Contests, NGOs, and Decentralizing Aid

International donors usually have particular goals they want to achieve with their foreign aid, e.g., poverty alleviation. In the international aid story lobbying by potential recipient groups attempting to capture the donor's support plays a potentially important role for non-governmental organizations. We model this situation as a hierarchical contest and compare the implications of a centralized allocation process with a decentralized allocation process with non-governmental organizations as intermediaries. Copyright © 2006 The Authors; Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.