Suchergebnisse

Transparency is a widely used concept in debates on international politics, from transnational anti-corruption campaigns to renewed requests for greater disclosure on health, finance, or even security issues. Calls for transparency date back at least to the League of Nations, when internationalists demanded open diplomacy. Yet, it is in the subfield of GEG, and its developments on nonstate actors as a key research topic (see introduction), where the practice and theory of transparency has made the most profound inroads (Gupta 2010a). GEG has been a particularly fertile ground for the development of informational governance (Mol 2008) and the rise of numerous transparency initiatives which have been analyzed in a rapidly developing literature. Importantly, current GEG research is also highly relevant for other IR subfields. For one, recent GEG research can help IR scholars to further refine the concept of transparency and to increase conceptual clarity and sophistication. Second, research on GEG has improved our understanding of the factors that determine the effectiveness of transparency as a governance tool in international politics.

This chapter reviews empirical literature on foreign aid and QoG. The chapter begins with a description of how scholarship on foreign aid and QoG developed in conjunction with prominent debates in the development community. The chapter discusses three major debates: whether or not QoG moderates foreign aid effectiveness, whether or not donors give aid selectively based on QoG, and whether or not foreign aid undermines or can help build QoG. With regard to aid effectiveness, the most recent literature suggests that aid can be effective even under conditions of poor QoG. With regard to selectivity, the existing literature shows an increasing selectivity for overall aid flows since the end of the Cold War and provides evidence of selectivity in terms of type of aid. The evidence that aid undermines QoG is not as strong as has been claimed by some of the initial studies in this literature. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways forward for all three literatures.