(First published as a blog post on the Center for Global Development’s Views from the Center.)
On Friday the Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will decide who will be the Bank’s next President. I’ve interviewed four of the candidates and the interviews are now online for you to listen to, and you can read the transcript here.
In September 2009, the leaders of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh called for the
“the heads and senior leadership of all international institutions [to] be appointed through an open, transparent and merit-based process.”
Despite this commitment, over last few months European Ministers have been horse-trading behind closed doors to try to get one of their nationals into a number of jobs which are up for grabs: as well as the Presidency of the EBRD, Ministers have to find a new Chair of the Eurogroup, someone to head the Eurozone’s permanent bail-out fund, and a new member of the board of the European Central Bank. But European Ministers have not been able to reach agreement, so for the first time ever the EBRD Governors have not been presented with a fait accompli. Five candidates will be in London this Thursday to be interviewed for the role, and the Governors are expected to make a decision by the end of the week.
At the Center for Global Development we believe this appointment should not be based on nationality, in some gigantic trade-off between unrelated institutions, but on the basis of merit and substance. We hope to make our own modest contribution to this by offering a public forum for the candidates to discuss their vision for the future of the EBRD.
Over the last couple of days I interviewed the four candidates who accepted our offer. We’ve put the interviews together in a Development Drums podcast. You can listen to this online, or download the podcast to your MP3 player, either from the Development Drums website or free in iTunes. You can read the transcript here.
The four candidates who agreed to be interviewed are: Thomas Mirow (at 03:58), the incumbent who has completed one four year term as President and is seeking re-election for the second term; Jan Krzysztof Bielecki (at 17:40), former prime minister of Poland; Suma Chakrabarti (35:45), a senior British civil servant; and Bozidar Djelic (at 47:43), the former deputy Prime Minister of Serbia. The fifth candidate, Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz, is vice president of the European Investment Bank and did not choose to participate in this process.
In the interviews, the candidates talk about the implications for the EBRD of the planned expansion to the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. They respond to criticisms of the EBRD for not doing enough on gender. And they talk about how their own professional background equips them to be an effective leader of the institution.
The interviews reveal some striking differences of view between the candidates. For example, the candidates offer quite different opinions about the extent of change that will be needed in the organisation to fulfil its new mandate in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Candidates also had quite different views about how they would respond to the criticism of the EBRD’s approach to women.
Given the differences in substance between the candidates revealed by these interviews, nobody should be in any doubt that the choice of the next president of the EBRD will have important real world consequences.
Listen to the interviews online, find Development Drums in iTunes, or read the interview transcripts.
Toby Ord
My guest in the latest Development Drums podcast is the moral philosopher Toby Ord.
Toby has made a commitment to give away the majority of his lifetime income to charities working in the poorest countries. He is also the founder of Giving What We Can, a society of people who commit themselves to give away at least 10% of their income to wherever it will do the most to relieve suffering in the developing world.
In the podcast, Toby talks why he thinks it is important to identify and support the most cost effective programmes. The podcast also discusses the moral philosophy which guides Toby’s approach.
One of Toby’s insights which I found interesting was his observation that the cost per year of life saved varied enormously between different development programmes. You can buy an additional year of life for $3-$10 by investing in interventions such as zinc fortification, childhood vaccination and managing tropical diseases, compared to about $500 for antiretroviral therapy. Toby challenges the common assumption that we should spread money around to do a little of everything, or that we are entitled to choose the issue which most interests us. He suggests we have a clear duty to identify the most cost effective approaches and then focus our money on those.
Chart courtesy of Toby Ord
(UPDATE: the green bar in this chart should really be labelled ‘most cost effective interventions’ rather than ‘treatment of parasitic infections’)
In the final part of the podcast we discuss Toby’s decision to establish Giving What We Can, and the choice that Toby has made to give away most of his lifetime earnings.
You can listen to Development Drums directly on the website, download it to your MP3 player, or subscribe free of charge in iTunes.
[This blog post was updated on 27 April 2012 to reflect corrections to the original DCP2 estimates of the cost effectiveness of treatment of Soil Transmitted Helminths, which were found to be incorrect]
The UK has repeatedly said that it favours merit-based appointments of the heads of the World Bank and IMF. It is also a leading advocate for transparency and accountability in development. Now it can live up to both these commitments.
The UK Executive Director will shortly be casting a vote on behalf of British citizens for the next President of the World Bank. At the beginning of the process it was widely assumed that all the European countries would back Dr Jim Kim, because he is the American nominee. Now that all three candidates have been interviewed by the board, I gather that is no longer being taken for granted.
The average British family contributes more than £30 a year to the World Bank and they are entitled to hold the British government to account for the choices that the British government makes about how it is managed. There is no reason why Bank shareholders should presume to fill this job without consulting the publics whom they represent. Since Andrew Mitchell believes in transparency and accountability, before casting the UK’s vote, the UK government should:
a. set out what it regards as the merits which are important for a ‘merit-based’ appointment (presumably these do not include ‘is an American’)
b. given these criteria, say which candidate it plans to support on behalf of the British public.
My former civil service colleagues will come up with any number of reasons why they do not want to reveal their hand; and few governments like to be accountable for hard choices. But the system of making international appointments by doing back-room deals behind closed doors has not served us well, often resulting in the wrong people ending up in powerful jobs. Whitehall rightly argues that transparency improves decision making in other aspects of public life; they should let the sunlight in here too.
This article first appeared in Norrag News, in a special edition with lots of interesting articles looking at “Value for Money in International Education: A New World of Results, Impacts and Outcomes”.
“The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit.”
- Benjamin Jowett, English Clergyman (1817-1893)
It seems perverse at first to oppose measuring the results of overseas aid. It would make sense if you work for a merchant bank which is trying to rip off its clients, as was recently alleged about Goldman Sachs by a former employee. If your business relies on your customers being less informed than you about the value of what you are selling them, you can see why even a little sunlight may be dangerous.
But foreign aid is not like that. Everyone I meet who works on development is motivated by the desire to make a difference for people in the developing world. So why is there so much anxiety among serious and sensible people about the idea that we should measure and make public the results of aid? There are seven common criticisms of the so-called ‘results agenda’.
First, it may add to bureaucratic overload. Collecting information about results is yet one more central reporting requirement, in a system that is already overburdened with forms and procedures.
Second, it may make aid less strategic. The need to produce quantifiable results may tend to make donors prefer a short-term investment in something which can be measured instead of an investment which which may have more significant, longer-term but less quantifiable benefits. Do we want to spend more on bed-nets today, if that is at the expense of investing in a country’s capacity to manage its own health system in future?
Third, it may impose the wrong priorities. We know that aid works best when it truly responds to the priorities of developing countries themselves. But if donors are trying to target a handful of results indicators – such as the number of children in school – then this may reduce their flexibility to get behind government programmes.
Fourth, it may ignore equity. If we reduce aid programmes to numerical totals, we may neglect the people in deepest need, who are often the hardest and most expensive people to reach.
Fifth, it may create perverse incentives. We have seen in our own public services how poorly designed targets can distort choices in unhelpful ways. A target to increase school enrolment may lead governments to pay too little the quality of education, for example.
Sixth, it may inhibit partnership. Aid is more effective when donors work together with developing country partners and with the private sector. The necessity of being able to quantify and demonstrate the results of each aid programme makes it harder for everyone to get together in a common cause.
Seventh, the results information is all bogus anyway. Claims about results must rely on assumptions about the counterfactual. Even the most rigorous impact evaluations do not reliably tell you what will happen when a slightly different project is implemented in a different context. Effects may be described within the boundaries of the project itself, but it is much harder to understand the broader effects of aid on the political economy of the country or its macro-economy. In the absence of a common framework for attribution, every one of the organisations through which the same money passes claims all the results of the programmes which it finances, leading to massive double-counting and exaggeration.
Underlying all these seven worries is a sense that the push to measure results is insulting to the development profession. Years of training and experience of working in difficult and nuanced situations cannot be replaced by an information system which reduces each aid project to a few numbers. Nor do aid professionals need targets to incentivize them to make the most of the budgets under their control: that’s the entire raison d’etre of their professional work.
All these concerns are valid and important; and yet I remain a strong supporter of the results agenda in aid, and (for the most part) I admire the way it is being implemented by the British government and others. I believe that Andrew Mitchell is implementing the results agenda in DFID in a sensible way which pays attention to these risks.
We must set against these concerns the reasons why the results agenda is important.
First, we cannot sustain rising aid budgets in the face of growing public scepticism unless we can demonstrate to the people who pay for aid that it is making a difference. In March the ONE campaign published an important summary of results which are expected from UK aid between now and 2015. The numbers were put together for ONE by the reliable aid data geeks (and my former colleagues) at Development Initiatives. By bringing together information from across the aid programme and simplifying it into a small number of summary statistics, they make a more compelling case for aid than anything we have seen in recent years.
