Better Aid: A Civil Society Position Paper for the 2008 Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness
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Better Aid: A Civil Society Position Paper for the 2008 Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness |
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| Written by the International Civil Society Steering Group | |
| Wednesday, 16 January 2008 | |
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A Civil Society Position Paper for the 2008 Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness1
1. BACKGROUND Civil society organisations (CSOs) were present in 2005 when donor country members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC), developing countries and multilateral institutions signed the Paris Declaration (PD) on Aid Effectiveness2. Since then, diverse CSOs have been engaged in tracking this agreement, both internationally and in developing countries. CSOs have been raising a range of issues and bringing in different perspectives, trying to ensure that this new framework for aid effectiveness translates into effective and accountable development processes. CSOs argue that the only true measures of aid’s
effectiveness are its contribution to the sustained reduction of
poverty and inequalities; and its support of human rights, democracy,
environmental sustainability and gender equality. What is the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness OWNERSHIP: Developing countries will exercise effective leadership over their development policies and strategies, and will coordinate development actions; ALIGNMENT: Donor countries will base their overall support on recipient countries' national development strategies, institutions, and procedures; HARMONISATION: Donor countries will work so that their actions are more harmonised, transparent, and collectively effective; MANAGING FOR RESULTS: All countries will manage resources and improve decision-making for results; and, MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY: Donor and developing countries pledge that they will be mutually accountable for development results. 2. INTRODUCTION: THE PARIS DECLARATION IS A POLITICAL AGREEMENT The principles of ownership and accountability endorsed by the Paris Declaration are welcomed by CSOs as the right basis for relationships between donors and recipient governments. Accountable aid relationships based on real ownership can help to support democracy and the empowerment of poor and marginalised people to claim their rights. Aid creates power relationships between donors, governments and citizens – the process of implementing, monitoring and evaluating the PD must recognise this. By crowding together and aligning their policies, donors increase their already significant power over aid recipients, which allows them to keep imposing their priorities and concerns. Radical change is needed to empower recipients and make aid accountable to all people and effective at meeting their needs and rights. Some donors have attempted to reduce the Paris agenda to a technical process for managing aid flows and lowering transaction costs, and have pushed much of the responsibility for change onto recipients. But reforming the aid system cannot be a ‘neutral’ technical process. For example, the PD largely ignores a number of key issues which are controversial in aid reform (e.g. conditionality, tied aid), but by excluding them it implicitly supports current practice – this is a political decision in and of itself. At the same time the framework creates new mechanisms of conditionality, such as the Joint Assistance Strategies. PD needs to focus on conditions for effective and sustainable development and for democratising the international cooperation processes. Recommendation 1: Recognise the centrality of poverty reduction, gender equality, human rights, social justice and environment. The Accra HLF must ensure that the aid effectiveness agenda aims to reduce poverty, promote gender equality and guarantee human rights and social justice. The AAA must commit to a work plan for 2010 that would elaborate indicators and an inclusive process of assessment of new aid modalities in terms of their actual impact on the achievement of progress on poverty reduction, gender equality, human rights social justice and environment. The PD’s objectives, commitments, and assessment indicators have also been artificially separated from any consideration about how aid actually affects the conditions that sustain poverty and inequality. Development is a political process. It is essentially an issue of the poor claiming and realising their human rights. The Accra HLF presents an opportunity to deepen the current aid effectiveness agenda by explicitly addressing its relevance to these broader development goals. Deepening aid effectiveness in the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) requires recognition by all stakeholders that the modalities and partnerships of aid must be explicitly coherent with, and accountable to UN goals to achieve progress in poverty reduction, gender equality and human rights. Donors must be accountable and take responsibility for their actions, while all governments must spare no effort to meet their obligations to provide basic rights for their citizens. Linking the implementation of Paris Declaration to these key development goals puts the interests and rights of poor and marginalized people at the centre of the aid effectiveness agenda. Progress for each of these goals hinges on strengthening empowerment, local capacity, participation, transparency, leadership and joint responsibility, all of which are consistent with the intentions of the Paris Declaration. 