DAC (Development Assistance Committee)

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is a specialised committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), headquartered in Paris. It was established in 1961, succeeding the Development Assistance Group created the previous year, and brings together most of the world's largest bilateral aid donors.

The DAC's core functions are to:

• Set the technical definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA), including what counts as concessional financing and which recipient countries are eligible (the DAC List of ODA Recipients).
• Collect and publish comparable statistics on aid flows from members, which feed into widely cited benchmarks such as ODA as a share of gross national income (the 0.7% GNI target endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1970).
• Conduct peer reviews of each member's development cooperation system roughly every five to six years.
• Issue guidance and recommendations, for example on untying aid to least developed countries and on countering bribery in aid-funded procurement.

Membership has expanded over the decades and now includes most Western European states, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea (which joined in 2010), and the European Union as a full member. Non-DAC donors such as China, India, the Gulf states, and Brazil are not bound by DAC rules, a gap that has shaped debates about "South-South cooperation" and the comparability of aid statistics.

The DAC also hosted the dialogue that produced the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and its 2008 Accra Agenda for Action and 2011 Busan Partnership outcome, which set principles such as ownership, alignment, and mutual accountability. For MUN delegates and researchers, the DAC is the principal authority cited when distinguishing genuine aid from other official flows or commercially motivated lending.