Second, we have a duty to the world’s poor to use money as effectively as we can. Sadly aid budgets are still too small to live up to the commitment made by world leaders to ‘spare no effort’ to reach all the Millennium Development Goals, and that means we have to make hard choices. Because the need is so great, almost everything we do with aid will make a positive difference, and it is easy for this to breed complacency. People making choices about aid should not merely try to do good, but try to do the very best they can so that they help as many people as possible as much as possible. If the differences between aid projects in the impact for each pound spent were small, we could be somewhat relaxed about spreading aid across many different activities, all of which would bring some benefit. But as the moral philosopher Toby Ord points out, some interventions are as much as a thousand or ten-thousand times more cost-effective than others, and that means we ought not succumb to the temptation to do a little of everything.
Third, measuring results is the key to unblocking the dysfunctional political economy of aid. Ineffective aid is more than a nuisance or a waste: it threatens to undermine the whole project. We can see the natural pressure on politicians to tie aid to domestic firms; to retain discretion to move aid about to respond to the most recent headline; to do a little of everything everywhere, to appease commercial interests and project the national image as widely as possible; and to spend aid on photogenic projects rather than supporting countries through the slow process of institutional and political change. By contrast the costs of tied, unpredictable, proliferated, projectised aid are invisible, because we do not adequately measure results. With tangible pressures to be dysfunctional, and in the absence of plausible evidence of the costs, it is no surprise that donors have made such little progress implementing the commitments they made in Rome, Paris and Accra to make their aid more effective.
Fourth and finally, measuring results is the most plausible response to complexity. There is a growing understanding that development is an emergent characteristic of a complex system. This means that it cannot be reduced to a series of smaller, more tractable problems to be solved independently. We have to support developing countries to experiment, to test new ideas and approaches, track the overall effects, and then be ready to help them to adapt as they find out whether they are heading in the right direction. (This point is well made in a recent Development Drums podcast featuring Tim Harford talking about his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Begins With Failure). On this view, measuring results must be an alternative, not an addition, to the convoluted plans, milestones and monitoring that can inhibit the flexibility of many aid projects.
How can we resolve the tension between four good reasons for getting better at measuring results, and seven valid concerns expressed by many in the development profession?
It is helpful that there is agreement about ends if not means. Nobody doubts the value of being able to demonstrate to taxpayers that their money has made a difference; of improving how aid is spent; of overcoming vested interests in ineffective aid; or of creating a stronger feedback loop to support evolutionary complex change. The concerns all relate to how that will happen.
Furthermore, we should recognise that the seven concerns about the results agenda are about risks which have, so far, largely not materialized. For example, while it is possible that focusing on results could lead some decision-makers to under-invest in strategic, long-term interventions, there is no suggestion yet that this is actually happening. Before the recent DFID bilateral aid review, several people working in DFID expressed privately fears that the money would flow mainly to superficial but easily-measurable projects with little transformational or systemic benefit; all told me afterwards that those fears had proved unfounded. DFID has made intelligent, nuanced choices about what to support, and through which aid instruments, which suggest that they have not lost sight of the key objective of long term, sustainable, systemic change.
Nonetheless, the point of identifying and articulate risks is to manage them. There are important steps which donors can take to protect themselves from these proper concerns about how the results agenda might be implemented. I propose here a dozen steps which donors could take which would help them to secure the goals of the results agenda, while reducing the risks that many development professionals have identified. They are divided into three parts: reduce bureaucracy, remain strategic, and increase rigour while remaining proportionate.
Reduce bureaucracy
- Use reliable results measures to replace, not supplement, existing procedures for tracking how aid money has been used. In practice that is likely to require a bottom up review of what additional reporting is needed, if any, once good results measures are in place, and getting rid of the rest.
- Put in place a simple, transparent framework to be used by donors, multilateral institutions, NGOs and other implementing agencies for attributing results to different contributors to a common activity, to avoid double counting and to eliminate the incentive for each donor to ‘go it alone’.
- Agree a global set of standardised output and outcome indicators as part of the International Aid Transparency Initiative reporting standard, to reduce the burden of reporting on developing country governments and implementing agencies, and to enhance cost-effectiveness comparisons. Then donors should impose a self-denying ordnance that they will track and report results only if they are either an indicator chosen by the developing country itself or if they are one of the globally-agreed standardized indicators.
- Trust development professionals by giving them more freedom to design and implement programmes to achieve the agreed results, including the freedom to adjust them in real time without needing to seek approval.
Remain strategic
- Put in place a transparent, simple, common framework for taking account of expected future results (e.g. from investments in capacity), so that strategic, long-term and risky investments are properly valued.
- Where there are concerns about equity, transparently include this by specifying the premium for marginalised or under-served groups. For example, if you think it is more important to educate girls than boys, say so, and include girls explicitly at a higher weight than boys in the results measures.
- Make choices about portfolios, not each aid project individually. A portfolio enables donors to invest in riskier, high-return projects (because the risks are diversified across the portfolio) which they might not support if they consider each project separately. Focus on portfolio performance in reporting (while also providing detailed information about projects individually for those who are interested).
Increase rigour while remaining proportionate
- Do fewer, better evaluations. There are still far too many mediocre process evaluations of individual aid projects; these should be substantially scaled back, with part of the savings going in to a smaller number of larger scale rigorous impact evaluations. The net effect of this will be to save money and bureaucracy, while generating more useful knowledge.
- Reduce the evaluation capacity in each aid agency, putting part of the savings into shared global capacity to do more rigorous and independent impact evaluations. Evidence about the impact of social interventions is a global public good, so donors should work together to fund and produce it collectively.
- Put in place a global register of impact evaluations, in which all impact evaluations must be registered when they begin, drawing on the precedent of clinical trials. Such a public register would, at almost no cost, reduce publication bias, prevent unnecessary duplication and spread learning.
- Recognise that not every intervention should be evaluated. It should often be sufficient for an intervention to set out transparently the existing, rigorous evidence on which it is based.
- Put in place an Institute for Development Effectiveness, modelled on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Effectiveness (NICE) to examine impact evaluation evidence and provide independent and transparent guidance on cost-effective interventions. Set a ceiling (say, £10m) above which a programme cannot be funded unless it is supported by an existing independent, published, relevant, rigorous impact evaluation which has been quality assured by the Institute for Development Effectiveness. In the absence of such evidence, a project above the ceiling should go ahead only on a trial basis and only if it includes a rigorous impact evaluation to fill the identified knowledge gap.
Large aid agencies are beginning an uncomfortable transition. In the past they have seen themselves as experts to whom the public has delegated the important job of managing the support we give to the developing world. Their job was to act on behalf of citizens who were disempowered by lack of information. In the 21st century aid agencies will play a quite different role – in fact, almost the opposite of how they have seen themselves in the past. They must become a platform through which citizens can become involved directly in how their money is used. Some aid agencies will not survive this change: those that do will be the ones which seize the opportunity to provide transparent, trustworthy, meaningful information which empowers citizens to make well-informed choices. Putting in place a comprehensive, honest results framework is the first step along that road.
This blog post first appeared on the Center for Global Development Views from the Center on March 30, 2012.
The World Bank has responded to concerns about its recent agreement with Google with a welcome announcement that it will only support mapping collaborations which make crowd-sourced data publicly available – and that means not collaborating this way with Google.
This is important because the World Bank is a leader in the use of maps and geospatial data for both humanitarian relief and for longer-term development. It aims eventually to map the world’s social infrastructure, and it is a leading member of the Open Aid Partnership. The World Bank’s announcement that it will not work with closed systems is a big boost for advocates for open mapping.
There was concern about their announcement in January of a new agreement with Google giving the World Bank and its partners access to data from Google Map Maker. Questions were raised by members of the open data community including Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, Nathaniel Heller from Global Integrity, and me. Our worry was that this arrangement would mean that the World Bank would encourage the use of the Google Mapping Platform. This is a problem because information contributed by users to applications using Google cannot be freely downloaded into other platforms.
The World Bank has now published a very helpful clarification of its position. The important sentence is this:
“the World Bank only supports citizen-mapping efforts that give users free access to the map data they create”
In plain language the World Bank will not support the use of Google Map Maker for citizen-mapping efforts, unless and until there is a change in its terms of service for user contributed information. This means, for example, that the World Bank would not repeat the ‘Mapathon’ it organized with Google in April 2011 to improve the mapping of South Sudan.
So what should we make now of the January agreement between Google and the World Bank? The agreement itself remains unpublished so we cannot be entirely certain, but with this clarification the agreement now sounds pretty good. The World Bank says:
The single goal of this joint project is to provide UN agencies and governments faster access to Map Maker data for humanitarian, development and disaster preparedness efforts. Access to Google’s map data is an important resource for the World Bank and our development partners and the agreement simplifies this process.
So Google has agreed to provide its proprietary data more quickly for humanitarian efforts, but does not get privileged access to community mapping efforts in future. What’s not to like?
I applaud the World Bank for its leadership on open data and use of geospatial information; for finding ways to work with private sector partners and non-profits; for listening when the open data community raised our concerns; and for making the necessary adjustments to make sure that it lives up to its commitment to open and equitable access to data.
Alternative platforms, such as Open Street Maps, have been proven to be effective and flexible in humanitarian situations, for example in Haiti immediately after the earthquake. Open maps are also increasingly being used by mainstream commercial applications. Foursquare switched from Google to Open Street Maps last month. This month Apple switched to Open Street Maps for its mapping layer in iPhoto, which may signal the beginning of a broader move by Apple away from Google Maps.