3. MAKING DEMOCRATIC OWNERSHIP A REALITY Ownership is essential, but must be democratic. CSOs believe that ownership is the cornerstone of development – unless countries are able to decide and direct their own development paths, development will fail to be inclusive, sustainable or effective. The ownership principle is meant to be a foundation of the Paris aid effectiveness agenda as well as other ongoing reform processes, including the ‘One UN’ reforms. However, the way ownership is understood is often limited, and based on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process4. While PRSPs have different expressions in different countries, these processes are seldom an authentic and ‘owned’ reflection of the citizens of poor countries – they often reflect the interests of a technical/political elite and the demands of key donors (the World Bank and IMF in particular). According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “the autonomy of countries in designing their own growth and development strategies is circumscribed by the same considerations that dominated the structural adjustment programmes of the past two decades”5. Setting national and local development priorities in a country is a complex and ongoing political process, involving many stakeholders. This process must allow for real input and leadership from poor and marginalised populations and take into account specific national and local contexts. Some countries use the donor requirement of a PRSP to organise national debates around these issues, but PRSPs cannot be the only or main definition of ownership. Neither Joint Assistance Strategies often negotiated in secret between the donors and recipient country governments without public scrutiny or space for participation. Country ownership of development programmes should be understood not simply as government ownership, but as democratic ownership. Democratic ownership means that citizens (women and men) voices and concerns must be central to national development plans and processes (PRSPs, SWAPs, etc.) they must have access to resources, meaningful and timely information, and be active in implementation, monitoring and evaluation. It also means establishing legitimate governance mechanisms for decision making and accountability, including parliaments, elected representatives, national women’s machineries and organisations, CSOs representatives and local communities. Democratic ownership will only be possible if all actors are integrated into the national strategic planning, implementation and assessment. Recommendation 2: End all donor-imposed policy conditionality. The AAA should include a commitment to end all donor-imposed policy conditions and practice of using aid with foreign and economic interests, priorities and military interventions. The AAA should include as well recognition that such conditions undermine democratic ownership. The AAA should set out a work-plan to achieve ambitious targets to simplify and reduce the overall number of conditions (including triggers, benchmarks etc) attached to the programme-based approaches promoted by the Paris Declaration. One of the key recommendations of the 2006 Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration6 was that “development strategies need substantial strengthening” and have to be “determined by each country’s priorities, pace, and sequencing of reform”. Donors must recognise that their activities can undermine democratic ownership. All imposed policy conditions, including benchmarks, triggers, and performance-based allocations, prevent recipient countries from exercising real policy choices and undermine democratic ownership of development and poverty reduction strategies. Policy conditionality, as distinct from fiduciary responsibility and accountability for aid expenditures, renders governments unaccountable to their citizens and their parliaments. Donors often undermine democratic accountability through secret policy dialogues with governments on aid and debt conditions. The use of aid as a tool to impose policy conditions has no place in an aid paradigm rooted in a commitment to ownership. Donor policy prescriptions continue to be attached as conditions for both debt cancellation and aid, and yet the PD contains no targets or indicators to reduce conditionality. There is also a concern that conditionality could even increase with the expansion of new aid modalities. CSOs are concerned that conditions are becoming broader and deeper, and continue to promote economic policies which are not in the interests of poor and marginalised people, but undermining their rights. Donor harmonisation has the potential to reduce rather than increase policy space for recipients if it means that all donors make their aid conditional on the policy reforms demanded by the World Bank and IMF in particular. This underlines the importance of tackling the question of conditionality at the 2008 High Level Forum. Recommendation 3: Donors and Southern governments must adhere to the highest standards of openness and transparency. Donors must commit in the AAA to the highest standards of openness and transparency. This should include: timely and meaningful dissemination of information, particularly during aid negotiations and about disbursements, and the adoption of a policy of automatic and fully disclosure of relevant information, in languages and forms that are appropriate to concerned stakeholders, with