research

2026

1. Working Paper

   Competition or Chaos? Donor Fragmentation and the Politics of Aid Effectiveness

   Ethan Sager, and Jennifer Tobin

   2026

   Working paper

   Abs

   Does donor fragmentation help or harm local development? We study this question through a spatially precise lens: the World Bank is effectively the only donor in Sub-Saharan Africa geocoded to exact project sites, so we use the staggered arrival of World Bank projects as a treatment and ask whether its local impact depends on how many other donors crowd the surrounding district. Using a continuous, sensor-harmonized nightlights series over 2000–2020, an event-study design shows that World Bank project arrival is followed by rising local economic activity, a level effect we treat as suggestive given that pre-trends are not jointly zero. This return appears to be offset by donor fragmentation where subnational state capacity is weak: the fragmentation-by-capacity interaction is statistically strong at the cell and district levels—competition where the state is strong, chaos where it is weak—though it attenuates and loses significance under the most demanding native-resolution de-trending. Turning to 146,000 georeferenced Afrobarometer respondents, fragmentation is associated with higher material service delivery yet lower citizen trust in and responsiveness from local government, a pattern consistent with an accountability cost invisible to economic proxies. Precise donor geocodes for five countries sharpen this: the legitimacy association is conditional on the presence of a dominant coordinating donor, with the World Bank appearing to act as a coordinating anchor. We read the survey results as conditional associations, not causal effects.