So the World Bank ‘gets’ open data; Google not so much. I understand why Google wants to (or has to) limit access to the proprietary mapping data it has assembled or purchased at considerable expense, but it should open up community-contributed data for everyone to use in any way they want. We are gradually learning about the enormous potential economic and social benefits of open access to geospatial data. The Google of a few years ago would have understood that too.
Nominations for the head of the World Bank have now closed, and there are three candidates:
- Jim Kim, nominated by the United States; President of Dartmouth College, former head of HIV at the World Health Organization, and a founder of Partners in Health;
- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, nominated by Nigeria, South Africa and Angola; finance Minister of Nigeria, former foreign Minister of Nigeria; former Managing Director of the World Bank
- José Antonio Ocampo, nominated by Brazil; a professor at Columbia University; former UN under-secretary for economic affairs; former Finance Minister of Colombia.
That means that for the first time ever there is a genuine contest. In previous years other shareholders were faced with the choice of accepting or rejecting the US nominee. This time round, with three serious candidates to choose from, it is not clear that the US nominee has to win. The other shareholders should now take a moment to consult, and assess which candidate they think is best for the job; and it is very important that they should do so in an accountable way, for the sake of the integrity of this appointment and for the future of the governance of international institutions.
Should merit or nationality determine which person becomes President of the World Bank?
In the past, the head of the World Bank was nominated by the United States, and has been a US citizen, under a so-called ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ reached shortly after the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. This does not reflect, as is sometimes supposed, the fact that the US alone has sufficient voting power to veto an appointment. The origin of this arrangement was that the US Treasury Secretary at the time, Frederick Vinson, convinced John Maynard Keynes that it was necessary for the World Bank to have an American at its head to secure the confidence of Wall Street, which was to be the main supplier of capital to the Bank in the early years. Of course today capital markets are global, and this rationale for US leadership of the World Bank no longer applies. In return for the leadership of the World Bank, the US gave up their claim to appoint the Managing Director of the IMF.
An appointment requires an 85% super-majority of the votes of the Board [UPDATE: I now believe that this appointment can be made by simple majority]; this means that the US can veto an appointment, but it also means that a candidate could be blocked by a coalition of three European directors plus the nominating constituency of one of the candidates; or by any four of the directors from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. In other words, if the European shareholders choose to act together they have at least as much power as the United States to block an appointment.
In the past when there was only one nomination, it made little sense for any other country to oppose the person on offer – since that would mean getting off on the wrong foot with the new World Bank President and annoying the US administration to boot. Opposing the nominee would mean having to mount an invidious attack on the individual that the US government had nominated. So any US candidate had unstoppable momentum.
But with three candidates on offer, all this changes. If the European shareholders were to make it clear right away that they do not regard this as a done deal, and that it has not been stitched up already in private conversations between officials, then the dynamics change completely. Anyone can win, and that means that it no longer makes sense automatically to back the American nomination. That would make it both possible and necessary for each of the shareholders to consider the candidates on merit.
The world needs more effective global economic governance more than ever. This appointment can make an important contribution to that: as well as giving direction to an economically significant institution, the President of the World Bank has a seat at the table of G-20 meetings alongside the heads of state of the most powerful nations.
In the past, these decisions have been made by governments negotiating privately, with no public accountability for the choices they make. Europeans blamed the US for having nominated Paul Wolfowitz in March 2005, but their own governments did not exercise their power to prevent his appointment. The consequence of this lack of accountable decision-making was a series of poor appointments (such as Strauss-Kahn at the IMF and Wolfowitz at the World Bank) and the exclusion of highly qualified alternatives, to the detriment of the reputation and authority of both institutions.
These deals behind closed doors for posts in key institutions based on nationality are an obstacle to effective global governance. Right now the UK will be offering to support Jim Kim for the World Bank in return for US support for the UK candidate for the EBRD, Sir Suma Chakrabarti. But that is no way to make either appointment. Jim Kim should not be appointed because of his nationality; nor should he be precluded on that basis. Let all three candidates be judged on their merits against the criteria of who has the best qualifications for the post.
The United States and the European governments have all said that they favour an open, merit-based competition. A good step would be for shareholders to set out publicly what they consider to be the ‘merits’ required for the post. Do the governments agree with a CGD survey some years ago whose respondents ranked the criteria as (in order): efficient manager, experience of international organisations, knowledge of development, political and diplomatic experience, and banking and finance?
Having set out what they consider to be the main requirements for the job, the member governments should say publicly which candidate they plan to support. They should set out the case for their favoured candidate, which they can do without criticizing the other nominees. It may be clear quite quickly which of the candidates is best qualified for the job; or further discussion may be required.
Such a focus on qualifications will make it harder for appointments to be made in future on the basis of nationality. Governments would find it harder to acquiesce in the appointment of inferior candidates, based on some tawdry trade-off, if they have to set out the basis for their choice and be held to account for it domestically. Using transparency and accountability in this way would help to improve the governance and effectiveness of our global institutions.
Of course, much of the public has never have heard of the President of the World Bank and they are unlikely to be much interested. But there are some who will care, as befits international financial institutions which are ever important for the stability of the world economy. Furthermore, the average British household contributes more than £30 a year to the World Bank, and that alone entitles them to some involvement in the decision about how their representative on the World Bank board will vote on their behalf. The British government has a very good record of promoting transparency and accountability of the development system; they should put that into practice for this appointment.
The fact that there is, for the first time, a contested election, and no automatic presumption that the US nominee must win, creates an important opportunity to improve the way our global institutions are managed. Shareholders can act now to ensure that this really is an accountable and transparent appointment based on merit, and so start the world down the road of cleaning up the way we make these important international appointments.
This Doonesbury cartoon is causing some American newspapers either not to run the series, or to move them to the op-ed pages.
A younger me arrives at the South African Department of Finance
I first became aware of the problem of ‘odious debt’ when I was seconded from the UK Treasury to work for the government of Nelson Mandela. The apartheid regime in South Africa had borrowed from private banks through the 1980s, most of which went to finance the military and security services and to sustain the repression of the majority of its citizens. As a result, the new democratic government in South Africa inherited about $40 billion of international debt (in today’s prices). The question for my colleagues in the South African Treasury was whether to pay this debt, or to renounce it as odious. In the end they decided to pay, to protect their credit rating and ensure that they would be able to access global financial markets in future. Ministers even opposed a lawsuit seeking reparations from banks that had helped finance the apartheid regime, because “we are talking to those very same companies named in the lawsuits about investing in post-apartheid South Africa.”
All this is bad for two reasons. First, it means that illegitimate governments can be sustained in power by rogue creditors, undermining the effectiveness of sanctions. Second, it means that when a new, legitimate government comes to power, it is saddled with the debts of its predecessors. The ‘rainbow nation’ of Nelson Mandela’s South Africa would have got off to a better start if it had not had to service apartheid-era debts.
In principle donors from creditor nations could choose to write off these debts; but this has an opportunity cost within fixed aid budgets, and it is not politically appealing to use aid to bail out rogue creditors who have been making money lending to illegitimate governments. So in practice the successor government are often left with a huge debt to pay.
There is a disarmingly simple solution to this problem.
The main financial and legal centres of the world should declare that any contracts signed after today by a regime which has been designated illegitimate will be regarded as odious, and will not be enforceable in their jurisdictions.
Take Syria today. The regime of Bashar Al-Assad has been declared illegitimate by the United Nations and the Arab League. The European Union and United States have imposed sanctions, which make it illegal for their citizens to engage in certain kinds of trade with that government. But some Russian companies continue to sell arms, presumably on credit, and Syria is looking for someone to buy their heavy crude oil. Weirdly, those contracts, which would be illegal for European citizens, will be enforceable in British and American courts against any future Syrian government.
As Tim Harford says in the Financial Times this weekend:
This is an elegant idea. By drawing a clear line between existing debt, which is to be respected, and all future debt, which will be regarded as odious, it reassures creditors lending to the governments of poor countries. It frees innocent people from debts not of their making. And, cleverly, it undermines odious regimes by making it hard for them to promise credibly that they will repay their creditors.
The idea was first proposed by Thomas Pogge (here) and was subsequently developed by Michael Kremer and Seema Jayachandran, and it has been developed by a Center for Global Development Working Group which looked in detail at how it could be applied. We have now published an updated two-page policy brief by Kim Elliott and me and a new FAQ.
We have also put together a four-and-a-half minute video explaining how this approach could be applied to Syria today:
Many of us feel a sense of helplessness about events in Syria. The least we can do is call any new contracts with the regime what they are: odious and illegitimate, and promise that when Assad falls, debts incurred by him from today will not be visited upon those who will be working to rebuild the nation
Kim Elliott’s post on the CGD blog has more. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please add them to the discussion there.
UPDATED 18 March 2012 to add reference to Thomas Pogge’s paper proposing the idea, first published in 2001.
I am a generally a fan of both the World Bank and of Google, but we should all be worried about their recent deal.
