Aid effectiveness: the question of mutual accountability
The issue of development cooperation especially aid can be traced back to the United Nations resolution 2626 of 1970 on the international development strategy for the second United Nations development decade where rich countries pledged to give 0.7% of their gross national products as development assistance after recognising the role that aid could play in fostering development in developing countries. The next 30 years that followed saw aid being manipulated and used to meet political ends such as recruiting and rewarding southern allies during the Cold War. The question of aid for development seems to have taken a lull in this period and only surfaced again after the signing of the Millennium Declaration.
The financing for development conference held in Monterrey in 2002 that followed sought to examine the internationally agreed development goals adopted during the past development decade, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that originated from the 2000 Millennium declaration, for their financial implications and to indicate ways of mobilising the financial resources needed to achieve them. The outcome of the conference on financing for development was a turning point in international economic cooperation. The adoption of the Monterrey consensus at the summit level on 22 March 2002 not only signalled a new partnership in international economic relations but also reaffirmed the advantages of the new approach toward consensus building taken by the international community.
In February 2003, leaders of the major multilateral development banks and international and bilateral organisations, donor and recipient country representatives gathered in Rome for the high level forum on harmonisation. They committed to take action to improve the management and effectiveness of aid and to take stock of concrete progress, before meeting again in early 2005. The high level forum concluding statement, the Rome declaration on harmonisation, sets out an ambitious programme of activities, which includes among other things agreements to streamline donor procedures and practices, ensure that donor assistance is aligned with the development recipient's priorities and most importantly to implement the good practices principles and standards formulated by the development community as the foundation for harmonisation.
The Paris Declaration of March 2005 represents a landmark achievement that brings together a number of key principles and commitments in a coherent way. It also includes a framework for mutual accountability, and identifies a number of indicators for tracking progress. There is a general recognition that the Paris declaration is a crucial component of a larger aid effectiveness agenda that could engage parliament, gender groups, civil society actors, new lenders, global funds and foundations in a more direct manner. In the Paris declaration, donors and partners committed themselves to monitoring their progress in improving aid effectiveness against 56 specific actions, from which 12 indicators were established and targets set for 2010 (OECD 2007).
Although the international post Paris process has represented a significant amount of work (in terms of surveys, analysis, consultation process, evaluation of the Paris declaration etc), there still remains the need to ensure that the Accra agenda for action is more ambitious, securing strong input and impact, reaffirming the Paris commitments, reflect on the midterm review of the Paris commitments, and include guidance on areas where further progress is needed.
THE PARIS DECLARATION
The purpose of the 2005 Paris declaration on aid effectiveness is to improve aid delivery in a way that best supports the achievement of the MDGs by 2015.
It highlighted the importance of predictable, well aligned, programmed, and coordinated aid to achieve results. See Paris declaration on aid effectiveness, ownership, harmonisation, alignment, results and mutual accountability. One of its five key principles is mutual accountability in which donors and developing countries pledged that they would hold each other mutually accountable for development based on the other four principles of ownership, alignment, harmonisation, and management for results. The Paris declaration emphasises accountability in relation to parliament and other domestic stakeholders, which can only be feasible with effective structures for dialogue (Tjonneland 2006). Although these commitments build on the content of previous agreements, notably that which is expressed in the Rome declaration of February 2003, the Paris declaration is more comprehensive and reflects a broader consensus.
The Paris Declaration flags CSOs (civil society organisations) as potential participants in the identification of priorities and the monitoring of development programmes. However, it does not recognise CSOs as development actors in their own right, with their own priorities, programmes, and partnership arrangements. By taking a narrow view of CSOs’ roles, the Paris declaration fails to take into account the rich diversity of social interveners in a democratic society and fails to recognise the full range of roles played by CSOs as development actors and change agents. CSOs are often particularly effective at reaching the poor and socially excluded, mobilising community efforts, speaking up for human rights and gender equality, and helping to empower particular constituencies. Their strength lies not in their representation of society as a whole, but in their very diversity and capacity for innovation, and in the different perspectives that they bring to the issues when engaging in policy dialogue (OECD 2008). CSOs operate on the basis of shared values, beliefs, and objectives with the people they serve or represent.
