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Paper short abstract

With OECD aid retreating, if aid is changing hands, is it also changing outcomes? This paper combines political economy with an econometric analysis of Qatari aid to ask whether emerging donors transform development, recipient agency, and justice.

Paper long abstract

As traditional donors scale back aid commitments, the global development architecture is entering a period of heightened uncertainty and experimentation. This paper revisits the political economy of aid retrenchment by asking not only who fills emerging financing gaps, but whether alternative development modalities generate measurably different outcomes.

Do non-DAC donors reproduce the practices and outcomes of traditional aid regimes, or do distinct incentives, impact timing and financing? And can such differences be empirically identified, rather than rhetorically asserted?

The paper combines a conceptual analysis of aid pluralisation with an econometric assessment of development outcomes associated with Qatari development assistance. Using cross-country panel data and quasi-experimental methods, the analysis compares recipient countries engaged with Qatari aid to appropriate counterfactuals and to recipients of traditional OECD-DAC assistance. The empirical strategy focuses on outcome trajectories, aid volatility, and sectoral concentration, allowing for an evaluation of whether alternative aid models exhibit distinct development effects.

This quantitative strand is embedded within a broader inquiry into development, recipient agency, and distributive justice. How do emerging donors navigate conditionality and sovereignty? Does the diversification of aid sources strengthen bargaining power for recipient states or exacerbate coordination failures? And what do observed outcomes imply for the future of multilateral development institutions amid fiscal retrenchment?

This paper contributes to ongoing debates on the future of development cooperation and offers evidence-based insight into whether emerging donors, such as Qatar, China, and Gulf states more broadly, are reshaping development practice or converging towards the established aid paradigms.