History and the post-2015 debate
Development is human progress. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast published a powerful conceptual framework in 2009 to explain human progress already achieved, in their book Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009). The book continues to be a source of great inspiration to me, and is highly relevant to the current debate on development guidance post-2015.
In an International Alert report in 2010, we summarised the book’s central argument, and I include this again here as a stimulant to useful thinking by those involved in the post-2015 debate. It reminds me above all that development is history looking forwards, hence we need to learn lessons from – though not attempt to repeat – history (or development as seen from the future…).
Their analysis is based on five key interlocking premises.
• Economic and political progress are intimately intertwined, and cannot be considered separately if they are to be understood.
• Violence is endemic to human society. Ruling elites have a strong incentive to retain control of violence, so they can control access to resources, ensuring sufficient peace and stability to allow them and their allies to benefit from such access, and using violence to disrupt access by others.
• Access to economic and political opportunities becomes increasingly open as societies develop. In early stages of development, opportunities are restricted to and bargained and fought over by the elite(s), but then become more open to others. Only when access became more open has sustainable progress occurred.
• Understanding organisations, institutions (i.e. the rules of the game), beliefs, values and culture is critical to understanding how society is organised and evolves.
• One of the critical changes taking place as societies develop is from the personal exercise of economic and political opportunity and power (e.g. “big man” politics, landownership linked to the capacity for organised violence) to the impersonal (e.g. shareholder-owned corporations, freehold land, and offices of state).
North and his colleagues identify a process of transition from what they term a limited access order to an open access order. In a limited access order, political and economic opportunities are limited to the elites. The characteristics of limited access polities are vulnerability to shocks, arbitrary legal processes, personal insecurity, small governments accountable only to the elite, and patronage-based systems of governance. Open access is characterised by greater personal security, larger and more decentralised government, participatory citizen-based governance, the rule of law, and a more resilient political economy.
While considerable evolution and back-and-forth variation is possible within these broad parameters, a fairly rapid step-change towards open access has occurred in history when three so-called “doorstep conditions” have been met:
• The establishment of rule of law for the elites;
• The existence of “perpetually lived” (i.e. institutionalised) forms of public and private elite organisations, including the state itself; and
• Consolidated control by the state of the military and other forces of security.
Once these conditions are established for the elite, circumstances can lead them to be extended to include other members of society, and a broadening of access to political and economic opportunities can occur quite quickly. This step-change is reckoned to have happened for example in the UK and the US around the end of the eighteenth century. North and his co-authors claim that most societies – and certainly all those known as fragile contexts – have yet to make this step-change from limited to open access order. It seems essential that post-2105 thinking pays attention to development processes that can contribute to these three kinds of changes.
A tactical approach to post-2015 MDGs advocacy
In advocating for a better replacement for the MDGs post-2015, there are two main elements. First, the content: what kinds of things matter in development? Second, the model itself: how best to frame the content so that all those who need to be, are guided, encouraged and incentivised to adopt the right directions? In a crowded advocacy market, which of these should we focus on?
Many people in the field of development and international relations are currently engaged in figuring out what should replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) after 2015, by which date very few of the goals will have been achieved globally, and none in fragile or conflict affected countries. Everyone involved has his or her idea about what the new international framework should contain, and some (though fewer) are discussing the equally important question of what kind of framework we should use to replace the discredited MDGs. Plenty of other issues are preoccupying those involved, not least how to ensure legitimacy, whether the new goals should be universal or not, and how to integrate them with other frameworks like the proposed Sustainability Goals and the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals. But ultimately, the two main questions about the post-MDG framework concern getting the content right, and finding the right model. In this article I will very briefly explore each of these items, before examining which of them matters most from a tactical advocacy perspective.
Content
It will be no surprise to readers of my earlier blog posts, or of International Alert’s many communications on this issue over the past two years, that from my perspective the content of the post-2015 framework should reflect an understanding of development which is as comprehensive as possible, and which combines the political and technical elements necessary for human progress. Although I work for a peacebuilding organisation, I don’t think adding in a couple of extra goals on peace and security will do the trick. What’s more important is that the content of the post-2015 framework as a whole should make sense from a peacebuilding perspective, rather than simply integrating some of the language of peacebuilding into a list of other development issues or themes.
