The Development Dance is about how donor countries and recipient governments negotiate the delivery of foreign aid. The book provides a conceptual framework for understanding donor-government relations and a theory for explaining the sustainability of aid delivery mechanisms. Drawing on extensive in-country fieldwork in four sub-Saharan African countries, as well as an original survey of development practitioners in twenty countries, the book points to a fundamental problem in the delivery of aid: the policy compromises reached by donor agencies and recipient governments are rarely politically sustainable. Commitment problems constrain the policy compromises reached by donors and recipients. As a result, fads and fashions dominate development cooperation, and the delivery of foreign aid is not determined by effectiveness alone. If we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments.