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SUMMARYAlthough recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the global aid architecture, less effort has been devoted to investigating the process of implementing those changes. By using the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as an illustrative and critical case, this article shows how a donor development priority—gender—travels from Stockholm and headquarters to a Paris Declaration‐infused aid practice in three cases with different aid modalities: Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Cambodia. More specifically, the qualitative empirical investigation conducted here shows that the implementation of the new aid architecture puts severe and competing demands on development practitioners. At the core of this tension is the fact that although all donors are supposed to promote partner country ownership, harmonize their efforts with other donors, and align themselves with partner country priorities, results‐based management simultaneously implies not only a focus on continuously measuring and reporting results but also stricter prioritizations on behalf of donor governments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Small island developing states (SIDS) have been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. However, although SIDS have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce different outcomes in different states, indicating variation in vulnerability. The objective of this article is to explore the sources of this variation. With the point of departure in theories about how political institutions affect adaptive capacities, this article sets out to investigate whether government effectiveness has an impact on the vulnerability of SIDS. While claims over the importance of institutions are common in the literature, there is a lack of empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study's time-series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government data set. The results show that government effectiveness has strong and significant effects on the number of people killed and affected by natural disasters.

Policy makers and policy-oriented scholars concerned with development and reform commonly appeal to "political will" as a cornerstone of development. We question the circular and voluntaristic view of leadership behavior inherent in such an approach, and argue that—to be more useful for the analysis of development outcomes, as well as for policy design—the discourse on political will should be firmly integrated into a more systematic framework of analysis. In particular, we suggest that it should engage in more active dialogue with the combined insights offered by principal-agent theory and what we refer to as state theory. More specifically, in the framework we develop, the principal-agent framework offers the analytical tools for analyzing leadership behavior at the micro level, while state theory provides crucial insights regarding the macro-level factors shaping leadership behavior. In the end, these two perspectives in tandem have the potential to significantly increase our understanding of empirically observed leadership behavior as well as our theoretical understanding of how the context—and especially the character of underlying social contracts—shapes and constrains "political will."