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Chapter 4 provides a summary of how donor-government relations are organized at the recipient-country level (i.e., the aid architecture), explaining why policy dialogue is so important for both recipient governments and donor agencies. The chapter articulates that far from being dictated by donors, aid policy is a compromise between donors and recipient reached via policy bargaining between the two parties.

Chapter 5 provides evidence of commitment problems on both the donor and the recipient sides. Donor agencies and recipient governments must manage competing interests in a complex and ever changing environment that is far from immune from global shifts and politics. This makes the measurement and enforcement of both donor and recipient commitments difficult, straining relations between the two parties.

Since the era of one-party rule, Malawi’s relationship with the donor community has proved erratic and contentious. During the second term of Malawi’s current president, Bingu wa Mutharika, this trend has had important implications for the consolidation of the country’s nascent democracy. Donors providing democracy aid have assisted with the conduct of elections and improved the technical capacity of parliamentarians. However, inconsistency across programme cycles, the concentration of funding around elections, and a reluctance to support political parties hinders the size of democracy aid’s long-term impact. Development aid, particularly general budget support, has tended to further sideline the role of parliament and indirectly has provided the incumbent party with an electoral advantage through support for the country’s fertilizer input subsidy programme. To prevent an erosion of democracy, donors often have threatened to withhold aid to Malawi. Yet, they frequently only proceed with these threats when concurrent concerns exist over economic governance.

Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical arguments of the book. The chapter first provides a theoretical framework for understanding aid policy bargaining between donor agencies and recipient governments. Then, drawing on theories of institutional economics, the chapter articulates how commitment problems in foreign aid are theorized to influence choices in aid delivery and the sustainability of aid delivery mechanisms over time. The chapter argues that the sustainability of a aid delivery mechanism depends on its ability to incentivize both donors and recipients to uphold their commitments over the long term.

Chapter 1 summarizes the core arguments of the book and introduces the significance of the project both theoretically and practically. The chapter argues that scholars and practitioners too often focus on aid effectiveness, ignoring how choices regarding aid delivery mechanism are made to being with. The chapter then provides a brief historical look at foreign aid, demonstrating that the history of foreign aid is a history of fads and fashions. Finally, the chapter summarizes the core theoretical argument of the book, which is that commitment problems constrain the policy compromises reached by donors and recipients. If we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments.

Chapter 6 focuses on CARE’s ongoing professionalization and its ties to government agencies, international diplomats, corporate players and marketing firms. It sheds light on CARE’s first attempts at a further internationalization of the enterprise and its investment in external development and nutrition expertise. CARE merged with the NGO Medico Inc. fostered community organising activities and pushed for a more development-oriented approach in its hunger relief programming.