Democratic Ownership and the Busan Partnership
by brendanswhitty
The debate about the qualifying adjective for ownership was vibrant and intense during the lead-up to Busan. Contenders included ‘country’, ‘democratic’ and ‘inclusive ‘ ownership? In the end, ‘democratic’ won: the Busan partnership document commits to actions which seek to “deepen, extend and operationalise the democratic ownership of development policies and processes”.
Besides the choice of qualifier, I think another interesting matter is on how to understand the operation of the qualifier. This can be interpreted in two very different ways:
- In the first interpretation, ’democratic’ describes the process of formulating a policy or commitment. Read in this way, the commitment exhorts development actors and governments to engage ‘democratic stakeholders’, be they civil society or parliamentarians or whomsoever else, either inclusively in the process of programming design, or in subsequent evaluations or both.
- The second is very different. Rather than an exhortation to a particular type of policy formulation process, it treats ‘democratic’ as a prior requirement for ownership and cooperation between government and development partners; i.e. that ‘ownership’ will only be accorded to a commitment if the authority making the commitment is democratic and has the legitimate authority that (depending on who you talk to) democracy confers.
It seems clear from a reading of the document that the first meaning is intended: the process of formulating programming should democratic but should happen alongside processes of democracy-building – the latter, democracy-building, is clearly not some form of prior condition.
Accra adopted similar exhortations, with a view to bringing in a wider set of actors into the notion of country ownership enshrined in Paris. Although the Accra commitments were not systematically tracked in the Paris Declaration evaluations, personal observations in Sierra Leone and Malawi and elsewhere suggest that the political governance context in some countries means that this does not happen. The executives of many developing countries are frequently highly centralised and wider inclusion has often not come naturally – although there are signs that this is changing. Parties have often been subordinated to senior party figures, so parliamentarians’ role rarely includes policy-discourse. Studies argue that in many countries, civil society’s space for engagement is being restricted. For their part, development partners cannot afford to sacrifice their working relationship with government officials on whom they rely for effective execution of an aid agenda. Sovereignty is a veil which cannot easily be looked through. Inclusive formulation of aid policy is therefore often an illusive creature. While it is to be hoped that the Busan focus renders it less so, the creation of parallel processes (deal with the executive, while deepening democracy on the side) suggests that progress is by no means guaranteed.
What of the second interpretation? Its adoption would suffer from two challenges: one of these is surmountable, I think, while the other seems crippling. The surmountable one is that making support on the basis of democratic ownership creates a normative frame which will, inevitably, be contested, particularly if large volumes of aid funds were at stake. What would count as sufficient democratic ownership to render aid justified? Making that frame a condition for international engagement with the US or UK would raise some interesting questions. While this presents problems, there are and have been for some time a range of governance indices that have common currency which are already used, including democratic values, institutional assessments and public financial management: some aggregate of these could offer a model. The crippling challenge is that developing country governments, finding their right to ownership and thus sovereignty challenged, would be expected to resist such an interpretation strongly. Such a definition would raise questions of their claim to legitimate government in a manner that would be unacceptable.
Yet despite the political challenges, the second interpretation focuses usefully on the quality of the ownership. While ‘developmental’ and ‘democratic’ ownership are by no means synonymous, this interpretation emphasises the need to work towards legitimate ownership, for the benefit of the people. It therefore brings us back to the key idea for development effectiveness – the need for ‘developmental ownership’ i.e. that ‘country’ ownership of aid is not a matter of right simply by virtue of sovereignty, but as a matter of the qualities and aims of the leadership who claim ownership (see for the argument this paper by David Booth). It usefully focuses on the construction of a development relationship between partner governments for the benefit of the people affected, and not the citizens of the development partner countries or the country government. It implies that the process of constructing relationships and legitimacy is central to the provision of aid and, even if is not a condition of aid, certainly requires considerably greater focus from the beginning rather than simply taking place as a parallel process.
