Acknowledgments

This report was prepared by: Samantha Custer, Tanya Sethi, Rodney Knight, Amber Hutchinson, Vera Choo, and Mengfan Cheng (AidData, College of William & Mary). The authors are appreciative of the peer reviewers that helped refine our thinking, methods, and prose, including: Rob Blair (Brown University), Catherine Elkins (CorStone), Sharon Felzer (World Bank), Rachel Leeds (USAID), Ammar A. Malik (William & Mary), Ida McDonnell (OECD), Annalisa Prizzon (Overseas Development Institute), and Phil Roessler (William & Mary).

John Custer and Parker Kim were instrumental in creating high-impact visuals and along with Soren Patterson conducted the final formatting, layout, and editing of this publication. Bryan Burgess made an important contribution through providing the cross-walked data for financing against the Sustainable Development Goals that supported our analysis of donor-leader-citizen alignment of development priorities. Phil Roessler and Rob Blair were invaluable in the design and preliminary analysis of two conjoint survey experiments featured in this report.

We designed the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey through a consultative, iterative process, and are grateful to the many individuals who took the time to provide us with feedback on the survey questionnaire and/or user interface. Norma Altshuler, Grant Cameron, Sharon Felzer, David de Ferantti, Charlotte Lane, Mark Skeith, and Ariel Swan, among others, contributed helpful guidance on the substantive design of the survey questions. We are grateful to the pre-testers, who kindly completed a draft version of the questionnaire and provided feedback on their experiences so that we could refine the final version, including: Jihee Ahn, Maria Arnal Canudo, Jack Cornforth, Emilie Efronson, Anthony Gao, Paige Kirby, Rachel Leeds, Ahmed Naseer, Kathy Nolan, Soren Patterson, Suma Pratyusha, Huiting Tan, Jennifer Turner, Jessica Wells, and Hannah Wheatley.

Much thanks is due to the efforts of our large and talented team of research assistants from the College of William & Mary who put in the spadework to help us update our sampling frame from the 2017 Listening to Leaders Survey to ensure we included holders of key institutional positions between 2016 and 2020, along with their current contact information. Under the direction of Mengfan Cheng, Hanna Borgestedt, and Kelsey Marshall, our research assistants were also invaluable in serving as translators and managing the email inquiries of respondents. The broader team of research assistants who supported the 2020 survey wave include: Danielle Batterman, Hanna Borgestedt, Daniel Brot, Grace Bruce, Riley Busbee, Jack Doherty, Codi Elliott, Emma Groene, Hannah Hampton, Cassie Heyman-Schrum, Jason Lin, Haowen Liu, Jingjing Liu, Kelsey Marshall, Holden Mershon, Ankita Mohan, Lehman Montgomery, Erin Murphy, Cassie Nestor, Yaw Ofori-Addae, Laura Opsahl-Ong, Joanne Owens, Catalina Palma, Ryan Posthumus, Grace Riley, Claudia Segura, Madeline Smith, Megan Steele, Minkyong Song, Semira Tewolde, Undra Tsend, Dongyang Wang, Mikayla Williams, and Angela Yost.

Last, but certainly not least, we thank the over 6800 survey participants who graciously answered our questions, sharing their invaluable insights on the most important development problems to solve, their interactions with international donors, and their experiences in trying to get traction for policy initiatives in their countries. We hope that this report amplifies their voices and shapes the next generation of international development policy and practice.

This report was made possible through generous financial support received from: the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development through the Higher Education Solutions Network cooperative agreement (AID-A-12-00096) with AidData/William & Mary. However, the findings and conclusions of this report are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of these funders and partners.

Citation

Custer, S., Sethi, T., Knight, R., Hutchinson, A., Choo, V., and M. Cheng. (2021). Listening to Leaders 2021: A Report Card for Development Partners in an Era of Contested Cooperation. Williamsburg, VA: AidData at the College of William & Mary.

1.1 Leaders: Who participated in the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey?

AidData is a market leader in fielding large-scale surveys in a consistent and comparable manner to capture the insights of those who influence and make development policy in low- and middle-income countries. Although the true global population of development policymakers and practitioners is, for all intents and purposes, unobservable, we took painstaking efforts to identify a well-defined and observable population of interest. For the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey we define this population of interest broadly as: those individuals who are knowledgeable about the formulation and implementation of government policies and programs in low- or middle-income countries at any point between 2016 and 2020.

