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Motivation: The public needs to be better informed on the reasons for providing aid, especially that which supports the Sustainable Development Goals. How aid is framed by donors directly affects levels of public support. Purpose: The article investigates support for aid among English‐speaking Canadians, and how this varies by the framing of aid spending, socioeconomic markers, personal values and political engagement. Approach and methods: Statistical analysis is undertaken of data from a representative survey of English‐speaking Canadians on their knowledge and attitudes with respect to aid to developing countries. A particular focus of the analysis is the influence of the framing of aid spending on public support for aid spending, while controlling for the influence of socioeconomic factors. Findings: Support for increased spending rises when spending is framed relative to the size of the economy, whether in dollar or percentage terms, rather than when framed relative to government taxation or spending. Providing information on the current level of aid spending also raises support for increased aid spending. Overall, when informed about the level of aid spending, most respondents support maintaining or increasing aid. Views on aid vary little by age, education and other socioeconomic markers. People's values, however, did affect support for aid. Respondents who believe in "Canada first" were considerably more likely to support aid cuts than others. Those who see kindness as part of Canadian identity tend to favour aid, while those who see economic prosperity as part of national identity tend to want aid cuts. While voting intention does not affect views on aid, respondents who have been either politically active or involved in collective action on media/social media are a little more likely to favour increased aid. Policy implications: The findings confirm the importance of the framing of aid spending for designing and implementing programmes to inform, engage and elicit support from the public. Given how values influence public support for aid, engagement needs to be tailored to different target audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite substantial scholarly attention given to aid allocation motives of state agencies and professionalized non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), privately funded grassroots international NGOs (GINGOs), which have rapidly emerged in the global North, have escaped academic analysis. Using an original dataset of 948 Canadian NGOs, this study compares country aid allocation patterns along competing variables of need, merit, self‐interest and convenience between professionalized, mid‐sized independent and grassroots international NGOs. Our results underscore the importance of a disaggregated analysis yet reveal similar aid allocation trends between all three NGO groups and show significant herding behaviour. These findings question the added value of the growing phenomena of GINGOs. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of bilateral foreign aid in supporting the diffusion and enactment of common models and institutions of the rule of law among aid‐recipient low‐ and middle‐income countries. We ask whether aid targeted at security‐sector reform and the rule of law influences the adoption of constitutional and legal reforms over time (institutional diffusion), and whether aid also supports more effective implementation of the rule of law, writ large (legal reach). We use event history and fixed‐effects panel regression models to examine a sample of 154 countries between 1995 and 2013 to answer these questions. Our findings suggest that aid does increase the likelihood of adopting several rule of law reforms, but its effect on increasing the depth or quality of rule of law over time within countries is much less substantial. These findings suggest that though aid may play a role in supporting the diffusion of models contributing to state isomorphism among countries, it is less effective at increasing the pervasiveness and quality of such model's implementation. This discrepancy between the effectiveness of bilateral aid in promoting law on the books versus law in action in aid recipient countries calls into question the current approach to rule of law reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights an emerging research agenda for the study of foreign aid through a World Society theory lens. First, it briefly summarizes the social scientific literature on aid and sociologists' earlier contributions to this research. Next, it reviews the contours of world society research and the place of aid within this body of literature. Finally, it outlines three emergent threads of research on foreign aid that comprise a new research agenda for the sociology of foreign aid and its role in world society globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of gender on the leadership of bilateral development aid agencies, particularly their official development assistance (ODA) allocations toward gender-related programming. Drawing on earlier research on gendered leadership, the article tests the hypothesis that female director generals (DGs) and ministers responsible for aid agencies will allocate more ODA than their male counterparts toward gender programming. This existing literature on gendered leadership is divided: some scholars argue that women and men have distinct leadership styles on account of their gender, while others argue that the only distinguishing factor is the institutional context in which they lead. Drawing on data collected on aid flows and agency leadership within the major Western aid donors of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) over the period from 1995 through 2009, we use pooled time series analysis to examine the effects of gendered leadership on aid allocation. Our analysis reveals a tendency for female DGs and ministers to focus ODA on gender-mainstreaming programs, while male DGs focus ODA on gender-focused programs. We argue that these divergent priorities reflect the women's desire to reform gendered power structures within their respective aid agencies, and the men's desire to maintain existing gender power structures from which they benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fragmentation of a donor's foreign aid across too many recipient countries is widely believed to be detrimental to aid effectiveness. This article explores the origins of a new norm - recipient concentration - and assesses the extent to which it can be expected to improve aid effectiveness. It also examines 23 donors' actual record of country concentration, and finds that, though there are some potential explanations for donors' behaviour, their collective failure to implement country concentration has very little consequence in theory or in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]