continent is driven more by commercial than by altruistic motives, and that negative unintended consequences may follow. Of course, official financing is only one component of China’s footprint in Africa. AidData does not yet systematically track other financial flows from China, such as state-sponsored and private foreign direct investment and joint venture projects, which may very well be an important part of the overall story of how China is shaping development outcomes in Africa. Additional data collection and analysis will be needed to draw firmer general conclusions about China’s development impact in Africa.

Despite allegations that foreign aid promotes corruption and patronage, we know little about how recipient governmentsÕ electoral incentives influence aid spending. I propose a distributional politics model of aid spending in which governments use their informational advantages over donors in order to allocate a disproportionate share of aid to electorally strategic supporters, allowing governments to translate aid into votes. To evaluate this argument, I code data on the spatial distribution of multilateral donor projects in Kenya from 1992 to 2010 and show that Kenyan governments have consistently influenced the aid allocation process in favor of co-partisan and co-ethnic voters, a bias that holds for each of KenyaÕs last three regimes. I also confirm that aid distribution increases incumbent vote share. This evidence suggests that electoral motivations play a significant role in aid allocation and that distributional politics may help explain the gap between donor intentions and outcomes.

While international cooperation research emphasizes institutional design, states mostly interact with existing organizations. How do states choose organizations for cooperation? We develop a theory of agency choice for development projects, emphasizing the importance of domestic institutions, the scope of cooperation, and the resources of the implementing agency. If states are to cooperate with funding agencies that have abundant resources, such as the World Bank, they must accept more stringent conditions on project implementation. We argue states accept the stringent conditions that resourceful organizations demand if the public goods from project implementation are highly valuable. Empirically, this is the case for democratic states, large projects, and projects that produce national instead of global public goods. We test this theory using data on 2,882 Global Environment Facility (GEF) projects, 1991Ð2011. The GEF offers an ideal case because various implementing agencies are responsible for the actual projects. States implement projects in collaboration with the World Bank, which has the most expertise and resources among the GEFÕs implementing agencies, if their regime type is democracy, the project size is large, and the benefits are primarily national. Qualitative evidence sheds light on causal mechanisms.

Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynamics; project characteristics; and civic participation in the recipient country environment sector. We test the influence of these variables on project success using a dataset of outcome ratings for all environmentally focused World Bank projects approved since 1994. We find that strong public sector institutions in the recipient country and proactive staff supervision foster project success and that projects seeking to achieve global environmental objectives are less likely to succeed. Future research will be most fruitful if it focuses on how operational and management characteristics of individual projects lead to successful outcomes.

Some international relations (IR) scholars lament the divide that exists between the academic community and the policy community. Others celebrate it. In this article, we test a core proposition advanced by advocates of bridging the policy-academy divide: that direct engagement in the policy-making process will make international relations scholars more adept at designing, undertaking, and communicating research in ways that are useful and relevant to policymakers. Using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we evaluate whether and to what extent direct exposure to the policy-making process influences how IR scholars select publication outlets. We define and evaluate policy-making exposure in two ways: periods of public service in which faculty members temporarily vacate their university positions to work for governments or intergovernmental organizations; and instances in which faculty members undertake substantial consulting assignments for government agencies and intergovernmental organizations. Our findings suggest that Òin-and-outersÓÑfaculty members who temporarily leave the ivory tower to accept policy positionsÑreturn to the academy with new perspectives and publication priorities. By contrast, we find no policy-making exposure effect among Òmoonlighters.Ó Our results suggest that IR scholars are no more likely to publish in policy journals after doing part-time consulting work for governments and IOs.

There is little systematic knowledge about the magnitude and allocation of international funding flows to support biodiversity conservation in the developing world. Using the newly released AidData compilation, we present a comprehensive assessment of official donor assistance for biodiversity during 1980Ð2008. We find that biodiversity aid increased markedly in the early 1990s, but that estimates of current aid are likely overstated and donor commitments at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit have not been met. Aid has been well targeted, however, in that the allocation of biodiversity aid is positively associated with the number of threatened species in recipient countries after controlling for country size, national population, and wealth. Biodiversity aid is also positively associated with indicators of good governance. Our results provide an empirical measure of progress toward international conservation funding targets, a baseline against which future flows can be compared, and information necessary to assess the effectiveness of biodiversity aid.

