Examination of Witnesses (Questions 109-117)
MS JOANNA
MACRAE AND
MR MICHAEL
MCCARTHY
13 JUNE 2006
Q109 Chairman: Thank you, both of you,
for your patience. There are some important issues that we want
you to share with us. The Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative,
which is beginning to take effect, is one that is of interest
to us. I suppose the first question we need to address is why
was there a need for such an initiative, and why do we need to
have agreed principles? It does imply that there is something
wrong with a system that requires the creation of this. Perhaps
you can first of all answer that.
Ms Macrae: We have been hearing
quite a lot this morning about how donor behaviour matters, and
it matters in terms of how individual bilateral donors behave,
so when DFID decides to respond to an emergency, it matters how
much it is going to give and when it is going to give the money
and on what terms it gives it. So individual donor behaviour matters
but also the collective donor behaviour matters. I think Afshan
has described very well how we have to look at not only what DFID
decides to do but how DFID's decisions relate to those of the
US and ECHO and Japan and Sweden or whatever. I think during the
late 1990s and the early part of this century we were becoming
very aware that donor decisions had a really big impact on both
the quality and the quantity of humanitarian action in any place
and at any time. What was interesting is that, in contrast with
donor behaviour in other areas, it was basically unregulated.
There were no standards or guidance that said "This is good
donor behaviour and this is bad donor behaviour." And whereas
in the development side the Development Assistance Committee to
the OECD has huge swathes of guidance that exist with regard to
how you mainstream gender and environment and how you engage in
fragile states, there was nothing on humanitarian assistance.
I think what donors came to realise in the lead-up to the conference
in Stockholm in 2003 was that the volume of ODA being spent on
humanitarian assistance was rising very, very sharply but there
were no norms against which donor performance could be measured,
on the one hand, and I think also whole agendas around harmonisation
of donor procedures were getting greater currency more generally,
so there was a kind of moment then when donors came to the view
that it would be useful to have such principles to guide their
behaviour both bilaterally and collectively, and by initially
incorporating these principles into the DAC peer review process
and, more recently, having them agreed as a reference point for
DAC members, I think there has been an attempt made to make sure
that humanitarian assistance is basically subject to the same
level of scrutiny as the main part of development assistance.
Q110 Chairman: It was endorsed by
DAC in April of this year, which presumably has some significance,
that DAC have picked it up, but to what extent are they encouraging
or reflecting the way governments are buying into it? Is that
trying to put more pressure for more to buy-in or is it an indication
of the amount of buy-in we have achieved so far?
Ms Macrae: I think it is a bit
of a two-way street. I think what happened was that after the
Stockholm conference there was . . . I think you have to understand
humanitarian donorship objectively as being two things. One is
a set of principles which were agreed in Stockholm and which we
have been trying to get embedded into the normative regulatory
framework of aid, and at another level it has existed as a forum
for the discussion between donors of shared areas of concern,
and that is really where issues around this alignment of donor
procedures has been happening. For various reasons, that forum
for debate has not been in the Development Assistance Committee
in Paris. It has tended to happen much more from a Geneva base
and as a series of ad hoc meetings at headquarters, I think
in part because one of the achievements, I suppose, of the GHD
initiative was to say that, although we think humanitarian assistance
should be subject to the same expectations and professionalism
that we subject development assistance to, it is by definition
different, and so the perception has been up till now that there
is a need for a slightly separate parallel strand for the debate
of donor issues relating to humanitarian action, and that has
largely been happening outside of Paris, with the exception of
the peer review process.
Q111 Chairman: What I find interesting
is that of the countries that have bought in, it includes the
United States, which is quite interesting because on development
issues they definitely follow their own agenda. Is that partly
because it is a fresh approach and a relatively blank script,
or is it because the United States has a more genuinely common
approach to the humanitarian response than it does to development?
Ms Macrae: I think ultimately
that will be a question that you would need to address to them,
but I think maybe some of the answers to that will come out .
. . One of the big wins out of the Good Humanitarian Donorship
process is that historically—it sounds small but actually
it is big—if you looked at the peer review process of the
DAC, there was maybe a paragraph, which was very descriptive,
on emergency aid. Now what is happening is that in the DAC peer
reviews there is a huge ten-page annex which reviews in great
detail donor governments' performance against GHD criteria, and
in fact, next week I will be part of the DAC peer review team
that will be investigating the US's compliance with those frameworks,
so I will be in a better position to at least give a personal
reflection on that in a few weeks' time. But their report will
be available in December.
