Foreign donors driving policy change in recipient countries: Three decades of development aid towards community-based forest policy in Bangladesh

•We analyse the influence of donors' development project aid on domestic policy changes.•We take on community-based forest development policy in Bangladesh as a case.•A link between donor funding and domestic policy changes is evident.•The observed links are substantially demonstrated.•These links are further specified based on their temporal relation.

The influence of foreign actors on domestic policy change is a major question in political and development studies, involving issues of sovereignty as well as major methodological challenges in its analysis. This study analyses the influence of donor aid for development projects on domestic policy change, particularly on community-based forest development policy in Bangladesh. With our analytical framework, we combine concepts from development policy analysis, the international relations theorem of direct access, and the adapted correlation of variable approach to policy change analysis. We build on own, existing, and longitudinal findings on forest policy changes in Bangladesh over three decades. We contrast this data with data on forest Development Project Aid from 1980 to 2014. First, we identify multiple links between the two parallel data sets. We subsequently corroborate selected links through qualitative in-depth analyses. The results indicate a link between donor funding and domestic policy changes towards community-based forest policy. This link is further specified by different temporal relations, as policy changes are being observed prior to, in response to, or simultaneously with donor funding. We conclude that donor funding for forestry projects has a strong influence on the recipient country's forest policy.