Douglass North is a uniquely creative and inspiring social scientist. The impact of North’s ideas in the area development cooperation can hardly be overstated. By stressing the role of institutions, this scholar has immensely influenced development thinking and practice, providing intellectual...

Le Sénégal est un des pays les plus démocratiques de l’Afrique, très pauvre, et fortement dépendant de l’aide extérieure. A priori, on pourrait s’attendre à ce qu’il soit un des premiers bénéficiaires de la nouvelle approche de l’aide initiée par les donateurs bilatéraux et...

The participation conditionality linked to the PRSP creates a wide range of problems. It is too ambitious to be workable, too vague to be monitored. The pragmatic way out has been for the Breton Woods institutions to be uncommonly lenient in the verification of this conditionality. Governments...

The EC recently launched a new aid instrument for the ACP-community: the “governance incentive tranche”, a modality designed to incentivise ACP-governments to carry out governance reforms. In this paper we analyse whether this new initiative incorporates the principles spurred by the aid...

The new aid approach (NAA) pays particular attention to the politico-institutional dimension of development. It is largely centred around a reform-driven governance agenda. Donors must facilitate and support reform, and this implies that they move away from micro-managed and donor-driven...

The mandatory participation of civil society in the PRSP is hardly ever questioned. It is on the contrary generally applauded by the experts inside and outside of the aid business. If only there could be more of it, things would even be better than they already are, but any start, however...

In the mid-1990s, an initiative was launched to provide special debt relief from public creditors to more than forty Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). In 1999, this initiative was further refined and widened in what has been hailed as a new approach to development co-operation. The...

Budget support entered the aid scene at the turn of the millennium and it is considered as the aid modality par excellence to foster ownership and more effective aid through institutional reform. In 2008-2009 a number of political events in aid receiving African countries however pointed at the...

Belgium's Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO)-sector embodies some of the country's most distinctive characteristics. Two of its main features are the affiliation of many organisations to one of the societal pillars and the divergence of the NGO-landscape on the different sides of the language...