Q112 Ann McKechin: Clearly, the GHD
initiative needs to be widened out to a much broader constituency
if it is going to be truly as effective as you hope. I just wonder
to what extent it is a problem that non-DAC donors, you have to
interact with them in terms of humanitarian responses, and also
how you try to engage the NGO and civil society into this initiative
as well.
Ms Macrae: I think there is a
recognition amongst those 23 governments who are now signatories
to this process that we do need to broaden them out, to broaden
out ownership of them. I think this is a relatively young initiative
still. It was only signed up to in 2003 and here we are in 2006,
so it is a relatively young process and I think the main effort
till now has been in terms of making sure that there is understanding
of what those principles are and ability to roll those out within
that initial group. I think also, as the initiative, in other
words, as the standing forum, we have been aware of the need to
make sure that we are not duplicating effort and, for example,
the OCHA donor support group has been doing a lot of work on reaching
out to so-called emerging donors and part of that work is around
trying to promote a more multilateral approach.
Q113 Ann McKechin: I think there
might be some concerns in the perception of the OECD as the voice
of the northern countries of the world primarily, who would be
seen to be setting the agenda without involving the integral voice
or the southern voices in it. I am trying to see to what extent
are southern voices able to be heard and contribute to that process?
Mr McCarthy: Through the OCHA
donor support group there have been some discussions with the
G77 countries in Turkey and in Abu Dhabi recently this year. What
we are trying to do is explain to countries such as Middle Eastern
countries, which are significant supporters of humanitarian assistance,
how we do it and to do it collectively around a single plan so
that we are more effective, and the UAE are listening and considering
these issues, as are India, Pakistan and Turkey and these other
countries. Pakistan, for example, although it is all in its own
country, is this year a significant supporter of humanitarian
action, so it understands the benefits of a common plan because
it has happened in its own country now. The OCHA donor support
group is working with non-traditional donors to bring them inside
the tent so that they at least look at what we are doing collectively.
Whether they decide to join or not is another thing but it is
a start. They have not been approached before and OCHA are leading
this kind of momentum now, and as the Chair of the OCHA donor
support group, we are taking over the process from the Americans.
Sweden started it, the Americans have taken it forward, and we
will take it further again with these non-traditional donors.
Ms Macrae: Just to add on in terms
of civil society, I think one of the things that we see this framework
as doing is actually providing a framework against which the official
donor community can be subject to scrutiny by civil society and
by other bodies, including public scrutiny bodies. It is interesting,
for example, that the National Audit Office in its report on DFID
some years back was using part of that GHD framework in its analysis.
I think in some ways it has been slightly disappointing perhaps
that civil society has not more actively used these principles
as a basis for dialogue. I think maybe the fault is both ways,
that maybe donors need to be reaching out more to civil society
but also whether or not civil society might be using this framework
more actively. In some countries that has happened. I know, for
example, in Canada there has been a very lively discussion between
the Canadian NGO community and Canadian CIDA using a lot of the
language in this.
Q114 John Battle: It is one thing
adopting the norms but the other thing will be measuring the progress
really. How do you measure the progress? I wondered if the DAC
consolidated peer review of humanitarian assistance threw up any
significant issues that would take us down that road, so you can
actually have a framework that not only adopts norms but actually
tells us how we are making progress.
