ABSTRACT
The East Central European (ECE) countries have expressed a desire to organize their aid policies along the lines of OECD DAC norms and thus implicitly to adopt the elements of the global consensus on aid. External actors play an important role in channelling the global consensus into the development policies of donors by putting various forms of pressure on them and attempting to socialize them. This chapter looks at the way the European Union (EU), the OECD DAC and the UNDP have attempted to influence the emerging aid practices of the ECE countries during different stages of the journey. The ECE countries had been eligible for Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) assistance during the 1990s, but with their approaching EU accession, CIDA decided to graduate them. The CIDA's Official Development Assistance in Central Europe (ODACE) program was seen as a form of 'gracious graduation', which helped these countries transform from recipients to donors.
