Finlands utvecklingsbistånd - En komparativ studie med fallet Sverige

Sammanfattning: Since Finland committed to international development cooperation in 1955, the country subsequently channeled a lower volume of foreign aid to developing countries compared to Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbors. This paper is a comparative study between Sweden and Finland's development policies that seeks an explanation for the considerable disparities. The herein contained empirical study is based on a theoretical framework derived from Foreign Policy Analysis where domestic and international explanatory factors behind states’ actions in foreign aid policy, extracted from a literature review of existing research on the development cooperation, are emphasized. Each explanatory factor is examined and compared between Sweden and Finland in different levels of analysis consisting of bureaucracy, state and system level in order to illustrate differences that explains the disparity of Finland's foreign aid volume and Sweden's. The empirical findings demonstrate that Finland and Sweden differ with respect to its historical geopolitical position, the emergence of their welfare states, the existence of non-governmental organizations, and in their organization of foreign aid. Based on these findings, this essay's empirical analysis demonstrates that these differences are potential explanations for why Finland channels a lower volume of foreign aid than Sweden.