This responsiveness to different primary constituencies explains the extensive diversity of CSOs in terms of values, goals, activities, and structure. It also explains the particular emphasis on human rights and social justice, including women’s, children’s, and indigenous people’s rights, which many CSOs take as a starting point for their development work. As the commission of European communities (2008) noted civil society were the ‘missing link’ of the Paris declaration. Civil society is a fully fledged player in development. It has to be included in the process and supported in its efforts to define its own principles of aid effectiveness. The same applies to parliament, local authorities, gender groups and others who are increasingly vocal in their wish to become stakeholders and actors in development.
Overall, human rights principles and standards should be upheld and promoted through results achieved and strategies used to achieve Paris declaration targets and indicators. Synergies between the human rights and aid effectiveness agendas should be sought and further developed in the ongoing roll-out of ‘Paris’ if other cross cutting policy issues such as gender equality and environmental sustainability are to be considered at the Accra third high level forum on aid effectiveness (OECD 2006). There is much potential for the international human rights framework and the Paris declaration to reinforce and benefit from each other. The application of the principles and partnership commitments of the declaration can help advance human rights in a changing context of more aligned and harmonised aid and new aid modalities.
ACCOUNTABILITY AND AID EFFECTIVENESS
Accountability is now a buzzword in contemporary development discourse. When accountability works, citizens are able to make demands on powerful institutions and ensure that those demands are met. [IDS (2006) ‘Making accountability count’ IDS policy briefing No. 33] The concept of accountability describes the rights and responsibilities that exist between people and the institutions that affect their lives, including governments, civil society and market actors. International financial institutions and donors have been consistently criticised for using aid to further their own interests. The current patterns of accountability in which donor agencies hold recipients accountable, and are in turn accountable to their own taxpayers must change. Donors continue to use unfair, undemocratic and inappropriate policy conditionality, in a way that skews recipient accountability away from the citizens of poor countries. The civil society message has been loud and clear that this 'one way' accountability should be replaced by a system of genuine mutual accountability, which balances the legitimate interests of donors, recipients and, most importantly, poor people. In this regard, civil society continues to monitor whether international financial institutions and donors use aid for their own purposes or for primarily reducing poverty and promoting development.
If donors are serious about promoting accountability, dialogue and making an effective contribution to the fight against poverty they must radically improve the quality of their aid. Failure to target aid at the poorest countries, runaway spending on overpriced technical assistance from international consultants, tying aid to purchases from donor country's own firms, cumbersome and ill coordinated planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting requirements, excessive administrative costs, late and partial disbursements, double counting of debt relief, and aid spending on immigration services all deflate the value of aid.
While some tensions remain between the CSO community at large and governments, especially in the South, we are witnessing a steady shift in the attitudes of both the government and civic groups. Each, at long last, is recognising the critical and indeed, legitimate role played by the other in achieving consistent, sustainable long term development. For the sake of accountability and other reasons, there is a growing realisation that civil society needs to engage government officials, donors, politicians and parliamentarians more determinedly. This reduces opposition and increase support and accountability for national, regional and global policies; it works for greater burden sharing of the cost and benefits of policy. For effective aid delivery, ordinary citizens have to be involved not only at implementation stages, but also at the initiating, evaluating, monitoring and institutionalisation stages. Inconsistent and incoherent policies on the part of donors have to a large extent made policy dialogue and accountability difficulty. Conditionalities stressed by donors especially on governance matters cause recipient countries to account to them at the expense of accounting to their citizens - visit Reality of Aid. Too much aid is project based, according to the donor's priorities rather than those of recipients and so on. Aid quantity is insufficient while its ‘quality’ is not good enough and the transaction costs of aid are still too high. Involving reciprocal obligations over the long term as well as monitored relationships and commitments could be a significant new mechanism to improve the effectiveness of aid and give added confidence to the development relationship.
MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONDITIONALITY
Mutual accountability is unlikely to function in a way that does not include donors calling governments to account over basic human rights violations. Accountability in aid effectiveness will not work if the framework used is restricted to donor recipient government relations without going further to include other stakeholders at national level (Uvin 2004). Improving transparency and accountability on the use of development resources is also an important objective of the Paris declaration. Partner countries have a big challenge to ensure that information and disaggregated data is accessible and transparently shared with all stakeholders. Capacity building here becomes necessary for aid effectiveness. Strengthening the credibility of the budget as a tool for governing the allocation and use of development resources can not only improve the alignment of donor support, but also permit parliamentary scrutiny of government policies on development, which is key to deepening ownership. Broadening and reinforcing CSOs involvement in aid effectiveness from inception or design stage allows independent assessments of the adherence to the commitments under the Paris declaration. Multi-stakeholders monitoring of progress reinforces accountability. Donors will also need to improve the transparency and predictability of aid flows by sharing timely and accurate information on intended and actual disbursements with budget authorities.
