There is global recognition of the need for more women in decision-making positions within bureaucracies to ensure gender-equitable policies and outcomes. Article 7 of the Convention of the Elimination of the Discrimination against Women commits states to ensure equality between women and men in political and public life, including participation in formulating government policy. In Indonesian government agencies, women now are employed in almost equal numbers to men. This thesis considers whether these changes represent genuine empowerment for these women, focussing on the gendered processes within the Ministry of Finance (MOF). There is a small but growing literature on female managers in developing country government agencies. However, no studies systematically combine an analysis of gendered processes within these organisations with an exploration of women’s work/family balance. This thesis develops such a combined approach. It draws on a range of data sources including interviews with 121 MOF employees, personal observation and documents. The analysis compares gendered practice within three different ministerial departments. Drawing on Goetz’s concept of the “gendered archaeology of organisation”, this thesis reveals a high degree of gender inequality in the daily practices. This includes overt discrimination in recruitment, as well as more indirect forms of discrimination in promotion and training. The thesis considers how employment in the MOF shapes the identities of female managers, and how these women balance their domestic lives with their careers. Among other things, this considers the effects of corruption, Islamic conservatism, Javanese culture, a bureaucratic reform programme and a gender mainstreaming initiative. The thesis observes how these women exercise agency within and outside the MOF, and the extent to which their education and professional status empower them in their working lives. The thesis also examines how gendered processes within the MOF affect its external policies.

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This thesis examines the role of business actors in networking, influencing and shaping the governance of China’s CDM market. By adopting a neo-pluralistic view of business power, it reveals how companies in the CDM market in China are wielding their unique capabilities and technics to affect policy making and implementing process both at the national and local level. It is based on a qualitative case study strategy to investigate and reveal the detailed context and causes for some worrying problems around CDM in China. 42 interviews, plus large number of document, and field observations have been carried out to collect data. The study also illustrated their constraints to achieve their goals and strategic preferences due to the confrontational interests among business actors. In general, it contributes insights of the reform era political economy in China’s environmental and climate governance.

This thesis provides an unpacked analysis of health aid effectiveness using Mozambique as a case-study. It comprises of three main papers of independent but related research. The first paper adds to the literature by employing a new model to study the impact of health aid on health outcomes. By taking into account the heterogeneity that exists in the amount of health aid received between Mozambican provinces, a multilevel model is specified. After recognizing significant variation of health outcomes between provinces, I found no statistical evidence that health aid was a cause of those variations. The second paper provides a systematic analysis of donors’ health aid disbursement decisions in-country. Using a game theoretic framework and grounded in qualitative evidence from Mozambique, this paper shows that donors have allocation tactics other than state-to-state aid to pursue their goals which are translated into opting for alternative channels of delivery. Simultaneously, this research acknowledges the non-passive role of the recipient country, i.e., donors’ decisions of how to allocate aid are mediated by the recipient’s response to their actions. This chapter suggests that recipient-donors’ strategic interactions are crucial to understand donors’ allocation behaviour and have direct consequences for aid effectiveness. The last paper explores empirically and theoretically aid coordination efforts of aid agencies. After providing an insight into the implementation of coordination in the health sector in Mozambique, this chapter explores why different agencies differ in their motivations to coordinate, based on the distinction between public and private good properties of coordination. Finally, using a collective action theory framework and aided by Schelling’s (1973) diagrams, this chapter illustrates why it is so hard to coordinate. My results show that individual incentives to coordinate are neither strong nor stable. Furthermore, the success of coordination depends, inter alia, on the number of agencies that perceive coordination as a public versus private good and the role and involvement of the lead donor and the recipient country.

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This study extends existing work on inequality, institutions and the impact of foreign aid by constructing and estimating different cross-country simultaneous equation models that identify bi-directional relationships between income inequality and several indicators of social and economic development. The first set of results for a model combining four endogenous variables (income, education, health and inequality) and estimated using the three-stage least-squares (3SLS) technique, show that lower inequality is associated with improvements in other development indicators, but this is the result of several complex interactions. The most interesting feature of the structural model is the insight it provides into the reasons behind the negative "Africa dummy" in previous growth studies: African countries are not unusually inefficient, given socio-economic conditions, but are unusually unhealthy and unusually inequitable. A new cross-country dataset (the World Bank's Health Nutrition and Poverty Data), is used to assess the impact of foreign aid on the living standards of population sub-groups within 48 developing countries by estimating: (i) the strength of the links between a number of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) targets and related variables, including access to water and sanitation; and (ii) the extent to which aid impacts on these variables. In doing so, the analysis provides direct evidence on factors driving inequality by employing data for different income groups in each country and by using a unique measure of material wellbeing that does not rely on purchasing power parity (PPP) comparisons. The empirical results show that foreign aid can be expected to improve outcomes across a wide variety of development indicators, including school participation ratios and child health. The study finally focuses on the robust estimation of the long-run impact of political institutions on economic development and on the identification of valid instruments to measure institutional quality. While recent empirical studies have used colonial settler mortality rates as such an instrument, this thesis develops a more eclectic theory of colonial development.

