NN42, June 2009
A Safari Towards Aid Effectiveness?
Reflections on the Paris Declaration and Aid Effectiveness
By David Ellerman, University of California at Riverside
Email: david@ellerman.orgKeywords
Paris Declaration; Rome; Accra
Summary
This article talks about the meetings in Paris, Rome and Accra as being ?periodic anti-poverty pep rallies? that are more focused on raising publicity for the respective agencies attending, rather than being for information exchange. The author argues that, insofar as development can be effectively assisted by outside agencies at all, assistance needs to be more limited and indirect than is currently the case.
Since the start of the post-WWII era, when multilateral and bilateral official development aid essentially began, we have seen these odd gatherings of development officials in various cities to issue city-named declarations "renewing" and "strengthening" their dedication to more development aid. The meeting in Paris resulting in the Paris Declaration immediately followed the Marrakech Roundtable and the High-Level Forum in Rome and was soon followed by the High-Level Forum in Accra. These periodic anti-poverty pep rallies are perhaps best viewed from an anthropological perspective, but not being an anthropologist, I can only make a few remarks as a commentator on the philosophies and methodologies of development assistance (see Ellerman, 2005).
On the whole, the postwar official development agencies have not been a success (see Easterly, 2001, 2006; Dichter, 2003). Where development has been most successful as in East Asia, the official agencies have had little importance, and where the agencies have had the largest footprint, as in sub-Sahara Africa, development has made the least progress. Given that track record, it is something of an organizational necessity for the agencies to have periodic junkets to selected cities for pep rallies to assure each other of the necessity of their existence and the gravity of their mission.
If the purpose of these meetings was to "trade notes" and "exchange information" then one would expect to see a slackening of these physical gatherings in the age of the Internet and instant global communications. But the number of the meetings seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. Indeed, in addition to the "new" meetings, there is now the practice of having anniversary meetings of the X-plus-Ten variety. In any case, informational exchange is most useful at the level of the operational staff in the agencies, not at the "High Level" of these fora.
Another explanatory factor arises from the "advertising" activities of the agency heads in their relationships with their "principals" such as the political funding sources in the donor governments and the public at large. In terms of development impact, the funds spent on these repetitive junkets and talk-shops may be better spent in the developing countries, but such a "quiet" use of funds does not put the agencies on the "radar screen" of their funders. One needs a large showy meeting to achieve a certain critical mass to get public attention and to show the funders that the agency is actively doing something?such as to "reaffirm the commitments" by "strengthening," "increasing," and "enhancing" this or that so the use of their funds will be even more effective in the future. Since they have finally got it right, the declarations invariably call for either more money or still more money.
In addition to these organizational considerations, one might look at the philosophy of development assistance that is implicit in these meetings and their declarations. From the beginning in the post-WWII era, the explicit or implicit assumption in the development agencies is that development is like an immense "project" that is planned and implemented by the governments of the developing countries "in partnership with" (i.e., under the tutelage of) the development agencies. The crudest form of this philosophy was in the "Big Push" development plans of the 40s and 50s. The empirical results of the Big Push plans as well as the intellectual criticisms by development thinkers such as Albert O. Hirschman (1958) have discredited these plans in their crudest form.
But the general idea of development as a socially-engineered mega-project and even the big push idea (with new "escaping the poverty trap" rhetoric) is still there in the declarations of the agencies.
The key to escaping the poverty trap is to raise the economy's capital stock to the point where the downward spiral ends and self-sustaining economic growth takes over. This requires a big push of basic investments between now and 2015 in public administration, human capital (nutrition, health, education), and key infrastructure (roads, electricity, ports, water and sanitation, accessible land for affordable housing, environmental management). (UN Millennium Project, 2005: 19)
The various city-meetings function like the meetings of a top-level planning commission that will issue updated directives to guide the aid agencies and their national partners to better implement their "national development strategies."
Even for the physical infrastructure projects that could be engineered, the development agencies have now been surpassed by the private sector so the agencies have focused more on the institutional infrastructure where the project-mentality is quite out of place.
The keys to development increasingly lie in the realm of the policies, laws, and institutions of a society, and to change these requires indirect kinds of approaches?stimulating, fostering, convincing?rather than doing things directly. Why is it, then, that the majority of development assistance organizations continue to "do" things? And why do more and more come into existence every day with funding to do still more things? (Dichter, 2003: 7)
The overall point by Hirschman and other critics was that if an underdeveloped country really had the organizational capacity to implement such development mega-projects, then it would not be underdeveloped in the first place. A bigger, stronger, better funded and more harmonised and aligned push will not make such development assistance more effective, and will only increase today's massive aid dependency in the underdeveloped world. Insofar as development can be effectively assisted by outside agencies at all, that assistance needs to be more limited and indirect?"stimulating, fostering, convincing"?a message that one will not hear from the periodic confabs of the major development agencies.
References
Dichter, T. (2003) Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World has Failed. Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Easterly, W. (2001) The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Easterly, W. (2006) The White Man?s Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good. New York: Penguin Press.
Ellerman, D. (2005) Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hirschman, A. (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale University Press.
UN Millennium Project (2005) Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. New York: United Nations.
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