The Fragmentation Of Aid

This edited volume provides an assessment of an increasingly fragmented aid system. Development cooperation is fundamentally changing its character in the wake of global economic and political transformations and an ongoing debate about what constitutes, and how best to achieve, global development. This also has important implications for the setup of the aid architecture. The increasing number of donors and other actors as well as goals and instruments has created an environment that is increasingly difficult to manoeuvre. Critics describe today's aid architecture as 'fragmented': inefficient, overly complex and rigid in adapting to the dynamic landscape of international cooperation. By analysing the actions of donors and new development actors, this book gives important insights into how and why the aid architecture has moved in this direction. The contributors also discuss the associated costs, but also potential benefits of a diverse aid system, and provide some concrete options for the way forward.

This edited volume provides an assessment of an increasingly fragmented aid system. Development cooperation is fundamentally changing its character in the wake of global economic and political transformations and an ongoing debate about what constitutes, and how best to achieve, global development. This also has important implications for the setup of the aid architecture. The increasing number of donors and other actors as well as goals and instruments has created an environment that is increasingly difficult to manoeuvre. Critics describe today's aid architecture as 'fragmented': inefficient, overly complex and rigid in adapting to the dynamic landscape of international cooperation. By analysing the actions of donors and new development actors, this book gives important insights into how and why the aid architecture has moved in this direction. The contributors also discuss the associated costs, but also potential benefits of a diverse aid system, and provide some concrete options for the way forward.

This paper shows that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique Nash equilibrium, explaining aid fragmentation. This equilibrium may be inefficient even without fixed costs, and the inefficiency increases in the equality of donors budgets. The paper presents empirical evidence consistent with theoretical results. These imply that, short of ending donors maximization of relative aid impact, agreements to better coordinate aid allocations are not implementable. Moreover, since policies to increase donor competition in terms of aid effectiveness risk reinforcing relativeness, they may well backfire, as any such reinforcement increases aid fragmentation.

This book includes reports on Multilateral Aid, the Division of Labour and Aid Fragmentation, Aid Predictability to provide an overview of the key trends and developments in the architecture of aid.

Multilateral Aid 2010 covers trends in and total use (core and non-core) of the multilateral system, with a special focus on trust funds from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank.

The aims of and motives for development cooperation have changed significantly in recent times. Besides pursuing short- and longer-term objectives in their own economic, foreign policy and other interests, donors usually have a recognisable and genuine interest in assisting countries in their processes of development.

A series of essays provides an overview of foreign-aid programs today, which utilize nongovernmental sources of aid more than ever, and offers solutions as to how to better coordinate this aid from a variety of sources. Original.