A growing amount of recent literature explores the issue of what motivates bilateral and multilateral donors to allocate aid to developing countries, using a political economic framework. Most studies are conducted within the framework of the “donor interest” versus “recipient need” models. Donors’ political decisions are not always in line with the declared objective of foreign aid; that is, to promote economic development in less developed countries, and therefore to provide aid on the basis of recipients’ need. As of yet, no consensus has emerged as to whether considerations of donors’ own interests or recipients' needs dominate the donor’s allocation decisions to less developed countries, but in any case donors’ interests seem to play a relevant role. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in the process of both bilateral and multilateral aid allocation, politicians from donor countries and bureaucracies of international financial institutions (IFIs) and different interest groups appear to play a role. In this light, we attempt to see which actors within the donor countries and institutions play a role in aid allocation, and what motives they might have. This will provide the relevant micro-foundations to explain the utility maximising role of different actors in aid allocation based on general behavioural assumptions from the general Public Choice literature. This paper is divided into three sections. Section 2 discusses studies on actors who use their influence on donors and IFIs to maximise their utility through aid allocation decisions. The last section presents conclusions.