We further break down this population of interest into six stakeholder groups: (i) mid- and senior-level officials from host government agencies; (ii) representatives of development partners operating in-country; (iii) leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); (iv) leaders of private sector companies; (v) independent researchers from universities, think tanks, and media; and (vi) national-level parliamentarians. [iii] For the 2020 survey, our research team spent nearly two years identifying approximately 100,000 leaders from 141 countries and semi-autonomous territories who met our inclusion criteria. [iv] This represents an expansion from the 126 countries and semi-autonomous territories included in the 2014 and 2017 surveys (see Figure 1). See Appendix A of the Technical Appendix for more information about how AidData identifies who receives an invitation to participate in the survey. [v]

Fielded between June and September 2020, 84,000 individuals successfully received an invitation via email to participate in the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey. Of these, 6,807 individuals answered the survey, for a response rate of 8.1 percent. [vi] It is worth noting that individual-level participation rates to email surveys and elite surveys tend to be lower than that of household surveys. AidData mitigates potential bias in our surveys in three ways: (1) developing a robust sampling frame of individuals who represent our target population of interest to ensure there is a large enough set of final respondents to facilitate this analysis; (2) collecting data to monitor the demographics of those who receive an invitation versus those who respond to the survey to assess representativeness; and (3) using non-response weights when computing aggregate statistics (e.g., arithmetic means) from the survey results. See Appendix A and C of the Technical Appendix for more detail on how we design our sampling frame and the weighting procedures for our analysis.

Respondents to the 2020 survey identified the type of organization they worked with for the longest period between 2016 and 2020, [vii] as well as their primary substantive area of focus from 23 different policy domains (e.g., economic policy, health, education). [viii] For the sake of simplicity and to facilitate meaningful comparisons with the largest number of responses possible, we collapsed the 23 policy domains into 7 larger sector groups for the subsequent analysis in this report. These sectors were economic, environment, governance, infrastructure, rural development, social, and other. [ix] Similarly, we collapsed the country-level responses into 6 larger regional groups: East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North Africa (MENA), South Asia (SA), and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Table 1 contains a breakdown by stakeholder group and region of the leaders who received an invitation to participate in the survey and those who responded.

1.2 Partners: Which development partners did leaders evaluate?

In this report, we use development partners as an inclusive term to describe a diverse field of external actors that provide a broad array of assistance to low- and middle-income countries—from financial assistance (e.g., grants and loans at varying degrees of concessionality) to technical assistance (e.g., advisory services and other non-financial support).

We first asked survey respondents to identify a single policy initiative they had directly worked on between 2016 and 2020. [x] Respondents then selected which development partners had provided advice or assistance in support of this initiative out of a list of 130 development partners, including 31 multilateral development banks or intergovernmental organizations, 96 bilateral aid agencies and foreign embassies, and 3 private foundations. [xi] To ensure that our list was sufficiently representative of the spectrum of development partners who were likely to work with our target population of interest, we added 53 new agencies (9 multilateral, 44 bilateral) to the list in the 2020 survey wave. For the full list of development partners, see Appendix B of the Technical Appendix.

In this report, although a bilateral actor may be represented by more than one agency, we collapsed the responses for all agencies flying the same flag into a single, unified picture for our footprint, influence, and helpfulness measures. For example, survey respondents could select up to four Japanese entities from which they had received advice or assistance: the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Japanese embassy (or consulate-general), and the representative office of Japan. [xii] However, for the sake of simplicity, we collapse those responses into a single score for Japan in this report.

We should note that given the spirit of this exercise—learning from what leaders have to say about the external actors who supported them with advice or assistance—we do not artificially impose an eligibility criteria from the outside on the basis of the sectors or regions in which we presumed development partners to operate. Instead, we use the answers of the respondents as the authoritative criteria to determine who worked with whom and calculate the performance ratings of development partners on that basis. In instances where a result appears counterintuitive to what we might expect given the known profile of a development partner, we note it and, when possible, provide additional insight or context for why that might be.

1.3 Topics: What insights did leaders share about their priorities and experiences working with development partners?

The Listening to Leaders Surveys capture leader perceptions, priorities, and experiences over time on a series of topics. This offers several advantages: (i) comparability of responses to a common set of questions across survey waves; (ii) comparability between multiple cohorts of interest (e.g., sector, region, stakeholder group); (iii) comparability of perceptions of various government agencies or international development organizations using standardized scales; and (iv) breadth of data on diverse topics captured simultaneously.

