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Setting the context

An international framework for the global governance of development cooperation has emerged. Spain has signed up to the commitments.

Spanish development policy has too often been submerged in overly romantic portraits of the suffering of, for example, Bolivian children or, worse, helpless African refugees. For a clear understanding of the current changes in international development policy, it is essential to recognize the shift in focus from charity-based sentiments towards the analysis of development cooperation as a system. Here we enter into a professional field that could be dubbed ‘development studies’ or ‘aid management’, and is concerned largely with the institutions of policy making and aid delivery. The profession itself can no longer ignore the emerging global consensus on development, in which institutions are increasingly integrated into a worldwide mechanism for risk reduction as a central aim of global governance. In this new architecture, bilateral project-based interventions, mainly inspired by the unilateral interest of donor governments, are being replaced by aid flows that are internationally coordinated and led by negotiated criteria. They integrate into the national planning frameworks of recipient countries, recently dubbed “partner countries”. Let us have a brief look at this.

Since the era of structural adjustment and the downsizing of the state in the 1980s, a new paradigm for development has emerged. Not only has the state been reassigned the role of regulator, with the job of creating an environment conducive to social development and economic growth; it also stresses policy areas below and above the state. Below the state, citizen participation has been enshrined into new procedural conditionalities, which insist on the people having a voice in policy formulation. Thus the concept of an “aid beneficiary” has been replaced by that of a “citizen”, with certain rights-based entitlements.1 Above the state, development finance and aid coordination has been synthesised in various international conventions and agreements into a system of global governance of development cooperation. For OECD states, it is becoming more and more difficult to opt out of these frameworks. Over the next few months, a number of events will be held to follow up on the milestones of this new development consensus. Underlying structural changes and core issues in the current aid landscape can be neatly illustrated by each of these high-level events:

  1. Poverty reduction: On July 7, 2007 the midpoint will be reached in the commitment to eight measurable goals – called the Millennium Development Goals2 – that were adopted by 189 nations and signed by 147 heads of state and governments in 2000. As a result of the post-Cold War global governance and world summit euphoria, stemming from the 1995 Copenhagen Summit on Social Development and nurtured by a new emerging consensus in the OECD DAC, a timeline was defined up to 2015 to achieve progress in the seven areas of poverty, primary education, gender equity, child mortality, maternal health, disease prevention and environmental sustainability. An eighth goal was added, committing donor countries to responsible behaviour in handling aid, trade and debt. There are three main criticisms of the MDGs. One is that although they are measurable, nobody is ultimately responsible for achieving them. Secondly, if the goal is to halve poverty, what will happen to those who stay poor, the so-called hardcore poor? Thirdly, despite the advantages of being measurable and simple to communicate, soft factors such as governance, dignity, democracy, and well-being cannot be captured. However, as a tool to generate awareness and translate a vision into action, the MDGs have proven to be of value.
  2. Development Financing: In the second half of 2008, Doha will host the follow-up to the Financing for Development (FfD) Conference in Monterrey of 2002.3 In Monterrey, rich countries and developing nations agreed on a deal on financing the Development Goals. As a first step towards mutual accountability for the achievement of poverty reduction, developing countries agreed to adhere to standards of good governance – such as combating corruption, sound public financial management and investment-friendly business regulations – and strive to raise domestic revenues for poverty reduction. In exchange, rich nations committed themselves to opening their markets to Southern products, and to complying with the 0.7 percent target for official development aid.
  3. Coordination and complementarity: In September 2008, there will be a High Level Forum on aid harmonization in Accra, Ghana. It is the third of its kind, following the conference in Paris in March 2005 and the Rome conference in 2003. While New York 2000 addressed the development vision and Monterrey 2002 the funding, in Paris the institutional side of aid delivery was tackled. This conference is a reaction to the erosion of administrative capacities in low-income states caused by an overload of projects and donors, and the resulting ineffectiveness of aid.4 In Paris, donors committed themselves to streamlining and simplifying aid provision, following recipient countries’ policies (ownership), adhering to domestic systems and procedures (alignment), and coordinating amongst themselves in order to limit the administrative burden on recipients (harmonization).5 The measurement of impact – as opposed to the follow-up of outputs – is being promoted.6 Most importantly, a commitment to mutual accountability of donors and ‘partner countries’ was agreed, in which new forms of political dialogue – sometime termed post-conditionality regimes – were championed.7 The innovative twist of the Paris declaration is that it is supposed to be measurable, with donors set to be benchmarked in their performance and compared with one another. The first assessments are coming out now.8 Whilst this consensus is a significant step forward, there are increasing concerns beyond the Paris consensus. These include a number of unanswered question: what is the role of NGOs within the new aid architecture?9 The Paris consensus only applies to highly aid-dependent countries, or even donor darlings. What is to be done with middle-income countries?10 What is to be done with non-aid-dependent countries with large poor populations?11 Why has the gender agenda suffered within the new aid architecture?12 And, lastly, although tackling poverty is noble goal, what about inequality?
  4. Euro-Africa relations: The Euro-Africa summit will be held at the beginning of December 2007 in Lisbon. The last, rather ineffective encounter was in 2000 in Cairo. In the meantime, the African Union (AU) has been founded, with a mission to forge a united government of the continent. The transition from the Organization of African States to the AU has signified the end of an era of non-interference in domestic issues, and opened the way towards benchmarking of governance standards. Some institutions (the Pan-African Parliament, AU Commission, Court of Justice, Peace and Security Council), initiatives (NEPAD) and instruments (APRM) have also been developed, and could potentially established a reference point for African civil society and reform-minded elites in their bid to make African institutions more democratic, efficient and transparent.13 Non-European actors have discovered strategic interests in Africa.14 The European Union, meanwhile, has developed a strategy for Africa that is supposed to bind both Commission and member states.15 Although the majority of poor people live in other continents, the degree of poverty in Africa is highest, which makes aid the appropriate response mechanism. Accordingly, the European Union declared that it would allocate at least half of its increase in aid to the continent.16

These are some of the most important international frameworks that development policy makers have to take into account. It is getting increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, the degree of national deviation varies substantially. Spain, starting in 2004 from a position far from the international consensus on both the volume and way development cooperation is to be delivered, has moved rapidly towards the mainstream.