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On “Aid Effectiveness and Governance: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”
By Kaufmann | March 24, 2009 No Comments »
‘Aid Effectiveness’ gone astray? Imagine official multilateral and bilateral donor aid agencies holding high level meetings for years to agree on ‘harmonized’ aid strategies for recipient developing countries whose governments are expected to fully ‘own’ them.
Don’t look in this space for formal definitions of donor aid ‘harmonization’. They are in official reports from aid organizations; there you can also read about efforts to ‘harmonize’ the timetable and frequency of official visits by donors to recipient countries. 
Instead, in this blog space let me spur debate, as I just did in a panel on ‘Aid Effectiveness’…
Let me start by echoing a panel member in advancing an unorthodox interpretation for donor ‘harmonization’: lowest common denominator agreement among donors regarding their strategy towards a recipient country. Spineless strategies, devoid of innovation, and skating over the toughest challenges for development.
Everybody knows that some official donors pursue their own narrow geopolitical agendas in developing countries. Other donor agencies, constrained by their own governance structure or by weak leadership, lack the mettle to bring up major abuses in the recipient country regarding human rights, media freedoms, or high level political corruption. [Then a few others, such as some Nordics, are serious about these, and are more effective.]…
Now enter another ‘fad’ in the donor lexicon: ‘ownership’. Donors also agree that the strategy should be fully ‘owned’ by the recipient country (typically the central government). Then, imagine that the recipient government happens to be rife with corruption. And, say, it happens to be the run up to the Presidential elections, which the incumbent regime intends to rig if needed so to stay in power.
Can aid be effective under such circumstances? Of course not. Worse than not, in fact.
I am not making this up. Take a country like Kenya not very long ago, as a telling illustration of this ill-fated strategy (there are others). Witness how the main aid donors approached the funding strategy to the Kenyan government prior to their ill-fated elections in late 2007.
Well over a year before such elections the extent of misgovernance and corruption had been studied and was well known in the donor aid community. Except for a couple of small donors, this reality was ignored by the multilateral and bilateral aid donors. Funding rushed out of the door up to election day in a harmonized donor strategy, in close coordination with the government in power.
Major violence erupts in the immediate aftermath of the highly irregular elections. Even though the governance reality preceding the elections was actually known, many in the donor community appear to be surprised by the turn of events. Well over a year has now elapsed. An honest and transparent in-depth assessment and lessons of this debacle for the donor community is still missing.
Instead of learning the concrete and hard-nosed lessons from such country experiences, the generic obsession of major gatherings to discuss progress on ‘harmonization’ and ‘ownership’ continues apace. Sadly, in many official circles ‘Aid Effectiveness’ has become equated with Harmonization, Ownership and Capacity.
I mentioned some of this in the panel discussion a few days ago that was hosted by the World Bank, the occasion being the publication of an issue of the Development Outreach Magazine devoted to “Aid Effectiveness”. There are a number of interesting articles in this issue of the magazine (here), and quite a number of them deal with the recent High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness that took place in Accra (Ghana).
I started my remarks in the panel by wondering: what could be worse than a non-‘harmonized’ donor approach to aid which is not ‘owned’ by the recipient country government? Well, I thought: if there is high level corruption (or an abusive autocratic regime) it would be even worse to have an ‘harmonized’ donor aid strategy that is ‘owned’ by such regime…
To be fair, there are many developing countries and emerging economies where corruption in government is not pervasive, and there are some countries exhibiting leadership from the top in implementing good governance and anti-corruption reforms. They deserve particular support, especially now. And to be fair to some in the donor community, some initiatives and agencies are trying to be more selective and do care about governance.
But there are many countries where political corruption and capture is prevalent, and no serious efforts to address these are taking place. And much of the international community tends to turn a blind eye or engage in cosmetic or low priority (and politically correct) programs, since a serious international drive on governance and anti-corruption lost steam years ago.
Actually, the governance and anti-corruption field has been in a state of silent crisis for some time. Such silent governance crisis is now magnified by the implications for countries (and for governments) of the current global economic crisis. This points to the urgent need for a major revamp of aid strategies, within which governance and anti-corruption needs a thorough ‘reboot’.
The aid industry was already ‘behind the curve’ before the global crisis. Now it is exponentially so. The arguments and implications are spelled out in a brief article here, entitled “Aid Effectiveness and Governance: The Good, Bad and Ugly” (or, for a slightly different version of the paper, with more pictures, here). Contrary to the naysayers, I am of the view that there are successes in development aid. But there is also plenty of ’spin’, and unwillingness to learn from failures, let alone being prepared to quickly adapt to the stark new world reality.
The hopeful news is that crisis brings up opportunity for real change and reform. Let us see whether it is seized.
Topics: Aid Effectiveness, Corruption, Transparency, Voice and Human Rights | | Read and Submit Comments