Introduction to the special issue 'unintended effects of international cooperation'.

The 'Evaluation and Program Planning' journal has contributed to the launch of an academic discussion of unintended effects of international cooperation, notably by publishing in 2016 articles by Bamberger, Tarsilla, & Hesse-Biber and by Jabeen. This special issue aims to take up the academic challenges as laid down by those authors, by providing among others a clear typology and applying it, by outlining various methodological options and testing them, and elaborating on suggestions on how to deal with the barriers that prevent unintended effects being taken into account. This special issue makes clear that it is possible to reduce the share of unforeseen effects of international cooperation. Turning the spotlight on unintended effects that can be anticipated, and aiming to make progress on uncovering those that are particularly difficult to detect and debunking those that are exaggerated is the task that lies ahead of us.

An exploration of individual-level wage effects of foreign aid in developing countries.

The key research question that this article aims to respond to is: what are the individual-level effects of wages financed by development assistance? Our hypothesis is that these effects are substantial and overall positive, depending on the level of analysis. This article theorizes about unintended wage effects at the individual level, spillover effects, and those at the macro level, yet focuses its research on individual-level effects. The empirical part consists of two case studies. One takes a sample of grants from a donor agency, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as a starting point, following these grants through the aid chain to determine local staffing costs. The other case study consists of a comparative wage analysis in a developing country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. As this field of research is rather fresh, instead of answering relevant questions with respect to wage effects, this study merely aims to identify questions that merit further research.