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Can New Aid Modalities Handle Politics?
Author: A de Haan and M Everest-Phillips
Date: 2007
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24 pages
(143 KB)
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Summary
Do aid modalities take sufficient account of political context? Are ambitions of better political understanding inevitably thwarted by aims to increase aid flows? This paper from UNU-WIDER considers whether recent commitment to increasing financial flows, scaling-up of aid, and promoting donor coordination are compatible with a political understanding of policy processes in partner or recipient countries. It argues for increased socio-political analysis and puts forward ways in which a better understanding of political context and change can inform the post-Monterrey consensus. As a starting point, it is essential to see donors as political agents.
The push for increasing aid is made in the face of clearly documented doubts and greater scrutiny about its desirability, absorptive capacity and ‘outcomes’, and against very clear evidence that new aid modalities engage only in a very limited way with local politics. Links between the political and economic spheres in development remain poorly addressed by development agencies and there is too little understanding of the political dynamics in which policies are inevitably embedded.
- Even though there is little doubt that PRSP’s have pushed spending in a more ‘pro-poor’ direction, they have been criticized for being too technocratic and outcome focused, resulting in little analysis of the political-economy of change.
- Social funds often operate as semi-autonomous institutions, avoiding the task of addressing problems of inefficiency in mainstream institutions. They are not neutral and can impinge on community and power relations.
- Political coalitions for economic growth are shaped by how political parties, government bureaucracy, and the private sector develop and maintain the state’s support for longer-term growth objectives, while balancing concerns for other key priorities: equity, human development and poverty reduction.
- Work on governance remains, by and large, too technocratic, and institutional approaches reinforce this. A discrepancy remains between an instrumental version of a governance-indicators approach that tends to focus on development as a technical fix and the political realities of the development process.
Scaling up aid will increase the importance of political analysis for development. It matters whether politics is understood to be a process (institutions), a set of structures (organisations), or a range of policies amenable to potentially subtle nuances of overt and covert conditionalities. The challenge is how to experiment according to experience and local realities, not to roll out best practice but to try to find a good practice that actually works.
- It is essential to see donors as political agents. Aid agencies consist of bureaucrats and political leaders, with interests and incentives in success, claiming success, and controlling the process such that success seems to be justified by the results. Political accountability extends to donors, not just partner governments: there will be increasing focus on whether donors are really delivering on their promises.
- Donors need to focus on key areas around building domestic accountability and voice; work better with other donors on political analysis to understand informal political spheres and recognise that there are as yet no adequate quantitative indicators for much of the political governance agenda.
Access full text: available online
Source:
De Haan, A. and Everest-Phillips, M., 2007, 'Can New Aid Modalities Handle Politics?', WIDER Research Paper, vol. 63, UNU-WIDER, Helsinki
Author:
Arjan de Haan
, dehaan@uoguelph.ca
World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, http://www.wider.unu.edu