In this report, we analyze a subset of the results from the 2020 survey that pertain to leader priorities and development partner performance. [xiii] The results are organized in five chapters. In Chapter 2 (Priorities), we analyze what leaders view as the most pressing problems to solve in their countries and what they want from their development partners. In Chapter 3 (Footprint), we analyze the responses of leaders regarding the development partners from whom they had received advice or assistance. In Chapter 4 (Performance), we assess how respondents rate the influence and helpfulness of the development partners with whom they work, as well as how this has evolved since the 2017 survey wave. We also probe deeper to understand why some actors were seen as influential and whether this influence was positive or negative. In Chapter 5 (Conclusion), we reflect on what we can learn from the insights of leaders to inform not only the practices of individual organizations, but also broader public debates on the future of multilateralism, development cooperation reform, and a resurgence of great power competition.

2.1 Development partners are in step with national priorities in health and good governance, but appear less attuned to education and jobs that leaders see as gateways to growth

Education (SDG 4), jobs (SDG 8), and peace, justice, and strong institutions (SDG 16) were top of mind as the most important priorities that leaders in low- and middle-income countries wanted to tackle (Figure 2). Over half of the respondents to the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey selected these among their top three priorities. These priorities were durable not only over time—they were also the top three in 2017—but highly consistent across respondents, regardless of stakeholder group, region (Figure 3), gender, or level of experience. The only exception was that private sector respondents placed marginally greater emphasis on innovation, industry, and infrastructure over peace, justice, and strong institutions (ranked fourth). This logic likely follows from the private sector's reliance on innovation and industry to develop markets for their goods and services.

Nevertheless, leaders are not monolithic: as we move into the second tier of priorities, their preferences vary, likely reflective of what they see as the most pressing challenges facing their particular contexts. In this second tier of priorities, good health and well-being (SDG 3), identified by 41 percent of respondents overall, was the most consistently present goal in the top six development priorities of respondents, regardless of region, stakeholder group, experience level, and gender. Parliamentarians, NGOs, development partners, and women were substantially more concerned about gender equality (SDG 5) than other groups. Private sector representatives and men, meanwhile, were more likely to emphasize access to affordable clean energy (SDG 7).

Promoting industry, innovation, and infrastructure (SDG 9) was fairly consistent among the top priorities for leaders in every region and was only marginally lower in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). However, there were some noticeable differences based upon local realities. Respondents from South Asia (SA) and East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), for whom rising sea levels and extreme weather events represent imminent threats to their countries’ livelihoods, placed greater emphasis on climate change (SDG 13) than eradicating poverty (SDG 1). Reducing inequality (SDG 10) was marginally more important to respondents from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)—the world’s most unequal region (World Bank, 2013)—and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Leaders cannot prioritize everything, so what goal appears most at risk of being out of sight, and therefore, out of mind? Environmental protection is the ultimate collective action challenge that requires leaders to join forces to tackle issues that entail “large upfront costs and uncertain future benefits” (Custer et al., 2018a). This may partly explain why environmental goals—life on land (SDG 15), life below water (SDG 14), and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12)—continued to be an afterthought for leaders. Climate action (SDG 13) received somewhat more attention from leaders in some geographic regions, such as SA and EAP, but not all.

Citizens agreed with leaders on many of their development priorities—particularly related to the importance of good health and education (Figure 4). If anything, it is likely that good health may have even greater importance for citizens today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic response, than in 2018-19, when they answered the MY World Survey. The largest disparities between citizens and leaders may be reinforced by their particular vantage points (Figure 5). Citizens were most concerned with their basic, immediate needs that impact them personally—feeding their families (SDG 2), accessing clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks (SDG 1), and promoting equal opportunities specifically for women and girls (SDG 5).

Leaders, by contrast, emphasized longer-term and macro development issues facing their countries such as the promotion of industry, innovation, and infrastructure (SDG 9), reducing inequalities in general (SDG 10), economic growth (SDG 8), and peace, justice, and strong institutions (SDG 16). There is one interesting departure from this trend—citizens appear to be much more attuned to issues of climate change (SDG 13) than their leaders, perhaps indicating that they may already be seeing early symptoms of how a degrading climate may impact their lives and livelihoods.

If you want to gauge a donor’s true priorities, a look at how they direct the power of their purse can be quite revealing—as US President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (then Senator Biden) famously declared in 2008, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value” (Biden, 2008). In this vein, we mapped how development partners deployed their official development assistance (ODA) toward the 16 SDGs in 2018-19, the two years most proximate to the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey (Figure 6). Admittedly, the financing picture likely shifted from 2020-21 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic with a greater emphasis on pandemic response; however, the 2018-19 picture is arguably a better view of donors’ longer-term priorities.