The intention is good: it is to promote crowd-sourcing of maps, to improve planning in disasters and to improve the planning, management and monitoring of public services. This is an important goal, which is now being made possible by new technologies and the spread of the internet. The deal is sufficiently important for World Bank Managing Director Caroline Anstey to write about it in the opinion pages of the New York Times:
Under the agreement, the bank and its development partners — developing country governments and U.N. agencies — will be able to access Google Map Maker’s global mapping platform, allowing the collection, viewing, search and free access to data of geoinformation in over 150 countries and 60 languages.
This is all consistent with an admirable push in the World Bank towards ‘democratising development‘, including becoming more open about its own activities and promoting open data. Indeed, this effort has come to be a defining achievement of Robert Zoellick period as World Bank President. As Sebastian Mallaby said in the FT the other day,
Where [the World Bank] once imposed prescriptions on the Third World, it now shares knowledge with respected clients from the new world. Where it once hoarded data, it now displays it on the web. … One decade ago, the Bank was routinely accused of indifference to the views of local people. Today Mr Zoellick talks of empowering the most humble netizen to provide feedback on projects.
So what is the problem with the deal? The problem is the way the data is licensed: once any data goes in to Google Map Maker, it all becomes the property of Google. If governments and citizens choose to use the Google Map Maker platform to contribute their information, then the data will only be available through Google’s own mapping system, and the data will be available under conditions specified by Google. At least, that is what we believe: ironically, given that both the Bank and Google are trying to market themselves as leaders in transparency and openness, they have refused to publish their agreement. The Bank has said that they ‘want a blanket permission from Google to provide NGOs, humanitarian groups, and other non-commercial entities with the data whenever they need it’ – though we do not know if this has been written into the agreement (and if so in what terms) or is just wishful thinking. Even if this concession were secured, it would not be enough. Open data offers opportunities for everyone – not just NGOs and governments but social enterprises and businesses too, and they should all be allowed to use the data which governments and citizens have contributed.
There is an alternative platform – Open Street Map – which proved its value in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. Data in Open Street Map is all available to everyone to use for any commercial or non-commercial purpose. So if the data were contributed to Open Street Map, it could be used by Google Map Maker, but not the other way round.
The World Bank defends itself by pointing out that the deal is non-exclusive – that is, everyone is free to give data to anyone else as well as to Google Map Maker. But that misses the point. Citizens will in practice contribute to one platform. If an organisation as prominent and powerful as the World Bank encourages governments and citizens, and UN organisations, to use Google Map Maker, then that becomes a de facto global standard.
I have no problem with Google, or any other company, making commercial use of this data. I have no ideological objection to the profit motive. On the contrary: having businesses looking for ways to make the best use of the data is a great way to generate innovation and improvements. We want businesses to try to make money by competing to serve the customer better – by providing better tools and services to access and use data. But we don’t want businesses to try to make money by restricting access to the information, which is a public good in every sense of the word, because this reduces, rather than improves, services for the public. By entering into this partnership on these terms, the World Bank is backing closed instead of open; monopoly instead of competition; corporate fat cats instead of upstarts.
I do not think that Google is evil (not yet, anyway). I admire what Google has done to make mapping available more widely, and to promote crowdsourcing of maps. While I was living in Ethiopia, they put online some of the best available maps of many of Ethiopia’s towns and cities, drawing in large part on citizen cartographers. But the fact that I am broadly sympathetic to Google does not mean that they should have sole control of this data.
The World Bank is trying to do the right thing. Their approach to opening up their own data has been exemplary. Caroline Anstey’s article in the New York Times makes a powerful and persuasive case for open data. But the article makes a stronger case for working with Open Street Map, whose work in Haiti she specifically praises, than it does for a partnership with Google.
The World Bank has been listening to the concerns that have been raised, and it sounds as if they have realised that they have made a blunder. They have recently met with key groups in Washington and, according to Nathaniel Heller from Global Integrity, they are going to take ‘concrete steps’ to address these concerns. We don’t know what these are going to be, but it seems to me that there are only two possible satisfactory resolutions. The first possible solution is for Google irrevocably to change the terms of the license for all the data in Google Map Maker to allow commercial and non-commercial use. I think that is unlikely (which should tell us something about Google’s assessment of the possibility that they may want to do something in future with their control over the data). If Google will not do that, then the second solution is for the World Bank to terminate the agreement and instead encourage citizens and governments to contribute to Open Street Map, or some other genuinely open system. Google Map Maker can then use that data if they wish, like everyone else. Anything but these alternatives is likely to be an unsatisfactory fudge. Furthermore, the full terms of the agreement must be published.
The UK Government is increasingly a world leader in promoting open, reusable data, transparency and accountability. As a major shareholder in the Bank, and one of the largest contributors of funds for the World Bank’s concessional lending, I hope the UK Government will put pressure on the World Bank to accept that this agreement does not satisfy their aspirations for open data, and instead to promote genuinely open sharing of mapping information which, as both Google and the World Bank rightly say, could make a significant contribution to humanitarian relief and to development.
Further reading:
- Caroline Anstey – Empowering Citizen Cartographers
- Patrick Meier (Ushahidi) - Google Inc + World Bank = Empowering Citizen Cartographers?
- Brian Timoney - World Bank Empowers Citizen Cartographers to Enrich Google in Developing World
- Global Integrity – Why We’re Worried about Google’s Deal with the World Bank
- Jon Mitchell – World Bank Assumes Control of Google Map Data
- Nathaniel Heller - Google, the World Bank, and Public-Private Data Partnerships
The class of 1988
I spoke at student-led conference on international development at Oxford University last night.
When I was a student at Oxford, the international development group, Third World First, used to meet in a small cafe on the Cowley Road. Last night hundreds of students filled the lecture hall at the business school. I found it very heartening to see so many committed students giving up their Friday night to think about development.
We have recently moved from Ethiopia to London, so we’ve been unpacking boxes. The other day I came across The Times for July 26 1988, which I had kept because it included my degree results.
The PPE class of 1988 seems to have done pretty well. As well as four Cabinet ministers, it includes the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and many other successful people. And me.
People ask me if I wish I were doing the kinds of things which many of my university contemporaries are now doing. My answer: sometimes. But not often, and not for long. What I told the students in Oxford last night is that it is a privilege to have the opportunity to work on the most important moral issue of our time: the reduction of global poverty. Even if I achieve nothing more than to stand up and be counted, there is no day on which I am not thankful that this is what I am paid to do.
Judging by the number of students here in Oxford who have given up their weekend to be better informed about international development, the next generation is going to do a better job than my generation of recognising the importance of tackling global poverty.
Tim Harford, the undercover economist.
In the latest episode of Development Drums, I talk to author Tim Harford. Known to readers of the Financial Times as The Undercover Economist, Tim’s latest book Adapt is a magnificent explanation of how complex systems emerge through a process of trial and error.
In Development Drums, Tim and I focus on the implication of this for development. We look at examples of how iteration and learning are needed, both for development to take place, and for effective development cooperation. We also look at some of the obstacles which make it difficult for aid agencies to engage more systematically in trial and error and to acknowledge failure.
Development Drums is free on iTunes; you can listen to it via the Development Drums website; or you can download it to your MP3 player.
Development Drums aims to be an in-depth discussion of a topic relevant to development, freed from the time constraints and short attention span of broadcast media. If you would like to suggest topics or guests, or propose questions for future guests we already have lined up, please do head over to the Development Drums group on Facebook.
The development world talks a lot about ‘the results agenda’. Of course everyone is in favour of results, but this superficial consensus may disguise important differences of opinion.
I was reminded of this yesterday in Berlin, when I was took part in a discussion of ‘Results and Accountability’, at a meeting organised by the centre-right think tank, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the development finance agency, KfW. My presentation was on ‘mutual accountability’, an idea of which I am increasingly sceptical. (No doubt I will write about that here in due course.)
The panel before mine was about ‘results’; and I was struck that different people were using the term ‘results agenda’ to mean quite different things. Here’s what I think they are, and why the differences may be important.
First – using results to justify aid to taxpayers. This is the results agenda we hear most often from politicians – both the ones who lead development agencies, and members of parliament. They make the excellent point that taxpayers want to know that their money is making a difference to people in developing countries – and that good evidence about results is essential to persuade an increasingly sceptical public. My impression is that many development professionals grudgingly accept that reporting results for this reason is a necessary evil, though many people would prefer not to have to do it.
Second – using results to improve aid. There are some development professionals who are concerned that while aid may have positive effects overall, we do not get the biggest possible benefits because we do not have enough evidence about what works and what does not work, and we are not sufficiently energetic about allocating aid to the programmes and projects which have the biggest impact.
Third, using results to manage aid agencies. Some leaders of aid agencies want to use results to contain the tendency of some organisations to spread themselves too thin, to sprawl across countries and sectors. A stronger focus on results enables them to re-focus the activities of the organisations they lead. This is something I hear a lot from the senior managers in aid agencies, though from few other people.
Fourth, using results to manage complexity. Many of the problems we are trying to solve involve supporting the emergence of successful complex systems – social and political institutions, economic change and the formation of various kinds of social capital. These complex processes cannot easily be broken down into a series of steps which will predictably lead to the outcomes we want to see. Instead these solutions evolve: taking small steps, finding out what moves in the right direction, and building on progress. The aid industry’s habit of reducing everything into a series of processes and activities which can be planned, tracked and reported not only fails to support this evolution, it can stifle it by preventing both the innovation and the adaptation that evolution requires. Focusing mainly on results can enable the aid business to resist the tendency to plan and prescribe, and so create space for the emergence of sustainable local institutions and systems.
