public administration and development

Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)

Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.1694

AIDING GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

RACHEL M. GISSELQUIST1* AND DANIELLE RESNICK2
1
United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Finland
2
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), USA

SUMMARY
More than a decade after becoming a buzzword on the development agenda, governance remains a high priority for the
international donor community. This article provides an introduction and overview of key findings from the United Nations
University—World Institute for Development Economics Research symposium on “Aiding Government Effectiveness in
Developing Countries.” This symposium moves beyond traditional debates about whether aid supports or undermines “good
governance” in the aggregate to instead focus on donor interventions in two interrelated governance domains. The first domain
examines donor efforts to augment government effectiveness at providing key services to citizens by national and local
authorities. Three studies in the collection therefore focus on policing, regulation, and civic education. The second addresses the un-
derlying administrative and financial institutions and processes that facilitate service delivery. Relevant papers in this regard address
decentralization, civil service reform, and taxation. In assessing what we know about “what works?” and “what could work?” across
these core areas of governance, the contributions shed new light on several key themes, including the dilemma of reconciling gov-
ernance with ownership, the importance of identifying exactly how context and sequencing matters, and the weaknesses in existing
donor evaluation methods. © 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

key words—governance; aid; local ownership; context; evaluation; government effectiveness; good governance
More than a decade after becoming a buzzword, governance is once again a high priority for the international
development community. Indeed, the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda recom-
mended that, along with other goals, “good governance and effective institutions” should play a central role
in renewed thinking about development interventions (United Nations, 2013). This commitment reflects recent
and dramatic demands for increased political liberalization in much of North Africa, the Middle East, and
Southeast Asia as well as a growing embrace of governance issues by a wide range of bilateral and multilateral
donor organizations.1
Like most buzzwords, governance is an oft-used concept with multiple connotations. Nevertheless, surveying
the plethora of definitions employed by various international organizations, Gisselquist (2012: 4) shows that at
its root, governance refers to the way in which power and authority is exercised “to manage the collective affairs
of a community (or a country, society, or nation).” In turn, analyses of governance often take into account the role
of institutions, the dynamics of policymaking, and the relevance of specific interest groups. In addition, governance
has been considered from both a political viewpoint, including the role of political parties, elections, parliaments,
and judiciaries, and from a public administration perspective, considering topics like accountability, transparency,
and efficiency.
This United Nations University—World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)
symposium explicitly examines whether and how both political and economic governance in developing countries
can be enhanced by foreign aid. Importantly, the contributions depart from existing research on this relationship, which
has thus far considered, among many other topics, whether governance improves aid’s effectiveness (e.g., Wright,

*Correspondence to: R. M. Gisselquist, United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER),
Katajanolanlaituri 6B, Helsinki 00160, Finland. E-mail: [email protected]
1
This has been clearly reflected in both the establishment of democracy and governance units within a variety of donor agencies as well as the pursuit
in recent years of political economy tools and approaches to better understand the processes underlying development decisions (OECD, 2008).
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
142 R. M. GISSELQUIST AND D. RESNICK

