Examination of Witnesses (Questions 158
- 159)
TUESDAY 2 MAY 2006
PROFESSOR ROBERT
PICCIOTTO
Q158 Chairman:
Good morning, Professor Picciotto. Thank you for coming. I know
you have been in front of the Committee before, but not in my
time. Welcome and thank you for coming here to give us evidence.
As you know, we are doing an inquiry on conflict, particularly
post-conflict resolution and reconstruction, although, of course,
the conflict dimension is not an avoidable topic. In the submission
you made to us[1],
which was both helpful and interesting, at one point you make
a fairly obvious statement, but quite an important one, that the
international community will not make poverty history without
making war history. You also slightly quantified the risks. I
think you put it down that a country with a per capita income
of $1,000 is three times more at risk than a country with a per
capita income of $4,000, and, therefore, the role of aid in raising
per capita income, and presumably distributing it effectively,
is crucial. Therefore, I think perhaps to start the discussion
off, what would be interesting for us is for you to give us an
assessment of our own Government's performance in that context.
They claim that they are well-placed to deliver effectiveness
in peace-keeping, conflict reduction and reconstruction and they
are concentrating in particular areas. I wondered if you could
give us your view of how you think the British Government is performing,
where they are doing well and where they are not doing so well?
Professor Picciotto: I have not
devoted expert attention to UK internal policies but can confirm
that the UK is perceived as a leader in the development business
in terms of its policies and its performance. This does not mean
it cannot do better, but, in the end, since it accounts for probably
less than 10% of total aid and since it has a comparative advantage
in intellectual, partnership and linkage assets, it seems to me
that focusing exclusively on how well the resources directly allocated
to aid may not be the fundamental point. More relevant is the
UK contribution to getting the global system to function better.
It is a more subtle criterion. It is a criterion which evokes
the positive leverage that UK aid can have on the global development
cooperation system. What is striking to me, and I spent 40 years
in the development business, is that we have been steeped in a
paradigm which, essentially, ignores conflict. Since 9/11 there
has been a certain amount of reconsideration, but policies are
still massively "path dependent", in the sense that
the whole system is still geared to a way of thinking whereby
conflict is here and development is there and the twain rarely
meet. The thrust of my testimony is to suggest that there is a
need for a very basic policy transformation, and it seems to me
that the DFID White Paper, which is coming to you should be judged
in terms of whether or not security and development policies will
be integrated in a fundamental way and not simply in terms of
an add-on to existing policies. That is why I believe that conflict
prevention is a crucial aspect of development policy. Of course,
good post-conflict work is also preventative, since half of the
conflicts recur. Thus a focus on post-conflict policies is appropriate.
If you do good post-conflict prevention, post-conflict reconstruction
or rehabilitation, peace-keeping and peace-making, then presumably
conflict prevention follows; but my point is that the policies,
the processes and the partnerships should be reshaped and that
these kinds of adjustment are more important than the structural
solutions in addressing the question of policy coherence.
Q159 Chairman:
To clarify that, you are separating, as you put it, the intellectual
contribution from the financial contribution, but an awful lot
of the time, when, for example, the British Government use budget
support as a principal instrument, part of the justification for
budget support is it gets you alongside the Government and gets
you into a partnership. Is not the reality that your ability to
influence that policy depends, to some extent, on how many dollars
you have got in the bank?
Professor Picciotto: There is
no question about that, and I think the volume of aid is important
and the sooner the UK can reach the 1% (or the 0.7% of Gross National
Income threshold at the very least) the better since money provides
the muscle and the fuel to get the right things done, but, in
that respect, 10% of UK aid has been going to fragile states.
That is too low, and a big policy question is: how much money
goes to the fragile states. We have developed an aid allocation
system in development which has emphasised "performance"
of countries, and the fact of the matter is we do not really measure
performance in allocating aid. The indicators we are using to
assess performance essentially reflect the weakness of the state
and the initial conditions, and, therefore, we have created aid
orphans and aid darlings with a view to satisfy voters that aid
is performing well. I know it will be politically difficult to
argue for greater risk taking, but to get the best results you
have to look at aid as venture capital. If you can prevent one
war, it means $60 billion in the bank, which is equivalent to
the totality of all aid. So you must take more risks to tap more
rewards. The key idea that I am pushing in the book which I have
just written for the Swedish Government[2]
is that we need to focus on human security instead of human development,
the current model in the development community. Human security
transforms this agenda by looking more systematically at down-side
risks and by also taking conflict explicitly into account in the
design of countries and global strategies. I am not sure I have
answered your question.
1 Ev 145 Back
2
Global Development Studies No.3, Global Development and Human
Security: Towards a Policy Agenda-a policy review commissioned
by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden Robert Picciotto,
Funmi Olonisakin and Michael Clarke, 2005. Back
|