With that in mind, and drawing on history, it seems fairly clear that the post-2015 framework should be designed above all to encourage and incentivise progress towards a world in which people can be reasonably assured of fair access to security and justice, of opportunities to earn a decent income and accumulate assets, of opportunities to participate in decisions which affect them, of supportive and trusting relationships, and of access to opportunities to maintain and improve their wellbeing and that of their families.
Of course, every country and every society is at a different stage in terms of its progress towards the kind of situation I have just described. Nor is there any rule which says that development progress is linear or smooth. Development is an unpredictable and to some extent uncontrollable process, replete with lurches forward and lurches backward. And it happens primarily in households, communities and countries, not globally all at once. So it makes no sense to set up global goals with timebound numeric targets. What kind of model might work?
The model
Much of the discussion about post-2015 so far has been about the process for developing and agreeing the content for post-2015. Not enough has been said about the model itself, which is a pity because this is at least as important as the content. What kind of international model really has the power to persuade, guide and incentivise developmental thinking, planning and behaviour across the world, and especially in places run by governments whose main incentive is to stay in power no matter what? Again, I won’t repeat here in detail what colleagues and I have described elsewhere. Our thinking so far at International Alert is that the best model to replace the MDGs is one with three main elements. This would meet a set of principles we have also enumerated elsewhere – of which the two most important are probably that it should be about development, not aid, and that it would reflect the very powerful concept of subsidiarity, i.e. that plans and activities should be made, implemented and monitored at the lowest or least centralised level possible.
This leads us to propose a model with three main elements:
- An overall vision defined globally, sharing much with the Millennium Declaration, and setting out a normative vision of how people and societies can live together successfully and peacefully with human rights being fulfilled. This would likely contain much of the language of security, justice, income, assets, supportive relationships, governance and wellbeing which I referred to above.
- The major locus of strategy, planning and targets would be the nation – given that we continue to live in a world still made up of nations, their governments and citizens. Countries would have to make their plans according to their own circumstances and realities and, crucially, according to their own political and economic cycles. The trick – and this is where I am still searching for ideas – is how to maximise the incentives for countries and their governments to aim for ambitious yet politically realistic development progress within the comprehensive set of criteria we recommend. Most likely regional organisations can play an important role here. That will be the subject of a future blog.
- The third element, meanwhile, is about the other entities which can have an enabling or disabling impact on national development: multi-national companies, regional and intergovernmental organisations, international NGOs, etc. They too, acting within their mandates, need to consider how they can contribute to long-term sustainable development writ large.
Advocacy tactics
So getting the nature of the content right and the nature of the incentives model right must be the two main ambitions for those with in interest in the post-2015 framework – whether or not they agree with our specific proposals for each. The perfect post-2015 framework can thus be shown symbolically by the blue circle on following graph, in which the x-axis represents the nature of the model, and the y-axis represents the nature of the content. For simplicity, let’s consider the content along a spectrum from “narrow” (à-la MDGs) to “comprehensive”, and the potential model along a spectrum from “MDG-type” (top-down) to “in line with subsidiarity” (i.e. in keeping with my proposal above).
Now, even though we haven’t yet figured out the right mix of incentives and rules to make this proposed system work, my gut feeling is that others with more knowledge of international relations and governance can. So I feel pretty strongly that the blue ball in the graphic represents the right outcome. Nevertheless I know it’s an unlikely one. There is too much invested in the MDG-type goal based concept already, to let it go; and other ideas than Alert’s will also prevail in terms of content. Others are in a similar position to me: no matter what their preferred ideal content and model are, they won’t see them enshrined in international protocols by the UN General Assembly in 2016. Compromise is the name of the game.
Tactically then, it is useful to consider the trade-offs, and a simple way to do so is in terms of the outcome of a bargaining game. There are four outcomes to consider as represented by the second graph below, with blue circle A as the perfect outcome: comprehensive content as seen from a peacebuilding perspective, and a vision-based global framework based on the principles mentioned above, especially subsidiarity.
A second outcome, the result of pushing hard for maximum success in terms of both the model and content, is represented by the yellow circle B. In this case, by holding out for a high standard on both content and model, the advocates have effectively bargained away too much of both. The outcome is mediocre on both counts.