2008), whether aid augments institutional weaknesses (e.g., Bräutigam and Knack, 2004), whether donors favor
certain types of political regimes (e.g., Dollar and Levin, 2006), and whether aid conditionalities contribute to regime
change (e.g., Morrison, 2007, 2009). By using aggregate indicators and often cross-country statistical analyses, such
research provides useful insights about general relationships that would be obscured by micro evaluations of donor
projects. At the same time, such an approach tends to analyze aid and governance in monolithic terms with little
appreciation of the nuances relevant for policymaking.
By contrast, the articles included in this symposium evaluate foreign aid interventions across a broad range of
countries while directly focusing on effectiveness in specific governance areas. In particular, attention is directed to
two main domains. The first relates to services that should ideally fall under the mandate of governments. In this
regard, providing security and rule of law are paramount government responsibilities, and Otwin Marenin focuses
on efforts to improve policing, particularly in fragile, post-conflict circumstances. A secure, stable and transparent
policymaking environment is not only essential for citizens’ well-being but also an important ingredient for the
private sector to thrive. Colin Kirkpatrick therefore considers efforts to correct market failures through improved
regulation of the private sector. Outside of the economic realm, governments in developing country democracies
benefit from citizens’ understanding of how basic political institutions and processes function. Steven Finkel thus
examines the impact of donor-supported civic education programs, which are aimed at increasing political
knowledge and spreading democratic norms.
The second main domain relates to the underlying organization and functioning of administrative and financial
institutions that, in turn, affect the ability of governments to provide essential services. Low levels of taxation have
long hampered governments, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, from making essential investments in key public
services. However, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad observes a renewed interest by the donor community in domestic resource
mobilization and evaluates donor efforts to assist African governments to reform their national tax systems. Tyler
Dickovick adopts a sub-national perspective to take stock of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralization
initiatives within the African region. In doing so, he distinguishes between donor attempts to increase both the
quantity and quality of decentralization and highlights the trade-offs that donors face between these two goals.
Implementing decentralization programs and improving tax revenue capacity both require a qualified and efficient
civil service. Sarah Repucci analyzes when and why so many civil service reforms have largely failed and what
lessons donors can learn to enhance their interventions.
Clearly, all six issues are interrelated, and both successful and failed donor interventions in one area can have
substantial spillover effects in the others. The genesis of these contributions was a multi-year research program
at the UNU-WIDER on “Foreign Aid Research and Communication” (ReCom). The aim of ReCom was to identify
what types of foreign aid interventions work and what potential innovative approaches in foreign aid could be
feasible. Although ReCom focused on a range of themes, including economic growth, social sectors, the
environment, and gender, this symposium only features research explicitly on governance.
The rest of this overview article situates the findings from this symposium within the broader academic and
policy literature on aid and governance. As such, the paper first elaborates on the donor’s dilemma of trying to
improve government effectiveness while simultaneously respecting the Paris Declaration’s tenets on local
ownership of reforms. The symposium authors jointly highlight that politics plays a central role in many of these
reforms, but if donors address this reality, they may undermine local ownership. Subsequently, the authors’
findings regarding context and sequencing are discussed. Attention is then drawn to collective observations about
areas in which evaluations of donor-supported governance reforms could be strengthened. The article concludes by
summarizing the implications of this symposium for continuing research on governance and for donor
interventions in the area of governance, highlighting answers to the key questions of “what works?” and “what
could work?” as well as identifying remaining knowledge gaps.

THE DILEMMA OF RECONCILING GOVERNANCE WITH OWNERSHIP

One of the defining policy shifts in the aid community occurred with the launching of the Paris Declaration on Aid
Effectiveness in 2005, which was reaffirmed in Busan, South Korea, in 2011. Of the five key “partnership”

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
 AIDING GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS 143

Locally-driven Locally-directed, Locally-selected, Donor-driven

Donor-supported Donor-directed

More ownership Less ownership

Figure 1. A spectrum of ownership.

principles promoted by donors, “ownership” was given priority.2 The aim was to shift away from donor-driven
conditionalities and instead ensure that donors align their conditions according to developing countries’ own
national development strategies.3
Ownership, however, is not a dichotomous concept but rather consists of multiple degrees along a continuum
(Figure 1). At the most extreme, “donor-driven” aid implies a complete lack of ownership and instead involves
the promotion of issues that are not considered important by governments and importing reform templates from
more developed countries. A minimal form of ownership occurs when recipient countries have identified a
particular issue to be a high priority in their development strategies, but the actual design and implementation
process may still be determined by donors, resulting in a category labeled “locally selected, donor-directed.” In
such cases, donors may even base the design of certain policies on initiatives that emerged from other developing
countries. For instance, key design elements of conditional cash transfer programs implemented in Latin America
have now been advocated in other developing regions. Another example is participatory budgeting, which enables
citizens to discuss and decide how public budgets should be allocated and initially emerged in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
in the late 1980s. As a step towards increasing transparency and combating corruption, donors subsequently began
to promote the engagement of civil society in budget processes in many other countries (World Bank, 2000;
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2001).

