Bureaucracy and Treaty Compliance: Evidence from an OECD Agreement

• In Event: Global Governance and Development

Abstract

Why do some states adhere to international commitments while others disregard them? Research has proposed various institutional and political explanations for states reneging on international obligations. In this paper, I examine the role of a previously unconsidered actor: domestic bureaucracies. I argue that bureaucracies can undermine in a state's compliance by offering a forum to special interests hostile to an agreement. When states provide policymaking authority to bureaucracies whose interests do not coincide with an international agreement, those bureaucracies will drag down the state’s level of compliance. I examine this theory through a specific global agreement designed to decrease the percentage of aid that is “tied” to the purchase of donor-state products and services—a practice that is popular among certain special interests but known to decrease the effectiveness of foreign aid.
Using cross-national evidence from a newly coded bureaucracy-level aid dataset, I find variation in states’ and bureaucracies’ foreign aid tying practices following a 2001 OECD aid-tying agreement. I find that the decision to renege on the agreement came not from states themselves but from non-development-oriented domestic bureaucracies such as departments of interior, labor, and agriculture. When traditional development bureaucracies untie aid, the special interests that benefited from tied aid simply move on to other bureaucracies. This is especially pronounced in states with many distinct agencies carrying out foreign aid policy. I argue that this is a result of forum shopping by interest groups who benefit from foreign aid tying.

Author

• Shannon Carcelli, University of Maryland, College Park