Fredrik Söderbaum (SweDev Steering Committee) will be coordinating a PhD course in the spring with the involvement of SweDev chair person, Jesper Sundewall, and SweDev Executive Committee member, Janet Vähämäki.
Photo: Susan Q Yin / Unsplash
Fredrik Söderbaum (SweDev Steering Committee) will be coordinating, from 19 March to 20 May 2025, a PhD course for the Development Research School. The course, “Making foreign aid work: Managing tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches”, will also involve Jesper Sundewall (SweDev Chairperson) and Janet Vähämäki (SweDev Executive Committee member).
The goal of the course is to build knowledge about the essential and longstanding question why and when development cooperation is successful, and for whom. The course zooms in on donor-recipient relations and the tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the management, delivery and implementation of foreign aid.
The course is divided into two parts. The first is made up of four online seminars and deals with the most important top-down and bottom-up approaches that currently dominate the debate in both the academic and policy-making communities. In the second part of the course all participants will gather for an exciting on-site workshop in Stockholm, which aims to provide hands-on and concrete knowledge why and under what contextual circumstances different top-down and bottom-up approaches to foreign aid are likely to be effective or not across different policy fields, contexts, types of donors as well as aid instruments.