More ownership, less ownership

More substantively, ownership may infer influence over the policy design and sequencing to address a priority
issue but still requires donor funding or technical assistance in order to implement the reform, resulting in “locally
directed, donor-supported” interventions. A key example in this regard was Rwanda’s Gacaca courts that were used
to prosecute perpetrators of the 1994 genocide in the context of a weak formal court system. While based on a
traditional community tribunal system, the courts received 60 per cent of their funds from the donor community
(Jamar, 2012). At its most extreme, ownership would involve recipient countries not only designing policy reforms
but also overseeing their implementation. For instance, Malawi’s fertilizer input subsidy program was initially
opposed by the donors when launched in 2005 (Harrigan, 2008) but was subsequently supported by donors and
replicated under alternative design frameworks in other African countries.
Most of the topics discussed in this symposium have been “owned” by recipient governments in at least the
minimal sense that they have been identified as priority issues in national development strategies, such as Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Private sector regulation and reforms to the tax system and civil service
typically have fallen into the “locally selected, donor-directed” category. In some cases, this can result in relatively
uniform, technocratic frameworks applied across a broad range of circumstances, with mixed implications for
effectiveness. For instance, Repucci (this issue) observes that the principles underlying civil service reform still
reflect the new public management reform experiences from New Zealand, the USA, and the UK. Fjeldstad (this
issue) reflects on the performance of the autonomous revenue agency model that donors have especially promoted
in much of Anglophone Africa.
In many instances, decentralization has been more of a “locally directed, donor-supported” intervention. As
Dickovick (this issue) details, the choice of whether to decentralize historically has been the choice of developing

2
The other four principles were better alignment of donor policies with country strategies, improved harmonization of donor interventions, better
managing aid for results to improve decision making, and mutual accountability between donors and partner countries for the use of develop-
ment resources.
3
http://www.oecd.org/development/effectiveness/34428351.pdf

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
144 R. M. GISSELQUIST AND D. RESNICK

country governments based on concerns over political stability or as a means to gain sub-national political support.
While donor assistance has in some cases expanded the degree of decentralization and the capacity of local
authorities, recipient governments have also largely been responsible for how decentralization is sequenced across
the fiscal, administrative, and political domains. Likewise, Marenin (this issue) details instances of locally directed
police reforms, such as in post-war Liberia where President Johnson Sirleaf prioritized recruitment of female
officers and changes in training, recruitment, and specialized units.
By contrast, civic education programs are predominantly donor-driven interventions and increasingly
accompany donors’ electoral assistance programs (Finkel, this issue). In some ways, this reflects that the ownership
agenda has predominantly been directed at the development aid community rather than at the field of democracy
aid, which focuses more on elections, human rights, parliamentary training, and party strengthening. Indeed, even
in the PRSPs, governance is typically advocated from an economic perspective, emphasizing public administration
goals, while less attention is given to political governance challenges.
This is problematic in that many donors simultaneously pursue development and democracy goals, often
creating uncomfortable trade-offs between these two types of aid (Resnick and van de Walle, 2013). Booth
(2012) also notes that support for local ownership of the development agenda implies that governments are
intrinsically developmentally oriented, when realistically, many are more concerned with short-term political goals
(refer also to Unsworth, 2009). Faust (2010) argues that ownership typically requires broad, societal consensus
about policy directions but that this consensus tends to be rare in developing countries, as do strong democratic
institutions to facilitate policy negotiation (refer also to Van de Walle, 2010).4
Underlying all these critiques is a recognition that the ownership and governance agendas are not easily
compatible. Because local elites may be hesitant to engage in practices that could undermine the status quo or
threaten established interests, many important governance reforms will essentially lack local ownership. In turn,
without domestic political will, donor interventions are likely to be less effective than intended.
Throughout this symposium, the authors stress that while ownership remains key for reforms to occur, so does a
fundamental grappling with underlying political processes and relationships. For instance, Fjeldstad highlights that
there are political disincentives for closing tax loopholes, even if that means more public revenue is lost.
Kirkpatrick observes that regulation of the private sector can result in political capture if it is under the control
of certain ministries. Marenin points out that political leadership is paramount in determining the degree to which
policing and broader security sector reforms occur. Likewise, Dickovick discusses how decentralisation is
ultimately about reforming intergovernmental relationships between the central government, sub-national
authorities, civil society, and the broader citizenry. These and other findings pinpoint that donor effectiveness
depends not only on ensuring that recipient countries own an issue and a reform process but also on recognizing
the political reasons for when and why ownership is missing.