Does foreign aid reduce terrorism? We examine whether foreign aid decreases terrorism by analyzing whether aid targeted toward certain sectors is more effective than others. We use the most comprehensive databases on foreign aid and transnational terrorismÑAidData and ITERATEÑto provide a series of statistical tests. Our results show that foreign aid decreases terrorism especially when targeted toward sectors, such as education, health, civil society, and conflict prevention. These sector-level results indicate that foreign aid can be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism if allocated in appropriate ways.

Among non-DAC donors, wealthy Arab states are some of the most prolific contributors of foreign aid. Despite this, relatively little is known about Arab foreign aid. The OECD development database offers a paucity of information, aggregating data for ÒArab countriesÓ and ÒArab agencies,Ó without identifying the constituent units of either. A further complication is that Arab donors are not uniformly transparent about their aid efforts, publicizing some of them while keeping other donations secret. In this paper, we advance the state of knowledge of Arab foreign aid in a number of ways. We use AidData to document the trends in reported donations from specific bilateral donors (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) and multilateral agencies (Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, OPECÕs Fund for International Development, and the Islamic Development Bank). Notably, Arab bilateral donors have given less generously over time with aid levels remaining relatively stable despite skyrocketing national wealth. We explore reasons for this decline, including that Arab donors have: shifted their giving from bilateral to multilateral channels, given less as DAC donors have given more, and increased domestic spending at the expense of foreign aid with a view to safeguarding regime security. In addition, we look at the sectoral allocations of Arab bilateral and multilateral organizations, and compare the aid practices of Arab donors to their DAC counterparts. Finally, we suggest why an exclusive focus on aid commitments is problematic where Arab aid is concerned.

We employ AidData to test the effects of primary-education aid on school enrollment. We argue that the problem of adverse selection complicates both the allocation and the effectiveness of aid. We hypothesize that bilateral donors ought to have greater freedom to condition aid on recipient governance quality than multilateral donors, which are often bound by institutional rules to provide aid more impartially. Compared to their multilateral counterparts, bilateral donors may have advantages in overcoming adverse selection, resulting in bilateral aidÕs boosting enrollments to a greater degree. AidDataÕs extensive coverage of multilateral aid enables this analysis for up to 100 low- and low-middle-income countries from 1995 to 2008. Latent growth regression analysis suggests that, compared to multilateral donors, bilateral donors indeed condition their primary education aid on recipient control of corruption and that bilateral aid is significantly related to improved enrollments.

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives, and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. At the same time, it is open to question whether new donors (many of which were aid recipients until recently) are more altruistic and provide better targeted aid according to need and merit. Project-level data on aid by new donors, as collected by the AidData initiative, allow for empirical analyses comparing the allocation behavior of new versus old donors. We employ Probit and Tobit models and test for significant differences in the distribution of aid by new and old donors across recipient countries. We find that, on average, new donors care less for recipient need than old donors. New and old donors behave similarly in several respects, however. They disregard merit by not taking the level of corruption in recipient countries into account. Concerns that commercial self-interest distorts the allocation of aid seem to be overblown for both groups.

In this study we resolve part of the confusion over how foreign aid affects armed conflict. We argue that aid shocksÑsevere decreases in aid revenuesÑinadvertently shift the domestic balance of power and potentially induce violence. During aid shocks, potential rebels gain bargaining strength vis-ˆ-vis the government. To appease the rebels, the government must promise future resource transfers, but the government has no incentive to continue its promised transfers if the aid shock proves to be temporary. With the government unable to credibly commit to future resource transfers, violence breaks out. Using AidData's comprehensive dataset of bilateral and multilateral aid from 1981 to 2005, we evaluate the effects of foreign aid on violent armed conflict. In addition to rare-event logit analysis, we employ matching methods to account for the possibility that aid donors anticipate conflict. The results show that negative aid shocks significantly increase the probability of armed conflict onset.

Since the early 1970s, coastal Ecuador has experienced significant mangrove deforestation, largely attributed to shrimp aquaculture. However, the area of mangrove lost has not been definitively quantified, and several different and conflicting estimates exist in the literature. Furthermore, it has been proposed that development aid has been the primary financial support for aquaculture projects that contribute to mangrove deforestation Ð and the resultant environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic degradation. We utilize Geographic Information Systems, remotely sensed satellite imagery, aerial photography, and topographic maps to quantify annual and total mangrove loss in five Ecuadorian estuaries. We then use the AidData database to statistically evaluate the relationship between international aid and mangrove deforestation in Ecuador's coastal provinces from 1970 to 2006.