Ms Macrae: Indeed. At the moment
there are at least two ways in which progress at a collective
level, if you like, can be measured. One is that, as part of the
initiative, members—I keep using that word but you know
what I mean; there are 23 governments that have been working on
this—have as a group identified a number of indicators that
it is using to measure progress against these objectives. For
various reasons, the main focus of those indicators has largely
been confined to the financing elements of the principles, partly
because they are the most easy to quantify, as you can imagine,
and what we have done is to commission an independent consulting
group, Development Inititiatives, to use these indicators and
to do two things: firstly, to comment on the robustness of those
indicators from a technical perspective, is it possible to collect
the data and how meaningful are they, and then the second thing
that we have asked them to do is to plug in those data for the
years 2004 and 2005. Their report on that will be published in
mid-July as part of their annual report called Global Humanitarian
Assistance. That looks at things like this issue of time limits,
for example. There is an indicator about how much money was allocated
to chronic emergencies in the first three months of the year,
for example, and clearly, if what you want to see is a more timely
response, we want early response to the consolidated appeals that
are launched in January because money that is pledged in October
is much, much less useful. So it is possible to measure those
things. Part of the roll-out of GHD at a country level, which
is very much what we are trying to do now, having tackled a lot
of the kind of headquarters and big institutional issues like
the DAC, at the country level we are also going to be working
to refine more indicators about how donors should be working there.
In terms of the DAC peer review, as you know, DAC members are
reviewed every four years. Up until now we have had Sweden, Switzerland,
Germany, Portugal, the UK, Australia, and what has been very interesting
about those is that there has been this very interesting synthesis
document, and I think it shows quite a lot of commonality in a
number of the issues. Part of what it is trying to do is both
to identify areas for improvement but also identify areas of good
practice. One of the things it has done is to encourage donors
to develop new policies, to articulate how they are going to translate
these quite high-level principles into their daily work, and we
have seen quite a number of countries develop more GHD-compliant
policies. I think there have also been quite strong recommendations
to address the issue of inadequacy of humanitarian aid, to which
a number of colleagues have referred this morning, and a number
of governments were advised that it would be ideal if they could
improve their total volume of humanitarian assistance. Quite a
lot of thought about streamlining of budgeting. Again, I think
this morning we have heard that one of the challenges for many
agencies is that they are having to appeal to many different budget
lines often. In the UK we are lucky because it is pretty consolidated
within DFID but in many governments you have a bit here and a
bit there, across government departments, so issues about streamlining
of budgetary systems. I think in every single DAC peer review
there has been an issue about how to increase our beneficiary
involvement in the whole humanitarian cycle and how donors could
increase leverage on that, and I think it is very interesting
that that keeps coming up. So through that process I think there
is quite a lot of leverage for addressing that issue more.
Q115 Joan Ruddock: You were talking
there quite a lot about process, and I realise this is all relatively
new, but I wonder to what extent the principles of good humanitarian
donorship actually result in good humanitarian outcomes.
Ms Macrae: I think it is quite
a complex causal chain that goes between the decision-making processes
in an organisation like DFID and what is happening in Darfur.
In some ways it is a fairly straight line about have we given
any money or not, which will make a very big outcome. I think
the question is how we measure those outcomes and what those outcomes
are, and it is difficult to say precisely what the outcomes of
the GHD initiative have been as a whole, but I think, for example,
the GHD as a forum was very important in establishing CERF, for
example. If you look at it in terms of an outcome to have a global
fund which we hope will end up with more timely and better proportioned
responses, that will make a difference. A lot of work we are doing
at the moment is about, there is a big commitment in the GHD principles
to so-called needs-based resource allocation, and it is to try
and prevent, if you like, the tsunami effect, where you have massive
concentration of resources in one part of the world, which, do
not let us forget, that is not only money but when you have all
that money, you are then sucking people and other kinds of assets
from across the system. So what we would like to see is more equitable
distribution of humanitarian action. So quite a large part of
the work that we are doing is to try and think through how do
we deliver that in practice, and we know that there are a number
of the constraints to achieving that, and we want to work through
those both bilaterally and collectively to make sure that we are
living up to that commitment to more impartial resources. I think
we do have some existing outcomes in terms of instruments, for
example, in terms of CERF and the common funds. I think we have
outcomes in terms of increased donor accountability. How we translate
that on to the ground is still very much work in progress and
is very much at the forefront of our agenda at the moment, as
we try to roll this out more at a country level, and I think the
outcomes should be about more timely, predictable and efficient
funding, and I think, in a way, one of the problems at the moment
is that—and I think you have all touched on it in your questions
this morning—it is quite easy to blame poor performance
in the humanitarian sector exclusively on donor behaviour. Our
challenge is really to make sure that we are doing our bit and
getting our behaviour as good as we can, and then the rest will
have to come out of that partnership with the operational organisations.
