Beyond Recipient Needs and Donor Self-Interests: Third-Kind Relational Drivers of Italy’s Aid Policy in Africa

As global aid budgets shrink, understanding donor motives behind aid allocation can help anticipate donor behaviour and inform recipient strategies. This paper contributes to donor-focused aid allocation research and broader debates on evolving patterns in international development cooperation by investigating the determinants of Italy’s bilateral aid allocation to African countries over the past decades, with a focus on explanations beyond traditional humanitarian or strategic motivations. Using a newly-assembled dataset and a combination of Tobit and two-stage Cragg-Hurdle models, complemented by a series of sensitivity analyses, we test a set of third-kind relational hypotheses, emphasising the role of other donors’ presence and recipient leaders’ diplomatic engagement. Findings show that Italy allocates more aid to countries with competitive donor environments, particularly when the overall aid market is large, and to those whose leaders conduct high-level visits to Rome. These dynamics suggest that aid allocation is shaped not only by domestic priorities and humanitarian needs, but also by relational factors emerging from multi-actor interactions.