
International organizations do not always live up to the expectations and mandates of their member countries. One of the best examples of this gap is the environmental performance of multilateral development banks, which are tasked with allocating and managing approximately half of all development assistance worldwide. In the 1980s and 1990s, the multilateral development banks came under severe criticism for financing projects that caused extensive deforestation, polluted large urban areas, displaced millions of people, and destroyed valuable natural resources. In response to significant and public failures, member countries established or strengthened administrative procedures, citizen complaint mechanisms, project evaluation, and strategic planning processes. All of these reforms intended to close the gap between the mandates and performance of the multilateral development banks by shaping the way projects are approved. Giving Aid Effectively provides a systematic examination of whether these efforts have succeeded in aligning allocation decisions with performance.Mark T. Buntaine argues that the most important way to give aid effectively is selectivity--moving towards projects with a record of success and away from projects with a record of failure for individual recipient countries. This book shows that under certain circumstances, the control mechanisms established to close the gap between mandate and performance have achieved selectivity. Member countries prompt the multilateral development banks to give aid more effectively when they generate information about the outcomes of past operations and use that information to make less successful projects harder to approve or more successful projects easier to approve. This argument is substantiated with the most extensive analysis of evaluations across four multilateral development banks ever completed, together with in-depth case studies and dozens of interviews. More generally, Giving Aid Effectively demonstrates
This book investigates whether administrative reforms and oversight mechanisms have successfully aligned the project allocation decisions of multilateral development banks with their stated environmental and performance mandates. Mark T. Buntaine, an expert in international environmental politics, utilizes a rigorous analytical framework to examine how member countries influence bank behavior. He argues that aid effectiveness is primarily achieved through selectivity, where banks prioritize projects with proven success records while disincentivizing those with histories of failure.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars and policy analysts recognize this work as a significant contribution to the study of international institutional reform and development finance. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which makes it a foundational text for those studying the intersection of environmental governance and international aid policy.
Page Count:
304
Publication Date:
2016-04-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0190467452
ISBN-13:
9780190467456
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