The green circle C, meanwhile, represents an outcome in which the subsidiarity-based model is largely intact, while the content is less comprehensive than one would like to see. And this is balanced in the graph by the fourth possible outcome shown by the red circle D, in which the incentives model has been eroded a great deal, but the peacebuilder’s perspective has been maintained with regards to content.
Of course this would not be a bargaining exercise in real life. Those of us arguing for circle A have limited influence and power; perhaps the best we can hope for is some version of B, i.e. a post-2015 framework which is somewhat acceptable from a peacebuilding perspective, and somewhat acceptable as an incentives model. But since B is neither strong in terms of content, nor likely to be an effective international approach, it might be better to aim for either C or D, putting more effort into persuading others of the merits either of our preferred content, or our preferred model. But which one?
My first response to this question was: Circle D is a better advocacy outcome than Circle C. After all, international incentives, whether MDG-type or other, have limited currency in the real world unless backed up by the likelihood of powerful carrots and sticks, and these still seem far off. And we know that aid money – one carrot that certainly does exist – is not the main driver of change, so an insufficiently powerful carrot! And getting the content right is surely more important? But on reflection, I think the better advocacy aim is Circle C. Why?
First, insufficient attention is being paid, at least thus far in the post-MDG discourse, to the incentives and measurement model. (Indeed, we still don’t know what to call it, with the rather weak “Post-2015” doing service until an appropriate abstract noun accompanied by an adjective or two can be found). That is odd, because there are reams of papers roundly and soundly criticising the way the MDG model has been (mis-)used. Therefore it seems only right to make more noise about and galvanise thinking about a better alternative. Second, from the way some of the High Level Panel members are talking, as well as insiders in the UN system, it seems that the battle for a less technical, more political and less a-historical post-2015 framework is already largely won, so better to put our resources as peacebuilders into stimulating some creative thinking about the model itself. And third, if we do succeed in achieving a model based on subsidiarity and the other principles defined by International Alert, then there will be ample space within the system for civil society and other voices in fragile and conflict affected countries to push for the content which they see as appropriate in their context. They may have to work hard for it, but that is the nature of political change – and it is well known that civil society space and voice which is hard-won, is hardest to reclaim.
Kyrgyzstan and Guinea?
I am fond of saying that one of the biggest problems in the international development & peacebuilding sectors is the hammer-nail phenomenon. I.e. when organisations tend to identify the problems (nails) for which their particular methods and tools (hammers) just happen to be the most likely solution. This applies most worryingly with the big international beasts of the development sector like the World Bank, UNDP, USAID and DFID; but also to smaller NGOs like the one I work for. It also applies in a slightly different way to individuals, each of whom when designing strategies and projects tends to bring the same set of analytical lenses to the task. I’m the first to admit that I tend to analyse any context in terms of the political economy of peace first and foremost, and I also tend to see the need for interventions which influence the policy discourse, wherever I go. This inherent “professional bias” is why individuals need to work within diverse teams when doing strategic analysis, and why organisations need to make sure they integrate multiple perceptions when they do theirs.
The scope of my job changed this year. Having previously been overseeing International Alert’s Africa and its cross-cutting thematic work, I took on a wider responsibility, including for our work in Asia. After working in and on Africa since 1985, it has been fascinating to try and understand the peacebuilding context in Asian countries where we work. During a trip to Nepal, I was struck by how ideological some of the peace and conflict issues are, compared with my experiences in Africa over two and a half decades. If African conflicts are all too often about how to cut the cake of power, in Nepal I had a sense that at least some of the conflict actors have a genuine desire to bake the policy cake in different ways. One young ex-Maoist soldier interviewed for a documentary was genuinely puzzled that her leaders had agreed to a peace in which they hadn’t yet achieved their (her) aims of changing society.
On my first ever visit to Kyrgyzstan this month, I had another surprise. During the week or so I spent there, I found myself referring again and again to programming options we had selected in the Republic of Guinea, in West Africa; and seeing them as highly relevant to the Kyrgyzstan context. People were surprised and, frankly, so was I. While human societies everywhere exhibit many similarities, I hadn’t expected to find many connections between vast, mountainous landlocked Kyrgyzstan, with its sub-zero winters and ski-resorts, and hot, tropical Guinea, nestled on the West African coast. Yet barely an hour went by without me thinking of similarities in programming, so what was going on? Undoubtedly this was partly because of my professional bias, but was there something more?
