Navigating Authoritarian Contexts: Unintended Consequences of Development Cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa

Development cooperation has long faced the challenge that many partner countries are not established liberal democracies but rather authoritarian, hybrid, or democratizing contexts. This dilemma is particularly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the region with the lowest proportion of democracies worldwide. In such contexts, development cooperation, such as through the support of service provision, may inadvertently contribute to the stabilization of authoritarian rule. Despite growing awareness of this risk, systematic inquiry into the unintended negative consequences of development cooperation remains limited. In particular, existing approaches often insufficiently account for the political regime effects of development interventions. This gap underscores the need to rethink development cooperation practices by explicitly incorporating their unintended impacts on regime dynamics, with particular attention to autocratizing and authoritarian settings. Building on Gerschewski's (2013) three-pillars framework, this study adopts a fine-grained, multidimensional perspective on authoritarian rule, conceptualizing repression, co-optation, and legitimation as the core modes through which authoritarian regimes maintain power. Empirically, the study examines one actor of German development cooperation using a multi-method research design. The analysis draws on an online survey of development cooperation staff working in and on the MENA region, complemented by anonymized semi-structured interviews with ten national and international staff members based in MENA countries. The findings indicate that the unintended negative effects of development cooperation vary substantially in their visibility and detectability. These range from clearly observable effects, such as repression directed at cooperation partners, to more diffuse and indeterminate influences, including the contribution of development cooperation to an authoritarian regime’s domestic or international legitimacy. Furthermore, we identify the risks associated with digitalization as a significant blind spot in both academic scholarship and development cooperation practice. Overall, the analysis highlights both the significant constraints that authoritarian contexts impose on development cooperation agencies and the adaptive strategies practitioners develop to continue implementing projects they perceive as beneficial to local populations.