The Kaufmann Governance Post

Why transparency, governance and corruption matter, and what we can all do about it

• Home
• About this Blog
• About Daniel Kaufmann
• What’s New
• Governance Fun..
• Arts and Music
• Disclaimer

About my Work

• Articles in SSRN
• Farewell Lecture @ The World Bank
• Presentations
• Publications
• Surveys — In-depth Country Diagnostics
• Webinar: Capture & the Financial Crisis
• Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI)

Blogs and Webs of the Week

• Global Leaders can be Made

Blogs I Follow

• Africa Unchained
• Bayesian Heresy
• Brad DeLong
• CGD
• Chris Blattman’s
• CIPE Blog
• Economist’s View
• EITI
• Freedom House Governance
• Global Integrity Commons
• Greg Mankiw
• Human Rights Watch
• IMF PFM Blog
• Jeff Frankel
• Macroscope Reuters blog
• MTEF
• ODI Blog
• Open Budget
• Oxfam Y-Gen blog
• Private Sector Development
• Rodrik’s blog
• Thoughts on Economics

Brief Articles

• Aid Effectiveness & Governance
• Annual Bribery: 1 trillion dollars
• Civil Liberties & Aid Effectiveness
• Corruption, Capture and the Financial Crisis
• G20 can learn from well governed countries
• Human Rights & Development
• State Capture in Transition
• Ten Myths on Governance and Corruption
• The End of Ideology: G20 Summit Aftermath

Datalinks on Governance

• Global Integrity Report
• Human Rights Data
• Ibrahim Index of African Governance
• Indicators by MinFinance of France
• Reporters without Borders — Press Freedom
• TI Corruption
• WGI

Governance Maps

• World Freedom Atlas

Selected Papers

• Civil Liberties & Investment Performance
• Colonialism, Inequality, & Development
• Governance Indicators: Survey Article (WBRO)
• Governance Matters VIII: Governance Indicators 1996-2008
• Growth without Governance
• Human Rights & Governance
• Legal Corruption
• The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development

Some Sites I Like

• Article XIX
• BIC
• Development Gateway
• G-20 could learn from “Missing” Countries (ggg-8)
• Global Witness
• Governance Lessons to G-20 Summit from Missing Countries
• Governance Matters @ World Bank
• IMF Fiscal Tranparency
• Internews
• Revenue Watch
• The Economist’s Voice
• Transparency International
• U4 Anticorruption

Technorati

Governance News

Translator

English • العربية • Deutsch • Español • Français • Italiano • Português 漢語

Search this site

Click orange RSS icon to subscribe

• Indicadores Mundiales de Gobernabilidad 2009
• Governance Matters 2009: Learning From Over a Decade of the Worldwide Governance Indicators
• Back to the Future in the Middle East: Governance Stagnation
• Grand Donor Illusion and Larceny in Africa?

Topics

• Aid Effectiveness
• capture
• Corruption
• financial crisis
• G-20
• Measurement Frontiers
• Public Financial Management
• Public-Private Linkages
• Rule of Law
• Transparency
• Voice and Human Rights

Recent Posts

• Indicadores Mundiales de Gobernabilidad 2009
• Governance Matters 2009: Learning From Over a Decade of the Worldwide Governance Indicators
• Back to the Future in the Middle East: Governance Stagnation
• Grand Donor Illusion and Larceny in Africa?
• Financial Crisis, Africa’s Permanent Damage, and Aid Effectiveness
• Financial Crisis as the Kiss of Death to the Governance Agenda?
• Captura del Estado y Corrupción Legal en los EEUU: Realidad o Ilusión?
• Financial Crisis and the Media: Capture, Culture and Incentives, or Lack of Training?
• V Summit of the Americas Concludes with ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’
• Concluye la Quinta Cumbre de las Américas: Ganadores y Perdedores
• Obama and the Summit of the Americas: One Eye Wide Open, Another Shut
• Obama, EEUU y la Cumbre de las Américas

Recent comments

• Vicente Vargas on Gobernabilidad o Gobernanza?: ‘Governance’ en español, en breve
• Joe Smith on Back to the Future in the Middle East: Governance Stagnation
• Dr Sheila Ochugboju on Grand Donor Illusion and Larceny in Africa?
• Jacqui Porth on From Madoff to Stanford Ponzi, from SEC to Congress: in dire need of political reforms
• Jim Wesberry on Financial Crisis, Africa’s Permanent Damage, and Aid Effectiveness
• Kent Sjolund on Financial Crisis, Africa’s Permanent Damage, and Aid Effectiveness
• HealThoid on Financial Crisis and the Media: Capture, Culture and Incentives, or Lack of Training?
• FoxJudsf on Financial Crisis and the Media: Capture, Culture and Incentives, or Lack of Training?
• john brightman on Will showdown on Global Financial Regulation be averted at the G-20 Summit?
• Finance Information Blog on Financial Crisis as the Kiss of Death to the Governance Agenda?

Email Subscription

Archives

• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008

My pages

• About this Blog
• About Daniel Kaufmann
• What’s New
• Governance Fun..
• Arts and Music
• Disclaimer

Tag Cloud

Africa Bono Botswana bribery Brookings Burma capture Chile China Colombia definition e-governance EEUU financial crisis Forbes G-8 G-20 Summit G20 G20 Summit G20Voice Germany gobernanza governance Kenya legal corruption LondonSummit Madoff Mexico myths Nigeria Norway Obama Olympics Ponzinomics Ponzi schemes Regulation Russia SEC stimulus UK US WBI WGI World Bank Zimbabwe

Governance News

Technorati

Calendar

« Delicious Governance: Not always an Oxymoron? | Main | Unfettered Free Market, Financial Crisis and Political Backlash: How about a Market-Friendly Approach Instead? »

Aid Effectiveness beyond Accra: good governance & anticorruption 2010

By Kaufmann | September 10, 2008

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), 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
 

 

Topics: Aid Effectiveness, Corruption, Transparency | |

2 Responses to “Aid Effectiveness beyond Accra: good governance & anticorruption 2010”

1. Tanya Gupta Says:
   September 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

   On indicators: 1) once we have the data and understand the existing system of incentives (which given cultural pecularities is itself a formidable task), what do we do about it ? 2) The more information (surveys, statistics) the better

   One idea to promote 2) in the area of indicators built bottom-up is as follows - use Web 3.0 tools to construct rating sites akin to citizen report cards. One reason citizen report cards have not worked that well, I think, is that the instruments used have not been democratized. By this I mean to say they have been mostly manual, and therefore not accesible to everyone. If we were to pick one country, and one sub-sector and pilot a rating site using social networking tools I think this idea would have a good chance of being proven right. For instance a Yelp-like site for a collection of districts in Mexico. Check out http://yelp.com to see how yelp works or http://unigo.com or this article about how democratic bottom-up unigo became a hit: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21unigo-t.html?pagewanted=2&em

2. Art Says:
   October 20th, 2008 at 5:05 am

   hm… 2010 ?
   i hope so :)

Comments

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website (not required)

Register

|Log in | Disclaimer