a strictly limited regime of exceptions. Southern governments must work with elected representatives and citizens’ organisations to set out open and transparent policies on how aid is to be sourced, spent, monitored and accounted for. This requires that government ministers and officials be accountable to their citizens, with effective mechanisms of answerability and enforceability, based on improved transparency of information about government policies and programmes. Aid suffers from a serious lack of transparency and openness. There are wide variations in the degree to which donors report in advance how much aid they intend to disburse, and then how much they have disbursed, and on what terms. This makes it difficult for recipient governments to budget properly, and for CSOs, women’s organisations and citizens to scrutinise budgeting processes. Aid negotiations continue to take place behind closed doors - there is a lack of publicly available information on conditions, spending priorities and other aid terms. Key documents are often inaccessible; or, if made publicly available, are buried in donor websites rather than being actively disseminated to affected communities in formats and languages accessible to them. Increased transparency from donors would not only make them more accountable, it would also support Southern CSOs’ efforts to scrutinise budgets and hold their own governments to account. Southern governments must also become more transparent and open. The DAC’s 2006 Survey on Monitoring the PD recognised that “partner countries need to deepen their ownership of the development process by engaging citizens and parliaments more fully in planning and assessing their development policies and programmes”. Recommendation 4: Donors should support reforms to make procurement systems more accountable, not more liberalised. At Accra, governments should agree to focus entirely on strengthening procurement systems to be more accountable to citizens in recipient countries. Rather than rewarding countries that introduce greater (if not full) liberalisation, they should support recipients to look at different ways to link government procurement to broader economic and social goals through country-led Technical Assistance. CSOs welcome the commitment by donors to use country systems, such as government procurement systems rather than their own. We recognise that to do this, donors need to be ensured of the robustness of the country systems. We have concerns that progress on this indicator is focused on developing country procurement systems rather than how far donors are actually using country systems. Furthermore, we are concerned that the methodology to assess the strength of government procurement systems rewards countries more highly if they do not discriminate against firms on the basis of their nationality. Transparency in government
procurement is a ‘Singapore issue’ which developing countries have
refused to negotiate on at the World Trade Organisation, seeing it as a
way of pushing procurement liberalisation. Government procurement is
worth US$2,000 billion annually and liberalised procurement markets can
provide good opportunities for firms from other, particularly
developed, countries. The degree to which developing countries
liberalise their procurement markets should be their choice and not in
any way linked to either aid flows (through conditionality), Recommendation 5: The AAA must recognize CSOs as development actors in their own right and acknowledge the conditions that enable them to play effective roles in development. Donors and Southern governments should support the conditions which are necessary to enable CSOs in the South to fulfil their roles in the development process. CSOs need legal frameworks and mechanisms which provide for freedom of association, the right to organise and participate in national decision-making processes, and a free and open media. CSOs also need predictable longterm funding – donors should explore new modalities of support to provide this. CSO are essential for creating a climate of social, political and economic change towards reducing poverty and inequalities and the fulfilment of human rights. Therefore it is vital to preserver their strategic role. CSOs have a vital role to play in development, although the roles assumed by CSOs are not a substitute for government obligations to meet their responsibilities to all their citizens. CSOs including women’s organisations, trade unions, peasants associations and other social movements are the expression of an active democratic citizenship, without which little progress can be made in governance or development. A democratic culture requires openness to policy and development alternatives, respect and encouragement for pluralities of views, human rights and gender equality. Embedding these principles into the policies and practices of donors, government and civil society organisations is a key challenge for the aid reform process. CSOs are development actors in their own right, rooted in the organisation of citizens to claim rights and hold governments and donors to account. CSOs have diverse characteristics and play significant roles at different levels. For example, they have a role in providing effective delivery of development programmes, in social empowerment of poor and marginalized groups, in holding governments to account, and contributing to the realisation of human rights. Some CSOs are also donors or channels of donor assistance and many of them play the role of watchdogs. The key roles played by CSOs as