Emerging Donors And Its Influence To The International Development Assistance System

After the Second War, the Marshall Plan had raised the curtain of large-scale foreign aid behavior of a state actor in modern sense. As a starting point, a more and more standardized and institutionalized international development assistance system had formed. The traditional development assistance system has always been playing a key role in public governance domain like alleviating extreme poverty, providing humanitarian relief etc. With the DAC donor club being the main source of development finance and the maker of soft norms like institution, rules, policy and so on, the system's main feature is its "Western Dominance", which is why the system is also called "the DAC aid system".Truth is, ever since its built, there exists several actors independent of and continue competing with the DAC system, but the DAC had maintained the monopoly position because of its powerful economic strength. However, over the past ten years, a newly emerging force has broken this tedious "Western Dominance" landscape. Along with the economic globalization process, groups of emerging economies countries like China and India have experienced high economic growth. From wanting to spread their influence abroad to looking for new business and building a positive, friendly image, these countries have largely increased their expenditure in foreign aid area, which made them successfully accomplished turning their role from recipient country to the contributor to the international development system.Owing to the differences in the aid model, principle and methodology etc., these new actors have been named "Emerging donors'" or "Non-DAC donors" by the western scholars, and China has always been seen as the "leading sheep" of the emerging donors. The rise of emerging donors have opened up a space for them to assume greater responsibility in the process of promoting sustainable development and participating in global public governance. At present, the emerging donors are introducing a silent revolution in the development assistance landscape, and them are considered as the key factor that influence the future direction of the international development assistance system in the 21st century.What kind of possibility will the emerging donors bring to the international development assistance system has become the center of the agenda in many international meetings, forums and the spotlight of the policymakers in different countries. This paper discussed these questions:(1) How did the emerging donors carry out their development cooperation programs? (2) What's the difference between the emerging donors and the traditional donors? (3) What influence are emerging donors having on the recipient countries, the traditional donors and the development finance system? (4) What direction does the emerging donors influence suggest for the future of development?Through analysis and discussion in depth, this paper has reached such important conclusions:for the beneficiary country, the emergences of new development partners not only break the bottleneck of infrastructure that contain the development of economic, but also pointed out another different way to development, most importantly, the new donors promoted the replacement of its subject position and the enlargement of the policy space; The rise of emerging donors not only helped the transfer of aid relationship from the unequal "North-South relationship'" to the forming global development partnership, but also deepened the legitimacy crisis of the traditional aid management mechanism, which lead to the start of the reform process of the international aid community.The organizing structure of the paper is as follows:The beginning part is the Introduction, in this section, this paper first reviewed the development history of the international development assistance system, its main character, its newly change and the root of its change. By this way, this paper introduced the concept of emerging donors, and then we summarized the research status of the emerging donors in the academic circle at home and abroad.According to the degree of recognition to the traditional DAC model and its norms, the emerging donors were categorized into three distinct groups:the DAC-alike donors, the Arab donors and the Southern Donors. Next up, this paper introduced these three groups'aid history, aid volume, aid patterns and channels, geographical orientation and sector orientation thoroughly successively in Chapter One, Chapter Two and Chapter Three. Moreover, this paper made comparative analysis between these three groups and traditional donors successively by the end of each chapter.Based on the clear understanding of the emerging donors, this paper analyzed and discussed the profound impact the emerging donors had on the beneficiary countries, the traditional donors and the international aid system successively in Chapter Four, Chapter Five and Chapter Six. In the end, this paper also discussed the possibility of emerging donors creating a substitute system for the traditional aid system rationally from the angle of capability and will.