CONTEXT AND SEQUENCING

Closely related to the issue of ownership are challenges of taking context into account in the design, implementa-
tion, and analysis of reform efforts. As illustrated throughout this symposium, context remains an overriding
determinant of the success of reform and particularly of donor-led interventions across multiple governance
domains. This focus on context, also highlighted in the broader literature, represents a clear critique of the “one size
fits all” approaches of more donor-directed and donor-driven interventions of the 1980s and 1990s (Andrews,
2008; Booth, 2012; Pritchett et al., 2012). As Andrews (2008: 380) argues, the underlying conception of “good”
governance embodied in much of this work has drawn heavily on examples from developed countries—the idea
of “Sweden or Denmark on a good day, perhaps.” Approaches based on private sector models, such as the new

4
Others have also criticized contradictions between the ownership principle and the other guiding principles in the Paris Declaration. For
instance, Sjöstedt (2013) notes that managing aid for better results requires donor governments to more strictly prioritize their interventions
to ensure measurable outcomes, which conflicts with the emphasis on allowing recipient governments to define the priorities most relevant to
their countries.

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
 AIDING GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS 145

public management, for instance, further might be criticized for insufficient attention to the distinct context and ca-
pabilities of the public versus private sector.
Although the importance of context is highlighted in the literature with respect to many areas of foreign aid, as
this symposium illustrates, the challenge of moving beyond one-size-fits-all approaches may be especially
pronounced in the governance area, where reform in many ways reflects a “chicken and egg” problem. As each
of the studies in this issue describes, the success of governance interventions across domains is affected by the
underlying quality of governance and public institutions themselves; governance interventions seek to strengthen
public institutions, but weak public institutions and poor capacity also imperil them.
In this respect, context may pose particular challenges for governance reform in countries with extremely weak
institutions, such as post-conflict and fragile states, that lack the institutional capacity to implement projects or
reforms drawn from stronger institutional contexts. For instance, as Marenin (this issue) discusses with respect
to security sector reform in Sierra Leone, the Inspector General of Police, appointed in the late 1990s, did every-
thing “by the book,” adopting reforms that “closely mirrored the recommendations provided by the latest research,”
but the fragile context imperiled reform efforts. Despite reform efforts, the security sector remains heavily
politicized and widely considered to be ineffective and corrupt. The adoption of value-added taxes (VATs)
provides another example: As Fjeldstad (this issue) discusses, VATs have been relatively less successful as a
source of revenue generation in low-income countries than in developed countries. Among other issues, weak
organizational capacity and the absence of reliable written or electronic records of economic transactions upon
which to base VAT assessment make it harder to collect. The VAT can also create new opportunities for fraud
and corruption. Pritchett et al.’s (2012) discussion of “isomorphic mimicry” captures this broad concern well:
Although institutions may be created or reformed to formally comply with international best practice, they may
actually operate quite differently and not fulfill core functions, further eroding institutional capacity over time.
There is little debate in the literature that context matters, but we need much greater clarity on precisely what this
means for the design and analysis of donor interventions. Context refers to a wide range of factors. Collectively, the
contextual variables highlighted by the studies in this symposium include colonial heritage and history, the level
and distribution of wealth, geographic and population size, ethnic divisions, the history of conflict, political will
and leadership, the distribution of power, the nature of the state, and characteristics of specific political institutions
such as electoral rules and the party system. In short, the range of contextual factors that may influence governance
interventions cover such vast terrain that a recommendation that context be taken into account without any further
elaboration is neither operationally nor analytically useful.
Instead, the contributions in this symposium begin to specify precisely which contextual variables matter most
and why with respect to the design and analysis of particular governance interventions. Dickovick’s systematic
discussion of the factors that influence central government incentives to decentralize and how these incentives,
in turn, influence the success of aid interventions to promote decentralization provides one example of what might
be further elaborated for other areas. As Repucci argues, the development of analytical frameworks or models of
change, such as Nunberg et al’s. (2010) agent-based stakeholder model, could also provide clearer ways to map
the influence of key contextual factors and improve programs accordingly. Another approach is presented by
Finkel, who analyzes the impact of civic education programs across multiple country contexts (the Dominican
Republic, Poland, South Africa, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), showing that several clear
patterns of effects emerge despite the diversity of these contexts. He also spotlights one key contextual variable
as significant, high levels of ethnic conflict and political violence, which he shows may “mitigate or temper” some
of these positive effects as illustrated by evaluations of the National Civic Education Programme II that ran in Kenya
from 2007–2008.
From a practitioner’s perspective, understanding how context matters (and does not) is important, but even more
important is what to do about it in program design and implementation. The contributions to this symposium
suggest several ways forward. Repucci and Marenin, for instance, both highlight the value of engaging experts with
deep local knowledge, working closely with local counterparts and priorities, and planning that involves solid con-
textual analysis, along with flexibility in implementation that may include providing local actors with the autonomy
to design the best way forward. As Repucci discusses, civil service reforms in Bolivia and Russia offer two

