Agents of Aid: A Survey Experiment on Aid in Conflict-affected Countries

• In Event: Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Abstract

International aid donors have increasingly focused their resources on fragile and conflict-affected countries to help them break out of the cycle of violence and underdevelopment. Scholarship on international aid, however, argues that donors are not motivated by the needs of the recipient country but by their own strategic interest. Relying on an original survey-embedded experiment administered to over 1,100 experts working for donor and implementing organizations, this paper argues that aid allocation behavior is not determined by strategic interest alone. Instead, it is based in heuristic, as opposed to holistic, foreign policy decision-making that leads donors to allocate aid in predictable ways in response to signals from the conflict-affected country that conflict dynamics are increasing or decreasing. The responses from the first global survey experiment of donor and implementer country-level staff, shows that these results hold regardless of the recipient country or donor organization.

Author

• Susanna Campbell, American University