Colonial Shadows and Development Assistance: Public Perceptions of Foreign Aid from Former Colonial Powers

How do citizens in former colonies evaluate foreign aid from former colonial powers? Existing research shows that donors often allocate aid through colonial ties, but we know less about whether those ties shape recipient publics’ judgments of aid legitimacy. We develop the concept of colonial trust to theorize how colonial memory, sovereignty concerns, and expectations about donor motives shape public evaluations of aid. We test the argument with a pre-registered survey experiment in Ghana and India, two former British colonies. Respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate an aid package from Norway, Britain, France, or Brazil, with implementation authority assigned either to the donor or to the national government. We find that colonial donor identity carries a legitimacy penalty, but one that varies by national context. In the pooled sample, Britain and France reduce aid enthusiasm relative to Norway, while Brazil does not generate the expected South–South solidarity premium. The negative effects are concentrated primarily in Ghana and are strongest when donors administer the project directly. Open-ended responses suggest that citizens rarely frame aid as colonial compensation; instead, they evaluate aid through concerns about trust, corruption, implementation, and tangible public benefits. The findings show that aid is judged not only as a resource transfer, but also as a historically situated political relationship.