Session Description:

Although much work examines foreign aid’s impact on development outcomes, its effect on bureaucracies and institutions that are key to development, and profoundly influenced by aid interventions, remains understudied. I argue that project-based aid alters financial and social aspects of work over which bureaucrats hold salient preferences, generating tradeoffs that drive bureaucrats to redirect effort from routine functions toward donor-funded initiatives. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and survey experiments with more than 600 Ugandan bureaucrats, I find that, despite preferring government funding and autonomy, bureaucrats are drawn to better-paid aid projects, thus diverting effort away from regular duties. They also prefer departments with substantial donor funding, although it undermines the equity and teamwork they value. These findings reveal why aid can weaken bureaucracies: the same incentives that boost performance on donor projects divert effort from government programming and erode the organizational cohesion needed for lasting bureaucratic capacity. 

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Biography: Maria Nagawa is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Her research bridges comparative politics, international relations, and public policy to examine how public institutions function under conditions of foreign intervention, weak legitimacy, and uneven development. Drawing on fieldwork across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, her work combines surveys, survey experiments, interviews, and administrative data to examine bureaucrats' incentives, the resilience of civil society, and the agency of vulnerable groups. Her research speaks to current debates on international influence, postcolonial legacies, state capacity, and citizen trust. It is guided by a core normative concern: how to build states that are legitimate, equitable, and effective, particularly in developing countries. She holds a joint PhD in Public Policy and Political Science from Duke University, an MA in International Economic Policy from Sciences Po, and a BA in Commerce from Makerere University. Before joining graduate school, she was a Lecturer at Makerere University Business School and a Research Associate at the Economic Policy Research Centre in Kampala, Uganda. She has also been a consultant with the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, a visiting researcher at the BRICS Policy Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado, Denver’s School of Public Affairs.