Environmental Aid

The first major product of the PLAID data collection effort is its identification and analysis of foreign assistance for the environment. In a book manuscript and a series of papers we describe and analyze the allocation and effectiveness of environmental aid from both bilateral and multilateral development organizations. Although this project is examining the allocation decisions of donors for environmental aid projects, a sub-sample of all aid, funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (NSF-grant #SES-0454384) will allow for the future use of PLAID in identifying and analyzing other sectors.

The project examines the allocation and effectiveness of international environmental aid (which we term "green aid") from 1970-2001. To date, we have collected information on over 430,000 international development assistance projects given by donors (countries like the United States and Japan as well as development banks like the World Bank) to recipient countries. To accomplish this, student researchers have helped the principal investigators to assemble data from each individual donor (there are over forty of them), and we have facilitated field research for several students in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.

The Environmental Aid project focuses on three overarching questions:

• Why and how do donors provide different types aid to particular countries?
• What drives recipient countries in their pursuit and consumption of environmental assistance?
• What are the effects of development finance for both environmental and non-environmental projects?

The completion of the PLAID database will help answer these questions by allowing the first systematic tests of a large number of core hypotheses from the international relations (IR), economics, and development-finance literatures. To date, theory in this literature has developed in the context of plausibility probes and qualitative case studies with small-n samples. Quantitative work, conversely, has been largely descriptive and employs incomplete and biased data. Scholars have aggregated incorrect sums of aid and loans at the sectoral or country level. The reason: most quantitative studies are based on existing data aggregated by donor-selected sector, for which we have identified large, persistent and systematic errors when sectors don’t map cleanly into environmental projects. Hypotheses have not been systematically tested with data gathered at the level of individual development projects.

Students and faculty in the Departments of Government, Economics and Sociology are collaborating on this project, which is notable because of its interdisciplinary nature, extensive opportunities for undergraduate research, and participation by junior faculty. We currently have students working with us on the project with backgrounds in international relations, government, economics, sociology, and the environmental sciences. Some students are interested in the environmental aspects of the project, others in the mechanisms of international aid, and some want to see economic and political theory applied to a real-world problem. We believe our project affords a rare interdisciplinary experience for undergraduates and fosters discussion across disciplines.

The first major product of the research is a book co-authored by Parks, Tierney, Hicks and Roberts entitled Greening Aid: Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance which will be published in 2008.

For access to papers presented at conferences or published in refereed journals, see the papers page.