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
146 R. M. GISSELQUIST AND D. RESNICK

examples of what this might involve in practice. Repucci and Marenin’s recommendations are similar in many
ways to Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock’s model of how to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to building
state capability through “Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation.” This approach highlights four components: solving
locally identified problems; creating an authorizing environment that promotes experimentation; providing for tight
feedback loops to facilitate active, experiential learning; and engaging broad sets of actors to ensure the viability,
legitimacy, and relevance of programs (Andrews et al., 2012: 2)
Attention to timing and sequencing can also be important components in addressing contextual challenges and
adapting to each country’s institutional environment. A simple example is offered by Kirkpatrick: Without the
reform of licensing regulations, the reform of enterprise regulation procedures has little chance of success.
Sequencing, and relatedly the adoption of incremental versus comprehensive reform, can also be an important
component of addressing the political context, including pockets of opposition to reform. Repucci illustrates with
diverse examples from civil service reform in Russia, Zambia, and Indonesia. More broadly, as Marenin highlights,
donors need to “learn how to play local politics. If they want to be successful, they cannot refuse to be drawn into
local events, despite their desire to appear neutral and giving only technical advice.”

IMPACT EVALUATION
A final theme highlighted in this collection concerns the weaknesses in existing impact evaluations and analyses.
One problem is the paucity of data. In the area of regulatory reform, as Kirkpatrick reports, quantitative data are
limited, as is the information that can be extracted from project and program reports. Much of the quantitative
analysis on the impact of regulatory reform draws on panel data from the World Bank’s Doing Business and
Worldwide Governance Indicators databases. With such data, cross-country heterogeneity may pose serious
problems of interpretation. Moreover, regulation is generally measured in these sources as a quantity or level, while
it might, in fact, be changes in regulation that are more important for analyzing its main economic effects.
Furthermore, in considering the effects of regulation, quantitative analyses tend to focus on economic welfare,
but regulation is also intended to improve social and environmental welfare, which are not well captured in the
extant data. In the area of civil service reform, as Repucci underscores, international organizations in general have
released very little information about their support of reform efforts, although both governments and civil society
should have the opportunity to evaluate such past experience.
Assessing causality is another core challenge in impact evaluation. Even with strong quantitative data, for
instance, uncovering a statistically significant relationship between two variables does not prove that one causes
the other. Indeed, as Kirkpatrick highlights with respect to the effect of regulation on economic growth, it is equally
possible for the causal arrow to point the other way, with strong economies lowering regulation and weak
economies increasing it. In unpacking such causality claims, both very fine grained quantitative evidence and
rigorous qualitative analyses may be necessary. Contextual factors that mediate the effects of interventions also
pose problems in assessing causality. Such factors might of course be included as controls in analyses—but this
relies on an underlying model of how contextual factors matter to outcomes, and as we have seen previously, such
models are underdeveloped. Such a model could also inform more rigorous selection of cases, avoiding cherry
picking of success stories. As Fjeldstad alludes to, assessing causality can become even more complex when
one is concerned with the secondary effects of governance reforms, such as the impact of tax administration
improvements on the growth of the informal sector or the ability of local governments to deliver services.
Finkel’s detailed discussion of four evaluations of civic education programs provides some examples of the sort
of evidence that can be used to address causality claims, including data from post-treatment cross-sectional
surveys, longitudinal studies measuring pre-treatment and post-treatment responses, and experimental studies. In
studies without a pre-treatment or control group, techniques such as propensity score matching provided a way
to compare individuals who received “treatment” with similar individuals in the control group, thus allowing for
assessment of the causal effects of the treatment without the effects of other (contextual) variables.
Experimental methods and randomized controlled trials are another solution that has been offered to such
methodological and data limitations, with some scholars advocating them as the best means of understanding “what

