The Persistent Fragmentation of Gulf Foreign Aid: Bilateralism and the Limits of Regional Humanitarian Coordination

ABSTRACT This paper examines why Gulf foreign aid has remained predominantly bilateral and fragmented since its emergence in the 1960s, despite the establishment of regional institutions, recurring regional crises and repeated calls for greater coordination. Bilateralism has been a persistent and defining feature of Gulf aid, and no effective regional humanitarian coordination mechanism has emerged even as Gulf donors have expanded and professionalised their aid institutions. Although Gulf states have occasionally cooperated on specific initiatives, such cooperation has remained episodic, informal and non‐institutionalised—a pattern consistent with the regionalisation of crisis response and the logic of liquid alliances, which all will be explored in this paper. Drawing on complex realism, the paper argues that strategic foreign policy objectives, political distrust, divergent aid bureaucracies and domestic imperatives interact to reproduce bilateralism. It distinguishes humanitarian aid from development assistance, showing that coordination failures are most acute in humanitarian response, where no collective Gulf mechanism exists. The focus, therefore, will be on humanitarian coordination only.