Donors’ top two priorities (based on their aid spending) converged most closely with leaders with regard to investing in peace, justice, and strong institutions (SDG 16) and citizens when it came to good health and wellbeing (SDG 3). In 2020, just as in 2017, development partners may be underinvesting in education (SDG 4) and jobs (SDG 8) relative to the strong emphasis placed on these priorities by leaders (Figure 6). Donors seemed most out of step with citizens on neglecting climate action (SDG 13), gender equality (SDG 5), and eliminating poverty (SDG 1). [xxi] Once again, environmental goals such as responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) and life below water (SDG 14) failed to penetrate the top priorities for anyone—be it leaders, citizens, or donors.

2.2 Leaders say that their preferred development partners are those that can best adapt their strategies to local needs and plan for long-term sustainability

Adaptability was top of mind for leaders when they thought about what they value most in a preferred partner. Forty percent of respondents to the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey said that they valued development partners that adapted their strategies to the country’s needs (see Figure 7). This was far and away the single most desirable quality respondents looked for in their partners, followed by prioritizing long-term planning. [xxii] As respondents answered follow-up questions about what adaptability and long-term planning looked like in practice (see Figures 8 and 9), a clear and compelling theme emerged—leaders want partners who prioritize long-term sustainability, and this manifests in several ways.

One important aspect of sustainability is that proposed development solutions are fit-for-purpose. Respondents placed a premium on development partner efforts to ensure projects were contextually relevant (60 percent), aligned with national priorities (60 percent), and incorporated feedback from domestic stakeholders (56 percent) (see Figure 8). A second aspect of sustainability is ensuring that development partners help their counterparts in low- and middle-income countries sustain gains beyond the typical 3-5 year planning horizon of a project or program. In the eyes of respondents, this meant planning with the end in mind— building institutionalized capacity (73 percent), planning transitions to ensure countries can continue projects beyond the donor’s engagement (50 percent), and prioritizing long-term impacts (53 percent) (see Figure 9).

The volatility of aid has long been a thorn in the side of low- and middle-income countries who must often navigate large and unpredictable fluctuations in the volume and focus of development partner contributions (Kharas, 2008; McKee et al., 2020). This dynamic is compounded as donors face shrinking budgets of their own, as well as increasing scrutiny from taxpayers and shareholders keenly concerned about value for money. In this respect, leaders shrewdly recognize that their best chance to preserve hard-won development gains is to ensure that they have the foresight, capacity, and mandate to independently sustain and build upon the foundation laid with external partners whose engagement is time-limited.

Fortunately, development partners have increasingly embraced the need to be more nimble and inclusive of local voices in defining the problems they want to solve and rapidly iterating together to find solutions that are fit-for-purpose in alleviating key constraints. Andrews et al. (2015) promoted their problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) model, which features structured participatory processes and tight feedback loops, as an antidote to the pitfalls of pre-packaged expert-driven solutions in tackling intractable governance challenges. Over 400 development thinkers and practitioners reiterated their commitment to these ideas in signing a “Doing Development Differently manifesto” (ODI, n.d.).

Adaptive management has since become an integral part of the enlightened development partner’s lexicon, from the UK’s LearnAdapt [xxiii] (Menocal et al., 2021) to the US Agency for International Development’s Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) toolkit [xxiv] (USAID, n.d.) and many more examples. Development partners who double down on such efforts may be better positioned than their peers to respond to the call of leaders to be more adaptive and focused on designing and delivering development assistance with long-term sustainability in mind.

2.3 Leaders prefer development projects that are transparent and generous, focused on infrastructure, and provide political cover to lock in desirable reforms

Leaders pay close attention to the generosity of financing offered by development partners in several respects. When presented with randomized descriptions of hypothetical aid projects and asked which their government should choose, respondents preferred grants (+20 percentage points) and low-interest loans (+13 percentage points) over high-interest rate lending; disliked tied aid (-7 percentage points); and favored large dollar projects (+2 percentage points). We should note, however, that while leaders may not like tied aid—when a “donor requires the recipients of its aid to use those dollars to procure goods or services from itself”—and this runs afoul of best practice, we have not found evidence to indicate that this necessarily undercuts development partner influence (Custer et al., 2015 and 2018a). Respondents were also noticeably more interested in infrastructure projects than those focused on civil society (-6 percentage points) or tax collection capacity (-6 percentage points).

Although there is an extensive literature on the perils and pitfalls of conditionalities, leaders were less opposed to the inclusion of social, economic, or democracy conditions in development projects than one might expect. Respondents were 1-2 percentage points more likely to choose projects with these conditions rather than to choose those with none at all. It could be that leaders view conditionality as relatively toothless, considering that “aid agencies often fail to enforce conditions” (Kilby, 2009), either due to lack of political will in the face of competing geostrategic priorities or limited capacity to follow-through (Li, 2017). Alternatively, leaders may view conditionalities as helping them push forward reforms they were predisposed to support and for which they now can access new resources to galvanize allies or minimize vocal detractors.