On reflection, I realised that there were an uncanny number of similarities between the two countries, for example:
- They were both colonised by European powers in the nineteenth centuries; both cynically exploited by the metropolitan power in question, and both decolonised in a rush. The leadership of both was captured by big men, post-independence.
- Neither had much of pre-colonial history of the “nation-state” as the basis for political governance and identity. In any case, the colonial powers undermined and skewed the governance systems they found in place.
- Both were coloured by communism: Kyrgyzstan as part of the USSR, and Guinea as a soviet client after independence.
- Both countries have an interesting and at times difficult ethnic mix, and in both cases, one of the main ethnic groups is traditionally pastoral, and another primarily sedentary. In both countries ethnicity and ethnic identity provide simple labels which have been exploited for political and economic purposes by leaders.
- Both are sparely populated countries with limited infrastructure, and the inherent challenges of communication that brings.
- In neither country does the population have a great deal of confidence in the capacity of the central government to represent its interests well – although both countries are currently presided over by elected heads of state who seem genuine about promoting national reconciliation, following political disruption in the recent past. Probably it is also fair to say that both governments are operating in a political system which inherently obstructs such efforts.
- Both are situated in an inherently unstable neighbourhood, where conflicts can spill across borders.
- Both are countries in which high value improved agricultural land is at a premium.
- Both face the challenge of exploiting mineral wealth peacefully, in the face of all the well-known ingredients for mining to spark violence.
- Both have a tradition of out-migration for jobs and economic opportunity.
- Both have a large bulge of young people with limited economic, political and social prospects – and who are easily attracted to religious or ethnic narratives offering an apparent alternative.
- Both are major transit routes for drugs – from Afghanistan to Russia, and from Latin America to southern Europe.
- Both countries are receiving a great deal of assistance from the international community, which finds it hard to figure out where and how best to apply its help conflict-sensitively.
- In Guinea a few years ago, when designing a project, my colleagues and I were struck by the difficulty Guineans had in pursuing political discussions to consensual outcomes. As a then senior politician said to us: “we have difficulty talking about issues in ways which allow us to find feasible solutions”. This month in Bishkek, a civil society activist told me “we don’t know how to talk about the difficult issues in Kygyzstan”… Uncanny.
So perhaps, yes, I find it hard to shed the analytical lenses I tend to carry from country to country. But perhaps, too, it’s not that surprising that conversations with West Africans and Central Asians lead me to think that a similar mix of programming options make sense in both locations:
- Extended dialogue, based on a comprehensive political analysis, carefully facilitated to allow participants to explore difficult issues without retreating to knee-jerk pre-defined positions, and linking them too readily to questions of ethnic identity.
- Research and policy dialogue on how economic development can better serve the interests of peace – and including a focus on the extractive mineral sector and land.
- Finding ways to help young people shape their future, through education and economic support.
- Building a local capacity for mediation – i.e. so that people within communities can intervene at an early stage in local disputes, and help avoid them escalating out of control and taking on an ethnic hue; and in so doing reinforce the idea of peaceful co-existence.
- Working with local actors to try and shape the institutional environment – governance – to be more conducive for peace; and with international institutions like the UN and the World Bank so that their programmes do the same.
Neutrality: an ethical or a pragmatic issue?
Last week I took part, with colleagues from Conciliation Resources (CR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), in a debate held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Chaired by Tim Jacoby of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, the debate was constructed around the issue of neutrality as seen from the perspective of humanitarian and peacebuilding organisations. In an interesting discussion, what struck me in particular was how instrumentally each organisation seems to view the idea of ‘acting neutrally’.
Neutrality – studiously not-taking-sides or pronouncing on the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of governments and other parties to conflict – is sacred to the ICRC, because only by remaining studiously neutral can they obtain the laissez-passer they need from governments and rebel groups, allowing them to perform their vital humanitarian functions. For CR, a peacebuilding organisation with a strong focus on mediation and dialogue, neutrality is an important public good which, when genuinely practised by those supporting peace negotiations, enhances the power and strength of their ‘good offices’, and thus the prospects for peaceful outcomes. For MSF, neutrality is a fiction: by intervening in a humanitarian disaster one is immediately engaging in a political act and – however slightly – affecting the outcomes in a way that goes beyond the purely humanitarian, but is not something to dwell on, as it gets in the way of their critical mission, saving lives. And for International Alert, where I work: although we don’t discuss neutrality often, it is quite clear to us that peacebuilding is an intrinsically political enterprise, and that by espousing the values and cause of peace we are not neutral, because we clearly believe that certain outcomes are better than others.
