Governments are not monolithic entities . There are change-makers and conservatives. Donors face a challenge in teaming up with the best strategic partners. Aid can also help creating new organisational constellations, and broker new forms of cooperation. Ideas, knowledge, trust and time are the critical factors in this work not money.
Ideas work better than money in creating reform.
This was a general conclusion from the Assessing Aid Study, by the World Bank a couple of years back. Poverty reduction implies in most countries is indeed about reform, not merely infusion of capital. Donors have an important role to play contributing to new knowledge, and the building of independent national capacity for policy analysis. Donors can help stimulating the public debate. With democratisation under way in most countries, a growing civil society and expanding mass media, UNDP found that it could play a major role in invigorating and broadening the public discourse on poverty.