If unbundling this reality of national ownership is useful, the same can be done to understand the variegated profiles of donors. A look behind the branded identities reveals policy making headquarters with one set of interests in tension with country-level missions with another. The nature of donor interaction also blurs the taxonomy of international vs national. With ‘international’ development partners present and working in partner countries for decades at a time, it can be argued that they too have become de facto national actors intimately engaged in national power plays, sometimes displacing endogenous counterparts in the process.[1]
The effectiveness with which actors can discharge their roles across far flung networks of engagement is a direct function of their capacity. The question here is, To what extent can the Paris Declaration be made to work so that partner countries can exercise ownership through effective engagement at sub-national, national and supra-national levels? For example, with so much development policy firmed up at the supra-national level, the realization of national ownership should entail serious capacity development support to partner countries to engage effectively at those levels. Does the Paris Declaration cater to this?
This point becomes more compelling when one factors in the two competing forces of economic liberalization and deepening democratic franchise. The economic liberalization of the past two decades has pushed economic power up towards transnational corporations for whose investments developing countries compete by racing to the bottom of the tax ladder. This has emptied out the content of democratic reforms. One consequence of becoming competitive in the global investment market is that states lack the tax base from which to expand the delivery of goods and services that confers on them political legitimacy in the eyes of their electorates. Add to this the fact that the citizenry of a typical developing country has little direct access to the levers of economic change upon which livelihoods depend. This produces outcomes in which domestic political discourse becomes trivialized and ceremonial, rather than authoritative and effective.
2. The risk of reductionism
We are all aware of the familiar adage that indicators should be used only to indicate and that they should not distract us from complex and context-driven realities needs constant reinforcing. This is easier said than done.
The Paris Declaration sees a broadly-recognized national development strategy as a cornerstone of national ownership. Needless to say this is a very narrow reading of national ownership and assumes a lot that is not practically in place: state capacity to plan, quality engagement with civil society, effective substantive involvement of Parliament, &c. In their defence, the authors of the Paris Declaration argue that all the indicators directly or indirectly relate to national ownership, if one assumes that, for instance, the number of project implementation units and joint analytical works are satisfactory proxies.
It is however the in actu interpretations of capacity development within the Paris Declaration that need the most attention. The text of the Declaration does a reasonable job outlining a holistic vision of the capacities that must pertain in the national domain: the capacities to lead, define, design, oversee and realize nationally-identified priorities that enjoy the support of a broad cross section of society. However, this holistic view is not reflected in the indicators, which are about as proxy as proxy indicators can get as measures of capacity. Moreover, donor preoccupations with how aid is managed and disbursed runs the risk of narrowing the discussion of capacity development down to capacities for sound fiduciary management and the capacity to deliver goods and services (this risk is only likely to grow if aid volumes increase). If such capacities existed then partner countries could be said to be good managers of aid. But the sound management of aid from DAC donors is only a subset of a subset of the capacities needed to run a viable nation-state. Donors must therefore take steps to persevere with a wide-angle view of capacity development that takes the discussion beyond short-term aid management and delivery imperatives.[2]
3. Can better aid management deliver national ownership?
OECD/DAC has created a major new apparatus, with related processes, to help make aid more effective, or at least lessen its administrative costs. Many of the Paris Declaration indicators, it can be argued, are ‘supply side’ in their genesis and reflect a desire among donors to improve their own practices and behaviours. This is appropriate and therefore welcome.
However, this forces a question: How can such an apparatus enhance national ownership without also reducing donorship? How can the input indicators of the Paris Declaration be meaningful measures of an output such as assertive national ownership? We are typically concerned with the methodological challenges of measuring development effectiveness as distinct from aid effectiveness. But here, within the Paris Declaration, there remain lingering questions about how indicators for improving the efficiency of aid throughput can realistically measure a transfer of power from donor to recipient.
While we wait for an answer to that question, observe how increases in the volume of aid produce tendencies among some donors, in some instances, to micromanage operational relationships. In
Another example of debatable practice is the way budget support dialogue is staged around performance assessment frameworks. Here the ‘dialogue’ between ‘partners’ is based on reporting by Government on ‘mutually agreed’ performance indicators. As a visiting researcher from the
The modalities preferred through the Paris Declaration include direct budget support and sector budget support. These are mirrored (or should that be mimicked?) in ‘national aid policies’ as the preferred modality of governments, including
Another assumed improvement in aid management comes in the form of a division of labour.