Ownership and conditionality represent the core issues in aid effectiveness – as ownership is the defining issue in development, while donor conditionality poses one of the gravest challenges to country ownership. The process of deepening the understanding of development partnership and advancing aid effectiveness reform requires further interrogation into the issue of ownership and conditionality from the southern context of development as well as taking the circumstances and needs of the poor as the starting point as well as the final destination or goal. While it is clear the policy conditionalities affect ownership negatively, fiduciary conditionalities also need to be reformed to promote national ownership and alignment.
In discussing mutual accountability between development and country partners the problem of conditionality is central. Dealing with conditionality is of the great importance for developing countries and is related to the ability of the various international agencies and institutions to impose political conditions on development assistance that restrict independence of action and limit the right of each country to define and implement the public policies it deems most appropriate to safeguard the rights and well-being of its people and the principle of ‘national ownership’. Many consultations held in developing countries in the last three years pointed out that conditionalities are antithetical to Paris declaration principle of country ownership and accountability (DFID 2005).
In instances of unreformed supply driven technical assistance aid effectiveness have been patchy and piecemeal especially at the national level. This continued policy conditionality through tied aid undermines ownership. It is, therefore, important if development partners are to build effective development partnerships that increase the volume and maximise the poverty reduction impact of ODA (official development assistance) based on the recognition of national leadership and ownership by developing countries to end all donor-imposed policy conditions. Thus the outcomes of both Accra and Doha should interpret the terms of national country ownership as democratic ownership and elaborate on its implications in the context of countries' obligations to international human rights law, core labour standards, and international commitments on gender equality and sustainable development. In line with this it becomes important to consider the creation of an independent monitoring and evaluation system for aid at international, national and local levels. At the international level, new independent institutions will be needed to play this role, in order to hold donors to account for their overall performance.
The emergence of new donors and creditors, public and private, who are contributing to financing for development, has brought in more resources and diversity to the aid architecture. It is estimated that between 2002 and 2006, net disbursements from non-OECD (organization for economic cooperation and development) donors increased by 60 per cent. These resources are both complementary to other resource flows and an important catalyst in achieving poverty reduction goals in developing countries. Non-OECD donors bring unique perspectives and contributions to the development agenda based on their own experience. Without proper management, non- OECD donor resources could prove ineffective at poverty reduction and counterproductive to maintaining the recent improvements in good governance, particularly where institutional and technical capacity is weak.
RECOMMENDATIONS
In line with the discussions above, it is important that regular and systematic spaces be provided for effective parliamentary and civil society participation in policy dialogue on aid and development effectiveness in all stages of the development process, and that this be recognised as standard practice that needs to be actively promoted at all levels. In this regard, it becomes vital to put in place structures, work frames and policies that govern the relations of these stakeholders with government and donors. Much focus must be put on responsibilities and division of labour to avoid duplication and unnecessary conflicts (OECD 2008).
There is growing concerns at the decline in the levels of ODA in recent years. It is, therefore, necessary for Accra to call for the sharp increase in ODA by a number of donor countries, and call upon all donors to honour their ODA commitments and to improve the effectiveness of ODA in support of nationally owned development strategies. Emphasis here is given to the special importance of continued work towards durable solutions to the debt sustainability and management problems of developing countries. Demonstrating tangible changes in sustaining the momentum and achieving progress in the commitment is key and inspirational for both development partners and recipient countries.
Further, there is need for the Accra agenda for action to consider how it brings on board those that are outside its Paris declaration framework. Emerging lenders such as China need to be engaged not only with the view to win them to the OECD framework, but for coherence and consistence in global partnerships and development cooperation. Besides, there are also big donors that need to be part and parcel of the joint assistant strategy at national levels.
Accra and Doha are important steps on the road to enhance development cooperation for the realisation of internationally agreed development goals, including the MDGs, and to promote dialogue and find effective ways to support this process. There is need to put mechanisms and indicators that work for medium to long term results that go further than Accra. The challenge now is to use the momentum of both Accra and Doha to implement the agreed global development partnership, scaling up efforts on the part of developing countries and the international community. Policy guidelines emanating from both Accra and Doha will need to be translated into concrete actions. This is a technical as well as a political task since the policy instruments have to be identified in detail, in an effort to ensure that they can become operational as each country’s circumstances warrants.
* Charles Mutasa is the executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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