Individual BRICS or a collective bloc? Convergence and divergence amongst 'emerging donor' nations

In recent years a number of countries have established more prominent development assistance programmes. These 'emerging donors' are generally low-and middle-income countries with fewer links than traditional donors to multilateral frameworks for coordination. This article focuses primarily on whether these increasingly important donors will converge upon or challenge the behavioural norms that have emerged from traditional donor operations. It offers two main findings. First, although the evidence is incomplete, it suggests that the group of emerging donors is too heterogeneous to pose a collective alternative to the existing aid architecture, though these states may well provide new insights to enrich and improve our understanding and practice of development assistance. Second, it suggests that the case of Russia as a re-emerging donor highlights the conceptual weaknesses of theorizing simply in terms of 'emerging donors' versus 'traditional donors'.