Developing consensus: The globalisation of development assistance policies
[Thesis]
McGill University (Canada): Canada
: 2009
238 pages
Ph.D.
, McGill University (Canada): Canada
This dissertation explains the increasingly homogenous institutional and policy framework of Official Development Assistance. Whereas multilateral actors like the World Bank or the issue of civil society involvement in development have been substantially researched and discussed, less attention has been paid to the institutions of bilateral donor agencies and the processes by which they arrive at common policy positions. It is of great importance to better understand how donors arrive at these consensus policy positions, essentially limiting development possibilities worldwide. Engaged with the literatures on world polity theory, development assistance, and social movements, this dissertation examines the social processes which explain this growing uniformity among major bilateral development assistance donor agencies. This research adopts a mixed-methods approach of both quantitative and qualitative methods to illustrate the working of world polity influences on nation-state donor agencies. Event history analysis techniques at the macro level are used to show the influence of world society on donor states, then the relationships identified in this quantitative analysis are used to frame two in-depth qualitative case studies on gender and security policy among three countries, Canada, Sweden, and the United States. My results show that despite different national contexts, there are common social processes and mechanisms of globalisation that promote conformity and isomorphism among donor countries. Five primary social processes are identified: (1) internalisation and certification; (2) donor agency embeddedness with civil society; (3) bureaucratic activism; (4) catalytic policy processes; and (5) assertion of donor autonomy from the rest of government. In contrast to most previous literature on world society influence on the nation-state, my findings show that these social processes result largely from individual agency and interactions that underpin the relationship of world society and the nation-state.