I hope I have not misrepresented the perspectives of my fellow panellists, in highlighting merely one aspect of what I heard each of them say. While we had different positions on acting neutrally, all panellists agreed that as NGOs it made good sense to act impartially towards different players in a conflict situation, i.e. to be seen by all sides not to take sides, and to garner a reputation for so doing in order to maintain the space to operate.
What struck me was that all four of us described our approach to neutrality in terms of its relation to our specific mission and the outcomes and aims we seek to attain, meaning that we all took what I would call an instrumental view of the issue. And this implies that neutrality, far from being the much-vaunted ethical principle it is sometimes made out to be in humanitarian circles, is actually much more of a pragmatic choice, even – especially? – for the Red Cross.
THE UTILITY OF VIOLENCE
A second aspect of the debate was, for me, far more challenging. The chair asked all the panellists – who were united in their commitment to peace – how we felt about the utility of violence. Were there occasions when we felt that violence was the right option? This was difficult. I work for an NGO whose raison d’être is building peace; I know from the (albeit victor’s) history I was taught at school in the UK that peace of sorts has often been attained through violence, and am not myself a pacifist… I can certainly think of situations to which the rational and ethical response involves committing acts of violence, not merely in defence but also to obtain a political change where other means have failed. But can I imagine a situation in which the peacebuilding organisation for which I work would explicitly support the use of violent means for peaceful ends?
As a panellist at that point I had to disassociate myself from my organisation and say that while I could personally support the use of violence in some circumstances, and particularly when applied by a legitimately elected government to provide security to its own citizens and/or following the rules of just war, I could not imagine International Alert coming out explicitly to condone violence. Alert’s published Programming Framework – the core philosophy of our approach to peacebuilding – says “though we recognise that there are times when fighting is justified, this is a last resort that is best avoided”, and I cannot recall a time when I was in a group of colleagues discussing or agreeing that a given situation where we work had reached the point where fighting was indeed justified, much less saying so publicly. In practice, we are an organisation which believes not only in peaceful outcomes but also in peaceful means of reaching them – and certainly as far as our own involvement is concerned. And I think this is true of pretty much all international NGOs operating in conflict-affected places.
But consider this: international humanitarian NGOs have been evolving apace over the past couple of decades. They have moved from being rather technical instruments of service delivery, to understand more and more, and embrace in their practice, the essentially political nature of the issues on which they intervene, and of the interventions themselves. As part of this journey they have increasingly embraced a campaigning and advocacy role, in their countries of origin, internationally, and in the countries where they intervene. They are, without a doubt, far more switched on and more interesting than they once were. Some of them sail pretty close to the wind – inevitable perhaps, when engaging in politics in and around situations of humanitarian intervention and underdeveloped and fragile contexts where poverty and exclusion abound.
At the time of the Biafran War, MSF’s founders knew they were committing a profoundly political act by intervening to save lives. The humanitarian imperative led them to act politically. At the time it was new, yet would seem normal today. NGOs continue to evolve and become yet more political, and yet more conscious of the nuances and subtleties of the contexts where they intervene. Some have found themselves – perhaps unwittingly – acting as the “humanitarian wing” of western armies – the way some of the NGOs collaborated with Washington in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion is good evidence of this. NGOs get sorely frustrated by the inability of politicians to resolve armed conflicts which seem tractable. So far, this has led them to respond with ever-increasing political advocacy, and in some cases this has been quite effective. The Iraq Body Count is a simple and effective example. The Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda coalition was formed by a group of frustrated service delivery and human rights organisations saying enough is enough, and I believe it had a significant impact in changing international and Ugandan attitudes to the never-ending LRA war.
