Foreign aid agencies represent and champion global development priorities within a donor nation. Increasingly however, these agencies sit within donor governments that are strongly committed to upholding the national interest through their development commitments.

This journal article is concerned with how bilateral aid agencies manage this tension and how they might continue to serve the altruistic aims of development. The main research question asks if autonomy – or a combination of autonomies – can improve a development agency’s ability to defend the humanitarian imperative of development against normative pressures privileging the national interest?