Thin gruel at Busan
by brendanswhitty
The biggest ball in aid effectiveness, the fourth High Level Forum, is being held next week in Busan, Korea, and sadly I shall not be going to it. Instead, I shall be reading the documents while sweeping up ash and so forth. The latest version of the outcomes document came out earlier in the week. Analysing it as a guest on Duncan Green’s blog, Gideon Rabinowitz of UKAN today identified aid transparency, tied aid and monitoring its implementation as the three key points. To this, I would add the importance of ‘management for results’, whose conceptual imprint can be seen throughout the document.
If that’s it, it’s some pretty thin gruel. Paris had a clear and ambitious vision, rooted in country ownership. It was based on the insight that recipients’ buy-in was vital to aid programming, and that to secure this, donors should therefore follow country agendas. As it turned out, this vision was flawed; the implementation of Paris failed. Only one of the thirteen commitments been achieved since 2005. However, most analysts conclude that Paris’ core insight remains valid: country commitment to development agendas is vital for effectiveness. The flaw is that the principle of country ownership presents a great goal, but is not a means. As David Booth argues, drawing on several political economic analyses, country leadership in a development-oriented agenda is in fact relatively rare [pdf]. Donors have a role in supporting that process, as political actors. Projects like the APPP, Developmental Leadership Program and Tony Blair’s AGI are exploring opportunities for this.
For Busan, however, this vision is obscured. Reading the outcomes document, it is unclear whether Busan marks Paris 2.1 or something new. Certainly, the Paris principles are there, but they are so watered down as to be almost unrecognisable. Ownership, insofar as it is referred to, is there to define what governments can be held to account for by their partner donors. Alignment (the use of systems) is reduced to a vague presumption, with the African states withholding endorsement. Commitments to transparency and tied aid are appropriate and useful, but are not new and do not pertain to country ownership (taking nothing away from the importance of work by IATI, which is absolutely essential to good, accountable, well-governed aid programming).
As a document, it reads to me like an effort in realpolitik: bring in the emerging donors and keep increasingly sceptical donors happy by including results agenda references (who are themselves under pressure from their domestic stakeholders). One part of me thinks that, as someone who’s never been involved in such a durbar, it’s probably a good thing and a necessary part of engaging with the emerging donors. Another part of me thinks that Paris was always asymmetrically implemented, with some donors way more committed than others, so what does it matter what Busan actually says? Maybe a more modest focus on transparency and untied aid will actually achieve something. However, what I’m really concerned about is the way that it obscures the importance of ownership.