In this introductory essay to the special issue, we introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance, AidData, that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing datasets while also improving project-level information about the purposes and activities funded by aid. We utilize that data to provide a brief overview of important trends in foreign aid. Contributors to this special issue draw on AidData as well as other sources to analyze aid transparency, " new" donors (not previously described or analyzed), aid allocation, and aid effectiveness. Our recurring theme in this introductory essay is that AidData and these initial academic projects refine rather than revolutionize our understanding of aid. The database has added significant numbers of new projects, dollar amounts, donors, and details about those projects, though there is much more yet to add. We worry that aid debates have been driven by too little information, and that many claims are based on limited or very poor evidence. Rectifying these problems will not be instantaneous: refining knowledge takes a lot of time and hard work. The common feature of the papers in this special issue is their careful attention to nuance and detail. In spite of what some recent authors have claimed, aid is neither a simple solution nor a sufficient cause of most problems in developing countries; its motivations, distribution, and effects are complex, and shifting. Capturing this complexity requires detailed data, careful thought, and sophisticated methods that allow scholars to make conditional causal and descriptive inferences.

Gender-based inequalities constrain womenÕs ability to participate in efforts to enhance agricultural production and reduce poverty and food insecurity. To resolve this, development organizations have targeted women and more recently ÒmainstreamedÓ gender within their agricultural aid programs. Through an analysis of agricultural-related development aid, we examine whether funded agricultural projects have increasingly targeted women and/or gender. Our results show that the number of agricultural aid projects and the dollar amounts targeting women/gender increased between 1978 and 2003. However, the increase was modest and, as a percentage of all agricultural development aid, has declined since the late 1990s. Significantly, this decline occurs at a time when there are an increasing number of women engaged in agriculture. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming outstrips efforts to develop projects aimed at women and gender inequality and that the concept may be being used to legitimize a decline in focusing explicitly on women.

This article seeks to answer why NorthÑSouth climate negotiations have gone on for decades without producing any substantial results. To address this question, we revisit and seek to integrate insights from several disparate theories, including structuralism (new and old), world systems theory, rational choice institutionalism, and social constructivism. We argue that the lack of convergence on climate grew almost inevitably from our starkly unequal world, which has created and perpetuated highly divergent ways of thinking (worldviews and causal beliefs) and promoted particularistic notions of fairness (principled beliefs). We attempt to integrate structural insights about global inequality with the micro-motives of rational choice institutionalism. The structuralist insight that Ôunchecked inequality undermines cooperationÕ suggests climate negotiations must be broadened to include a range of seemingly unrelated development issues such as trade, investment, debt, and intellectual property rights agreements. We conclude by reviewing the work of some Ônorm entrepreneursÕ bringing justice issues into climate negotiations and explore how these insights might influence Ôburden sharingÕ discussions in the post-Kyoto world, where development is constrained by climate change.

There is little consensus on whether foreign aid can reliably increase economic growth in recipient countries. We review the literature on aid allocation and provide new evidence suggesting that since 1990 aid donors reward political contestation but not political inclusiveness. Then we examine some challenges in analyzing cross-national data on the aid/growth relationship. Finally, we discuss the causal mechanisms through which foreign aid might affect growth and argue that politics can be viewed as both (a) an exogenous constraint that conditions the causal process linking aid to growth and (b) an endogenous factor that is affected by foreign aid and in turn impacts economic growth.

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) dramatically increased social lending for health, education, and safety nets after 1985. Yet the great powersÕ social policy preferences remained relatively static from 1980 to 2000. This contradicts the conventional view that powerful states control IOs. We argue that highly institutionalized IOs like MDBs require a complete model of possible member-state coalitions encompassing the preferences of all member statesÑnot just major powers. We develop multiple measures of state preferences and include all member states in our coalitional model. We evaluate our model and alternatives with an analysis of more than 10,000 MDB loans from 1980 to 2000. We find that when we include all member states weighted by their voting shares, principal preferences are significantly related to lending outcomes.