So what?
If you have read this far, you may be wondering whether these differences matter. Surely we should be glad we all want the same thing, even if our reasons are different?
The problem is that these four motivations for focusing on results take us in broadly the same direction, but not to the same destination.
For example, if an aid agency is concerned mainly about the first results agenda (demonstrating results to sceptical citizens) then it is not going to be tremendously excited about being honest about its failures. Yet recognizing failure is an essential component of the second results agenda (improving the way aid is used). Which motivation is uppermost in our minds will affect how much effort we put in to identifying and learning from investments that do not succeed.
The four motivations have important implications for time horizons too. There is a widespread fear among aid professionals that focusing on results for the purpose of having a good story to tell to taxpayers will tend to drive aid agencies towards results which can be achieved and measured in the short run – such as giving people bednets – at the expense of longer term improvements in institutions and incentives. Yet these longer term investments may have a bigger and more sustainable impact overall, even though there may be little to show for them immediately.
While I think this is a reasonable fear, I have not been persuaded that any of the aid agencies who are leading the charge on the results agenda are so far guilty of this kind of short-termism. Aid agencies can and do emphasize the likely future benefits of investments today, so there is no overriding reason why they should focus only on results which can be measured immediately. We should remain vigilant about this, but I do not agree with those who think that this risk invalidates the entire results agenda.
The different motivations also have differing implications for whether the results agenda is to be layered on top of existing processes of accountability, or should largely replace them. If you want a focus on results because you think this creates space for local ownership, to enable donors to support the emergence of local solutions and institutions, then we should be thinking about ‘post-bureaucratic aid’. Our existing systems have tended to lead to excessive outside prescription and micromanagement; and in principle they should not be needed if we can observe directly the results about which we really care. If on the other hand our interest is merely to increase our accountability to taxpayers, then all we have to do is pile better measurement of results on top of everything else we already track.
What can we do?
The four motives for focusing on results do point in the same direction: we have to do a better job of providing evidence for the results chain.
Aid agencies should be able to account for the inputs they have provided, and provide a reasonable estimate of their share to the outputs that are produced. They should also be able to point to rigorous evidence from impact evaluations which demonstrates that these outputs can be expected to produce the intended outcomes and impact, and they should be able to provide a quantified estimate of the impact of the outputs they have funded. These outcomes and impact can – and in my view should – be long-term, institutional improvements and not just short-term gains.
My view is not that there should be an impact evaluation of each and every project which an aid agency supports. (I also don’t believe that a doctor should conduct a randomised control trial every time she prescribes a medicine. What I want to know is that every medicine that is generally prescribed has been previously proven to be effective and safe by a rigorous study.) All activities on which significant amounts of aid are being spent should either be justified by existing rigorous, independent evidence from previous programmes, so enabling the agency to provide an ex ante quantified estimate of the impact of providing the expected outputs; or the programme should be run at first on a smaller scale and accompanied by a rigorous impact evaluation to gather such evidence for the future.
A combination of systematic, independent, rigorous impact evaluation and end-to-end transparency would provide information about results which can address all four motivations for the results agenda. It enables taxpayers to see how their money is being spent and what it is achieving, and enables them to press for that money to be redirected so that it has greater and greater impact. It will put pressure on development organisations to focus on the interventions in which they will have most impact, and to streamline their processes. The combination of end-to-end transparency and trusted measurement of impact can replace the burdensome controls and micromanagement which aid agencies have felt obliged to put in their place.
Although there is a model of managing for results which ticks the boxes of all four motivations, it does not follow that aid agencies will necessarily move in that direction. If we leave the focus on results to people who are mainly motivated by the first agenda – explaining to the taxpayer what difference their money has made – then there is every possibility that they will design systems which do not meet these other concerns. The danger is that aid agencies may not be sufficiently energetic in using information about results to improve the impact of aid; they may focus on short-term gains and ignore long-term impact; and they may add reporting results to the many existing procedures instead of using rigorous results measurements as the basis for radical simplification. I don’t think this is happening in practice, but it is a risk we must guard against, and one way to do that is to recognise and value all four of the motivations which lie behind ‘the results agenda’.
<Pedants’ corner> To an old fashioned grammarian like me, there is no plural of the word ‘agenda’. It is already plural, and the singular is ‘agendum’. Because, you know, we all still talk Latin in Britain. So I don’t like to say that there are four “results agendas” even though that was the title of one of my powerpoint slides yesterday. Hence the odd sounding title of this blog post. Oh, and while we are at it, you cannot ‘deliver’ results: you achieve them. </Pedants’ corner>
The Guardian development blog is running a series of end of year reflections on development, including one by me. Many of the articles are upbeat about progress in developing countries, but pessimistic about the short term economic prospects for the industrialised world and for global cooperation to tackle shared global problems.
The series so far includes:
- Duncan Green from Oxfam, who contrasts progress in developing countries over the last year with the gloom of the ‘formerly rich’ countries of the G-8.
- Calestous Juma from Harvard, who identifies regional integration and better links with the diaspora as key drivers of Africa’s growth.
- Shanta Devarajan from the World Bank, who is cautiously optimistic, especially in the light of increased demand by Africans for their governments to be accountable.
- Linda Raftree from Plan, who also emphasizes progress towards more inclusive and open societies.
- Kevin Watkins from Brookings and UNESCO, calling for “a properly financed global fund for education like those that have delivered such striking results in the health sector“.
- Jonathan Glennie from ODI and the Guardian, who is pessimistic about the prospects for international cooperation in the face of rising protectionism and nationalism as a result of poor economic prospects in the US and Europe.
- and my contribution, reproduced below, which gives a positive account of progress in many countries in Africa over the past year, and emphasizes the importance for developing countries of better global decision-making.
Busan was an expression of new geopolitical realities, but despite high level representation, it has done little to shape the future of development cooperation. I think there were perhaps four important outcomes from Busan, in addition to which I noted five other topics of discussion which may prove important in future.
The southern port city of Busan in South Korea was a fitting host for a meeting on aid effectiveness. Busan was the port through which humanitarian aid arrived sixty years ago, to help the people of a country ravaged by war. Korea’s reconstruction and development was financed in part by international aid. Beginning in 1952, American aid alone averaged about $3 billion a year (in today’s prices) and USAID had up to five hundred staff in Korea. Busan is also at one end of the Gyeongbu Expressway, the cornerstone of Korea’s first five year plan and regarded by many Koreans as one of the most important early ingredients the country’s successful industrialization. When the road linking the country’s main population centres with the port was planned 40 years ago, Korean national income was just $142 a person a year. The World Bank and other donors refused to finance the construction, regarding it as an excessively grandiose project for a country so poor. So President Park Chung-hee used a quarter of the nation’s budget, topped up with some reparations from Japan, to pay for it instead. National income quadrupled in the seven years following the construction of the road.
Today Busan is a bustling, prosperous city, home of the fifth largest port in the world; and the Gyeongbu Expressway is scheduled to become part of the Asian Highway, a planned network of routes connecting Korea with Japan, China, Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.
Korea exemplifies much of what we know about development: the fundamental importance of economic growth and industrialisation; the need for investment in economic infrastructure; the importance of good and effective leaders; the primary role played by the country’s own resources; the additional contribution that aid can make both to improving people’s lives and to investing in development; and the capacity of aid agencies to be wrong, especially in the poverty of their aspirations for developing countries.
Busan delegates wait for Starbucks to open at the conference centre in Busan
So Busan was a suitable place for about 3000 government officials, policy wonks, NGOs and a smattering of private sector representatives to discuss how the aid system could be made more effective. This was the fourth in a series of meetings, which have toured Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008).
I’ve been involved in all this since 2002, motivated by my involvement in a series of studies in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Senegal. Though we represented donor agencies ourselves, our report was outspoken in its criticisms of donor behaviour. We found that “the aspiration of a government-led process for implementing the PRS [poverty reduction strategy], with a nationally led process for monitoring, review and renewal of objectives, has yet to be realised. Instead, donors have continued to focus on their own timetables, their missions, their conditions, and have demanded information to suit their requirements.” Our reports on the experience of developing countries were part of the evidence which led to the Rome Declaration on Harmonisation the following year. Yet despite the best efforts of many good people, the problems we identified ten years ago are, if anything, even worse today.
Since 2003 these summits have grown in size and attracted increasingly senior representation. Among the roughly three thousand people in Busan were Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, a brace of Presidents, a Prime Minister, and hundreds of ministers and senior officials. If this group did not have the authority to make progress on improving aid, it was difficult to know who would. Negotiations on the communique began back in July and were concluded with the publication on the last day of the meeting of the “Busan Partnership for Effective Development“.
Now that the dust has settled, and many words have been written, it seems to me that there were four significant outcomes from Busan.