This thesis uses a focus on the Pearson Commission to explore some of the policy and institutional dynamics of international development aid during the later 1960s and early 1970s. It sets these explorations within a theoretical framework and an historical context. Firstly it draws on the theory of ‘international regimes’ created by international relations scholars. While acknowledging the importance of economic and military power balances, regime theorists also argue that the nature of international policy-making is partially defined by, ‘principles, rules, norms and processes’ which shape how policy-makers act. Using political science theory, the thesis identifies three groups who create and shape these regimes: elites, epistemic communities and bureaucrats. Through a close focus on the dynamics at play within the Pearson Commission’s creation, operation and reception, the main body of the thesis will identify how a small group of individuals, such as William Clark and Barbara Ward, acted to coordinate sections of these three groups within an ‘aid community’ as the international aid regime changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is argued that specific changes within this regime, including the emergence of the World Bank as a technical leader on aid matters, the establishment of the 0.7 per cent aid volume target, and the creation of a definition of official development assistance (ODA), can be attributed to the workings of this community. This concept of a fractious and fragile aid community is used to challenge accounts of this period which emphasise the inexorability of the rise of the World Bank, or prioritise the importance of ideas and knowledge in explaining the changes in the aid regime.

This thesis responds to the rapidly proliferating academic, civil society and policy discourses that posit diasporas as powerful and positive actors in the development of their 'homelands'. These discourses highlight diaspora organisations as key institutions through which international migrants and their descendants contribute to the progress of 'home'. Consequently, these organisations are being lauded as new development actors that should be engaged and supported by governments and international agencies interested in pursuing more direct and participatory modes of development assistance. However, it has been argued that this celebration of diaspora organisations is based on limited knowledge. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with London-based Nigerian organisations and their sites of intervention in Nigeria, this thesis makes a contribution to better understanding diaspora organisations and their progressive potential for 'home'. The thesis argues that London-based Nigerian diaspora organisations are not necessarily involved in the development of 'home' to the extent, or in the ways, imagined in celebratory discourses of diaspora and development. These organisations are entwined in the politics of socio-economic status, gender and belonging at 'home' in ways that are profoundly ambivalent in terms of the progressive role expected of them. Furthermore, their monetary, material, intellectual and political contributions to development at 'home' appear relatively limited and rather marginal, especially when compared to those made by local actors. This can be traced to a number of factors that are widely seen to severely constrain collective transnational mobilisation and intervention. Nonetheless, the thesis argues that diaspora organisations have much to contribute to the development of 'home'. However, if states and international agencies are to engage and support diaspora organisations in fulfilling this progressive potential, it will be necessary to engage these groups in more genuine and meaningful dialogue through which alternative, more cosmopolitan visions of belonging and development can be articulated and pursued.

The last half a century of Foreign Aid disbursal to Sub-Sahara Africa had been dominated by the need to address the perennial problem of its effectiveness. This has provided to a great number of stakeholders a premise for dismissal of foreign aid to be an instrument for economic growth and poverty reduction as initially thought. Drawing from recent literature, a conceptual framework was designed to capture and investigate various contextual factors that would contribute or initiate particular characteristics of the donor-recipient relationship. From a perspective of aid recipients, this study assumes that a management approach to aid would provide an understanding of mismatches between donors and recipients as a possible reason for aid effectiveness standards being unsatisfactory to many. A qualitative case study of two idiosyncratic countries: Cameroon and Tanzania was conducted utilizing a retroductive analysis approach. To provide additional internal validation, a stakeholders’ analysis and a business appraisal were also conducted. A number of explanatory mechanisms were constructed and answered positively the research preoccupation of identifying donor-recipient mismatches as well as showing that these mismatches affected to a very large extent the effective management of foreign aid. Further research is recommended chiefly in the donor-recipient relationship vis-vis foreign aid quality looking at the history, current and future international interactions. Also, researches in new and meaningful ways of assessing foreign aid impacts.