Under what conditions does foreign aid in a post-conflict environment foster state building and consolidation? This paper argues that in the aftermath of war for an aid regime to reinforce state building it needs to ensure continuity in strength of the state and to use recipient mechanisms and...

Academic studies of aid to Africa have typically asked how "we" in the West can get "them" in Africa to adopt economic and political systems that look like our own. Suspicion of African politics has led to the assumption that governments seeking to resist the developmental models promoted by...

Should aid be better coordinated? And if so, how? The case for aid coordination is a powerful one. As aid poured into Haiti in the wake of a massive earthquake in January 2010, television coverage around the world broadcast two different realities. One story was about well-organized aid-givers...

The quality of governance and institutions is increasingly seen as a fundamental factor in shaping the development prospects of poor countries. As a consequence, donor agencies have increasingly allocated resources to providing technical assistance for improving governance standards in such...

This paper describes three Bolivian policy reversals on aid, trade and climate change. The standard IPE explanation for policy reversals - a change in the payoff of cooperation - often begs the question of why a small developing state might choose to restrict its global policy space in contexts...

Mali is a landlocked country in francophone West Africa that ranked 175th (out of 177) in the United Nations Human Development Index in 2006. Its economy is mostly based on agriculture, and is marked by a high dependence on external assistance. However, the democratization process began in 1991,...