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
 AIDING GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS 147

works” in foreign aid (e.g., Druckman et al., 2006; Banerjee, 2007). Such methods have been used to some effect in
the study of governance reform, particularly with reference to political participation, corruption, and the
performance of civil servants (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2009; Moehler, 2010; Olken et al., 2011). However,
as Gisselquist and Niño-Zarazúa (2013) argue, there are also some major challenges to their use in this area
because of their inability to manipulate—for practical or ethical reasons—many key variables of interest in the
governance area, as well as their inability to examine processes that may unfold well beyond the normal lifetime
of an experiment.

CONCLUSION
In assessing what we know about “what works?” and “what could work?” in donor interventions across six core
areas of governance, the contributions to this symposium highlight several themes, including the dilemma of
reconciling governance with ownership, the importance of context and what might be done about it, and the
weaknesses in existing evaluation methods. Several other issues, such as the importance of donor coordination,
are also highlighted in selected studies.
Methodological caveats notwithstanding, this collection also provides clear answers in each of the governance
areas to “what works?” and “what could work?” In the area of policing, Marenin extracts the lessons from four case
studies of (partially) successful reforms in Africa (Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, and Liberia). In terms of
regulatory reform, Kirkpatrick concludes that adapting institutional processes to each country’s institutional and
regulatory environment is key. Dickovick similarly highlights the influence of contextual factors to the success
of decentralization efforts, while elaborating several programmatic characteristics that tend to work, including,
for instance, the development of “meaningful roles and interactions for central governments, civil society, and
other actors, including donors”. Finkel, on the other hand, finds that civic education programs can have
significant influence on political information, political participation, and (to a lesser extent) civic competence,
across diverse contexts. Particular program features, including the duration of education programs and the use of
active, participatory teaching methods, “work” more generally across multiple contexts.
In the area of taxation, Fjeldstad offers a number of recommendations with respect to improving tax policy and
design, creating more effective tax administrations, and encouraging more productive state–society engagement
around taxation. For each of these areas, he reviews what has and has not worked, and why, as well as providing
specific recommendations for future engagement. More broadly, he argues that tax reform handled well is one
component of what works in building stronger state institutions, public accountability, and democratic governance
(Braütigam, Fjeldstad, and Moore, 2008). Finally, Repucci synthesizes and examines best practices to promote
successful donor interventions in the area of civil service reform, providing examples for each.
Many aid skeptics point to corruption in developing countries to conclude that aid contributes to poor
governance (e.g., Moyo, 2009; Easterly, 2010). Notwithstanding biases in the choice of cases used to justify such
assertions, such claims obscure the important fact that governance involves much more than corruption. By
contrast, all of the studies featured in this symposium revolve instead around meso-level analyses focused on
specific governance interventions, allowing for a meaningful examination of ownership challenges, political will,
and contextual factors in a much more detailed way than would be possible by looking at the aid–governance
relationship in the aggregate.
At least three fruitful areas for further analysis emerge from the symposium. First, at a time of contracting donor
resources, it would be useful to delineate which aspects of governance should be prioritized for intervention from
an analytical standpoint and how they can be reconciled with those governance areas currently “owned” by
recipient countries. As highlighted previously, a second area for future research addresses how exactly context
matters and how precisely to take it into account in a feasible manner given that donor programming often must
encompass a range of different country settings. Finally, more attention is needed to the development of rigorous
project and program evaluations, addressing the key methodological and data limitations of existing work and
learning from failures as much as successes.

© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad
148 R. M. GISSELQUIST AND D. RESNICK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This UNU-WIDER symposium was supported by the ‘Foreign Aid Research and Communication’ (ReCom)
program. We gratefully acknowledge specific program contributions from the governments of Denmark (Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, Danish International Development Agency) and Sweden (Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency) for ReCom, as well as core financial support to the UNU-WIDER work program from the
governments of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the UK.

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© 2014 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 34, 141–148 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/pad