Q116 Chairman: Just on that, we have
discussed international reform and we have discussed UN reform.
How is this going to feed into that? If we want to use these principles
to be, as you say, predictable but flexible, and we have a situation
not earmarked, which is what UNICEF wanted, and we have a situation
where DFID is expanding its budget but with reduced staffing levels,
so inevitably having to use more agencies accountable through
principles. How are these going to fit together, from your point
of view inside DFID? Is this going to help shape a reform that
will enable us, that is, the United Kingdom, to deliver our humanitarian
aid efficiently and effectively and accountably?
Mr McCarthy: I think the cluster
system is an attempt to get away from this proliferation of UN
agencies and focus on how to deliver, because there are nine clusters,
and they are clear about what they are trying to deliver. The
fault at the moment seems to be that you can have a cluster appeal
but the response is to a UN agency. So it is a bit awkward in
that you cannot fund the cluster; you have to fund the UN agency,
and maybe there are two of them. In health, for example, it might
be UNICEF and WHO who are making appeals through the cluster system.
But I think these reforms and GHD, it is an attempt to try to
give some coherence and make it a more manageable humanitarian
response, because if you started with a blank sheet of paper,
clearly you would not end up with the number of UN agencies that
you have today. You would have something a little bit different,
I would hope. So we are trying to work from the back end really
by changing our behaviour and automatically require different
behaviour from the UN system.
Ms Macrae: I think that is right,
and, just to add on to that, I think, in a way, with the reform
agenda it is quite easy. There are lots of different elements
of reform going on, and if you take one step back and say what
are those trying to achieve? You have mentioned a lot of the key
words around predictability and I think also increasing equity
of response, this sense of the system not being driven by a variety
of pressures, financial and otherwise, to act in some places more
than in others, and this whole idea of delivering on needs-based,
predictable but also coherent and more coordinated. The way in
which we finance the humanitarian system will affect our capacity
to deliver those. So just to give you an example, part of the
reform agenda, as you know, is to strengthen humanitarian coordinators.
One of the huge in-built weaknesses at the moment to the humanitarian
system is that we are requiring that humanitarian coordinators
deliver the consolidated appeal behind which is the common humanitarian
action plan. So we are asking them to deliver a strategic plan,
but at the moment the way that we fund that is we say "Thank
you very much for the strategic plan. Now we are going to cherry-pick
all these little bits that we do like and fund those" in
a completely project-ised way. Part of the thinking behind the
Common Fund is to reverse that trend and to say "No, actually,
we actually want to try and keep the integrity of that strategic
plan" and to empower the person who is responsible for delivering
it, the humanitarian coordinator, with the ability to exert some
real leverage over the operational partners, in other words, to
influence resource allocation. So I think there is a very strong
connectedness between the financial incentives that exist for
certain type of behaviour and the ability to deliver those reforms
and of course, part of what we are doing within the context of
the GHD initiative as a forum is to think about those connections.
As Mike has implied, we have, for example, used that forum as
a mechanism for donors to exchange views about how to respond
to the cluster appeals, because there are shared donor concerns
around the way that those clusters have been designed.
Q117 Chairman: If I may turn to my
final point, is it the GHD leading towards helping to secure the
right UN reform outcome, so that we are all working together and
are the UN buying into that or are we in danger of finishing up
with two parallel and competing directions?
Ms Macrae: The objective is certainly
not to end up with two parallel things. I think there is a recognition
that donors have a very wide portfolio of which the UN is but
one pillar, therefore we need to be able to manage that portfolio
as a whole, but the idea is that we are identifying these areas
where there is a lot of . . . The way in which donors behave will
influence the UN's capacity to deliver on reform, on the one hand,
but also donors have shared concerns around this agenda, and I
think, just as in the development field we are trying to move
away from 12 different donors pitching up and telling the government
what it does or does not think about its development plans, part
of what we are trying to do is to use the GHD forum to make sure
that donors are sending more consistent messages to other Jan
Egeland colleagues in the UN about our comfort levels, about where
we would like to see certain improvements and also to communicate
plans around funding.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that.
As you know, Jan Egeland will be appearing in front of the Committee,
so we may be able to hear his views as well. I am sure we will.
Thank you very much, and thank you for being so patient. That
has been extremely helpful.
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