Memorandum submitted by WorldVision
POLICIES ON
GOVERNANCE AND
CONDITIONALITY
World Vision is a Christian relief, development
and advocacy organization, dedicated to working with children,
families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. Motivated
by our Christian faith, World Vision is dedicated to working with
the world's most vulnerable people. World Vision serves all people,
regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or gender.
We welcome the opportunity to respond to the
inquiry on DFID and the World Bank with a particular focus on
policies on governance and conditionality. In recognizing that
the UK channels around 40% of its aid through multilateral organisations,
it is essential that these channels are effective and promote
and not undermine widely developed internal poverty reduction
plans. Based on World Vision UK's work in various countries, we
hereby present two issues:
1. The DFID white paper underscores the
importance of good governance for poverty reduction and explores
it from the angle of state capability, responsiveness and accountability.
Responsiveness concerns itself with whether public policies and
institutions respond to the needs of citizens and uphold their
rights, whereas accountability is concerned with the ability of
citizens, civil society and the private sector to scrutinise public
institutions and governments and hold them to account.[183]
While the DFID policy profiles the issues above,
the World Bank, a key actor in development, is still falling short
of promoting governments to citizens' responsiveness and internal
accountability, through the continued use of conditionality. A
World Vision publication based on evidence from Zambia and Bolivia
and entitled, "Poverty Reduction: are the strategies working?"
explores this with examples of multilateral conditionality prescribed
by among others, the World Bank. The study concludes that there
has been a failure to shift from donor use of conditionality for
poverty reduction to effective domestic accountability mechanisms
that sufficiently draws on citizen engagement. World Vision is
concerned that this failure undermines both aid effectiveness
and governance initiatives (both policy and practice) and the
achievement of poverty reduction results.[184]
This would perpetuate voice without influence and weakens citizens'
ownership of the development agenda, resulting in donors aligning
and harmonising around a weak or even illegitimate development
agenda with the potential for poor development results.
2. The DFID white paper speaks to supporting
the African Peer Review Mechanism launched by the New Partnership
for Africa's Development (NEPAD) as a means to improve country
governance.[185]
World Vision underscores the need to recognise and support regional
bodies and institutions in promoting good governance as important
in strengthening decentralised development processes and providing
sustainability to governance oversight practices.
Unfortunately, the World Bank's Governance and
Anti corruption strategy does not "explicitly" promote
peer review nor does it profile regional bodies as key actors
in the promotion of good governance.[186]
183 DFID, Making governance work for the poor, July
2006. Back
184
World Vision, Poverty Reduction: are the strategies working? 2005. Back
185
DFID, Making governance work for the poor, July 2006 Back
186
World Bank, Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance
and Anticorruption, March 2007. Back
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