But the political tools available in conflict are often too blunt to make enough of a difference. Just as politicians at times find themselves using military force to pursue ‘politics by other means’, I wonder how these increasingly political NGOs will end up. Many humanitarian NGOs – as distinct from peacebuilders or human rights organisations – have long accepted an overlap with armed forces: think of NGOs protected by militias in Somalia, or armed military escorts for humanitarian convoys in almost any other war zone. As their political evolution continues, can we envisage, at some point in the future, humanitarian NGOs operating a paramilitary wing? Or will they from time to time, but outside the public glare, raise funds from politically interested billionaires to hire Executive Outcomes to intervene with force, as a rational and ethical response to the lack of political will for peace which they so often encounter in long-running, vested-interest, status quo-reinforcing civil wars where they so often find themselves sticking a band-aid on a festering wound?
OK, I know it’s nonsense. Just a thought experiment and a mere blog. But it is intriguing to wonder how the political evolution of values-based international NGOs will continue.
The politics of development is the development of politics
Lots of good buzz in and around the UN General Assembly in New York this week on the international development front. David Cameron making it clear he’s still committed to a growing UK aid programme – and co-chairing the first meeting of the UN’s High Level Panel on a new development framework to replace the MDGs after 2015. A large group of NGOs involved in the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding produced a great 6-pager – Bringing Peace into the post-2015 Development Framework – explaining why the post-2015 framework needs to have peacebuilding and conflict prevention at its heart, which would help fix one of the problems with the MDGs, which are far too technical and not nearly political enough.
At International Alert, where I work, we discussed whether to sign up to the Bringing Peace paper. We wanted to – we agreed with practically all of it, and it made sense that we’d show solidarity with fellow NGOs working on the same issue as ourselves. But in the end we decided we couldn’t, because the paper diverged from something we’ve been saying consistently for the past two years. The Bringing Peace paper suggests the need for the MDGs to be replaced by another set of global goals, and that individual country plans must be tailored to hit these goals and targets.
From our perspective, global goals and targets make no sense, and we have explained why on our website. We have developed a set of principles the post-2015 MDGs need to follow. One of these is subsidiarity, which Wikipedia defines as follows: ‘Subsidiarity is an organizing principle stating that a matter ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority capable of addressing that matter effectively. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.’
With subsidiarity in mind, along with the widely accepted aid doctrine of Taking Context as the Starting Point, it seems absurd to set goals, targets and indicators globally, when development happens nationally and locally. We’ve instead proposed on our website a post-2015 framework with three dimensions:
1. The need for a global vision, drawing heavily on the Millennium Declaration, setting out in broad terms the kind of world we aspire to live in, where people would have access to economic opportunity, justice, security, representative governance, the chance to participate in a supportive community, and steadily improving prospects for personal and family well-being.
2. Meanwhile the main focus of planning and implementing progress would continue to be the nation state and its component parts, right down to local level; national and other plans would be encouraged to show how they will make progress in line with the global vision, but they will be tailored primarily to the needs and opportunities of their specific context.
3. Meanwhile international organisations, regional groupings of nations, and businesses would also play their part.
In the end, even though the international community can do its best to incentivise individual countries to do their utmost to move in the direction of the global vision, it seems pointless to say that each country must make its plans to fit the vision. That ignores local politics, would utimately leave the international community whistling in the wind, and would feed cynicism about the whole endeavour.
Because in the end so much development is about politics, in two ways. First, the process of development itself is primarily political, concerned with highly political issues like equality, equity and changes in access to knowledge, power and resources. Secondly, development is also about the evolution and acceptance of a different politics – of institutions, practices and norms which favour broad participation and accountability.
One of the civil society representatives at the UN this week, Lancedell Mathews from Liberia, put it well when he spoke at an event in front of several heads of state, including his own. Referring to the New Deal for Effective Engagement in Fragile States, an agreement between donors and fragile state governments which is laced with good ideas (and fancy acronyms), he said – my emphasis added:
“It is our thinking that the New Deal is not only about the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals, FOCUS, TRUST and other acronyms. For us, it is essentially about building and maintaining honest, respectful and mutually accountable relationships, not only between the international community and states, but also and more importantly between both of them and the people they serve. As already mentioned throughout various messages that we spread this week, we believe that the New Deal should be used to change national planning processes because we strongly believe that peacebuilding, and conflict prevention, should and certainly must be made the priority if we want to see progress in development. This agenda is not only relevant for societies that are already conflict-affected – the events of the Arab spring and the global financial crisis show us that no society is immune from fragility – and that all societies can guard against it through the principles of inclusiveness, responsiveness, fairness and accountability.”
