Changing the conditions for development aid: A new paradigm?

The publication of the Assessing Aid report of the World Bank in 1998 has s timulated the debate on the future of development aid and aid policies. Thi s collection contains a number of studies that aim to contribute to this de bate. In this introduction we put the discussion on the future of developme nt aid into perspective and summarise the main findings of the other contri butions in this collection. We focus on two issues: the aid effectiveness d ebate. before and after the Assessing Aid report, and the discussion on pol icy conditionality and good governance. Our main conclusions are that the e vidence on aid effectiveness provided in the World Bank report is less conv incing than has been claimed and that the good governance criterion propose d by the World Bank for distributing aid comes down to introducing conditio nality in disguise.