Moreover, when it comes to the delivery of assistance projects, leaders gravitated towards projects requiring higher rather than lower standards. Respondents were more likely to choose aid projects with regulations attached, specifically to reduce corruption (+13 percentage points), minimize environmental damage (+10 percentage points), or protect workers from unfair labor practices (+6 percentage points), than those without. Perhaps in a similar vein, respondents preferred projects that required public disclosure of the aid agreement terms over those that did not (+10 percentage points).

This high degree of enthusiasm for regulations and required disclosures does not appear to support the ambivalence argument (i.e., regulations are unlikely to be enforced). Instead, this may lend further credence to the view that reform-minded leaders may sometimes view these external requirements as strengthening their hand to overcome potential domestic resistance and lock in desirable policy changes. This may be welcome news to development partners, provided that they are thoughtful about ensuring the regulations they propose are well-aligned with what their counterparts hope to achieve.

The willingness of leaders to embrace environmental regulations also gives rise to an important insight to complement our earlier discussion of national priorities. Although environmental issues were not foremost on the list of the most pressing development problems respondents said they wanted to solve, this should not be taken as an indication that leaders are unsympathetic to the importance of safeguarding the Earth’s biodiversity. The survey results do indicate that leaders preferred projects that did not actively harm the environment, even if they may feel the need to prioritize their attention and resources to other concerns.

Somewhat counterintuitively, leaders appear to be more similar, than different, in their preferences for development projects regardless of whether they work inside or outside of government. The one exception to this general rule is that non-government respondents were more likely to prioritize civil society-focused projects (+5 percentage points), while those in government (executive branch and parliamentarians) were more likely to prefer infrastructure projects (+4 percentage points). [xxv] It is also worth noting a rather surprising non-finding where we expected to see a clear difference: government officials and non-governmental officials alike strongly preferred transparent disclosure of the terms of lending. This may indicate that political leaders are not tone-deaf to maintaining the confidence of their colleagues and the public by making these transactions above board, as opposed to hidden from view.

2.4 Leaders place a premium on timely, accurate data from trusted organizations to guide their decisions, while senior officials are more concerned about the political feasibility of recommendations

In addition to financing, many development partners serve as information brokers, supplying data and technical advice to support reform-minded leaders. However, in a hyperconnected world, leaders can quickly experience information overload when faced with seemingly unlimited sources of data and analysis from which to choose. In a world of imperfect information, it is unlikely that leaders will encounter ideal data that precisely has all the features they want. So, what trade-offs are they willing to make, and which data will they pay attention to in a sea of imperfect possibilities?

Respondents demonstrated a clear preference for data that was timely (+27 percentage points) and highly accurate (+20 percentage points). The emphasis on timeliness (i.e., inclusion of recent years of data) and accuracy (i.e., the rigor with which data is collected and produced) implies that leaders are thinking critically about the information they need to inform their decision making, as opposed to pro forma reporting. However, sourcing such data is challenging especially in practice, in countries where national statistics organizations and line ministries tasked with collecting crucial administrative data are often resource-constrained to meet demand (SDSN TReNDS, 2019).

This should be a wake-up call for development partners to crowd in additional public and private sector resources to fill an estimated shortfall of US$700 million per year in national statistics systems (Calleja and Rogerson, 2019) which perpetuate “acute data gaps, data publication delays, insufficient data disaggregation and more” (SDSN TReNDS, 2019). Improving the capacity of countries to sustainably produce and access timely, accurate data is not only a recipe for better information, but also appears as a way for development leaders to be responsive to what leaders want.

In addition to quality, leaders consider the face behind the data, exhibiting a preference for information sourced from organizations that they have dealt with in the past and consider to be trustworthy (+12 percentage points). This raises the importance of information suppliers ensuring that they have either cultivated a strong relationship track record with the target audience for their data or have otherwise mobilized credible “local infomediaries—individuals and organizations who distill key insights as well as package information in a compelling way to their networks” (Masaki et al, 2017). Leaders were also concerned with accessibility (+13 percentage points), as reducing the time and effort to obtain data was top of mind.

