Special issue introduction Ownership in a post‐aid effectiveness era: Comparative perspectives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Motivation Close to 15 years have passed since the adoption of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which generated unprecedented efforts to advance effective development co‐operation with a central focus on developing country ownership. Under today’s international development co‐operation realities, involving inclusive agendas, strategic divergence and increasing competition, discussions on ownership, harmonization and alignment have lost traction. Yet the practices of development co‐operation relationships show strong continuities. Purpose This special issue examines how the principle of ownership may be understood and advanced under these new conditions. National ownership is prioritized in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development yet has so far been marginalized by a predominantly piecemeal response and by the rise of “mutual benefit” co‐operation. Approach and Methods This special issue takes an inductive approach to studying specific cases and actors bearing on the challenge of understanding and advancing ownership today, in order to inform future policy and research. The contributions to this special issue mainly draw from qualitative research designs that present detailed research inquiries into specific country and actor cases, drawing from interviews, structured desk reviews of policy documents and the rich body of literature on development effectiveness. They are complemented by two contributions that respectively present quantitative research and probe the critical and post‐development literature for additional insights. Findings Findings point to an increasing prevalence of pragmatism and self‐interest among all actors, to the detriment of national ownership. Broad co‐operation agendas, a sense of urgency interpreted as a search for quick results, and more diverse, interest‐ and outcome‐driven forms of multi‐stakeholder partnerships all entail a more assertive and proactive approach on the part of external actors. Under these conditions, local initiative may either become stifled or be reasoned away. Given this, today’s dominant approaches to co‐operation raise concerns about their ethics and sustainability. Policy implications Ownership remains both a requirement and a desired outcome of international co‐operation and is key to the effective use of public funding. A key requirement to revitalizing the debate on and practice of ownership is to gather better evidence as the basis for informed scrutiny. To this end, policy‐makers need to reprioritize independent evaluation at both the individual and collective level.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it