On 13 April 2006 the Ministry of Finance and National Planning released its provisional list of partners assigned to sectors. When the final negotiated list was agreed on 13 June, the map looked significantly different. In one case, the government moved to retain a particular donor in a sector, even though the donor concerned had indicated its intentions to withdraw. This is because the government valued and trusted that relationship and did not want to lose it. In another case, the government selected a donor for a sector it had not ‘pitched’ for because the government believed it had pertinent experiences that would benefit the sector in question. So far so good. However, the dark side of this experience included alleged instances of donors bullying or even threatening “consequences” if the government did not reconsider its choices of sector arrangements.
In this process, the government arguably made two mistakes: one strategic and one tactical. The strategic mistake was to open up no less than 18 sectors of the fifth national development plan for negotiated support from bilateral donors, the IFIs and the United Nations system.[3] This left the government exposed to considerable horse trading and tugs of war. It would have been more astute if the government had ring-fenced what it considered to be its key sectors and attempt to provide majority or full financing from its own resources. Donors would of course be welcome to supplement but the control of content and dialogue would remain largely in national hands.
The tactical mistake was to yield to donor representatives threatening “consequences”. Permanent secretaries in government are assessed partly for the amount of resources they are able to mobilize from donors so naturally the potential loss of a donor would have repercussions. But a basic lack of understanding of how donors work—never mind more sophisticated donor intelligence—undermined government actors confronted with un-partnerlike donor behaviour. Colleagues in my office argued at the time that the government officials concerned could easily have called the donors bluff. The argument goes that the donor would have returned within a few days or weeks, chastened, with offers of continued support.[4]
I started this section by asking the question: Can better aid management enhance national ownership? Not all of the examples above are of good donorship, less still better aid management. But they are behaviours that the ‘new aid architecture’ is producing. Senior government officials occasionally confide their frustration: whenever they seek to assert a position, some donors either “gang up” or “get hostile” or sometimes both. Still others become passive aggressive, withholding support when they are not happy with government performance when arguably a real partner would get stuck in and try to help solve the problem.[5] Some government officials are now watching carefully to see if the renegotiation of mineral contracts will yield additional revenues to the public bourse, in which case some have indicated their desire to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to their donors.
Ultimately donors are not going to let go of a good thing easily, which raises legitimate questions about donor sincerity on the question of national ownership. This question must be restated with vigour as aid volumes increase. What a mismatch. Donor country electorates measure commitment to development through the volume of aid provided to developing countries. Growing volumes of aid, managed as they are without any serious exit strategy, recycle the dependencies that erode national ownership. Zambians should be worried. Not only is aid likely to increase in the coming years, recent research appears to confirm that some donor countries continue to use aid to exert political and policy pressure, and even to buy support.[6]
4. OECD/DAC and legitimacy
The Paris Declaration is not international law and has been “endorsed” by participating governments and other actors, rather than acceded to or ratified. OECD/DAC is essentially a donor forum to which partner governments in need of aid feel obliged to participate.[7] So it is that the question of legitimacy looms over its implementation. How can DAC overcome this most existential of contradictions? Will donors be ready to step back—or down—as national counterparts step up? The G77+
One observes with some wonder how OECD/DAC is attempting to construct legitimate and inclusive foundations for the Paris Declaration through the belated engagement of civil society. This it must do from scratch, as what is essentially a club of donors attempts to become a more inclusive.[8] In the meantime, initiatives being taken by the G77+
Of course many countries, including least developed, landlocked and small island development states are not going to attract or generate significant sources of development finance and will be dependent on aid for the foreseeable future. But this is a separate argument and does not diminish the challenge of legitimacy that faces OECD/DAC.
5. The limits to national policy preference
There was a time up to the mid-1990s when most donors believed that a particular brand of economics was key to how societies could be organized for success. The primacy of the economic over other dimensions of human development (the social, the cultural, the political and the civil) is still taken for granted even as greater latitude in economic preferences are considered.
The idea that economics should be the optic through which human civilization can be organized has had disastrous repercussions for peace, security and human development. It has created political boomerangs from Latin America to
In spite of these realities, something like a neo-liberal orthodoxy lives on in the economic advice proffered by donors to partner countries. Some of this is due to orthodox neo-liberal economists unqualified to connect their faith-based initiatives with actual civil, political, economic and social consequences in much of the global South. Much of this is due to the fact that donor money is involved and that fiscal rectitude is a natural part of the policy toolbox when other people are tasked with spending your tax payers’ money.
