From Regional to Global Actors? Emerging Donors in the UN System

The UN system is, to date, largely financed through contributions by wealthy OECD member states–the “traditional donors”. And yet, there is another group of so-called “emerging donors” that is increasingly growing in prominence. This group is relatively understudied as aid providers, especially when it comes to their multilateral contributions to international organizations (IOs). In part, this is because the “emerging donors” group is quite heterogeneous and because this group of donors is still quite small compared to the OECD donors. IOs, however, are increasingly paying attention to this group and are developing strategies for interacting with them and their particular interests and dynamics. To enhance our understanding of the different emerging donors and the potential resource mobilization strategies that IOs use to fundraise from these donors, this paper focuses on the Gulf States as emerging donors and compares them to their BRICS counterparts. As a percentage of their Gross National Product, the Gulf States are some of the most generous aid donors in the world, and have been for decades. Unlike the BRICS, the Gulf States are known to coordinate substantively in their bilateral contributions. They have built a regional infrastructure to also coordinate their multilateral contributions, suggesting that their contributions to IOs may be more coordinated than those of other emerging donors. This paper thus seeks to systematically explore the donation patterns of Gulf States to the United Nations (UN) system and to compare them with donation patterns by other emerging donors, notably the BRICS countries. Our observations are based on UN system finance data from 1991 until 2018. These data underline the emergence of the Gulf States, notably Saudi Arabia, as regular multilateral donors to the UN system, while they still exhibit the more eclectic pattern of contributions that differentiates emerging donors from traditional donor countries.