POVERTY: Has the world met its Paris aid commitments?

 Jonathan Glennie  3 January 2011
Has the world met its Paris aid commitments?
Governments have missed most of the 2010 targets agreed in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, but there are good reasons why we should not give up on the process in 2011


Aid packages from the UK Department for International Development. Photograph: AP

In 2005, donor governments, accompanied by some key recipient governments and a smattering of international NGOs, agreed a set of principles for how to make their aid better support development. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness was the direct result of civil society's campaign to ensure better as well as more aid. Measurable targets were outlined and a deadline to meet them was set: 2010. So how has the aid world performed?
The short answer is not very well. The results from the 2010 survey are not yet in, so we don't know what progress has been made in the last couple of years, but apart from one or two significant steps forward, it seems progress has been weak. Of the 14 indicators of progress, the OECD, which is managing the process, thinks three are on track (relating to untying aid, better coordination between donors of technical assistance and better public financial management), a further three are within reach (on aid predictability, reducing the creation by donors of parallel project implementation units and recording aid in recipient country budgets), with the remaining eight requiring "very special efforts", which is the politically correct way of saying "we're miles off".
So it would be fairly easy to scoff at the Paris process as a wasted effort. Apart from the slow progress, it has come in for some fairly damning criticism over its methodology, with the targets being only mildly related to real development progress – ownership, conditionality and dependency cannot be measured by asking the World Bank to give countries scores on how good their development strategies are, for example. The Paris agenda does not really measure aid effectiveness, but aid efficiency, ie it looks at bureaucratic processes, but not the actual impact aid has on reducing poverty. After five years of evidence gathering, nothing in the Paris process will tell us if any more lives have actually been saved on account of changes in aid giving.
Another important criticism is that, as the middle-income countries become ever more important in aid giving (from China and India to Brazil and South Africa), the Paris process fails to involve them, giving the public in donor and recipient countries only a very partial view of the reality of aid. It's all very well accounting for OECD aid to Nicaragua, but what about the millions of dollars transferred by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, reportedly to a private presidential account?
But despite all this, there are good reasons not to give up on Paris just yet. Firstly, while I and others have argued that the most important issues are sidelined in the Paris agenda, some important principles are articulated, and this is the first time concerted effort has been made to implement them. You have to walk before you can run. A focus on transparency, in particular, is a substantial step forward, as Owen Barder wrote on the Poverty matters blog recently.
The fact that progress has been slow is disappointing, but hardly surprising to anyone who has worked in a complex political bureaucracy. It takes time to alter ways of working and incentives (a salutary lesson for donors with a habit of trying to force poor countries to introduce huge reforms in short periods of time). A meeting in Accra in 2008 led to improvements to the Paris declaration, with a particularly important focus on civil society as a vital complement to the state in ensuring that good decisions are made about aid and development.
Importantly, recipient countries are becoming more interested in the Paris declaration, just as, ironically, enthusiasm among donors appears at risk of waning. Presumably this is because more people in recipient governments realise that the principles enshrined in the declaration are broadly in their interests (except, perhaps, "harmonisation", which risks strengthening the bargaining power of donors). While fewer than 40 countries took part in the baseline survey in 2005, 55 took part in the monitoring survey in 2008, and more than 80 are expected to take part in the 2010-11 evidence gathering initiative.
Finally, while it is right to criticise the Paris agenda for being overly bureaucratic and for failing to clearly link a fairly technical set of targets with real changes for real people, there is something to be said for a focus on systems. The millennium development goals, another process that is broadly a good thing, has been criticised for looking at the "what" but not the "how", with some perverse results. Development is not just about reaching better health and education outcomes in the short-term, but about state-building and institutional strengthening. The Paris agenda, for all its many flaws, addresses some of those issues, and we should should try to refine and improve this important process in 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/03/paris-declaration-aid