The Influence of the Millennium Development Goals on Foreign Aid Priorities

• In Event: Interest, Need, and the Politics of Foreign Aid

Abstract

As the international community has embraced a campaign to "leave no one behind" in pursuit of the 2015-2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is renewed interest in learning from the predecessor goals -- the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -- in terms of how they were effective (or not) in catalyzing development action. We ask: to what extent did the MDG agenda influence states' foreign aid-giving practices? Others have noted that the adoption of the MDGs coincided with broader shifts development priorities and practices, and thus attributing changes in states' behaviors to the MDG agenda itself is difficult. We exploit the fact that the MDG agenda was amended mid-campaign in 2007 with new targets related to employment, reproductive health, HIV/AIDs, and biodiversity. We use project-level data from AidData to evaluate whether changes to the MDG agenda led states to increasingly prioritize the new targets after 2007. We find that states tended to devote greater proportions of aid to the new targets after 2007. We also develop and test a set of hypotheses on the conditions under which states should be most responsive and attentive to changes in these priorities. In particular, we examine how domestic institutions and integration with international organizations conditioned states' responsiveness to the new agenda. We find some evidence that states that were more involved in intergovernmental organizations were more responsive to the changed agenda for some targets, though not others.

Authors

• Matthew DiLorenzo, Old Dominion University

• Devon Bennett, Old Dominion University