Within the last decades, the share of government aid in overall external financial flows to developing countries has decreased. It is estimated that between 75 and 85% of all current financial flows to developing countries derive from a variety of private sources, including remittances,...

Support for private sector development is an important item on the ODA budgets of most donor countries and recently, there has even been an upsurge in the weight given to 'private sector led growth'. The paper raises the basic questions: Why inherently commercial activities should actually be...

At the centre of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is the idea of country ownership. It is meant to change the situation in many aid dependent African countries where donors dominate decision-making over which policies are adopted, how aid is spent, and what conditions are attached to...

Success with direct support to the poor is highly dependent on the particular context in which it is implemented. Cash Transfer Programmes, handing over funds directly to poor households - typically on certain conditions, such as school attendance of the children - have the potential of creating...

How EU policy for global development will look in the future depends on how the organisation manages two key challenges: The changing political dynamics within an enlarged EU with a diverse set of preferences - and the evolving external environment characterized by emphasis on global public...

Everyone knows that aid is not working as intended, and that something must change. The big question is how to change the status quo. The current international aid debate is characterized by dichotomies and over-simplified generalizations. In order to push the debate forward and identify...

This working paper provides an analysis of the efforts by the European Union to support democracy building in developing countries. It focuses on the specific question of the legal obligations of, and limits for, the European Union in seeking to further democracy through its policies directed at...

The effects of development aid have been extensively discussed, and the extent to which aid has been effective in achieving its goals is widely disputed. At the same time, several studies and theorists point towards the unintended and potentially negative effects of aid. This working paper gives...

This paper argues that the emergence of stabilisation as a concept out of peace-building, state-building and counter-insurgency theories has carried with it some of the key weaknesses of international intervention, in particular the idea that imposing western liberal systems on non-western...