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Human rights shaming through INGOs and foreign aid delivery

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Abstract

Does the “shaming” of human rights violations influence foreign aid delivery decisions across OECD donor countries? We examine the effect of shaming, defined as targeted negative attention by human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), on donor decisions about how to deliver bilateral aid. We argue that INGO shaming of recipient countries leads donor governments, on average, to “bypass” the recipient government in favor of non-state aid delivery channels, including international and local NGOs and international organizations (IOs). However, we expect this relationship to be conditional on a donor country’s position in the international system. Minor power countries have limited influence in global affairs and are therefore more able to centrally promote human rights in their foreign policy. Major power countries, on the other hand, shape world politics and often confront “realpolitik” concerns that may require government-to-government aid relations in the presence of INGO shaming. We thus expect aid officials of minor donor countries to be more likely to condition aid delivery decisions on human rights shaming than their counterparts of major donor countries. Using compositional data analysis, we test our argument using originally collected data on human rights shaming events and an originally constructed measure of bilateral aid delivery in a time-series cross-sectional framework from 2004 to 2010. We find support for our hypotheses: On average, OECD donor governments increase the proportion of bypass when INGOs shame the recipient government. When differentiating between donor types we find that this finding holds for minor but not for major powers. These results add to both our understanding of the influences of aid allocation decision-making and our understanding of the role of INGOs on foreign-policy.

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Notes

  1. Examples of studies that examine the link between aid and these different foreign policy objectives include Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2009), Bapat (2011), Vreeland and Dreher (2014), and Dietrich and Wright (2015), respectively.

  2. Cingranelli and Pasquarello (1985) show that the U.S. cuts economic but not military aid support to countries with human rights violations. Lebovic and Voeten (2009) find that donor governments pressure international organizations to sanction repressive behavior with cuts in multilateral aid, while bilateral aid flows between donors and the repressive recipient government remain unchanged. Nielsen (2013) disaggregates bilateral aid into its various sectors, showing that human rights violations lead donor governments to cut economic aid but not humanitarian aid. The latter two findings by Lebovic and Voeten (2009) and Nielsen (2013) make important contributions to the literature as they disaggregate aid and are based on a more nuanced understanding of the decision-making process. Both works theorize and test for important heterogeneity within foreign aid.

  3. Multilateral organizations like the UN increasingly rely on bilateral aid as source of financing, which increases the amount of projects that they implement directly on behalf of donor governments (Katherine 2015; Eichenauer and Knack 2014). Although multilaterals engage with recipient authorities in project implementation they often impose strict conditions. As Lebovic and Voeten (2009) find, international organizations promote human rights more forcefully than bilateral donor governments.

  4. Others bilateral aid tactics include the imposition of conditionality, or the appropriation of aid budgets into aid sector.

  5. Examples include Dreher et al. (2010, 2012a, b), Dietrich (2013, 2016), Acht et al. (2015). More recently, scholars have begun to study important variation in foreign aid provided through multilateral organizations. See Eichenauer and Knack (2014) and Katherine (2015) for exemplary work.

  6. This study builds on a burgeoning literature that investigates the extent to which negative statements about human rights conditions influence government behavior and a country’s foreign policies (Risse et al. 1999; Murdie and Davis 2012b; Barry et al. 2013; Murdie and Peksen 2013).

  7. Please see Murdie and Peksen (2014, 218) for a discussion of these World Values Survey findings.

  8. See Murdie and Davis (2012b) and Hendrix and Wong (2013) for examples of this mechanism.

  9. Author Interview with Senior Government Official, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stockholm, June 18, 2013.

  10. It is important to note that we do not expect that the entire foreign aid budget earmarked for the public sector in any given year will be shifted towards non-state actors. Many collaborative donor-recipient projects have a multi-year time frame and are implemented with the involvement of donor agencies. While many of these projects may be more difficult to reorient in terms of delivery method, more programmatic and budget-oriented funding can more easily be redirected to alternative delivery agents. However, according to extensive author interviews with more than 70 aid decision-makers across OECD donor countries, aid officials have the power to freeze or withhold significant funding even for multi-year projects if deemed necessary, which may be in the face of unexpected anti-democratic behavior or corruption.

