Since 1990, the international donor community has pledged billions of dollars to dozens of countries emerging from violent conflict or undergoing political-economic transformation. Such assistance is intended to rehabilitate fragile states by encouraging political stability and sustained economic growth. Through grants, loans, and credits multilateral institutions and UN member states have encouraged war-torn and transitional societies to demobilize military forces, restore essential services, replace obsolete infrastructure, reform political institutions, reconstitute financial entities, embrace structural adjustment, and revive commercial activity. Good intentions notwithstanding, failures in both donor and recipient countries have resulted in repeated delays and recurrent gaps in aid disbursement. This discrepancy between proclaimed aspirations and practical follow-through could threaten vulnerable politics whose collapse would endanger regional peace and security.
To improve our understanding of this phenomenon, CIC and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) convened an international group of scholars and policymakers to conduct a comparative study of the causes and consequences of failures to fulfill pledges of aid. Employing a common methodology, pairs of scholars from donor and recipient states investigated the aid experiences of six countries: Cambodia, El Salvador, Bosnia, Mozambique, South Africa, and the Palestinian-Administered Territories (West Bank and Gaza).
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