Aiding War or Peace? : the Insiders’ View on Aid to Postconflict Transitions

Abstract

International aid donors now allocate the majority of development assistance to conflict-affected countries. Aid scholarship largely classifies this subset of recipients as poorly governed countries where donors bypass the government in favor or third-party implementers. We argue that further disaggregation shows how donors use different aid types—humanitarian, transitional, development, and budgetary aid—to support postconflict transitions. We expect that when a postconflict country signals progression toward peace, donors will give development and budgetary aid to the government and withdraw humanitarian and transitional aid; when the country signals regression toward violence, donors will do the inverse. To test our expectations, we use an original survey-embedded experiment completed by 1,130 aid experts around the globe. Our findings generally support our expectations, although they reveal important nuances. In particular, they show that experts are more certain of how donors aid countries that are progressing toward peace than those that are returning to war.