Memorandum submitted by Professor Mick
Moore (Institute of Development Studies)
1. In recent years, there has been a great
deal of discussion in aid donor circles, followed by quite a few
agreements and resolutions, about improving donor performance
around the set of issues labelled "coordination for aid effectiveness".
Two concepts about how aid effectiveness could be improved have
been central to this debate: (a) coordination (mainly of donor
activities) and (b) recipient ownership.
2. I fully respect the motives behind the
push toward coordination and ownership. But I believe that this
agenda will not work, for three reasons: (a) it is to some degree
misconceived (b) the two objectives are to some degree contradictory
and (c) more important, change will not happen fast to keep pace
with the scale of the problems.
3. Contradictory? If it happens at all,
coordination will largely be on donor terms.
4. Coordination. Yes, the channelling of
aid through a growing number of channels, each with its own modalities,
does impose major costs ("transactions costs") on recipients.
It is good in principle to harmonise procedures and try to reduce
the number of channels. But this is a deeply rooted problem, which
is getting worse even as we appear to be trying to deal with it.
The number of aid channels has been increasing steadily since
the 1970s. The growth has probably accelerated recently. More
evidently, the new aid donors (China and other fast-growing middle
income countries that were "traditionally" aid recipient;
the big private foundations) have made the field much more diverse.
The system is now out of control. The Western donors' club (OECD
DAC) can no longer coordinate it. As the ODI evidence shows, progress
by the Western aid donors even in meeting their own commitments
to coordination (Paris Declaration and after) is painfully slow,
and sometimes even contrarian (see references to "common
funds"). Worse, the ODI evidence suggests that "coordination"
has not reduced the burden of "transactions costs" imposed
on recipient governments. One can imagine it worsening the problem.
It is far from clear that it was ever sensible to expect the institutionally
fragile governments—which largely overlap with those who
get a lot of aid, from many different donors—to be able
to take the lead and coordinate. Even if they could do that, we
might be guilty of further focusing the attention of their high
level politicians and public servants on getting and spending
aid, when they should be focusing on promoting development.
5. Ownership. The term both addresses a
real problem, but is a fudge. People still argue about what it
means, and how one measures it. It is a politically convenient
way of signalling a general concern—and one that is very
appealing to recipient governments. It does not relate directly
to what should be our central concern: the quality of aid. And,
as Paul Collier has very usefully pointed out, it tends to obscure
the fact that many of the best uses of aid are regional rather
than country-focused, especially in relation to infrastructure.
We don't want the Government of Kenya entirely to "own"
the Kenyan aid programme, if that discourages it from working
with other governments in the region.
6. The current bundle of coordination-ownership
reforms are (a) partly misconceived and (b) are likely to continue
to roll out at a snail's pace - while the aid environment is changing
much faster. Neither existing aid agencies, recipient governments,
nor the donor governments who give aid for geo-strategic reasons
have strong interests in accelerating reform. Why should they
oppose a system characterised by (a) generous budgets, (b) so
many overlapping agencies, activities and programmes that it is
very hard to attribute either causality or blame, and (c) limited
independent evaluation?
7. Policy implications?
(i) At the national/individual donor level:
Do not expect very much of the current coordination-ownership
agenda, and focus wherever possible on improving the quality of
aid.
(ii) At the global level: Concentrate on
building up a powerful system of independent evaluation, along
the lines of the new International Initiative for Impact Evaluation,
that should (a) provide aid-takers with information so that they
can better choose among the increasing range of aid channels at
their disposal and thereby (b) provide the aid-giving agencies
with more tangible incentives to perform well.
4 March 2008
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