This article explores the hypothesis that global inequality may be a central impediment to interstate cooperation on climate change policy. Conventional wisdom suggests that outcomes in international environmental politics are primarily attributable to material self-interest, bargaining power, coercion, domestic environmental values, exogenous shocks and crises, the existence of salient policy solutions, the strength of political leadership and the influence of nonstate actors. Yet none of these approaches offers a completely satisfactory explanation for the long-standing north-south divide on climate change. Drawing on social inequality literature and international relations theory, we argue that inequality dampens cooperative efforts by reinforcing ÔstructuralistÕ world-views and causal beliefs, polarizing policy preferences, promoting particularistic notions of fairness, generating divergent and unstable expectations about future behaviour, eroding conditions of mutual trust and creating incentives for zero-sum and negative-sum behaviour. In effect, inequality undermines the establishment of mutually acceptable Ôrules of the gameÕ which could mitigate these obstacles.

The globalization of economic production fundamentally reshapes how a ÔfairÕ solution to the climate change problem must be forged. Emissions are increasing sharply in developing countries as wealthy nations ÔoffshoreÕ the energy- and natural resource-intensive stages of production. We review a new and relatively under-utilized theory of Ôecologically unequal exchangeÕ and apply it to the case of climate change. We describe four distinct principles that have been proposed to assign responsibility for carbon emissions, discuss their inadequacies, and briefly lay out some ÔhybridÕ proposals currently under consideration. We suggest combining hybrid proposals with environmental aid packages that help poorer nations transition from carbon-intensive pathways of development to more climate-friendly development trajectories, using remuneration from the so-called Ôecological debtÕ. In the context of deadlock over a completely inadequate Kyoto Protocol, we argue that fairness principles, climate science, and an understanding of globalization and development must be integrated.

As the earth's climate begins to shift into a hotter and less predictable period, there is a basic injustice in who will suffer worst and first. Nations facing rising oceans and drought are those least responsible for the problem, and they have the least resources to cope with them. To evaluate claims of environmental injustice, we examine three cases where the first signs of climate change are being felt worst and first: murderous flooding from Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, rising sea levels swamping entire Pacific Island atoll nations, and devastation from flooding among squatter settlements in Mozambique. In each case these nations are suffering not only because of bad geography or management. Rather, because of their colonial past and current positions in the world economy, they are brutally vulnerable to forces outside their control. We conclude by offering an explanation for generalized mistrust among Southern nations vis-ˆ-vis Northern nations and the Kyoto treaty.

In this article, we seek to explain reform patterns at the World Bank. Traditional realist and institutionalist theories say little about the process of change within international organizations (ÔIOsÕ). Drawing upon the insights of relatively new rationalist and constructivist approaches, we develop and test a model of IO change that combines insights from rationalism and constructivism. Our explanation integrates the Ôtop-downÕ logic of a rationalist principal-agent model Ñ targeting the redesign of organizational structures, hiring procedures and promotional standards, and the Ôbottom-upÕ logic of sociological constructivism Ñ focusing on the transformation of bureaucratic culture. We find that reform outcomes hinge upon the ability of change entrepreneurs to disrupt both the logics of consequence and appropriateness that shape the preferences and behaviour of bureaucratic actors. We evaluate our model by examining four distinct aspects of the World BankÕs Strategic Compact (1997Ð2001), which included attempts to alter project management, organizational culture, and the mission of the institution itself.

International environmental accords have become important mechanisms by which nations make promises to administer natural resources and manage the global environment. Previous studies, relying mainly on single cases or small-n data sets, have shed light on the proximate political causes of participation in these agreements. However, no study has yet systematically explained the deeper social determinants of why nations sign, ignore or resist environmental treaties. We offer a theoretically-sequenced model that exploits complementarities between rational choice institutionalism and world-systems theory. Key variables posited by realists and constructivists are also examined, using a new environmental treaty participation index based on ratifications of 22 major environmental agreements by 192 nations. Cross-sectional OLS regression and path analysis strongly supports the institutionalist claim that credibilityÑthe willingness and ability to honor one's international environmental commit-mentsÑÒmatters.Ó But these measures also lend considerable support to the world-systems hypothesis that state credibility is strongly influenced by a legacy of colonial incorporation into the world economy. Narrow export baseÑour proxy for disadvantaged position in the world-economyÑdirectly and indirectly (through institutions and civil society strength) explains nearly six-tenths of national propensity to sign environmental treaties. A nation's natural capital, its ecological vulnerability, and international environmental NGO memberships had no explanatory power in the path analysis. Our results indicate that new theoretical, methodological and policy approaches are needed to address structural barriers to international cooperation.