The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid

by Clark C. Gibson, Krister Andersson, Elinor Ostrom

What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. In their analysis, the authors apply the theoretical insights of the new institutional economics to several settings. First, they investigate the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can
produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, the authors use cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Throughout the book, the authors offer suggestions about how to improve aid's effectiveness. These suggestions include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation processes of development assistance programs.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2005

Reviews

[Marty]

The seven pages of table of contents in this 250 page book is a testament to the rigid structure that this book employs, with Chapters, sections, subsections, and sub-subsection, and the great complexity within development aid. For someone relatively new to public policy, this book is a great introduction to concepts, though it would help to be familiar with concepts of game theory. The writing is rather dense, making it slow for a fun reading book, but the material is fascinating.

[Dr. Faheem J. Khan]

My love! An excellent resources for my PhD Research :) Authors spent four years to publish this amazing book on the political economy of development aid. It describes the complexity of aid network, the collective choice and collection action situations and problems; offers institutional analysis framework and the game theory application.
p.s. It's certainly not a fun read!