Legal empowerment as a theoretical and practical concept has gained increasing attention in international development. Due to the shifting aid paradigm, caused by the rising of South-South cooperation, legal empowerment’s proposed bottom-up character has challenged the larger conventional top-down approaches to development that traditionally have dominated the development agenda. Nevertheless, studies examining legal empowerment have failed to analyse whether the concept is produced in a top-down setting and hence omitted possible power imbalances that the discourse might be hiding. By conducting a critical discourse analysis through applying postcolonial theory, the dissertation critically explores the concept on a sample of public policy documents by two of the largest legal empowerment donors, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The thesis analyses both how the donors approach the concept and how the discourse may distinguish in their approaches. Furthermore, it examines how power imbalances in the legal empowerment discourse might emerge from a Global North/South perspective. The study finds that the policies from both development banks do not discursively produce legal empowerment in significantly different ways, which moreover forswears the premise that the South-South development cooperation is to be essentially distinctive from the North-South cooperation. Furthermore, the both discourses were found to (re)produce postcolonial narratives that reduce the ‘subjects’ in the discourse into homogenous groups which could somewhat dispute the essence of the concept.

Official Development Assistance (ODA) or international development aid (defined as the transfer of official financing to promote the development and welfare of developing countries), is a highly influential and politically sensitive area of international relations. Though it is not governed by any international legal agreement, it displays remarkable cohesion across the major Northern donors in its modalities of governance, the coherence in its normative aims and in its institutional reform agenda. In order to understand why, this project focuses on the central, if overlooked, role of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) as the key institutional locus of the international governance of ODA by donors. This project examines the legal nature of the international governance of ODA, tracing and critically analysing the link between the governance of ODA and governance by ODA. It demonstrates how the legal form of the international governance of ODA is central to the reach and effectiveness of the legal and institutional reform agenda promoted via ODA at national and international levels, and to contouring the legal and political subjectivities of donors and aid-recipient states in ways that escape formal legal and democratic recognition. Finding that mainstream legal analytical methods fail to fully capture the legal-juridical quality of the international governance framework of ODA, and the particular role of law therein, I develop a new analytical lens based on the concepts of ‘jurisdiction’ (as juris dictio) and the ‘signature.’ This lens reveals how ODA creates a distinct jurisdiction with its own internal legal logic, where donor and aid-recipient subjectivities and relations of authority are continually constructed and maintained by international governance instruments and practices developed during colonial and imperial governance eras under the League of Nations and Marshall Plan institutions. I demonstrate how this jurisdictional space is augmented by key legal, policy, bureaucratic and technocratic instruments of governance by the OECD and DAC, through patterns of juridification and reiteration.

The principles of human rights and democracy have been of great importance for a long time and for many actors globally, especially for the European Union. This paper has the purpose of examining the European Union’s bilateral development aid and its relation to the organisation's human rights and democracy promotion. The study is a case study of Myanmar in the years 2000-2017 and with particular focus on the situation for the Muslim minority Rohingya. The case is investigated through the perspective of Ian Manners’ Normative Power Europe supplemented with aspects collected from previous research, to see if it can explain the behaviour of the aid flow. The conclusions of this study were that human rights and democracy while appearing greatly central has not had any major influence on the aid from the Union to Myanmar, and neither can the idea of European normative power explain the nature of the aid allocation.

Master Thesis called Are the development aid and democracy inseparable? aims to find out what impact does development aid have on democracy. The development aid is divided into four groups. Hypotheses are tested on data of 48 of countries from Sub-Saharan Africa in the period starting from the end of the Cold War and ending in 2009. In order to achieve its aim, the study uses regression model of ordinary least squares in combination with moving averages, when in position of dependent variable stands either value of democracy according to Polity IV Project or value of democracy evaluated by Freedom House. In first two chapters is presented theoretical concept of this study, on which this study is based on. In third chapter dependent and independent variables are analyzed including their descriptive characteristics. In the fourth and the fifth chapter the basic model is introduced, estimated results are analyzed and in following sixth chapter the model and results are tested. The estimated results of both models confirm the hypothesis about positive influence of human capital development aid on democracy. On the contrary, both models disprove the hypothesis about positive relationship of institutional aid with democracy and they both find negative influence of institutional development aid on...

Foreign capital inflows (FCI) play an important role in the economic development of the recipient country as they fund investments and promote growth. However, the size and composition of such inflows are determined on the basis of country specific requirements. The study investigates the impact of capital inflows on the economy of Kenya at a time when the government implemented economic reform measures to stabilize the economy and restore sustainable growth. More specifically, the study examines the impact of foreign capital flows remittances such as overseas workers remittance, official development aid, and external debt, on selected macro-economic variables using monthly time series data and a single-equation empirical approach. The study findings reveal that some forms of FCI are not influenced by the macro economic variables in the country but by other factors such as political stability and policy variables.

