Funding TJ: How Donor Preferences for Shape Project Impact

• In Event: Coding, Databases and Datasets in Transitional Justice Research

Abstract

Scholarship on the factors that determine aid flows has tended to focus on characteristics of recipient states, such as the structure of their political institutions. However, a focus on recipient states overlooks how donor-specific preferences shape aid provision and effectiveness. Recent research suggests that donors tend to favour the funding of development projects that promise relatively more tangible and measurable outcomes. Bureaucratic demands place an emphasis on tracking results and effectiveness of spending. Thus, donors may favour funding projects in sectors in which results are more easily measured and interpreted. Simultaneously, there is conceptual literature that critically engages the turn to ‘evidence-based’ decision making in development programming and examines data as a form of power. Sally Engle Merry, for instance, establishes the appeal of quantification – data purportedly cleans up the complexity of social phenomena and provides accurate, objective, scientific, and transparent information about messy social realities. Thus, it helps policy makers make decisions they can justify through bureaucratic rationality. However, the production of these quantitative measures is shaped by inequalities in power and expertise which influences outcomes. This paper applies these findings to development funding of Transitional Justice (TJ). TJ projects vary considerably when it comes to their relative tangibility. The paper uses a new dataset on donor funding to examine aid flows towards specific thematic areas within TJ – gender, rule of law, criminal courts and reparations – in order to assess whether funding for TJ-related projects reflects the tangible-intangible binary established in the development literature. Building on Merry’s work on power and data, it interrogates the ways in which donors make judgements around tangibility and whether these judgments bias donors to pursue their own short-term interests rather than the long-term interests that recipient-country populations have in structural change. Comparatively intangible forms of TJ are more likely to seek structural change, such as by altering gender relations and addressing gender-related conflict issues. To extend and nuance the quantitative findings, we engage in qualitative analysis of donor support for TJ programmes in Sierra Leone and Colombia. We examine the ways in which donors exert power by linking aid flows to the demand for tangible results, the competition for scarce resources within donor agencies, the influence of the recent call for more accountability in aid spending, and the creative ways in which development recipients attempt to make the intangible tangible in order to attract funding. The paper concludes by arguing that the demand for tangibility is not neutral and has substantial impact on TJ practice. Tangible results that are viewed favourably in the capitals of donor states are likely to be results that mirror the donor states’ interests rather than those that achieve the transformative and gender-progressive goals of contemporary TJ programmes.

Authors

• Shivangi Seth, Australian National University

• Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

• Kirsten Ainley