Using foreign aid contracts to pursue participatory approaches to development within large foreign aid agencies
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| Author | Amy Beck Harris |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.2024 |
Received: 9 February 2022
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Revised: 3 August 2022
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Accepted: 11 June 2023
DOI: 10.1002/pad.2024
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Using foreign aid contracts to pursue participatory
approaches to development within large foreign aid agencies
Amy Beck Harris
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
USA
Correspondence
Amy Beck Harris.
Email: abeckh@umich.edu
Abstract
Participatory development has become, ‘development orthodoxy’, receiving wide-
spread proclamations of support from foreign aid agencies. Participatory devel-
opment engages international development beneficiaries in making decisions about
project activity selection and design. Yet, many foreign aid donors deliver project
assistance through top‐down, highly controlled systems that may constrain the
flexibility needed to delegate decision‐making power to project beneficiaries. This
paper explores whether and under which conditions these foreign aid agencies
delegate decision‐making power to project beneficiaries, focusing on the key
mechanism for delivering foreign aid: government contracts. The analysis relies on
a novel dataset of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) projects
that incorporates contract specifications for beneficiary decision‐making during
project implementation. Despite an expectation that delivery system constraints
would prohibitively exclude contract specifications for beneficiary decision‐making,
donors are found to commonly use contracts to delegate decision‐making po-
wer to beneficiaries, but within pre‐determined parameters. The results suggest
that USAID is using contract specifications to engage in bounded delegation,
providing some decision‐making power to beneficiaries, but using boundaries to
ensure the right ‘fit’ with institutional goals and constraints. By focusing on con-
tract specifications and variation within these specifications, this study identifies
widespread use of a ‘middle ground’ in how donors motivate participatory
development.
KEYWORDS
contracts, delegation, foreign aid, implementing agencies, participation, participatory
development, USAID
Work was begun while at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin Dev. 2023;43:293–308. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad
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INTRODUCTION
Large foreign aid donors have widely promoted goals of participa-
tory development, defined here as the engagement of aid project
beneficiaries in making decisions about project activity selection
and design
1
(Atwood, 1993; Corneille and Shiffman, 2004; USAID
project websites; DFID Good Practice Guidelines; Jones et al.).
Scholars have gone as far as to assert that, “participation has
become development orthodoxy” (Cornwall, 2003, p. 1325). Yet,
many of the large foreign aid donors deliver project assistance
through top‐down, highly controlled, bureaucratic systems that may
constrain the flexibility needed to delegate decision‐making power
to project beneficiaries, including the US, UK and UN development
agencies, among others (Dietrich, 2016; LaChimia and
Trepte, 2019)
2
. These limiting factors include political priorities,
existing institutions and requirements for policy delivery, pressure
to maximize efficiency, and regulations geared toward ensuring high
levels of accountability (Gibson et al., 2005; Gulrajani, 2014;
LaChimia and Trepte, 2019; Martens et al., 2002; Mosse, 2005).
Despite the seemingly prohibitive constraints, proclamations of
support for participatory approaches and their ability to increase
development outcomes abound (USAID Forward, 2014;
White, 1999; Atwood, 1993), and scholarship on the presence and
potential of decentralized decision‐making power within aid work is
growing (Dreher et al., 2017; Eckhard and Parizek., 2020; Gulra-
jani, 2017; Hermano et al., 2012; Honig, 2018,2020; Marchesi and
Masi, 2020).
This study explores whether and under which conditions aid
donors that operate via these top‐down delivery systems delegate
decision‐making power to project beneficiaries. I explore this puzzle
by first considering how these systems deliver aid, building on the
“bureaucratic turn” in the foreign aid literature (Gulrajani, 2017, p.
375), and merging it with research on delegating decision‐making
power to aid projects' intended beneficiaries.
3
.
Contracts are the primary mechanism through which many top‐
down aid donors deliver foreign assistance (Berrios, 2000; Die-
trich, 2016; Honig, 2020; LaChimia and Trepte, 2019; Nagaraj, 2015;
Roberts, 2014), and are shown to impact beneficiary engagement and
influence over aid activity decisions during project implementation
(Harris, n.d.). Focusing on contract specifications for beneficiary
decision‐making during project implementation allows me to explore
whether and how these donors specify decision‐making power for
project beneficiaries, including the extent to which this specified
delegation occurs, the variation in specifications for decision‐making,
and the conditions under which it occurs. Despite an expectation that
delivery system constraints would be prohibitive, I find these donors
commonly use contracts to delegate decision‐making power to ben-
eficiaries during project implementation, but within pre‐determined
parameters. Further, these specifications are employed in the face
of high problem complexity and in countries with lower levels of
democracy.
Consider how contracts are used to pursue participatory devel-
opment. First, donor agencies write project contracts outlining re-
quirements, expectations, and targets for contractor performance
during project implementation. As a part of these contracts, donors
may write explicit contract specifications for beneficiary decision‐
making, which I call, allocated delegation. For example, a 2015
project in Syria specified:
“The contractor must work through local councils to
identify priority services and undertake interventions
that restore critical essential services identified by the
community and ultimately contribute to increased
stability…..” (SOL‐278‐16‐000001, Syria Essential
Services II Activity, 2015, bolding added).
The quote demonstrates contract specifications for beneficiary
decision‐making: local councils should be delegated decision‐making
power to determine which priority services and interventions should
be provided via project activities to restore essential services to the
community.
Research at the intersection of government contracting and
public participation finds that many government contracts do include
incentives for participation, and contractors can be effectively
incentivized to engage beneficiaries in participation (LeRoux, 2009;
Mosley, 2012).
4
Notably, USAID contract specifications for benefi-
ciary decision‐making effectively incentivize contractors to engage
beneficiaries in decision‐making. These USAID specifications are
commonly implemented as indicated in the contract or more often,
and are rarely not implemented (Harris, n.d.).
Upon award, the contractor further specifies the goals, tasks, and
activities outlined in the scope of work, generating specific and
detailed activities that can be added to an annual workplan. As part
of this process, they implement contract specifications for beneficiary
decision‐making. I call the implementation of allocated delegation,
implemented delegation. During this stage, beneficiaries communi-
cate their needs, preferences, and opinions about which activities
should be selected for project implementation and how they should
be designed. Following the example, implemented delegation would
1
A full definition of participatory development, and a discussion of the array of definitions
across scholars and practitioners, is discussed in Section three.
2
There is variation in both the form of aid delivery among foreign aid donors and the factors
predicting the structure of aid delivery systems (Dietrich, 2016), but most large donors,
especially the US, UK, and UN utilize a third party, contract or grant‐based implementation
approach (La Chimia et al., 2019).
3
Existing work within this bureaucratic turn focuses on the political environment
surrounding aid delivery (Honig, 2018 and 2020; Swedlund, 2017; Gulrajani, 2017; Rahman
et al., 2017), donor staff field‐agent discretion (Eckhard and Parizek., 2020; Honig, 2018
and 2020), delegating decision‐making power to centralized versus decentralized
government actors in aid‐receiving countries (Dreher et al., 2017; Marchesi and
Masi, 2020), delegating decision‐making power to state versus non‐state actors (Hermano
et al., 2012; Shin et al., 2017), challenges in implementing Paris Agreement commitments
(Gulrajani, 2014; Sjostedt, 2013), or promoting discretionary behavior within recipient
countries (Pritchet et al., 2014),
4
Contractors are more likely to engage in participation when it is a contractual requirement
(Amirkhanyan and Lambright, 2018; Nishishiba et al., 2012; Nowland‐Foreman, 1998).
294
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