Can Aid Interventions Facilitate Project Resilience Performance? An Inverted U-Shaped Relationship Investigation

International development organizations have provided aids for a range of projects in developing countries, where the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment can pose great threats and challenges to project resilience. In this study, we aim to explore the impact of aid interventions on project resilience performance and the contingent role of institutional conditions in which projects are located. By integrating resource-based and capability-based views, we theorize an inverted U-shaped relationship between aid interventions and project resilience performance. Using a dataset of 654 projects in 33 countries from 2002 to 2019, the empirical results validate the inverted U-shaped relationship, and indicate that such relationship is steeper in countries with poorer institutional conditions than in countries with better ones. As one of the pioneering attempts to address the topic of international aid interventions on project resilience performance, this study contributes to refining the understanding of how aid interventions affect project resilience performance by identifying two concurrent but opposing forces. It further sheds light on the contingencies of institutional conditions and unveils the complex interactions of internal governance, external aids, and institutional environment in project management, and provides a novel and reasonable measurement of project resilience performance for future empirical research.