Civil Society, Aid and Development: a Cross-Country Analysis

International cooperation for development relies on several aid modalities and - in addition to bilateral and multilateral programs - non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an important role in channeling development aid towards their Southern partners. The support of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs to developmental NGOs perceives several objectives, ranging from direct poverty alleviation to capacity building and lobby and advocacy activities. Rigorous evaluations of programs and projects executed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are generally scarce and tend to be limited to the analysis of perceived effects at local level. Far less attention is usually devoted to the aggregate effect of development aid on global civil society strength and performance. This is, however, considered of utmost importance given the overarching aim of strengthening the role of civil society in the development process. The recently developed database Indices of Social Development (ISD) hosted by the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam offers a unique opportunity to further analyze the relationships between civil society development and development aid (ODA) over a 20-years period, making use of cross-country data of multidimensional indicators related to civic activism, intergroup cohesion and club membership. The current paper ‘Civil Society, Aid and Development’ has been commissioned by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs to enable the professional discussions regarding the different pathways for strengthening civil society in developing countries. Such analysis requires a careful appraisal of the direction of causality and needs to give due attention to endogeneity issues, including several control variables to account for other relevant factors. The study provides an overview of the literature regarding the influence of foreign aid on civil society, drawing extensively on theories of social capital, social inclusion and social norms.

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