  11. Other studies that suggest lack of responsiveness among major power states include Carleton and Stohl (1985) and Perkins and Neumayer (2010).

  12. Aid to government channels may be seen as a way to prop up a regime that is having to use repression in the face of increasing domestic opposition (Escribà-Folch 2010; Licht 2010; Ritter 2014).

  13. Evidence of this trend documented in country reports by Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org/publications/reports) and Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/africa/ethiopia/).

  14. As donor governments have increased their capacity for reporting over time, the coverage of the delivery channel data has steadily increased. In 2004 and 2005 Austria, Belgium, Sweden, and the United States reported data on this dimension. In 2006, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and Portugal joined the group of reporting OECD donors. By 2007 all OECD provided data on delivery channels with the exception of Luxembourg and Spain. Across all these countries data coverage is steadily increasing across recipient countries, without any evidence of systematic underreporting on particular recipient countries.

  15. However, as Dietrich (2016) shows, donor political economies influence the degree to which they respond to low governance quality in recipient countries with bypass tactics.

  16. The results are robust to alternative cluster specifications on the recipient country and the donor country.

  17. For example, we should expect differential effects for distance. Minor power donor governments have less reach and less capacity to implement their own projects. As distance increases we should expect minor powers to decrease bypass and channel more aid through the government-to-government channel. For major powers we might not expect there to be as strong as an effect, perhaps we even expect the opposite outcome.

  18. Again, the results are robust to alternative cluster specifications.

  19. The Appendix is available on the Review of International Organization’s webpage.

  20. Given our short time span and small within-unit sample sizes we opt for the inclusion of donor and recipient fixed effects instead of dyad fixed effects. If the within unit sample size is small, the unit effects alone may account for most of the variation in our bypass variable. What is more there are time-invariant dyadic variables in the specification that are very important to include in the model, including distance. If we included dyadic fixed effects this control would drop out as it is perfectly collinear with the set of unit dummy variables. This makes it impossible to estimate the unique effects of that variable. We nonetheless estimated the model using dyad fixed effects and the shaming coefficient (with a p-value of 0.108) just misses conventional levels of statistical significance.

  21. We present the results in the Appendix Table 1, Models 1 through 4.

  22. We thank the editor and one anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

  23. The sample is slightly bigger as it excludes the Total Aid Per Capita measure. This measure captures per capita levels of foreign aid that flow between donor and recipient pair given that at least 90 percent of the channel of delivery data was reported to the OECD CRS.

  24. Table 2 in the Appendix presents further tests that explore the effects of INGO Shaming on levels of social and economic sector aid. Again, INGO Shaming is not systematically associated with levels of aid.

  25. Table 3 in the Appendix presents the results for the INGO coefficients from three different samples that exclude the top 10, top 15, and top 20 most fragile states in the international system. The model specifications include ones with and ones without the lagged dependent variable. The size of the coefficients are increasing in size as the estimation sample becomes more limited to include only aid-receiving countries with functionally competent governments.

  26. We thank one anonymous reviewer for raising this issue and suggesting the alternative proxy.

  27. We re-estimate the model using a seemingly-unrelated regression framework. The results are very similar to the independent subsample analysis.

  28. We thank one anonymous reviewer suggestion and present the findings in Table 8 in the Appendix.

  29. We present the results of these estimations on a full sample as well as the minor and major power samples separately in Tables 4 and 5 in the Appendix.

  30. Tables 5 and 6 in the Appendix show the results.

  31. Since we should expect major and minor powers to respond differently to at least some confounders we include the controls in interaction with Minor Donor.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Tim Buethe, Stephen Chaudoin, Desha Girod, Raymond Hicks, Stephen Knack, Matthew Winters, Joseph Wright, participants at the 2014 conference on The Political Economy for International Organizations and the 2014 conference of the American Political Science Association, as well as two anonymous reviewers and Axel Dreher for valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, UK

    Simone Dietrich

  2. University of Missouri, Columbia, USA

    Amanda Murdie

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  1. Simone Dietrich
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Correspondence to Simone Dietrich.

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Dietrich, S., Murdie, A. Human rights shaming through INGOs and foreign aid delivery. Rev Int Organ 12, 95–120 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-015-9242-8

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