Dr. Siobhan Airey

Summary

Book project - "Ordering the World" offers a provocative and compelling legal analysis of the international governance of Official Development Assistance (ODA or development aid) and makes two new contributions to law and development and law in global governance. First, it provides new evidence that identifies the overlooked Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the key institutional locus for the international governance of ODA. Mobilising fresh archival research and drawing on a tradition of unorthodox critical legal and anti-colonial scholarship, "Ordering the World" unsettles a historical narrative on the OECD's post-war reconstruction origin story. It reveals how, through a battle over the content and governance of ODA in the 1960s-early 1970s, the OECD-DAC successfully resisted anti-imperial proposals for more democratic, egalitarian international economic governance from the G77 and UNCTAD, a debate that remains relevant today. Secondly, the book reveals and examines a governance of/by dynamic at the heart of ODA - that how ODA is governed, is key to how ODA governs. Here, the role of law, and the legal quality of the international governance of ODA is key. Through the original concept and heuristic of the "Governance Signature," the book traces and illustrates how formal OECD law, its dedicated policy frameworks on development, along with technocratic data-heavy instruments on ODA and bureaucratic monitoring mechanisms on donor ODA policy, create a strong weave of governance in which an alternate, cohesive jurisdiction on neoliberal development becomes manifest. This approach uncovers the legal and juridical patterns that link the OECD-DAC's international governance of ODA with how ODA governs both donors and aid-recipient states. In a break with orthodox legal thinking on law in global governance, "Ordering the World" expands how we think about law in, and the legal quality of, blended international governance instruments.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Summary

Blended Finance (BF) is an international public-private finance instrument that uses official public funds to leverage extra capital from private sources to invest in development projects. With a $2-3 trillion per year shortfall needed to finance the UN SDGs, BF is viewed by international organisations and donors as a viable funding solution. To date, international initiatives to develop international BF policy and instruments have mainly focused on the challenges to the funding approaches of donors, development operators and private financial actors. This project examines the overlooked challenges to the governance of BF by developing country states, focusing on Tanzania.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

New Foundations