Justine Greening: The Reluctant Minister for International Development?
“I didn’t come into politics to distribute money to people in the Third World”, Justine Greening is said to have told PM David Cameron when he moved her from Transport to DFID in last week’s UK government reshuffle.
At first sight it looks like a double whammy for the British overseas aid programme: on the one hand, losing Andrew Mitchell who, whatever his original reasons for getting into politics, had shown every sign over the past five years that he was very happy to devote his political career to overseas aid, and who had impressed his staff and others with his sincerity, energy, and some of his ideas. On the other, finding that he’d been replaced as Secretary of State for International Development by Justine Greening who it seems would have preferred almost anything other than DFID; indeed, is said to have seen her move to DFID as a demotion.
I too regret that DFID has lost Andrew Mitchell’s leadership: he brought commitment but also a welcome degree of skepticism to his brief, and he was quite rightly very conscious of the need not to take UK taxpayers’ generosity for granted, and to treat them with respect. But what’s done is done, and I also see two bright aspects of Greening’s arrival on the scene.
First, the good news for Greening which I hope her officials have already shared with her, is that in general DFID’s role is not to “distribute money to people in the Third World” [wherever that is]. Instead, it’s to help stimulate and promote the values, institutions and practices which both enable and represent development progress. As her officials have no doubt explained, this is a challenging business bearing little relation to the distribution of money in poor communities which, as Graham Greene illustrated in The Comedians many years ago, is not usually very effective, and can contribute to conflict. If Greening likes a challenge, she should find her time at DFID very stimulating indeed.
Second, there is a great deal to be said for the idea of The Reluctant Minister. I don’t recall the exact circumstances of Douglas Alexander’s appointment to DFID in 2007, but do remember very well how his initial skepticism led him to ask much more difficult questions of DFID than his predecessors had done. At first this was confusing, and some of us doubted his commitment. The word from some corners of DFID was that “he didn’t get it”. Thank goodness for that, because as a result of his questions and the directions he set as Secretary of State, DFID produced probably its best ever White Paper – Building our Common Future – in 2009, focussed clearly on critical issues like climate change adaptation, economic recovery, and strengthened citizenship and citizen-responsive state institutions in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
DFID is a world leader among international development institutions. It’s been among the pioneers of new thinking about what “development” means, and how rich countries like the UK can promote and stimulate development in poor and fragile countries. But there are still many many questions to answer, and I’d like to think that once the new Secretary of State gets her head round her new brief, she’ll bring a fresh set of eyes to these.
People and organisations in the UK’s overseas development sector are getting hot under the collar. This is because the government is not prioritising legislation to enshrine a perpetual commitment to spend 0.7% of UK Gross National Income (GNI) on overseas development aid (ODA). Letters are being drafted, articles are being written, politicians are being lobbied. After all, this issue has cross-party support, so why not just rush it through parliament?
Well, there are several reasons why not.
First, it’s politically naïve to push this issue now. In case NGOs haven’t noticed, most voters are not clamouring for this to be made into law. In fact, most people would rather see UK aid reduced, not increased in line with the 0.7% pledge. The Daily Mail is among voices asking why we are helping people far away when we have so many problems at home. On the whole it’s only aid specialists and some among the political elite who want to increase aid. So pushing the Overseas Development Spending Bill through parliament now would be like raising a red rag to a bull. Asking a government already under pressure to raise a red rag to a bull seems rather naïve – especially when it has already committed itself to raise the aid budget to 0.7%, and when its own backbenchers already have difficulty explaining the overseas aid budget to their constituents.
Second, there’s no logical basis for 0.7%. In fact, what is this obsession with 0.7% all about? No-one really seems to know where it came from. As far as I know, someone calculated a few decades ago that the investment gap in what was then known as the Third World was the equivalent of 0.7% of OECD GNP, ergo by transferring that amount from the First to the Third World over a period of a few years, developing countries would catch up. That rather simplistic notion of “development” has long been blown apart, but somehow the mythical, or perhaps I should say “mystical” figure of 0.7% remains. Paul Collier has argued that because aid is a global public good, there is a problem of free-riding and therefore it’s useful to have a target, however arbitrary, to aim for and hold governments to. Hmm, fair enough perhaps, but why should it be 0.7%?
