Chapter 2 develops the principal claim of the book, which posits that foreign aid delivery is endogenous to national structures. The chapter begins with a brief historical account of how patterns of foreign aid delivery have evolved since the end of World War II. It then fleshes out three theoretical and empirically informed observations about aid decision-making: (1) that aid officials, as key decision-makers, seek to minimize risk in aid delivery, that (2) their response to risk is conditional on the rules and practices that make up the national aid organizations in which they operate, and (3) that these rules and practices have ideological origins that inform us about the substance of aid delivery: why it is that aid officials choose to bypass or engage with the recipient government.