About the lecture:
 

Autonomous government aid agencies are dying. In recent years we have seen the abolition of NZAID (2009), CIDA (2013) and AusAID (2013). There is also considerable speculation about the fate of the UK’s DfID. Typically, decisions to abolish aid agencies have been accompanied by budget cuts. If the way aid budgets are administered shapes development outcomes then these decisions are significant. Despite their importance scholars rarely consider why aid agencies rise and fall, and whether the institutional structure of aid administration affects development outcomes. This paper answers the first question by examining how current public administration thinking about organisational termination and survival can be employed to explain the recent spate of aid agency deaths. To underscore the value of a ‘court politics’ approach the paper analyses the history of the Australian aid agency, which has been abolished twice (first in 1976 and more recently in 2013). The lesson for both scholars and development practitioners is that for government aid agencies getting the ‘court politics’ right, matters. It concludes by considering how this insight might be developed, either via an explicitly comparative study of aid agency termination or an examination of the impact of institutional structure on development outcomes. 

The paper for this DGA seminar can be accessed here.