Third, surely it’s basic economics that an arbitrary target creates a perverse supply incentive?
Fourth, it seems absurd to enshrine this in law. Are any other budgetary targets similarly enshrined, such as the percentage of GNI to be spent on defence, education, health, etc? I doubt it, as it would make little sense to base one’s national education, health or any other policy on the cost of inputs, when one should rather be focused on the outcomes. The same should be true of aid. In any case, I find it profoundly undemocratic to pass laws which simply cannot be enforced, and which bind the representatives of future UK voters to spend a fixed proportion of their voters’ money on overseas aid, whatever circumstances they may be in at the time.
Fifth, and most important: it’s the quality of aid that matters, not the volume. The current government has rightly emphasised results and value for money in its approach to overseas aid. This is partly to head off the anti-aid critics, but it’s also a healthy reaction to more than a decade in which UK aid grew and grew and grew, but with far too little attention being paid to whether it was targeted at the right issues, in the right places, nor whether the theories behind it and delivery mechanisms being used were right. One can certainly argue that the current government has swung too far in the other direction with its near-obsession with value for money, but even so it’s understandable it felt the need to do so.
Squaring the circle
The UK government has a difficult circle to square. It is committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of GNI, with or without passing the Bill. Even though we are in recession, that implies an increase of more 25% in aid expenditure over the course of a few short years. Meanwhile, its criticism of the previous government’s approach to aid means it has called into question some of the delivery mechanisms which allow DFID (the UK’s Dept. for International Development) to spend money in fairly big sums at a relatively low internal cost: large scale budget support to developing country governments, large grants to the UN and other inefficient multilateral organisations, and strategic grants to UK-based development NGOs, to name three. It is also committed to bringing down DFID’s in-house costs, which are already among the lowest in the world compared to DFID’s international peers, by cutting staff numbers and their admin support (ask any DFID staff member how easy it is to get a new stapler, or get the photocopier fixed….). The government is also committed to spending about one-third of its overseas aid in so-called fragile states, where systems are weak, governments are relatively undemocratic and unaccountable to their people, and where aid needs to be programmed with particular care if it is not to be wasted, misused, stolen or to do outright harm. And finally, people in the aid sector now understand that “development”, especially in fragile contexts, is far more complicated than providing roads, schools and clinics – it is about the emergence of stable, democratic and accountable insitutions including a social contract: thus development aid is also far more complex and complicated than we used to think.
So in short, Her Majesty’s Government is trying simultaneously to increase overall aid expenditure, spend a greater proportion in difficult places, tackle ever-more complex problems and find new, more effective and efficient delivery mechanisms which are fit for new and more complex purposes. How can it possibly square that circle?
A few years ago I was discussing this issue with an ex-minister for UK overseas development who by then had long retired. I explained why I felt it was more important to focus on the quality, not the quantity of aid. He readily agreed, but he told me that when he’d been a minister, he had felt constrained by the politics of aid to keep increasing the ODA budget, even when his officials told him they were overwhelmed. I think he felt that it was important to keep stepping up the voltage applied to ODA, lest momentum be lost.
Squaring almost any circle is made harder by politics, and I would not go as far as to recommend cuts in the UK government’s aid spending. That would be naïve, and probably also wrong. But the argument against reducing DFID’s staffing and admin support, making it harder to deliver aid effectively in fragile contexts is one that can and should be made. And I certainly think it’s time to stop pushing for the 0.7% figure to be reached as fast as possible. Above all it is entirely the wrong moment – if there ever is a right one – to enshrine 0.7% perpetually in law.
We have to start having a more honest conversation about development, and development aid. The message of Make Poverty History and those who campaign incessantly for 0.7%, that global poverty can be overcome simply by financial transfers, is misinformation which insults people living in poor and fragile countries while doing little to change their long-term prospects. Development is about political change and societal transformation in fragile contexts, not just financial transfers. It’s time to move the terms of this conversation on, before the Daily Mail does it for us.
Phil Vernon 