Interestingly, while respondents inside and outside of government were fairly consistent in their revealed data preferences, more senior leaders (of any organization type) differed from their mid-level colleagues in one respect—the trade-off between political feasibility versus ease of implementation. Mid-level leaders were more likely to choose data where the recommendations were easier to implement (+5 percentage points), while senior leaders emphasized political feasibility (+5 percentage points), perhaps indicating greater awareness of the necessity of building consensus and support for any recommendation to be successfully implemented. [xxvi]

In this chapter, we examined the broad contours of what leaders had to say about the problems they most want to solve, what they value in their preferred partners, and which attributes they prefer in development assistance projects and data. In the next chapters, we increase the specificity of our discussion, turning from leaders’ general aspirations to their experiences working with a diverse set of development partners between 2016 and 2020. In Chapter 3, we compare development partners that have different size footprints in terms of their reach with respondents across geographies, sectors, and stakeholder groups. In Chapter 4, we turn to the question of how leaders assessed the influence and helpfulness of their partners, and why?

3.1. The UN system and large OECD donors have the largest footprints, supplying advice and assistance to the most leaders overall

Three multilateral organizations—the World Bank (WB), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the European Union (EU)—had the largest footprints, working with at least 40 percent of survey respondents from 137 countries. Members of the OECD’s club of the largest providers of development assistance, the development assistance committee (DAC)—such as the United States (US), Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom (UK)—were also major players. [xxix] Between 20-40 percent of respondents from over 120 countries reportedly received advice or assistance from these development partners. Rounding out the list of development partners with the largest footprints were the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Health Organization (WHO), [xxx] the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Education Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The relative prominence of the WHO may be partly attributed to its role in helping countries navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, as the survey was fielded from late June to mid September 2020. Twenty-seven percent of respondents from 137 countries reported receiving advice or assistance from the WHO. [xxxi] Comparatively, health-focused vertical funds such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (Global Fund) and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) had relatively smaller footprints in terms of the percentage of respondents who reportedworking with them. [xxxii] The WHO’s footprint extended beyondthe social sector (including health): it was among the ten largest development partners in 4 out of 6 sectors, with the exception of rural development and the environment.

At first blush, a connection between the FAO’s footprint and the COVID-19 response may not be as apparent; however, it is conceivable that as low- and middle-income countries grappled with pandemic-induced food shortages and import restrictions, food security became of paramount importance of leaders. In line with its mandate, 58 percent of respondents in the rural development sector and 34 percent in the environmental sector reported receiving advice or assistance from the FAO, perhaps illustrating the mutually reinforcing relationship between agricultural practices and environmental protection.

3.2. Middle powers and specialized multilaterals have more concentrated footprints with outsized focus in particular geographies or sectors

The development partners with the largest footprints in 2020 were fairly consistent across regions, sectors, and income levels; however there were some exceptions worth highlighting. Figure 11 provides a breakdown of the top 10 development partners with the largest footprints by sector and geographic region. Figure 12 shows the percentage of respondents who reported working with a given development partner by country income groups (i.e., low-income, lower-middle income, upper-middle income).

Even if they are smaller players on a global scale, middle powers often have outsized footprints in a specific geographic region, particularly in their backyard. Over 20 percent of respondents reported working with Switzerland and Sweden in Europe and Central Asia (ECA), New Zealand in East Asia and Pacific (EAP), Spain in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and France in Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Notably, Australia was among the top 10 development partners with the largest footprint in both South Asia (SA) (26 percent) and EAP (55 percent).

Similarly, regional development banks had larger footprints with respondents from their geographic focus areas including: the African Development Bank (AfDB) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (46 percent), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in EAP and SA (52 percent and 47 percent, respectively), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in ECA (34 percent), and the Inter-American Development Bank in LAC (45 percent). Specialized UN agencies were among the development partners with the largest footprints in the environment (e.g., Global Environment Facility, Global Climate Fund), rural development (e.g., World Food Program, International Fund for Agricultural Development), and social sectors (e.g., UNESCO).

Generally speaking, the development partners with the largest footprints overall (see Section 3.1) retained that status regardless of the income level of the respondents’ country. That said, there were a few subtle differences that emerged between income groups. South Korea had the ninth largest footprint with respondents from upper-middle income countries (18 percent). The footprints of the regional development banks, meanwhile, varied based upon the income profiles of their geographic focus areas. With Africa home to the lion’s share of low-income economies, the African Development Bank had the fifth largest footprint with respondents from this group of countries (40 percent). By contrast, the Asian Development Bank had the tenth largest footprint with respondents from lower-middle income countries.