development actors in their own right, as well as the enabling conditions that are necessary for them to be effective, need to be recognised in the aid effectiveness agenda. CSOs should not be instrumentalised in the aid effectiveness agenda as a means to implement commitments made by donors and governments in the PD (e.g. uncritical alignment of CSOs with country PRSPs). Rather, CSOs must be given full play to hold donors and governments to account in implementing aid effectiveness principles, and in enriching the application of aid effectiveness principles and PD in their diverse roles in engagement with donors and governments, and especially in empowering the poor to claim their rights. CSOs have already taken many initiatives to improve their effectiveness and accountability (e.g. International Charter on Accountability, Sphere project) and are taking further steps to improve the partnerships between northern and southern CSOs in particular. The PD mentions the importance of civil society organisations in holding governments accountable. However, the current “new aid modalities” are putting additional challenges in CSOs access to resources. Donors need to explore new modalities for effective access to financial resources for CSOs, including women’s rights organisations. 4. MAKING AID ACCOUNTABLE Accountability is the basis for effective aid, and should be based on rights. CSOs around the world argue that accountability is the only basis for effective aid. Donors, Southern governments and other actors in the aid system must be accountable for the impacts and development outcomes of aid. CSOs believe that these impacts and outcomes must be ultimately assessed in terms of progress towards internationally-agreed human rights, including the right to development and associated economic and social rights. Rights-based obligations should provide a normative and organising framework for accountability in the aid system. In addition, accountability mechanisms must include gender responsive indicators and results-based frameworks, in order to ensure steps towards the achievement of MDG37. CSOs demand the inclusion of specific instruments within the ‘new’ aid tools, particularly: gender budgeting, gender audits and monitoring of the implementation of international instruments for gender justice. Recommendation 6: Create an effective and relevant independent monitoring and evaluation system for the Paris Declaration and its impact on development outcomes. The AAA should create a system of independent monitoring and evaluation of the PD at international, national and local levels. At the international level, new independent institutions will be needed to play this role, in order to hold donors to account for their overall performance. At the national and local levels monitoring and evaluation should involve a range of stakeholders – including CSOs. Monitoring and evaluation should also take much more account of the links between reforms in aid modalities and development outcomes and progress towards human rights. The AAA should initiate work to further explore these links. The AAA should also set out a working plan to develop a more comprehensive and participatory process, led by developing country partners, including Southern CSOs, for determining more appropriate indicators and measurements of aid effectiveness. The 2010 review of the Paris Declaration commitments should be expanded to include the outcomes of this comprehensive assessment. The current monitoring process for the Paris Declaration is asymmetric – donors monitor themselves, while recipients are monitored by the World Bank and others. If the Paris process is to be credible, independent monitoring and evaluation is essential. There is insufficient confidence in the definition and measurement of many of the PD indicators and in the monitoring system. The current official monitoring process has allowed some donors to re-define commitments in order to over-state their performance. In contrast, monitoring of recipient governments has been in large part a review of compliance with norms and standards which were only discussed in a very limited way in Paris and which are, in many cases, defined by donors (e.g. use of World Bank assessments of ownership, mutual accountability and public financial management). It is not acceptable that the monitoring and evaluation of Paris Declaration implementation is controlled by donors, both directly in individual countries and through the World Bank and the OECD-DAC. The monitoring process can also become a hidden door for the introduction of conditionality, when for example donors have pushed for the openness of government procurement to foreign bidders as a pre-condition for using countries’ own procurement systems. So, to be ‘effective’ in terms of aid, Southern countries face pressures to adhere to policy recommendations that have not been agreed in international fora such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Recommendation 7: Introduce mutually agreed, transparent and binding contracts to govern aid relationships. Aid terms must be fairly and transparently negotiated with participation and accountability to people living in poverty and inequality. Donors and recipient governments should agree to base future aid relationship on transparent and binding agreements including clear commitments by donors on aid volumes and quality, with sanctions. In addition, it is vital that effective fiduciary mechanisms remain in place to ensure that aid money is spent for the purposes intended. These agreements should be independently monitored, as outlined above. Mutual accountability must go beyond donors and recipient governments must become a reality. At present, accountability in the aid relationship flows almost entirely in one direction: from recipient to donor. Donors are often unaccountable to the governments and citizens of the countries that their aid is supposed to be helping. In order to make mutual accountability a reality at the country level, donors must make transparent and binding commitments to which they can be held to account. Mutual accountability in the context of highly unequal