The Bexco Conference Centre in Busan
First, the beginning of a new global partnership. This is the result of Busan which the OECD and traditional donors have been most keen to emphasize. It was not clear right up to the last day whether China, and perhaps other new donors, would be willing to agree to the declaration; and much of the last day was spent refining and agreeing to this key disclaimer which had to be included to persuade China to sign: “The principles, commitments and actions agreed in the outcome document in Busan shall be the reference for South-South partners on a voluntary basis.” With this disclaimer the new donors are not bound to any particular commitments to improve their aid, but it must be a step forward everyone accepts the need of these new donors to be part of the conversation. Note that there was no need to weaken the specific commitments of traditional donors as a price of China’s agreement, since China was never likely to sign up to these commitments anyway. For example, the October draft would have committed all the donors who had signed the Accra Agenda for Action to “untie all aid by 2015″ – this was taken out of the Busan agreement in the final days at the request not of China, who would not have been bound by it, but of the United States.
Second, the new deal for fragile states. A group of 19 fragile and conflict-affected countries, known as the g7+, has been working with donors on how to improve peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts in these situations, beyond the aid effectiveness agenda. The main idea has been to focus on five themes: legitimate politics, justice, security, economic foundations, and revenues and services. The resulting “New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States” was endorsed at Busan. For more information see this article by ODI’s Alasdair McKechnie, and this blog entry by Fernanda Faria at ECDPM.
Third, significant progress on transparency. Since Accra, transparency has shifted from the periphery to the centre of the discourse on aid effectiveness. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned a round of spontaneous applause for her announcement that the United States would be signing the International Aid Transparency Initiative, taking the membership of IATI up to 75 percent of global aid. Donors committed to draw up plans within a year, explaining how by 2015 they will publish electronically full details of all current and planned future aid projects in a common, open standard. Stephanie Majerowicz and I have written elsewhere about the contribution that the Open Government Partnership may have made to this progress. It also owes a great deal to leadership by the UK and Sweden, and the World Bank and EU, as well as civil society organisations Publish What You Fund, Development Gateway and aidinfo.
Fourth, significant changes in the international governance of the aid system. This may be one of the most important outcomes of Busan, yet it has so far attracted little comment. The Busan agreement abolishes the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, which is technically a sub-committee of the OECD DAC but in practice has become a sprawling network of committees and meetings which had come to represent a broader group of stakeholders than the donor club in which it had been incubated. In its place will be a new “Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation”, to be supported by the OECD and UNDP. Though it may seem impolite to point this out, this change relegates the DAC back to the role of a caucus of traditional official donors, representing a dwindling proportion of aid, in defiance of its aspirations to lead reforms of the global governance of development cooperation. Even more significantly, Busan turns its back on the requirement of unanimity which has underpinned agreements on the aid system for the last 50 years. The DAC makes decisions by consensus, giving all its members a veto so that it moves only at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy. But that is not how Busan envisages progress in future. The implementation of Busan will take place through a series of ‘building blocks‘ which are described as “voluntary, practical and actionable game-changers in the global dialogue on aid and development effectiveness.” This model was apparently conceived in in the light of the experience of work on transparency – the issue on which most progress has been made since Accra – which was taken forward by a coalition of the willing in the form of the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Stepping outside the DAC structures enabled a group of donors, foundations and civil society to work together without the constraint of an implicit veto of reluctant partners. Busan marks a shift in the global governance of development cooperation from consensus in the DAC to the ‘variable geometry’ of building blocks. The declaration highlights the ”opportunities presented by diverse approaches to development cooperation”. There are new commitments for all donors on transparency, and the declaration calls for “a selective and relevant set of indicators and targets through which we will monitor progress”. (It is hard to see how these targets will be agreed in the coming months given that no consensus could be reached in the run-up to Busan.) But beyond exposing their behaviour to public scrutiny, there is little else to which donors have specifically committed. This evolution of the architecture for the global governance of development cooperation towards progress by more flexible coalitions of the willing has obvious parallels with the direction in which the global governance of climate change is also moving.
In addition to these four outcomes on which progress was made, I noted five other themes being discussed in Busan which were not translated into significant progress, but which may be issues to watch for the future. These were:
- everyone wants a shift from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness - the importance of this change in perspective was emphasized by many people, especially the delegations from Africa. It is intended to mean focusing more on non-aid policies, and talking more about development outcomes. Everybody said they were in favour of such a shift, but this does not seem to have had much effect on the Busan agreement.
- there is greater recognition of the role civil society. The Accra meeting in 2008 was notable for the involvement of civil society in the meeting. Busan went further by including a civil society representative in the drafting committee, which led to specific recognition (in para 22) of the role that civil society plays in the development process, especially in enabling people to claim their rights and in service delivery.
- everyone is talking about ‘the results agenda’. I actually think there are at least three results agendas, not wholly consistent with each other. My CGD colleagues hosted a side event on results, which in my (not unbiased) view was one of the better discussions in Busan. But overall there was not much progress on results from Busan, other than calling for developing countries to put in place specific results frameworks at country level. I anticipate that one of the most important ‘building blocks’ after Busan will be on how the development system can do a better job of identifying relevant results, and how to avoid the risk that a focus on results leads to misallocation of money, for example away from longer term and institutional changes towards short-term and easy to measure results.
- the notion of mutual accountability is evolving. As Nancy Birdsall pointed out on the CGD blog, there seems to be less focus on ‘mutual accountability’ between donors and developing countries, and more attention to accountability of donors to their taxpayers and of aid-recipient governments to their own citizens in their use of aid.
- there is more talk about the private sector. There were lots of meetings about the private sector and its role in development, but I got the impression that it was mainly discussions between governments, development finance institutions, and some government affairs and corporate social responsibility representatives of firms from industrialised countries. I saw no sign of any businesses from developing countries being part of the discussion. I wonder what anyone really involved in business would have made of Busan.
I’m glad to see more people taking development effectiveness seriously, and impressed that the UN General Secretary and US Secretary of State felt it worth their while to attend. I also agree that it is important to build broader coalitions, and to think strategically about development and not just aid. But I also regret that, as a consequence, these meetings are gradually losing the focus on more technical issues about how aid is delivered. In 2003, the signatories to the Rome Declaration committed themselves to amend their “individual institutions’ and countries’ policies, procedures and practices to facilitate harmonisation”. Yet in 2011 in Busan, the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, gave a masterclass in aid effectiveness, in which he observed
Developing countries spend more time and energy agreeing on procedures and accounting to donors and an ever-increasing number of related non-state actors than in actual development work, often responding to endless questioning that no answers can fully satisfy.
As Busan has shifted the discussion away from the nuts and bolts of how aid is delivered, and pushed much of the specific discussion of aid effectiveness to country level, it is not clear to me that there is any place left to address the concerns about donor agency policies which President Kagame so eloquently expressed.
In years to come, I expect that we will look back on the Busan agreement as a reflection of changing realities, including the growing range of different kinds of donors and shifting geopolitical power. I think it less likely that we will look back on Busan as having done much to shape those realities.
Further reading:
Aid Alert: China Officially Joins the Donor Club By Nancy Birdsall (President of CGD), December 5, 2011
Busan HLF4: The will and the way By Brian Atwood (Chair of DAC), December 8, 2011
Busan has been an expression of shifting geopolitical realities By Jonathan Glennie (ODI / Guardian), December 2, 2011
A View from Busan By Andris Piebalgs (EU Development Commissioner), December 5, 2011
Reflections on Busan By Judith Randel (Development Initiatives), December 9, 2011
Beyond Aid to Open Development By Alan Hudson (ONE), December 6, 2011
Moving towards open development By Sanjay Pradhan (World Bank), December 1, 2011
Busan: Yes we could By Patrick Love (OECD), November 30, 2011
An unnoticed but crucial development summit By Manuel Manrique (FRIDE), December 4, 2011
Busan: A Bang or a Whimper? By Alan Hudson (ONE), December 2, 2011
Busan: Why Aid Effectiveness Matters By Jessica Espey (Save the Children), December 1, 2011
Busan Forum: Aid promises come tumbling down By Sanda Van Damm and Jennifer Martin (Oxfam), November 29, 2011
Verdict still out on whether Busan is a good deal for poor countries By Oxfam, December 1, 2011
Two-speed aid effectiveness By Stefan Leiderer & Stephan Klingebiel, December 7, 2011
‘Value for money’ or ‘Results Obsession Disorder’? By Marcus Leroy (ex Belgian Development Cooperation), December 7, 2011
A killing embrace of diversity By Reinier van Hoffen, December 6, 2011
Towards more effective aid By Axel von Trotsenburg (World Bank), December 1, 2011
Written Ministerial Statement: Outcome of the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness By Andrew Mitchell (UK Secretary of State), December 7, 2011
Three-way-learning. The South-South Agenda in Busan, By Han Fretters (World Bank), December 1, 2011
Aid architecture debate surfaces new ideas, appetite for dialogue By Axel van Trotsenburg (World Bank), December 2, 2011
h/t @ithorpe
On which subject, I’m amazed by how many international development organisations do not make effective use of video conferencing, either by using commercial systems (eg Polycom, Tandridge) or Skype or (my favourite for low bandwith settings) GoToMeeting.
This joint post with Stephanie Majerowicz first appeared on the Views from the Center blog at the Center for Global Development
“The defining division these days is increasingly: open or closed? Are we open to the changing world? Or do we see its menace, but not its possibilities?”
