[...]... (or the lack of it) between the assumptions held and final decision-making 6 Introduction In addition to studying the policy theories supporting aid selectivity, this book also attempts to analyse the implementation of selectivity policies in the case of the World Bank, the Netherlands and the United States This part of the analysis, which tries to establish the impact of certain key variables on the. .. the strengths and weaknesses of the principle are and what future the concept might have in development assistance policies 1.4 Outline of the book This book is both about the making of policy and about the way in which policy ideas are being implemented A substantial part of the book deals with the analysis of policies that claim to apply the argument of aid selectivity to development assistance The. .. of the donor community, brought together in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), to reformulate the objectives of development aid in the light of declining aid levels (Development Assistance Committee 1996) Although the DAC (1996: 1) acknowledged that the efforts of countries and societies to help themselves have been the main ingredients in their success’, the committee emphasised the. .. variables on the selection of recipient countries and the allocation of aid over recipients, is performed with the use of quantitative-empirical techniques The objective of this part of the analysis is to establish to what extent the choices reflected in country selection and allocation can be explained on the basis of the very criteria that were applied in the policy theory of the respective donor country... economics and the emphasis of information for the functioning of markets has led to a rethinking of the role of the market in development Importantly, the proper working of the market was increasingly seen to depend on certain institutions, such as a system of property rights, the rule of law and contract enforcement In the mid-1990s, policy-makers started to question publicly the prevalent methods of aid delivery... performance-based allocation policy The chapter contains an analysis of the implementation of this policy, to the degree that this is possible given the relative lack of transparency of the decision making process at the World Bank The chapter is concluded with an evaluation of policy-based allocation, focusing primarily on the policy theory, the methodology and the role of the World Bank as a multilateral... through the adoption of mechanisms of country selectivity The analysis of the United Kingdom’s development assistance policy since 1997 focuses on the increasing emphasis on poverty as a criterion for aid, alongside the move to different aid modalities The section on the United Kingdom’s aid policy also discusses the desire to implement ideas of ‘mutual accountability’ between the donors and recipients of. .. povertyrelated criteria since the end of the 1990s Country selectivity is the most visible, and arguably the most political, part of the aid selectivity agenda, as this element is the clearest response to the criticism that aid monies have often been used to support countries with insufficient capacity to produce results The next chapters are an attempt to analyse the ways in which country selectivity has been... provides an analysis of the paradigm shift that occurred in the thinking about development assistance at the end of the 1990s The discussion in this chapter builds on the interpretation of good governance and development assistance in sections 1.2 and 1.3 Chapter 2 argues that the emergence of the selectivity agenda has been the result of a successful ‘framing’ of development policy in terms of effectiveness... contexts The cases of the World Bank’s performance-based allocation mechanism, the Dutch policy on the selection of aid recipients, and the United States’ Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) have been chosen as these are the clearest examples of contemporary policies based on country selectivity The analysis of these cases serves to establish how country selectivity has been applied by several important aid . describes in detail the policies of aid selectivity adopted by the World Bank, the Netherlands and the United States since the end of the 1990s. The main assumptions. class="bi x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" The Politics of Aid Selectivity With the ending of the political dichotomy in world politics around 1990, the good governance principle