power relationships between donors and recipients also requires a
commitment to a fundamental reform of International Financial
Institutions (IFIs). The IFIs continue to have significant influence
over the policy choices available to recipient countries, and
harmonisation between donors could further increase this influence. And
yet the architecture of the international financial system continues to
be highly undemocratic – recipient countries have very little voice in
determining the policies of the IFIs. Recommendation 8: Create new multi-stakeholder mechanisms for holding governments and donors to account. Multi-stakeholder mechanisms for holding governments and donors to account for the use f aid should be developed – these should be the real test of whether commitments to ‘mutual ccountability’ and (indicator 12) are being met. They should be open, transparent and regular, ith real room for citizens of southern countries to hold their governments and donors to account. The ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum could become a much better space for a mutual accountability exercise, with multi-stakeholder presence, and governed by UN rules. Mutual accountability must go beyond donors and governments. Southern countries often have weak accountability systems, without effective mechanisms for citizens and parliaments to hold the executive to account. Broadening aid accountability mechanisms to include a wider ranger of stakeholders is an opportunity to engage poor and marginalised people in the decisions which affect their lives. It is also important that new accountability arrangements build on existing international and regional human rights mechanisms of accountability (such as UN treaty bodies). Recommendation 9: Establish an equitable multilateral governance system for ODA in which to negotiate future agreements on the reform of aid. The aid reform process should be dealt with in a broader multilateral institution with clear and transparent negotiating mechanisms, equitable representation of donors and recipients, and openness to civil society. The aid reform process itself must be more accountable. The OECD DAC does not represent the aid-recipient countries who are the legitimate owners of development and aid financing, and yet it provides the key forum for reforming aid. This flawed ad hoc governance of the aid system renders the most aid dependant countries unable to hold strong positions in negotiations. It is important to establish a multilateral governance system for ODA based on equitable power sharing between donors and recipients, and with representation of civil society. The aid effectiveness agenda should also be more effectively linked with the broader UN agenda on Financing for Development, concretely with the chapter on “addressing systemic issues”. 5. AID QUALITY: DONORS MUST DELIVER Recommendation 10: Donors must be held to account for commitments they have already made under the PD. Targets for individual donors should be set for 2010 to ensure that they meet the commitments they made in the PD. Donors must re-affirm their willingness to change the way they do business to meet basic standards of aid quality. In line with the commitment to reduce poverty and inequality (paragraphs 1 and 2), donors should ensure access to resources for country owned gender strategies. Donors must deliver basic standards of aid quality wherever they work. The PD contained some important commitments from donors to meet basic standards of aid quality. However, there is reluctance from some donors to be held to account for these commitments. Although targets have been set for individual recipients, donors have resisted setting themselves individual targets for 2010. In addition, it has been widely recognise the crucial role of gender equality improvements for development effectiveness. Therefore, donors should ensure the efficient channelling of development aid in support of country owned gender policies on the basis of an in-depth policy dialogue with partner governments and key non-government stakeholders. The potential benefits of the new aid effectiveness agenda may not be realised unless a gender perspective is adopted. Recommendation 11: Commit to giving aid for poverty eradication and the promotion of human rights Donors must commit to give aid mostly to eradicate poverty and inequalities and to promote human rights. They must end the practice of using aid for their own foreign and economic policy interests and priorities. Aid must be for the benefit of poor and vulnerable people. CSOs continue to be concerned that aid is often used to meet donors’ own foreign and economic policy interests, while ignoring the needs and rights of the poorest and most vulnerable groups. For example, aid has often been used to promote policies of economic liberalisation which have benefited companies from donor countries but harmed the interests and rights of poor and vulnerable people, especially women and girls. Recommendation 12: CSO urge for a