Several years ago I received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to study the global foreign aid network. I have published several pieces that resulted from that project, and continue to study aid from a network perspective. One piece that emerged from that project is titled “World Society and the Global Foreign Aid Network” – an article which has been accepted for publication in the new ASA section journal Sociology of Development. Having been through more revisions than I care to admit, this article examines whether aid network centrality – how plugged into the global aid network a recipient country is – is associated with other measures of global connectedness or embeddedness in World Society.
The takeaway point from the article is that the more donors from which a country receives aid, the greater the number of ties that country is likely to have to the international human rights architecture, international NGOs, and other international organizations in the future. In the paper I start to explore the role aid donors may play in brokering these connections for recipient country partners – a topic that is a focus of my ongoing research.
The final submission version of the article is downloadable below, or on my research website.