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Development aid currently given by developed countries is increasingly criticised in terms of its effectiveness and because dependencies are created or reinforced between the donor and receiver. This study focuses on aid given by non-governmental organisations. In the meantime, a new legal form has beenintroduced for private companies that follow the principles of steward-ownership, which means that the generated profit needs to serve a purpose and is self-governed. These principles ensure a more responsible and sustainable way of business making.This study seeks to determine the influence of the steward-ownership tenets on the efficiency and selfsustainment of aid projects, the role of steward-ownership in decision-making processes in project management and tries to understand how steward-ownership manages dependencies within aid projects for sustainable development. This study focuses on Nepal, a state which heavily relies on aid from other countries and where it thus is essential to make it as effective as possible. For the study, one steward-based company was the object of focus, as it is based in Germany but establishing social enterprises in Nepal. The empirical research was carried out with ten semi-structured interviews. The sample consisted of four Nepalese employees, four German employees, one follow-up with a German employee and finally, one interview with a journalist who served as an expert about current aid and its problems. The qualitative study used directed content analysis with open coding. Five propositions were formulated and discussed based on an analytical framework derived from the literature and relevant theories.It was found that steward-ownership plays an essential role in project management. An influence on the internal corporate structures of the company itself was discovered as well as in the implemented projects and social businesses in Nepal. Moreover, the findings indicated that the principles of steward-ownership affect the management of dependencies, especially concerning knowledge transfer and developing symmetric relationships by ensuring an equal distribution of responsibility and voting rights. The findings of this study contribute to research conducted on aid development and finding ways towards more sustainable development. However, further research is necessary to identify the cause-and-effect relationship between steward-ownership and the mindset of all stakeholders. The changes in internal corporate structures and work processes through the incorporation of steward-ownership could not be specified in perfect detail due to the limitations of this study.

Is intersectionality the way forward: A textual analysis of development strategies in Myanmar Development strategies need new perspectives to effectively allocate resources to those most affected by natural hazards, conflicts, economic insecurities, and many more. This qualitative thesis suggests intersectionality in the form of an analysis to uncover hidden passages in and core values of development strategies. In turn evaluating if these strategies hold a necessary amount of awareness of vulnerable groups by crossing the sections gender and sexuality; age; class status; ethnicity; and disability. By examining two development strategies in Myanmar, one can conclude that there is a lack of intersectional approach when creating the outline of the interventions which suggests a lack of context-based evaluations of the issues in Myanmar, and in turn it suggests a lack of understanding on who is vulnerable.

The first chapter examines donors’ motives for allocating foreign health aid. Do donor countries allocate foreign aid according to their economic interests or the needs of recipient countries?”. This paper analyzes the relevance of the donor country’s government ideology – namely, where it fits on the political spectrum – on how much its aid agencies can be influenced by industrial interest groups. Specifically, I follow Suzuki (2020) and consider to what extent countries with large pharmaceutical sectors structure aid so that recipient countries buy more pharmaceuticals. However, I allow results to differ not only on how autonomous aid agencies are in the donor countries but on whether the ruling government is left or right/center. Using a fractional logit model, the result shows that neither government ideology nor the structure of aid agencies is sufficient on its own in determining health aid allocation (either for economic interest or for the needs of the recipient countries). The allocation of foreign aid is dependent on the combination of government ideology and the structure of the aid agency. Also, regardless of the structure of the aid agency, a government with a right/center political ideology allocates more aid to basic needs than a left party. In the second Chapter, the paper considers to what extent infant mortality lessens for those near a facility financed by development aid. Using geocodes, the study matches household-level data taken from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys to the location of these aid-backed facilities. Therefore, this paper investigates if proximity to an aid-financed facility enhances the chances of infant survival at the sub-national level. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, the results indicate that geographical proximity to active aid projects reduces infant mortality. In addition, there is evidence of biases in the allocation of aid as the study shows that aid projects are established in areas that on average have lower infant mortality than non-aid locations. The result concludes that while aid is effective in reducing infant mortality in areas where development aid projects are established, there are biases in the allocation as aid is not reaching those that need it the most. The third chapter examines to what extent foreign direct investments worsen environmental pollution. Many see Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a source of economic development, income growth, and employment in developing countries. However, FDI could also cause pollution, hurting the environment and harming health. According to past studies, there appears to be no consensus on whether FDI has a positive or negative effect on the host’s environment in developing countries. Using a panel of 48 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, this study examines to what extent inflows of FDI lead to greater pollution using carbon dioxide as a measure of pollution. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first attempt to study this issue for a group of sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2018. The results from fixed effects models show that FDI has no effect on pollution in Sub-Saharan African Countries. These results do not support the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, suggesting that polluting industries leave countries where environmental regulations are strict to re-establish themselves in countries with lax environmental oversight. Given that many African countries are deemed to have ineffective governance (and so presumably less able to enforce environmental standards), the lack of a positive association is especially striking. However, the results show a significant positive relationship between FDI and pollution in more democratic countries while FDI pollutes less in countries that are less democratic.

The aim of this paper is to examine how European development intervention in Africa iscommunicated in the documentary “Sweet Poison.” For many decades there have beenprojects that were developed in Africa in order to support civilization in the poorest areas.This paper explores how the three projects in Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Mali werecreated and developed, but not fully completed. These had various consequences overtime. With a reflection of representations, narratives and documentary story-telling, thestudy will use Teun Van Dijk's framework (2004) to analyze the film. The importance ofcritical discourse analysis techniques is well-known and provides an effective strategy toanalyze ideology as well as power in the language. In particular, the dichotomy of in-groupfavoritism vs. out-group derogation seems to be efficient in analytical discursive practices.A semi-structured interview was made with the author of the film to collect important datafor the analysis.