Aid Effectiveness beyond Accra: good governance & anticorruption 2010

Evidently it was Huge, and very ‘High Level’ -- the Forum on Aid Effectiveness which just ended in Accra, with 1,700 attendees.  I wasn’t one of them. But I read and talk to people. The sense is that at the end of the day some promising steps may have taken place.  Mark Nelson was there, blogging already about the Parallel Forum with civil society, and the main declaration points of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which was improved at the 11th hour.

Civil Society and Transparency

Let us not exult.  The last minute changes are far from path-breaking.  But they are encouraging because they ‘officially’ recognize the role of independent Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) as third party monitors and as active participants in the policy dialogue; they support local (not donor) ownership of development programs, and they commit to transparency in aid and to a few timelines for progress on selected areas (such as on reducing aid fragmentation and duplication). 

Bringing concrete transparency to all multilateral and bilateral donor agencies and to the projects and programs donors fund (including those of the World Bank), as well as instilling more transparency within institutions and programs of recipient countries, would of course constitute major progress – even if long overdue.

Likewise if a leap forward were to take place in empowering CSOs to be concretely involved as actual partners.  On this, it is worth looking into the new initiative launched in the eve of the Forum, when a group of CSOs – including ONE (formerly DATA), Tiri, Access Info, Action Aid and UK Aid Network– launched the Publish What You Fund Initiative.  It lays out principles for greater transparency in the delivery and funding of aid.  Also check out aidinfo.org.  And let’s keep a close eye on how DfID’s International Aid Transparency Initiative, just launched, will actually track how aid is spent.  

From Communiqué to Delivery 

These are welcomed promises of sunshine. And many officials seemed enthusiastic about the agreements in the AAA communiqué.  Time to uncork champagne and celebrate?:  Not so fast, I am afraid.  

Let’s remember that these are communiqués, declarations.  They need to be put into concrete practice, with monitorable time-bound benchmarks on those things that really matter.  Accra was not the first meeting of its kind. The track record so far is mixed.  Three years ago the major donors got together at Gleneagles and pledged major increases in development aid, with focus on Africa.  The actual amounts of aid delivered so far fall short.  As it is customary, Jeff Sachs reminds us that some of the most powerful donors in particular are lagging behind.

Cleverly, one of the Accra sessions did emphasize the importance of improved “predictability” of aid resources -- for the case of health, in fact.  Important, no doubt.  But why not focus first on whether overall amounts of promised aid resources by each agency and country have been delivered or not (and hopefully untied...) – whether “predictably” or “unpredictably”…?

Critique by Civil Society

Civil society appears divided in their assessment of what was accomplished in Accra.  Some, like The Reality of Aid, are pleased that they manage at the last minute to get some CSO issues into the AAA declaration.  Others, like CIDSE and Caritas point to unaddressed issues in the final resolution, such as the food crisis, and regret that few time-bound commitments were agreed to.  Better Aid characterizes the AAA as “marginal progress”, stating that it fails to make aid work better for the poor due “backroom deals and obstructions within the negotiations.” (since they happen in the ‘backroom’, and I was so far away, I have no idea which obscure ‘deals’ they are referring to).

Missing in Action

Beyond these loud celebrations and critiques, there is also a “silent elephant” that was being kept under wraps: how best to concretely support better governance and corruption control?  Obviously more focus on transparency, which did feature at the Forum, helps.  And talking transparency (and a bit of ‘accountability’ for good measure) instead of governance and corruption is a politically palatable way to get some unreformed official signatories on board.  It causes allergy to some to have to deal explicitly with commitments on media freedoms, on controlling state capture and high level corruption, on integrity safeguards in official statistics, or on an independent and clean judiciary.  

As a result, minimal mention (and merely exhortative) of governance and corruption challenges is made, while concrete time-bound commitments and targets on key dimensions of governance and anticorruption have gone missing. By contrast, the focus is on the technocratic problem of ‘capacity’, and how donors will help solve it. The question of political will to improve governance is conveniently ignored.  It is easier to talk about strengthening institutional capacity... Considerable ‘accommodation’ takes place.

1990

The problem is that we are no longer in 1990, but on the verge of 2010.  Obscuring the reality of the impact that governance and corruption exert on aid effectiveness is no longer possible.  This reality is crucial not merely for safeguarding the integrity of particular donor projects, since the notion of ‘ring-fencing’ is absurd anyway.  More fundamentally, good governance and anticorruption matters for ensuring that overall aid supports domestically-led governance reforms and has a country-wide development and poverty alleviation impact.

Further, consider a setting with initial weak institutions, but where there are political will and governance reforms. In such setting, if explicitly tackling head on the challenge of governance and anticorruption, the divisive debate about using or not using “country systems”’ would morph into constructive work by donors supporting country-led governance reforms and working with the institutions of the country—within and outside the executive.

Contrasting 1990, when is was taboo, in a 2010 world it would be a step backwards to move away from explicitly and concretely addressing governance and corruption in Aid Effectiveness.  And it would send a message that we have not yet learnt the lessons from Zimbabwe, Kenya, Burma (Myanmar), Sudan (Darfur), Chad, among others.  It does not surprise that Transparency International deplores the absence of concreteness on fighting corruption during the Accra Forum. 

The paucity of actions on governance and corruption are not the only indicator that some of the ‘Aid Effectiveness’ industry is still in 1990 rather than in 2010.  Glaringly absent from the Forum were the path-breaking IT innovations taking place nowadays, in spite of the fact that they offer such great promise to improve governance (including for a freer media) and aid effectiveness.  Similarly, the traditional Aid industry may not yet be grasping the seismic shift taking place due to FDI (for some time already) as well as private donor aid and sovereign funds (more recently). Similarly absent are the innovative market- and private-driven solutions to development challenges.

2010

Honoring funding pledges, and better governance of aid delivery, including untying aid and selecting types of funding and programs that maximize development effectiveness, are some of the pending challenges for the donor community.  And the resolve by reformist leaders and civil society in recipient countries to implement governance improvements is paramount for development impact. 

Top-Down:  Witness the reforms that the leader of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been spearheading, and her contribution during the Accra Forum, where she called on donors to honor their funding pledges and go about it more efficiently, while at the same time addressing the challenge of corruption faced by recipient countries. 

And Bottom-Up listening to stakeholders: when we ask thousands of citizens in developing countries for what they consider the priority for aid effectiveness, they mention support for improved governance and anti-corruption ahead of other options, including whether to provide funding to their central governments.

In a blink, the 2010 world will be with us.  One where governance, integrity, IT and free media, privates and market-based solutions do matter.

Worldwide Governance Indicators