Featuring
Bill Savedoff
Senior Fellow
Center for Global Development
Discussants
Paul O’Brien
Vice President for Policy and Campaigns
Oxfam America
Linda Van Gelder
Director, Operations Policy & Quality Department
World Bank
With all the hype (and criticism) over foreign aid programs that pay for results, what do we really know about how they are being implemented and whether they are effective? In their new paper titled “Does Results-Based Aid Change Anything? Pecuniary Interests, Attention, Accountability and Discretion in Four Case Studies”, Bill Savedoff and Rita Perakis look at a subset of performance programs that pay governments in proportion to changes in development outcomes to see what motivates the use of these approaches and how they work in practice.
In his presentation, Savedoff will present four theories commonly used to justify results-based aid programs. Then, using case studies, he will argue that most programs that pay governments for outcomes don’t work because governments want the money — they work by getting politicians and bureaucrats to pay attention to results. Instead of a revolution in aid, these programs are mostly designed as cautious adaptations of traditional approaches.