Paying Attention to Aid: A Comparative Study of Aid Policy Change in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

Abstract

Over the course of 2013, a trio of important Western donors unexpectedly announced major redirections of their aid spending trajectories: Australia abandoned a decade-long aid spending expansion; the United Kingdom (UK) became the first G20 country to achieve the 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) aid spending target; and the Netherlands abandoned the 0.7% target after having met or exceeded it for almost four decades. Motivated by this puzzling set of decisions, this thesis responds to the question: why do states change the trajectory of their aid policy?

The existing frameworks offered by the International Relations literature are unable to satisfactorily explain why three similar states would make contemporaneous choices about the trajectory of their aid policy that were both at odds with expectations and divergent from one another. The key weakness of existing literature is its framing around the search for a single driving explanation located at a single level of analysis—either the domestic or international levels. In turn, this thesis attributes this failure to an inability, both methodological and conceptual, to understand the role of individuals in aid policy change and how they handle the competing pressures upon them.

In response, this thesis makes two major moves. First, it appropriates insights from the Foreign Policy Analysis subliterature to build a multilevel framework for reconstructing aid policy decisionmaking episodes. The multilevel framework is used to reconstruct a series of six individual aid policy decisionmaking episodes (two in each case study country) as a basis for understanding why these states decided to reorient their aid spending trajectories. The reconstruction process led to the most important empirical finding of this study: that states change the trajectory of their aid policy when powerful individual political actors pay sustained attention to aid policy issues.

The second move is to draw on the agenda-setting literature to develop a theory of how individual political actors influence the aid-giving behaviour of states. This required clarifying the powerful incentives that usually prevent individual political actors from devoting their scarce attention to aid issues, before identifying circumstances where this tendency is overcome. The actor-specific theory of aid policy change advanced by the thesis incorporates two explanatory mechanisms — decider salience and aid salience shocks. Together, these mechanisms map the attentiveness of individual political actors to aid issues over time. Decider salience explains the top-down, individual actor-driven process by which aid issues reach the political agenda, while aid salience shocks conceptualise the momentum for policy change that emerges once they do.

To demonstrate the utility of these mechanisms, this thesis uses them to organise accounts of aid policy change in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands. Interrogating a state’s aid policy choices from an actor-specific perspective, rather than the actor-general perspective of existing frameworks, generates new understandings of what factors influence aid policy change and how they do so. This thesis finds that the agency of powerful individual actors is crucial in initiating and sustaining aid policy change. For example, one must understand Prime Minister David Cameron’s personal commitment to the 0.7% target to explain the UK’s aid expansion. Yet at the same time, the thesis finds that key domestic and international factors operate to either impede or reinforce the momentum for change. In the case of the UK, momentum towards the 0.7% target was reinforced by a powerful development constituency, a series of institutional path dependencies, and the ascendance of the moderate faction within the Conservative Party who adopted a relatively internationalist approach to global engagement.