Paper short abstract:

The paper takes as its case an aid effectiveness model (the US Millennium Challenge Account) that benchmarks countries using governance indicators. In its attempt to manage risk and ‘depoliticize’ aid allocation, this approach creates politics of its own with wide-ranging implications.

Paper long abstract:

This research investigates how economic expertise influences development governance through a case study of aid-effectiveness at a recently established US aid agency. It aims to make a theoretical contribution by addressing the asymmetrical treatment of experts in the planning and development literature. When experts fail, politics has triumphed over rationality. When experts succeed, the credit goes to rationality, not politics. By turning the focus to economists' styles of reasoning and expert tools, this research treats experts' success as having political effects of its own. Doing so allows us to treat economist-led, results-based development not as a process of depoliticization, of technical solutions prevailing over political interests and values, but as an explicitly political project that can format power relations and reshape the development process.

The paper takes as its case an aid-effectiveness and risk-reduction model at the US Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). The paper discusses the method of benchmarking countries using governance indicators. Unlike structural adjustment's more direct and absolute approach to policy reform, governing aid by indicators is a more indirect form of governance that ranks countries' 'policy environments' relative to their peers. This method's influence on the executive branch's planning process, bureaucratic relations, distribution of aid funding, and US foreign policy will be discussed. Primary data from interviews with professionals in the US global development community, official government documents, and secondary country-level data support the paper's findings.