3.3. In line with its global ambitions, China eclipsed other emerging donors in working with 15 percent of leaders from 113 countries in 2020

China far outstripped the footprints of other emerging international donors in two respects—the percentage of respondents (15 percent) and number of countries (113) that reported receiving its advice and assistance. The geographic reach of China’s footprint is highly consistent with the global ambition of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which now includes 138 participating countries, 76 percent of which are low- or middle-income status (Nolan and Leutert, 2020). Noticeably, China has established itself as a development partner reaching far beyond its immediate neighbors, with 54 percent of respondents from sub-Saharan Africa reportedly receiving its advice or assistance. [xxxiii]

Comparatively, China’s footprint overall is more similar to Canada (15 percent of respondents from 115 countries) and France (16 percent of respondents from 114 countries) than its BRICS counterparts. Only seven percent of respondents from 79 countries reported working with India and less than five percent reported working with South Africa, Brazil, and Russia. Contrary to popular belief, China did not appear to be more likely than traditional OECD donors such as Canada or France to provide advice or assistance to leaders from non-democracies. [xxxiv] These three development partners—China, Canada, and France—also had a similar breakdown of respondents who worked with them across country income categories (i.e.,low-, lower-middle, upper middle). [xxxv]

Nevertheless, China’s approach converges with other emerging donors in one respect: the preponderance of those that received its advice or assistance were from host country governments (82 percent), including executive branch officials (75 percent) and parliamentarians (7 percent), rather than non-state actors. Governments are an almost universally important constituency group for most development partners, as they have the power to set the agenda for their countries in terms of priorities, financing, and legislation. [xxxvi] Yet, some development partners had more government-centric constituencies than others, [xxxvii] including BRICS donors such as Russia (82 percent), India (81 percent), and South Africa (80 percent). By contrast, civil society leaders comprised a relatively larger share of those who reported working with the largest OECD donors than they did for emerging donors.

3.4. UNICEF increased its footprint with a much larger percentage of leaders since 2017, while China dramatically expanded by an additional 52 countries

Even as the development landscape is continuously evolving, with new entrants offering assistance and status quo donors changing their strategies in response to new realities at home or abroad, the club of development partners with the largest footprints proved fairly durable between the 2017 and 2020 waves of the Listening to Leaders Survey (Figure 13). That said, the percentage of respondents who reported receiving advice or assistance from these development partners were not entirely static. Differences between the survey waves could be due to a combination of supply-side changes (i.e., shifting development partner strategies or priorities), demand-side changes (i.e., shifting preferences of leaders regarding their partners), or an artifact of the respondents who did (and did not) answer the surveys in 2017 versus 2020.

The EU experienced the single largest decline in the percentage of respondents who reported receiving its advice or assistance (-12 percentage points). [xxxviii] The EU’s receding footprint is particularly surprising in light of its leading role in the global COVID-19 response (Kharas, 2020). [xxxix] By contrast, UNICEF saw the largest increase in the percentage of respondents who received its advice or assistance (+8 percentage points), followed by the IMF (+5). The IMF’s expanded footprint could also be related to the COVID-19 response.

The World Bank [xl] and the US had a more mixed picture—an increase in the percentage of respondents who reported working with them in some regions and a decline in others. The World Bank’s footprint expanded between 2017 and 2020 in ECA and EAP, but declined in SSA. This decline in the percentage of SSA leaders who reported working with the World Bank is notable, in that it runs counter to the organization’s stated strategy since 2013, which calls for “specific attention” to be placed on the SSA region in a bid to “accelerate the pace of poverty reduction” (World Bank Group, 2013a and b).

The US, meanwhile, supplied advice or assistance to a growing share of respondents in ECA and EAP, but lost ground in LAC. Growing US prominence in ECA is broadly in line with Washington’s stated policy priorities during the 2017-2020 period, which included curbing Russia’s attempts to “undermine the legitimacy of democracies” in the region (White House, 2017). [xli] The increase in footprint in the EAP is consistent with former US President Donald Trump’s promotion of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) in response to concerns of waning US influence in the face of China’s BRI (White House, 2017). [xlii]

In comparing the change over time, the banner headline is most likely China’s rise as a development partner with a truly global reach. China’s increase in its overall footprint (+7 percentage points) obscures a more jaw-dropping observation: respondents from an additional 52 countries reported receiving its advice or assistance in 2020 (113 countries) than in 2017 (61 countries). [xliii] China’s footprint expanded across all geographic regions during this time period, with the most notable gains in SSA and EAP (+6), two regions that also account for the largest share of BRI signatories (Nolan and Leutert, 2020). [xliv]

In this chapter, we leveraged the 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey to understand which development partners are working with leaders in low- and middle-income countries, how their footprints are shifting over time, and to what extent this seems to correspond with donors’ stated priorities. In Chapter 4, we turn from examining who is working with whom, to examining how well these development partners perform from the perspective of those who receive their advice and assistance.

