Do aid agencies comply with human rights requirements in Practice? Systematic evidence on the integration of human rights in German development cooperation

When are human rights integrated into bilateral development cooperation projects? While researchers investigated human rights mainstreaming in development policy and the allocation of foreign aid across states, we lack systematic evidence of effective implementation of human rights mainstreaming at project level. Drawing on principal-agent-theory, we formulate expectations on the conditions under which implementing agencies of development projects comply with donor governments’ requirement for human rights mainstreaming. Using supervised text classification and mixed effects regressions on 761 German development project proposals, we find that mainstreaming is incomplete across projects and primarily focusses on measures to prevent abuses rather than to proactively promote human rights. Implementing agencies better comply with mainstreaming policies in sectors whose objectives are linked to human right priorities, e.g., in the health or education sectors. Human rights mainstreaming also becomes more likely if agencies have more organizational resources and less autonomy from the donor government. The human rights record of the partner government does not influence the extent of human rights mainstreaming but affects how exactly mainstreaming is implemented. Specifically, when partner governments violate human rights, implementing agencies avoid working with state actors and prioritize empowering marginalized groups. This suggests that implementing agencies bypass state actors to reduce the operational and political costs of integrating human rights in development projects. Our findings underscore the need to be attentive to the costs of human rights mainstreaming for development cooperation agencies and implement better follow-up and donor enforcement mechanisms to close the gap between donors’ human rights commitments and effective implementation at project level.