Description
The use of bypass aid delivery channels has been popularised recently as a means to alleviating donor concerns over institutional quality in the most in-need recipient developing countries. Bypass aid delivery provides a tool for bilateral donors to disburse aid while circumventing recipient governments, in cases where concerns of recipient government corruption or similar institutional inefficiencies are high. The international aid community has praised this innovation as a solution to the traditional dilemma that the most in-need recipient countries are often the ones where the likelihood of aid capture by political elites or bureaucracies is also the highest. Nevertheless, in this paper I offer an alternative approach to the use of bypass aid delivery channels. Building on the case of AfT, I advance evidence that bypass channels are not primarily used by donors in cases where recipient institutional quality is lower. Instead, donors leverage bypass delivery channels when negotiations with the recipient government in question are less likely to conclude in their favour. This paper questions the use of bypass delivery channels, arguing it represents a new form of donor interventionism in aid-recipient developing countries in contexts where the self-interest of donors is less likely to be realised via traditional government-to-government aid negotiations.