Notwithstanding the fact that the policies and modus operandi of the IMF falls outside of the Paris Declaration framework, a thought experiment is due. What would the donor response be if the Zambian government adopted a dramatically expansionary fiscal policy to meet its national development targets, including those that relate to the Millennium Development Goals? We already know the answer to this: donors that reserve the right to pursue protectionist and public expenditure-led growth strategies discourage or deny both as policy options to their partner country counterparts. Some donors are inclined to give more space than others. But in an age of partnership, should not partner countries be ready to take even that which donors do not want to give?
6. National ownership without national assemblies?
“More and more, the Parliament is becoming involved in the affairs of the country.” So spoke a senior government official at the Zambian national consultation on civil society and aid effectiveness on 18 September 2007. It was intended to be a positive statement of progress and, to be fair, should be taken as such. Inadvertently however it revealed a truth that can be generalized about the role of many national assemblies during the so-called third wave of democratization.
National development agendas and the poverty reduction debate have been dominated by executive branches of national governments and their donor counterparts for the past decade.[9] This was especially true since poverty reduction strategy papers became the main venue of discussion on related matters. The World Bank owned these papers in practice. They sometimes edited the usual free-market and pro-liberalization dictums into nationally-drafted texts before its Board, not national assemblies, approved them. National assemblies were marginalized because they did not have the capacity to handle the content. Bilateral donors who encouraged the Bank in its new-found focus on poverty reduction likewise found it convenient to sideline national assemblies. Thus is was that during a decade of what should have been democratic consolidation with parliaments gradually coming into their own, donors further strengthened executives at the expense of legislatures.
The case of
Some have argued that this to-and-fro reflected a genuinely domestic political exchange, as opposed to the constructed technocratic discourse of poverty reduction contained in the fifth national development plan. Whatever the explanation, the fact that the Plan played such a little part in the weeks of electioneering suggests a very serious gap between would-be legislators and the country’s poverty reduction debate.
Between 2000 and 2002, my own organization, UNDP, witnessed quite a dramatic increase in requests, from both programme and certain donor members of its Board, to engage in poverty reduction strategy processes (from a handful in 2000 to over 80 two years later). Support requested included helping countries to convene inclusive dialogue, to support national stakeholders formulate their own well-researched positions, and to introduce transferable comparative lessons from countries elsewhere in the global South. This involvement served to emphasize the deficit in national ownership over a turnkey development process.
The Paris Declaration will in itself be unable to undo that legacy for a number of reasons. One reason is that habits of deference and risk aversion have grown during the years in which national actors have played second fiddle to their donor counterparts. Another reason is that parliamentary democracy in general, and parliaments in particular, will need many years of patient and unobtrusive support if they are to become strong in substantive leadership, alongside fiduciary oversight and budget execution. A third reason might be that the Paris Declaration is itself largely silent on issues of governance beyond narrowly defined notions of ownership.
This leaves both donors and partner countries to establish terms of engagement that redistributes power from international stakeholders to national ones. I’m not holding my breath. 5,000 years of modern human history suggests that ownership is not usually given away, but taken.
[1] This de facto reality also makes possible a post-positivistic reading of the role of donors within a national domain. It allows us to ask difficult questions, only partly rhetorically. If, as donor literature sometimes states, that corruption in a society is endemic, how long does a donor have to be present before it too becomes part of the local fabric and, in a manner of speaking, part of the endemic problem?
[2] In
[3] The latter being coherent in some instances, a shambles in others, but gradually realizing that the
[4] The donor concerned in one of these alleged cases does not have the decentralized authority to pull out of a sector without significant dialogue with its headquarters and other government entities in its capital.
[5] A point made by the Minister for Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources at a meeting with lead donors in November 2007.
[6] See, for instance, (2007) Dreher, A. et. al. ’Development Aid and International Politics: Does Membership of the United Nations Security Council Influence World Bank Decisions?’ KOF Working Paper No. 171.
[7] One could also argue that the involvement of the United Nations Development Group is also in part due to the fact that DAC processes have—through donorship—become the main venue of dialogue around aid.
[8]
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