Examining New Donors in the OECD's Development Assistance Committee

ABSTRACT

How do emerging donors integrate into the existing international aid architecture? While the existing literature focuses largely on emerging donors from the Global South, such as Brazil, China, India and Russia, there are many emerging donors from the Global North that have joined the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—the premier standard‐setting organization in international development cooperation. How do these new members integrate into the existing international aid architecture? We study this question by analysing the compliance of traditional and newer donors with standards and best practices set by the DAC. We argue that new donors are more likely to adhere to DAC statistical reporting requirements, while traditional donors are better at following substantive policy guidelines to achieve global policy goals. In particular, we posit that the Secretariat interacts differently with members depending on their status: With new donors, it tends to support the adoption of statistical standards, which are necessary to align aid‐giving practices with all other standards, while adherence with more substantive guidelines for aid effectiveness is scrutinized more closely for older members. We examine one mechanism that facilitates the integration of new DAC members: the Policy Marker System, an IO‐driven monitoring system whose functioning requires both compliance with statistical guidelines and the adoption of good practices in aid giving. Our analyses indicate that new donors are indeed more likely to comply with procedural reporting requirements, while traditional donors are more likely to implement the more substantive DAC recommendation of targeting aid towards certain priority policy areas.