A strategic theory of international environmental assistance

Elena V McLean

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2015, vol. 27, issue 2, 324-347

Abstract: Over the past three decades multilateral financial aid has become an important institutional arrangement enabling environmental cooperation between developed and developing countries. However, previous research suggests that financial institutions are largely ineffective in achieving environmental goals. I show that financial assistance can be successful in increasing recipients’ contributions to environmental programs, thereby promoting environmental protection. This positive impact of aid, I argue, should be attributed to the effects of donor-recipient interactions that can alter incentives of recipient governments and induce their cooperation rather than to capacity building through inflows of aid. I study environmental assistance by first developing a game-theoretic model of strategic interaction between the donor and aid recipients. To avoid a common methodological problem of misspecification and to unify theory with empirical testing, I then derive a strategic statistical model and conduct empirical tests using a new dataset on projects financed by the Global Environment Facility.

Keywords: Environmental cooperation; foreign aid; international organization; principal-agent model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629814531669 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:27:y:2015:i:2:p:324-347

DOI: 10.1177/0951629814531669

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().