—Tony Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, September 2006
It is easy to be cynical about international summits and their carefully drafted communiqués. But they sometimes matter more than people expect. (If they didn’t, why would government officials put so much time and effort into negotiating the text?) Even if the text is often a bland compromise, these meetings can help to move an issue forward, by locking in a new consensus which forms the platform for further progress.
We saw how this works at this week’s High Level Forum on development effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. In a speech notable for a thinly veiled warning about aid from China, Secretary Clinton made the welcome announcement that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which entails the publication of the details of all US aid projects. This decision has given a major impetus to the international movement for aid transparency, which has been one of the important outcomes of the Busan meeting. According to US administration insiders, this decision was in part a consequence of an earlier international initiative, which has not had as much attention as it deserves: the Open Government Partnership (OGP).
The OGP is an effort to create a club of nations committed to good governance and transparency. It was launched a few months ago in New York, at a side-event of the UN meetings, by 26 heads of state, the culmination of months of work by the White House and eight partner governments.
David Eaves (an open government enthusiast from Canada) sees the Open Government Partnership as more than just another meeting. The OGP, he says:
…is much more than a simple pact designed to make heads of state look good. I believe it has real geopolitical aims and may be the first overt, ideological salvo in the what I believe will be the geopolitical axis of Open versus Closed. This is about finding ways to compete for the hearts and minds of the world in a way that China, Russia, Iran and others simpley cannot.
The Economist blog is less convinced: in their view “this is really nothing new or major” especially because the partnership includes “such beacons of openness as Russia and Pakistan.”
We’ve warmed to the Open Government Partnership after some initial skepticism. The architects never had the grandiose ambitions that David Eaves suggests: rather they wanted to do something which might encourage small, tangible improvements in the way governments promote transparency and good governance. The idea is to provide a network of support to reformers across the world pushing for open government, to enable them to share ideas and lessons, and to strengthen their hand by demonstrating to sceptics that they are part of a broader international movement. It brings government’s domestic achievements to the international spotlight to encourage reforms and reformers. By that modest yardstick, the initiative is a step in the right direction.
Why were we skeptical at first? Partly for the reasons set out by the Economist: the standards for joining the OGP (and the implicit endorsement that it confers) are not very exacting. What kind of transparency club has Russia and Azerbaijan as members? More importantly, we felt that an international initiative would have most value if it focused on transparency of cross border flows such as payments by companies for minerals, cross-border transactions between multinational companies and their subsidiaries, aid transparency, and cooperation between tax authorities. It is in tackling transnational problems that an international coalition makes most sense. But there was little political appetite for starting with these difficult international problems, and the OGP has focused mainly on encouraging its members to implement policies which promote transparency domestically.
But although the OGP has not focused on improving the transparency of international flows, there are already signs of how it can work to put pressure on its members to be more open. It has apparently contributed to the announcement this week that the US would join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, bringing the US into line with other OGP members. Furthermore there is now a debate bubbling up in the UK about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative which requires governments publicly to disclose their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to disclose the payments they make. President Obama announced at the launch of the OGP that the US would itself become a member of the EITI. As a result, the UK is now under pressure to follow suit. Although the UK was a supporter of EITI from its inception, it has never joined itself (partly because of opposition from the Business Department): a position which will be more difficult to sustain if and when the US fulfills President Obama’s commitment to join. That is exactly the kind of international peer pressure which OGP is designed to generate.
So the OGP is, to misquote Churchill, a modest initiative with much to be modest about. It was not conceived as the opening salvo of a new battle, but as a small step to encourage and support those countries round the world who want to move towards greater openness and transparency. There are some welcome signs that it is already making a difference. It may eventually lose momentum, especially as the politicians who put it together move on, and it may become too diluted by the undemanding criteria for membership. We hope not.
This blog post first appeared on the Media and Government site.
The Institute for Government is hosting a panel debate on ‘Policy by Twitter’ today with Tom Watson, Tim Montgomerie, Alberto Nardelli and David Babbs, chaired by Jill Rutter. It is part of the Media and Government series in collaboration with Fishburn Hedges.
Online engagement may have bigger implications for politics than many commentators, journalists and politicians have yet realized. The generic description ‘new media’ could lead to a false sense that little has changed by implying that facebook, twitter and blogs are just a faster, less professional version of the ‘old media’. But perhaps they are the early signs of a form of social engagement which is qualitatively different from old media, in ways with important implications for government and policymakers.
Consider the demise of the News of the World. The paper was not killed by competition from new media: it brought itself down by a failure of journalistic integrity, and by management which either did not know or did not care how journalists were getting their scoops. In the past this might have been a survivable incident: it would merely have joined a long litany of press misjudgments, alongside the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, Piers Morgan’s anti-German Mirror headline and the Daily Mail’s support for Hitler and Mussolini. But this time the error was terminal for the News of the World. What has changed?
The collapse of the News of the World is partly the result of a new understanding by British politicians that their political future no longer depends on the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron and Ed Milliband realized that they not only could but should disown their relationships with him – an act which would have been considered political suicide only a few years before. And it was not just that the stranglehold of newspaper proprietors over politicians had been relaxed. The final nail in the coffin for the News of the World was a short campaign on twitter which persuaded companies to withhold their advertising from Britain’s biggest highest-circulation newspaper.
This suggests that new media is not just a faster and 24 hour news channel. The political economy of media is changing in three important ways.
First, the economics of media are changing in a way which could shift political power. The old media required expensive equipment for printing presses and broadcasting studios, and income from advertising revenues or governments to cover significant running costs. Wealthy individuals and business provided the capital for old media, and often subsidized loss-making newspapers. The wealthy owners acquired political influence through their ownership of limited means of mass communication. By contrast, new media requires no capital. From Mumsnet to the Huffington Post, everyone now has the tools of mass communication in their hands, irrespective of wealth. The decision of British politicians to ostracize News International appears to be an unconscious recognition of a new world in which wealth no longer buys control of mass communication, and so buys less political power too. If so, this will have significant implications for the way that policy is made in future.
Second, the new media is a conversation not a broadcast. This is more than a difference in form: it is a difference in attitude and meaning. For digital natives the impact of the internet on media is analogous to the impact of the enlightenment on science: the authority of a message is not derived from the position of the person from whom it comes, but from it being exposed to human interaction, review and scrutiny. Digital natives increasingly do not rely on a newspaper editor to curate news stories, but on their extended social network which guides them to interesting news and commentary. They expect articles to be followed by user comments, which draw attention to errors of fact and weaknesses in reasoning. This combination of social filtering and the wisdom of crowds draws good content to the surface in a way which is both more reliable and more democratic than the old media. The government is at risk of treating new media as if it were a new way to transmit information to the public, without being willing (or knowing how) to engage in the conversation which for digital natives is the essence of its legitimacy.
Third, digital citizens engage in a long tail of conversations. Chris Anderson explained in 2004 how online businesses such as Amazon and Netflix make money by selling a large number of distinct items in relatively small quantities to consumers with specific interests. For bricks-and-mortar stores the costs of distribution and inventory made it impossible to serve this ‘long tail’ of niche interests. Similarly old media, with high marginal costs, has only ever been able to serve a narrow range of topics which they deem to be of wide appeal. This has led to a conceit that they are the centre of the ‘national conversation’, as if popular interests were normally distributed along a bell curve and they were able to serve people within one or two standard deviations of the typical citizen. But the public’s appetite for engagement is not normally distributed: it follows a power law (or ‘long tail’) distribution. With zero distributional costs, new media can serve small groups of people with deep interests in niche topics in a way that old media never could.
These three characteristics of new media – low capital needs, a culture of engagement and the long tail distribution – could have profound implications for policy making and especially the way that the government interacts with citizens. The public will increasingly expect to have a conversation with government, not a one-way transmission of information. They will be less inclined to accept the authority of pronouncements from the government, unless they are confident that it can be the subject of detailed scrutiny. They will expect engagement on a wide range of topics previously regarded as of interest only to a limited few, not a focus on a single issue of the day.
This could bring about considerable changes in the way policy is made and communicated. For example:
a. The government will have to become accustomed to publishing all the data it holds, and the analysis which underlies its policy choices, to enable calculations to be reproduced and judgments scrutinized. The public will be less and less inclined to take the government’s word for it. (Examples: OBR, ICAI)
b. Social media strategies will have to mean more than employing someone in the press office to post press releases online and link to them on twitter; government departments will have to become part of the online conversation. (FCO Ambassador blogging is moving in this direction).
c. The long tail of public interests means that most public communication can no longer be channeled through ministers and press offices. Guidelines requiring officials to refer all enquiries to the press office will need to give way to new rules which allow technical experts across the range of subjects to engage directly with citizens, in the way they have in the past through meetings with lobby groups.
d. The erosion of the political power of media proprietors may democratize policy-making to a broader cross section of society. It will be harder to sew up a consensus among the political classes.
None of this means, of course, that government will make policy or have conversations with the public in 140 character tweets. Twitter is merely the dial tone of new media. It is the background hum which confirms you that you are online. It is increasingly the gateway to interesting content and conversations. Policy by new media – including Twitter – could look very different from today’s world.
This blog post first appeared on the aidinfo site.
More than two thousand delegates have gathered today in Busan, South Korea, for the fourth installment of a succession of meetings aimed at making aid more effective.