stronger expression of commitments to untied aid. At Accra, donors should commit to expanding the agreement on untying aid to all countries, and all aid modalities (including food aid and technical assistance) and set up independently monitored targets for translating this commitment into practice. All aid must be untied. ‘Tying’ of aid to the procurement of donor goods and services inflates costs, slows down delivery and reduces the flexibility of southern countries to direct aid where it is most needed. The primary beneficiaries of this practice are often firms and consultants in donor countries. Whilst donors have made some efforts to reform, they have excluded key areas such as food aid and technical assistance from their agreements, and in practice continue to heavily direct their aid budgets to their own firms. Donors have continued this practice while at the same time requiring recipients to open up government procurement to foreign competition. Untying should make aid more flexible and effective, but recipients should be allowed to maintain preferences for locally procured goods and services to ensure that more aid money remains in southern countries and used according to country decision making processes. Recommendation 13: Reform technical assistance to respond to national priorities and build capacity. Targets on improving technical assistance should be strengthened; including making sure that 100% of technical assistance is demand-driven and aligned to national strategies. The right of recipient countries to contract according to their needs should be respected. More effective South-South forms of technical assistance should also be developed. Technical assistance must meet real capacity demands. The OECD has estimated that as much of half of all aid is in the form of technical assistance. Yet the recent Paris monitoring survey process revealed that several developing country governments believed that none of the technical assistance they received responded to their demands. Much technical assistance continues to be tied and overpriced, and is often ineffective at building local capacity. Technical assistance must be demand driven and aligned with national strategies, with an emphasis on building local capacity. Recommendation 14: Improve aid allocation to respond to needs. At Accra, governments should agree to develop an effective and transparent international mechanism to improve aid allocation so it goes to those most in need. Aid must be allocated fairly. A basic condition for aid effectiveness is that it should be allocated to the countries and areas which need it most. However, the current system of allocating aid too often does not respond to need – some donors continue to allocate aid according to their own interests and objectives, others use allocation as a way to impose policy conditions and the system overall lacks coherence and coordination. Many countries and critical issues receive paltry aid allocations: this is a situation which all agree must change, but the Paris Declaration is largely silent on this critical issue. Recommendation 15: New targets to improve multi-year predictability of aid. Donors should agree new targets in Accra to make multi-year, predictable and guaranteed aid commitments based on clear and transparent criteria. Aid must be more predictable. Aid flows are often volatile – many donors make commitments for no more than one year and deliver aid late or not at all. Aid is often disbursed according to donors’ own priorities and timetables, without making sufficient efforts to respect and conform with national planning and development priorities, or the national budgeting timeframe. All this makes it very difficult for recipients to prepare effective budgets, or to plan ahead, and makes it hard for CSOs to monitor aid flows and effectiveness. Donors should make multi-year aid commitments based on clear and transparent criteria, and should deliver those commitments on schedule, in a transparent manner. 6. MAKING THE ACCRA HIGH LEVEL FORUM OPEN AND ACCOUNTABLE CSOs are essential if aid is to be made more effective. As such, they must have a meaningful and sustained engagement and participation in the process of agreeing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating the aid effectiveness agenda. There should be special efforts to ensure the participation of women, indigenous people, disabled people, local communities and other marginalised people. Engagement with CSOs should be part of an institutionalised commitment by DAC members and the DAC Secretariat for regular and meaningful engagement with CSOs on a range of issues, not limited to concerns regarding aid effectiveness. Recommendation 16: Ensure meaningful participation by CSOs in the Accra HLF. CSOs should be included in all the segments of the Accra HLF. CSOs perspectives must be part of the official discussions, including the Ministerial event and the drafting of the Accra Agenda for Action. The agenda for the HLF must reflect the concerns of groups which are often excluded from these processes. In particular, meaningful participation of women’s organisations in the whole HLF process, including through a roundtable on gender equality and aid effectiveness, is key to ensure that the voices, concerns and proposals of women are taken into account. A transparent, open and properly resourced consultation process should be organised in the run up to Accra, including:
GLOSSARY: AAA: Accra Agenda for Action
Endorsing Organisations up to March 2008: Costa Rica Guatemala Korea Kyrgyzstan New Zealand Switzerland Tunisia |