Research

Does Aid to Domestic Revenue Mobilization Support Tax Fairness? A synthesis of Oxfam research

Between 2017 and 2022, Oxfam examined aid to DRM from multiple donors provided to multiple low- and middle-income countries.

This synthesis report seeks to draw lessons across these studies. The key issues examined include tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness in generating revenues on the one hand, and equity on the other; whether donors support direct or indirect taxation; the progressivity of instruments supported; whether aid to DRM explicitly links revenues to poverty reduction (health, education, social protection); whether aid supports country ownership; and whether aid explicitly seeks to advance gender equality.

Metrics Matter: How USAID Counts "Local" will Have a Big Impact on Funding for Local Partners

In November 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power set out her vision to make aid more accessible, equitable, and responsive, including a key metric that 25% of USAID’s funding will go to local partners by 2025. Publish What You Fund (PWYF), with support from Oxfam and others, has undertaken detailed research into the 25% local partner funding goal to establish an independent, credible, and replicable baseline to measure and track funding for local partners. Using a sample of ten countries where USAID works, PWYF calculated the current proportion of USAID funds received by local organizations. PWYF compared two separate approaches – USAID’s announced measurement approach that looks at a narrow set of funding and uses simple criteria to identify local organizations, and PWYF’s own approach that includes more project funding and uses detailed criteria to identify local organizations.

This report was originally published by PWYF here.

Decolonize! What does it mean?

This document introduces the key concepts of decolonial theory that inform many current calls to decolonize. It provides examples from Latin America, Africa, and North America of how activists have envisioned or realized decolonial futures. These movements led by Indigenous Peoples, people of color, women, and queer people articulate and define the possibilities of decolonial futures.

Since decolonial theory suggests multiple futures and not one single solution, this document does not address what decolonizing particular systems, such as international development, should look like. Rather, the document aims to introduce the reader to the tools of analysis that decolonial theory offers, give examples of decolonial theory in practice, and discuss some potential shortfalls of the decolonial framework.

Surviving Deterrence: How US asylum deterrence policies normalize gender-based violence

This joint report by Oxfam and the Tahirih Justice Center documents how migrants and asylum seekers experience gender-based harm as a consequence of deterrence-driven US asylum policies. First, it finds that US asylum deterrence policies foster conditions that cause gender-based violence (GBV) to proliferate at the US-Mexico border. Second, it finds that the US asylum process is woefully trauma-uninformed and systemically disadvantages and re-traumatizes survivors of GBV who are ultimately able to apply for relief. The report concludes that by choosing a deterrence-based approach to asylum, the US is complicit in systemically harming and devaluing the lives of women, girls, and LGBTQI+ individuals desperately seeking access to the asylum process as enshrined in US law. These policies, moreover, normalize GBV as an inevitable consequence of pursuing safe haven in the US.

As such, the US is repudiating its legal and moral obligation to protect the rights and respect the dignity of migrants. To rectify these harms, the US must fully abandon its punitive, deterrence-based approach to asylum in favor of one that honors the humanity of all. The report details concrete steps that the US government can take at the executive and congressional levels to begin to realize such a transformation and to mitigate the harm that current US policies engender.

Unaccountable Accounting: The World Bank’s unreliable climate finance reporting

Despite being the largest multilateral provider of climate finance, the World Bank supplies very little evidence to support its claims about the amount of climate finance it provides. Oxfam has attempted to recreate the Bank’s reported climate finance figures using public information for projects in the Bank’s FY2020.

Oxfam found that the Bank’s current climate finance reporting processes are such that its claimed levels of climate finance cannot be independently verified and could be off by as much as $7bn, or 40%.

Without better disclosure practices, the World Bank is asking us to take much on faith. Climate finance funding is too important for us to do that. The World Bank must be more transparent in its reporting so that it can be held to account. 

Full Oxfam Briefing Paper: Unaccountable Accounting: The World Bank’s unreliable climate finance reporting.

Download supporting documentation below.

The State of Local Humanitarian Leadership

A learning report on a series of LHL online convenings held in Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa, the Pacific, and West Africa