Paper details

Paper authors	Clara Egger
In panel on	Hierarchies and Exclusion in Humanitarianism
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Although humanitarian aid is still dominated by a stable club of long-established donors, newcomers, as Turkey, Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States are becoming increasingly generous towards crisis-affected population. This visible rise of “new donors ” has been met with a lot of criticism by long-established aid agencies denouncing rogue and politicized aid practices. This paper examines how hierarchies about aid donorship behaviors are set up by the OECD Development Assistance Committee. Combining comparative political economy with club theory, it shows that the OECD DAC acts as a hierarchy setter in the aid donorship field, laundering its members’ self-interested aid behavior. At the empirical level, the paper combines a large-N analysis of the determinants of humanitarian budgets with an analysis of the activities of the DAC. Overall this paper contributes to break with some common myths about non-Western humanitarian donors and to a better understanding of humanitarianism as a strategic and unequal organizational field.

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