There has been significant progress since the meeting in Accra in 2008 towards improving transparency of aid. This is important because it’s a pre-requisite for achieving all the aid effectiveness principles. Jamie Drummond from the ONE campaign explains this very well in the Huffington Post.
The challenge is to provide information to people at country level. Our existing aid information systems are mainly designed to enable donors to share information with each other, not to meet the needs of people in developing countries.
But the information needs at country level are hugely diverse, both between and within developing countries. Within governments, the information needs of the finance ministry are different from the needs of line ministries. The needs of parliamentarians, civil society, media and citizens are all different again. It is impractical for donors to try to meet the needs of every niche interest with their own subset of the data in a particular format.
뜻이 있는 곳에 길이 있다 (where there’s a will there’s a way)
Here’s the technical bit: the way to serve all these different needs for information without massive duplication and bureaucracy is to separate the data from the interface. An open, standardised, detailed, shared data layer can support a whole range of different applications, tailored to specific users.
That is why it is so exciting that the open data revolution is coming to aid. In 2008, in a side-meeting in Accra, a coalition of willing donors, developing countries, foundations and NGOs made a declaration which launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative. A lot of that data is now being published – countries accounting for nearly half of global aid are now publishing through IATI, and that proportion will grow in the coming months.
If you are in Busan this week, and you want to know how IATI works, the IATI secretariat will be doing a briefing at 5pm on Wednesday, in room KW202 (I’m making a guest appearance to show off some beta software, so do come along and laugh at me when it doesn’t work).
천릿길은 한 걸음부터 (A 1000-li journey starts with one step)
Transparency by itself does not lead to more accountability, less waste, or better coordination. That happens when people are able to use the information. The extent to which they are able to do so depends on their context, including the political and administrative climate. Open data won’t automatically make organisations responsive, but will greatly reduce the difficulty and cost for citizens of taking the data and turning it into something meaningful and useful.
With an open aid data platform now in place, huge opportunities are being opened. We can use the standard to introduce traceability of aid as it passes from organisation to organisation. We can improve the quality and detail of the data that is collected and publish it through these systems.
Reporting of aid data should be not just by donors but by NGOs, private sector implementing agencies and foundations. The mechanisms for sharing information can be extended beyond aid to other kinds of resources for poverty reduction. We can add detailed geo-coding, to enable aid projects and programmes to be mapped, and better coordinated. We can begin to compare across aid programmes and across countries. We can mix aid information with other data from other sources.
The twenty four donors who have signed IATI should be congratulated for their efforts to make data available. The payoff from that effort will come when we all start to use the data to understand aid better: to see what is working and what is not, and to hold the aid system to account, so leading to improvements in the effectiveness of aid. IATI removes the most significant barriers to entry for a wide range of diverse applications.
The next step is to nurture and encourage an ecosystem of civil society groups, parliamentarians, researchers, think tanks, academics, governments, private sector organisation, media and hackers, all accessing and using the information in different ways, and using this as a platform to push for improvements in how resources for poverty reduction are used. The new Open Aid Partnership is an example of an initiative of this kind: the door is now open for many more.
We can now look forward to the day when we take for granted the ubiquitous availability of aid data. We will soon forget that it was ever a struggle to find out about aid projects in a developing country, or to follow the money through NGOs and implementing partners. Having laid these important foundations, we will be able to move on to much more important and exciting innovations which support people in developing countries to use and repurpose this information and use it to change their world.
Will the largest aid donors hide behind China to excuse their inability to make substantial improvements in foreign aid? How can Busan balance the desire to be more universal with the pressing need for real changes in the way aid is given?
Much of the development policy world converges on Busan this week for the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. This is the fourth in the series after Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). The Guardian has a good ‘explainer’ about the issues being discussed.
Behind the scenes here in Busan, the trade-off is between getting everybody on board, including new providers of south-south cooperation such as China, India and Brazil, and pushing the boundaries towards more effective aid from existing donors.
Liberian children hold Chinese flags before the arrival of China's President Hu Jintao
Busan offers the possibility of a globally inclusive agreement, especially bringing in the important providers of south-south cooperation such as China and India, and non-traditional donors such as foundations and the private sector. But a broad consensus may only be possible if the text is sufficiently watered down. New donors are unlikely to sign up to an agreement which seeks faster improvements in development assistance by setting more explicit and demanding targets than were agreed in Paris and Accra. Most would not be willing to sign up even to long-established effectiveness principles such as untying aid, more predictability, and greater transparency and accountability. Nor are they likely to agree to be bound by any kind of monitoring or enforcement regime.
Many of the organisations involved in Busan have a strong institutional interest in emphasizing the benefits of a ‘big tent’ agreement:
- Individual DAC donors will be glad to talk up the importance of drawing new players into the process. They can trumpet this as a big step forward, especially to domestic audiences which feel threatened by China’s growing global role. They can pretend to be disappointed that it has required them to accept a rather bland communique which steps back from their existing commitments, while being privately relieved to have been let them off the hook for the improvements in aid to which they have agreed in the past and which they have shown themselves unwilling to make.
- A dialogue with new donors could give a new raison d’être to the DAC, an OECD body which is otherwise staring into the abyss of obsolescence. The DAC is a club of traditional government donors which constitute a dwindling proportion of global aid; nobody any more believes that an exclusive group of donors should set the rules of the aid system; and anyway DAC members themselves have failed to implement the principles they have agreed. It is not lost on the 150 staff of the DAC that hosting a dialogue between traditional and emerging donors could give the DAC a new lease of life.
- The Korean hosts will be looking ahead to how the Busan conference will be remembered. Building the bridge to new Asian donors would be a natural legacy. Korea has itself only recently joined the DAC and they would be very glad to shift the discussion away from compliance with a (largely European inspired) aid effectiveness agenda towards the value of a broader dialogue with emerging donors and the private sector.
- China would be happy to have a declaration which validates their approach to development cooperation, but they do not regard this as important. They are apparently sending a small, low-key, delegation of about six people to Busan, and it is rumoured that they will either not sign the outcome document at all, or that they will sign as a developing country but not as a donor. China believes that different rules should apply to ‘south south cooperation’, so in principle they do not regard any of this discussion as applicable to the aid they give. In any case, China gives very little actual aid (as defined by the DAC) – probably less in total than Switzerland. The vast majority of China’s involvement in developing countries takes the form of quasi-commercial trade credits which are not included within the scope of these aid effectiveness discussions.
Given these strong institutional interests which favour getting China on board, it is no surprise that the latest (5th) draft of the Busan Outcome Document is a largely anodyne document with few additional commitments by donors. The UK Aid Network has a concise update about this here. Unless this changes in the next few days, Busan will be remembered as the conference at which traditional donors retreated from the explicit, time-bound commitments and monitoring arrangements which they agreed in Paris in 2005.
There is one group of stakeholders with something to lose from this: the people of developing countries who are the intended beneficiaries of aid, whose voice is not strongly heard in the discussions. They are the people who lose out when aid is wasted because it is unpredictable, untransparent and unaccountable. It is their services, not the aid bureaucracies, which suffer when there is duplication and burgeoning bureaucracy. It is their businesses which are damaged by tied aid. It is their governments which become answerable not to their citizens but to an unaccountable group of donors. A decision to accept a weaker, more universal agreement in Busan will satisfy the donors, but the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world will pay the price.
As Gideon Rabinowitz of the UK Aid Network pointed out last week, the Accra communique was similarly disappointing at a similar stage before the 2008 conference. That time round, a group of European development ministers arrived in Accra and insisted on significant improvements, causing outrage among other participants, not least the bureaucrats who had sat through endless drafting meetings over the preceding months only to find their work had been nugatory. But this year, those donors seem to be much less inclined to use any of their economic or political capital pushing for improvements in aid. So it will suit them to emphasize the importance of a new agreement which includes China, and hide behind this as an excuse for their own inability to summon the political will to make aid more effective.
There is, however, another approach which could both and secure broad international agreement and still lead to substantive improvements in aid effectiveness. We should learn from what has happened since the Accra High Level Forum in 2008, in particular on transparency which is the issue on which there has been most progress. Donors accounting for half of global aid are now publishing their aid data through the new International Aid Transparency Initiative, IATI. But this has not been achieved by the official DAC processes which are limited to moving at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy. Instead, a coalition of willing donors has worked alongside the official process to agree and implement an international aid transparency standard.
There is a lesson here as we consider how to move forward from Busan. A possible approach is to accept an outcome document setting out principles which represent the ‘highest common factor’ among all the participants, which is buttressed by (and which could endorse and launch) various coalitions which are willing to move forward more quickly on particular issues (e.g. predictability, using country systems, and so on). These coalitions can then be pathfinders, leading by example and exerting peer pressure on other donors. Taxpayers in donor countries can put pressure on their governments to join these coalitions, so that their aid also benefits from the improvements which the coalitions are bringing about (in the way, for example, that the Canadian NGO Engineers Without Borders has put pressure on the Canadian government to join IATI.) There is more hope of achieving real progress through a series of path-finding coalitions than by investing all our energy in a universal agreement which is acceptable to everyone and satisfies nobody.
Some rights reserved
Recent Comments