The international aid effectiveness agenda from a theoretical perspective

Some ten years ago, the international community acknowledged that the international system of development cooperation was in urgent need for reform and formulated a comprehensive agenda for enhancing its effectiveness. In the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), further developed in the Accra Agenda for Action (2008) and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (2011), all important bilateral and multilateral donors and more than 100 partner countries agreed on principles and commitments that enlarge the international regulatory framework of development cooperation quite considerably and, if implemented, amount to a silent revolution in international aid.

There is hardly any policy area that already after a few years was submitted to such a comprehensive and internationally comparable monitoring and evaluation process as has been the case with the reform of the international aid system. On the one hand, the OECD reviewed the implementation of the Paris Declaration in three monitoring surveys (2007, 2008, 2011). On the other hand, an independent international evaluation conducted in two phases (2007-2008, 2009-2011) assessed the Paris-Accra agenda with regard to both its implementation and impact, and basically confirmed the relevance of the principles and commitments. The implementation of the agenda, while falling short of the targets, has improved the system in several regards and produced positive development impacts in some areas.

In the theoretical debate, the reform of the international aid system has so far been critically commented on mainly from the perspectives of political economy, institutional economics and theories of governance less so from the perspectives of other theoretical strands (e.g. global governance, international regimes, international cooperation, formation of international normative orders). This is the starting point of the research project. Its assumption is that the assessment of the international aid effectiveness agenda can benefit from these theoretical strands and, conversely, can yield additional insights for the latter. Issues to be covered include the conditions of emergence, the legitimacy, the impact and the transferability of the achievements of the agenda.