Both Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were part of the former Soviet Union and were integrated into its political, economic and governance systems. As Union republics, they remained isolated from the outside world, with little direct interaction with external actors. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, both Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan established relations with a number of bilateral donors and multilateral development agencies. Despite their many similarities (e.g., social, cultural, religious, linguistic, geographic) and a shared history, the two countries’ post-Soviet development trajectories diverged dramatically. While Kyrgyzstan quickly launched transition reforms, liberalizing its economy and polity with support from external donors, Turkmenistan adopted a more gradual approach to political and economic reform and managed to minimize the influence of external actors in domestic affairs. This thesis analyzes the donor-recipient interaction in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan across three sectors: governance, rural development, and environment. The analysis focuses on the management of aid through an anthropological, political economy-directed inquiry of relations between foreign donors and aid recipients at the micro level (daily interactions in managing aid). Collective action theory, evolutionary theory and adaptive behavior approaches are utilized to analyze the interaction on micro-level. However, the analysis is also situated in a broader, macro-level context of development and security priorities of the two states, for which the realist branch of the international relations theories is applied. Methodologically, the study is based on the triangulation of findings from various sources, including the content analysis of primary and secondary sources as well as the analysis of over 60 semi-structured interviews involving government and donor officials from the two countries. The thesis does not attempt to analyze whether development aid was effective. Instead, using similar analyses of aid interactions (Mosse, 2005; Swedlund, 2017), this thesis aims to investigate how aid interactions ‘happen’ (Wedel, 1998). While I agree that the sustainability of development aid is hampered by the inability of both donors and recipients to ‘make credible commitments’ (Swedlund, 2017), in this thesis I argue that aid interactions are also influenced by other factors, namely the political sensitivity of the sectors to which the aid is given (governance, rural development, environment), regime characteristics, availability or absence of natural resource-based revenues, and geopolitics. These factors, taken together, affect the aid bargaining process in important ways. The thesis makes a three-fold contribution to the existing knowledge on aid relations. First, it expands the knowledge on the agency of recipient governments by putting them at the core of the analysis. Second, it contributes to the very limited number of cross-sectoral and cross-country comparative studies on both aid management and on public policy making in general and in Central Asia in particular. Thirdly, it provides a detailed account of how development aid has been managed in Turkmenistan, a country on which no serious academic literature related to aid management has been produced to date.

In an attempt to improve the effectiveness of aid, many of the stakeholders in the international aid regime agreed to commit to five key principles in the Paris Declaration (PD) in 2005. These principles of ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results and mutual accountability were aimed at improving the effective delivery and use of aid, although the Declaration has been followed by continuing doubts over aid effectiveness, especially in the context of deficiencies in donor cooperation and coordination and weak recipient ownership. Since the PD, donors have made varying efforts when it comes to implementing the Paris requirements towards greater aid effectiveness. However, after two OECD DAC monitoring surveys, in 2006 and in 2008, donors and recipients found out that the overall result of the progress of the implementation has been slow and that donor behavioural change towards implementing the PD has differed. In the light of this, this research aims to examine how donors have implemented the PD and why there are such differences in donor behaviour based on a comparative study of Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK), South Korea and China in Tanzania. This thesis reveals that there are key differences between advanced donors (Sweden and the UK) and emerging donors (Korea and China), particularly in terms of their levels of behavioural change in implementing the PD. While Sweden and the UK have shown greater progress in implementing many of the protocols of the PD, Korea and China have barely implemented the Paris requirements. The findings of this research highlight that the uneven responses and outcomes of the PD implementation are due to the design of the PD, which was based on the existing aid delivery mechanism of traditional donors at its top level, and the Paris requirements have not considered the bottom level reality of emerging donors who have different aid mechanisms from traditional donors. By examining seven major factors which inform the uneven donor performance (aid amount and number of staff, aid history of donors, political commitments, action plans and country specific strategies, aid management systems, aid modalities, and monitoring and evaluation), this study argues that the PD has been an 'easy option' for traditional donors such as Sweden and the UK, while it requires radical changes for emerging donors such as Korea and China. While this research relies on the public policy implementation theories to explain uneven donor behaviour in the PD implementation process, there has been less focus on the political economy and the self-interests and motivations of donors, which remains a main limitation of the study. Given this, this research has suggested conducting a further study on donor behaviour with a new methodological focus on the political economy and donor self-interests.

En matière d’aide au développement le droit est aussi inventif que fertile : droits économiques et sociaux, droits de l’homme, développement humain durable, etc. ; autant de matières mises en balance avec le droit du marché, de la concurrence sous couvert d’un intérêt économique général. La première option de cette étude est d’envisager les mécanismes juridiques propres à l’aide au développement à travers ces deux finalités à première vue antinomiques : l’efficience économique et le développement humain. La seconde est de délimiter le champ de recherche à la matière conventionnelle afin d’apprécier le seul processus partenarial qui, du point de vue de la coopération internationale, n’a pas livré tout son potentiel. L’intérêt de ce modèle de coopération internationale fondé sur le « Partenariat » n’est encore que secondaire comparé à la nature des parties (publique et privée) qui s’obligent, la nature des droits (politiques, économiques et sociaux) qu’il se propose de concilier, et enfin, les obligations à la fois de rentabilité et d’humanisme (le marché du développement humain) qu’il impose aux partenaires. Ainsi, la finalité de cette recherche est, certes, d’interroger les effets juridiques de tels partenariats, mais également de considérer le contrat de marchés publics d’aide au développement comme, potentiellement, porteur d’une nouvelle formule de coopération visant à résorber les inégalités de développement entre États. / As regards development aid the law is as creative as fertile : economic and social rights, human rights, sustainable development, etc. ; so many matters put in balance with the market law, the competition on behalf of a general economic interest. The first option of this study is to consider the legal mechanisms peculiar to the development aid through these two ends, at first sight paradoxical/antinomical : the economic efficiency and the human development. The second is to bound the field of research to the conventional material in order to appreciate the only process partnership which, from the international cooperation point of view, has not delivered yet all his potential. The interest of this international cooperation pattern based on the ”Partnership” remains still secondary, compared with the nature of the parties (public and private) which bind themselves, the nature of the rights (political, economical and social) that it sets out to conciliate, and finally, the bonds of profitability as well as humanism (the market of human development) it imposes upon its partners. Thus, the purpose of this research is indeed, to question the legal effects of such partnerships, but also, to regard the contract of public procurements of Development Aid, as potentially a growth market of an new model cooperation to be used for resorb inequalities of development between states.