Description
With nearly $150 billion in official development assistance, in addition to hundreds of billions in remittances and other forms of aid from ‘emerging’ donors such as philanthropists, diasporas and middle-income countries, the politics of aid still play a key role in shaping international relations. With the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the international society has made significant steps in revising and broadening its understanding of ‘development’. The new narrative recognizes the mutual destiny all countries share in terms of social, economic and ecological sustainability. By dealing with interconnected challenges such as migration, conflict, terrorism and climate-change, development co-operation has broken into new frontiers and deepened the links between foreign aid, foreign policy, and domestic policies. At the same time, 2015 may have been “the zenith of global multilateralism”, as multilateral co-operation is increasingly coming under threat.
This dual development has important implications for our understanding of international agenda setting and contemporary international relations. As present-day development policies rarely arise from a single source or context, we need to examine how both the domestic and the international policy arena function as enabling environments to policy-making. The paper seek to advance the state of the art of on agenda setting and policy-making by compounding data from Norway, Malawi, and multilateral institutions. It sets out to answer the question: what actors and processes form the political agenda within the rapidly changing field of aid and development?
The paper shows the increasing linkages between foreign aid and security concerns in modern-day development co-operation. Taking the case of Norwegian policies on fragile states, migration and global education, it also show how the low salience of aid combined with its normative character enables policy entrepreneurs to pursue a number of ambitious goals relatively detached from domestic politics and oversight. The data material consists of more than 70 interviews, document analysis and participant observation.
