Balancing Donor Control and Organisational Autonomy: Pooled Funding and Performance in UN Development Entities

In an era of tightening aid budgets and rising global needs, how resources are channelled may matter as much as the volume of funding provided. Recent scholarship has examined how voluntary earmarked contributions shape the performance of international organisations, showing that tightly earmarked funding tends to undermine organisational performance relative to unearmarked resources. Yet, this literature largely treats earmarking as a homogeneous category and overlooks pooled funding as a distinct institutional arrangement. This study conceptualises voluntary funding modalities as alternative delegation structures that vary in how donor control and organisational autonomy are distributed and exercised. Positioned between tightly earmarked and fully unearmarked funding, pooled funding combines structured collective oversight with meaningful organisational discretion in allocation and implementation. Drawing on a panel dataset covering 16 UN development entities (2018-2024) and a novel performance measure based on computational text analysis of over 15,000 evaluation reports, the quantitative analysis shows that a higher share of pooled funding is consistently associated with more positive evaluation sentiment. This relationship remains robust across multiple specifications. The findings are consistent with the argument that pooled funding may mitigate the control-autonomy trade-off inherent in voluntary financing by preserving a structural donor oversight while reducing fragmentation and transaction costs relative to tightly earmarked arrangements. By identifying pooled funding as a distinct and empirically consequential delegation arrangement, the study advances principal-agent approaches to the financing of international organisations, extends the literature on earmarking and performance beyond the core-versus-earmarked dichotomy, and contributes new evidence to debates on the institutional design of multilateral development funding.