4.1 China earns a spot among the top 10 influencers, joining the US, UK, and multilaterals with global reach

Multilaterals with a global reach such as the IMF, WB, EU, UNDP, and WHO, along with bilateral development partners like the US and UK dominate the list of the top 10 influencers (Figure 14). However, rising powers such as China are making their mark, while other development partners have carved out spheres of influence in particular sectors or regions. In the remainder of this section, we breakdown which development partners are: (i) global heavyweights as top influencers in nearly every sector and region, (ii) those that function as regional hegemons in exerting concentrated influence in particular geographies, and (iii) those that have earned specialized star power with respondents in niche sectors.

4.2. Influence can be a double-edged sword: leaders most often viewed the influence of their development partners positively, but less so in the case of China, Russia, and fragile state donors

In absolute terms, respondents generally reported that all the development partners they worked with had a “somewhat” or “very positive” influence on their countries (see Figure 15). [lviii] There may be some self-selection bias here, as leaders may elect to work with donors that they view more positively. Nevertheless, some donors were viewed less positively than others in relative terms, indicating that leaders do differentiate between their partners.

Respondents rated the regional or sector-focused multilaterals and smaller bilateral donors they worked with most positively, as opposed to the larger players that typically dominated the overall rankings (see Section 4.1). Japan was the sole representative of the G7 economies among the top 10 development partners viewed most positively. It was joined at the top of the positivity rankings instead by smaller bilaterals such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Taiwan, health-focused vertical funds such as GAVI and the Global Fund, as well as multilaterals with niche areas of focus by region (e.g., IDB) or sector (e.g., WHO).

Comparatively, the bottom 10 donors were viewed somewhat less positively. Why might this be? One possible explanation is that leaders view the development cooperation activities of these donors as more controversial in light of their focus, terms, or intent. The IMF’s mandate is the promotion of global macroeconomic and financial stability, which often involves stepping into the wake of financial crises (IMF, 2021). Meanwhile, respondents may have more mixed feelings on the opacity and less concessional terms of China’s development assistance (Horn et al., 2019) [lix] and Russia’s explicit interest in bolstering breakaway regions in post Soviet states (Cooley, 2017).

Seven of these actors in the bottom 10 on positivity—Belgium, France, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates—share a common emphasis in working with fragile states, which may provoke mixed feelings amongst partner countries regarding their role (OECD, 2020b, 2020g-l; International Crisis Group, 2019). On balance, this explanation is not entirely satisfying, as the UN and the WB also focus on fragile states and did not experience similar pushback to their influence.

Adjusting the raw influence scores from Section 4.1 to take into account the perceived “positivity” or “negativity” of development partners, there is little change in the top ten donors, with two exceptions (see Figure 16). China slipped nine positions (from 8th to 17th ranked) due to its relatively less positive influence compared to other donors, dropping out of the top 10 influencers. This implies that China must overcome a perception challenge if it is to live up to its positioning as a development partner who seeks to promote a “community of common destiny...based upon mutual respect and win-win cooperation” (Watts et al., 2020). The Global Fund, meanwhile, benefited from a modest positivity boost to join the top 10 influencers in the adjusted ranking (9th ranked).

4.3 Leaders view multilateral organizations and the US as most helpful in implementing reforms

Multilateral organizations and the US (86%, ranked 7th) dominate the market when it comes to helpfulness in implementation of policy initiatives (Figure 17). Two health-focused organizations—the WHO (81%, ranked 2nd) and the Global Fund (87%, ranked 1st)—were perceived as the most helpful partners overall. While this might be partly due to the survey coinciding with the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, the Global Fund and GAVI were also among the most helpful donors in 2017 (the WHO was not included in the 2017 survey).

Development partners that were influential (see Section 4.1) also tended to be helpful and vice versa. In cases where there was a divergence, this could be an unintentional byproduct of limited resources that makes it difficult to perform well on both measures or may be an indication of differing institutional mandates and functions (see Chapter 3). Some development partners may not be interested in influencing a country’s policy priorities and instead may focus on supporting leaders in implementing the policy changes they have already self-identified. The opposite could also be true for partners that view their mandate as advocating for particular policy priorities or reforms, but relying on others to support leaders in implementing these ideas.

In the remainder of this section, we break down which development partners are: (i) best in show as partners seen as both very influential and helpful; (ii) quiet helpers that are more helpful than they are influential; (iii) vocal promoters that are more influential than they are helpful; and (iv) those that have earned specialized star power for being particularly helpful in the eyes of respondents in niche sectors or regions (Figure 17).

4.4 EBRD was the most improved across the board, while China and Japan leapfrogged their peers in relative influence since 2017