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Apply to our Doctoral Course "Making Foreign Aid Work: Managing Tensions Between Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches"

A civilian worker guides a UN container being unloaded from a ship during the multinational relief effort Operation Restore Hope
A civilan worker guides an UN container being unloaded from a ship. Photo.

We are very glad to announce that the application is open to the third PhD course of the Development Research School — Making foreign aid work: Managing tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The deadline is the 22 February.

The goal of the course is to build knowledge about the essential and longstanding question what makes foreign aid successful in different contexts and circumstances. The course focuses in particular on donor-recipient relations and the tensions between top-down and bottom-up approaches in the management, delivery and implementation of foreign aid. 

Fredrik Söderbaum is leading the course together with an exciting team of lecturers and practitioners with several decades of practical experience of managing and delivering foreign aid around the world:

This course provides doctoral students with a unique opportunity to build both theoretical and hands-on, practical knowledge about why and under what circumstances top-down and bottom-up approaches to foreign aid are likely to be effective across different policy fields, contexts, types of donors and aid modalities. 

The course runs on a part-time basis between 28 March and 26 May 2023. It is made up by a few online seminars with a short introductory lecture followed by discussions and presentations. All participants will then gather for a three-day on-site workshop at the School of Global Studies (SGS) in Gothenburg (15-17 May). 

We hope to attract doctoral students from a range of different disciplines and PhD programs in order to create stimulating seminars and discussions based on intense and genuine interaction between lecturers and doctoral students. The goal is that course will be of direct relevance for the participant’s PhD projects and that the doctoral students will be able to bring their own experiences to the benefit of the course. 

Read more about the course here.