… an important building block for future accountability.

As I understand it, there are two concerns. First, Owen takes the view that I have gravely misrepresented a serious contribution – in the form of the Conservative Party Green paper – to the international development debate. Second, and relatedly, he is “not comfortable with the fact that a UNESCO official, paid from public funds, is using his position to make highly partisan and inaccurate attacks in the newspapers on the main UK opposition party.”

On the first point, I fear it is Owen who is dealing in misrepresentation. My specific concern with the Green Paper is on education. The short section dealing with this important subject is a cut-and-paste job based on the work of James Tooley. For those of you unfamiliar with this particulal genre, it claims that the way forward for the poor is to promote low-fee private schools and a range of market-based interventions that will be familiar to those of you that follow the proposals of Michael Gove in the UK. As it happens, I do not discount a role for low-fee private providers under the right conditions (though Tooley’s work is a case study in ideology trumping evidence). What I object to is the failure of the Green paper to address in a serious way the challenge of strengthening public education systems through increased and more equitable public financing, more effective aid, the recruitment and training of teachers, and – above all – a stronger focus on marginalised communities. The chronic failure of the Fast track Initiative, which DfID could and should have done more to reform, is one of the many issues ducked in the Green Paper. But you can’t help wondering why some of the major public sector success stories in education of the past decade appear to have slipped the attention of the Conservative Party, while the rambling of Messrs Tooley et al get top billing. My view is that Owen is mistaking platitudes about the ‘right to education’ for substantive policies. Alan Hudson suggests that my Comment piece is based largely on interpretation. This is a fair point. But I stand by my interpretation.

On the subject of platitudes, I wonder if Owen himself should declare an interest. The Green Paper enthusiastically endorses a proposal that he is closely associated with: namely, cash-on-delivery aid. In a nutshell, this envisages aid recipients getting development assistance after they have achieved a specified result (such as getting x number of children through primary school and achieving specified test scores). It all sounds terribly attractive. But when you scratch the surface this is an approach that transfers risk from donors to aid recipients – a point made in a critique developed by Paolo de Renzio and Ngaire Woods at Oxford Univeresity’s Global Economic Governance Programme. Imposing a new form of ‘cash-on-delivery conditionality’ on poor countries does not strike me as a forward-looking approach to aid.

Finally, a word on UN officials making ‘partial and inaccurate attacks’. To set the record straight, I do not hold a brief for the Labour Party – and I did not write the Guardian piece as a UN official. My interest in development is not with conforming to whatever idea Owen of a disinterested UN official, but in what happens to real people. I leave it to others to decide whether I’m being partial and inaccurate. Hopefully, we can debate these issues without casting silly professional slurs. I stand by the claim that, when it comes to education, the Green Paper signals an ill thought-out drift towards market based approaches which, applied in poor countries, will damage equity and progress towards the education for all goals.

Owen is obviously entitled to act as a spokesperson for the Conservative Party – and to defend the Green Paper against what he sees as ‘partisan attacks’. But I can’t help feeling that, on this occasion, he is doing some highly partisan and inaccurate barking up the wrong tree.

Owen replies: Thanks for replying, Kevin. I certainly do not act as a spokesman for the Conservative Party.

But I think we agree that your case is based on your interpretation of the Green Paper, not on what it actually says.

For what it’s worth, Owen, I agree with your reading of the specific bit of the Green Paper that you suggest Kevin uses as the basis for his claim re rolling back the state. But perhaps his analysis/expectations are based on more than an interpretation of the Green Paper? It would have been better if that had been made more explicit.

Where’s Kevin?

However, my temporary status as a UK civil servant should perhaps restrain me, as does Owen’s analysis that (paraphrased, with apologies) acting as if the presumed development consensus is real is the best way of ensuring that a future government remains committed to sensible (?) policies on poverty reduction – although I am not totally persuaded by that analysis.

[I have been playing around with a matrix of real/unreal commitments or consensus, and best guesses about/probabilities of a future government, to consider whether challenging a party on the truthfulness/reality of its stated position is wise or unwise, but have found myself too busy trying to understand Ethiopian politics and ownership to complete my half-baked analysis!]

What I’d really like to see is a response by Kevin Watkins. In his absence, readers might be interested to have a look at Duncan Green’s recent piece on his dream manifesto for development http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/01/from-poverty-to-power/

Owen, do you think that putting forward a dream manifesto is acceptable or does that – and the judgement that is implicit in that about what a good policy and hence (assuming there are policy differences between parties on the issues in the dream manifesto) party position on international development is – put at risk the supposed cross-party consensus?

How much or what type of discussion of parties’ policies on international development is OK? What if someone’s voting decision were shaped by a party’s likely approach to international development? Wouldn’t that then merit some discussion of the likely/possible differences between parties?

Just some thoughts. Sanitized of my party political views. Almost. And with thanks to Owen and Duncan for interesting posts.

PS: I will be interested to see what my former ODI colleagues – a think tank that prides itself on its political neutrality and basing its advice on “evidence” – might have to say about this sort of thing, particularly with a change of government (and major client) in the offing.

Owen replies: Alan, I too am in favour of debate about party policies. But my point in this blog post is that these two particular articles are not part of a such a debate. Kevin Watkins criticizes a policy that the Conservatives do not advoate; this does not debate the issues, but tries to use development to score party political points. The Times leader is a combination of ignorant and misleading generalisation, and arguments unfit for a university debating society. Where there are substantive disagreements between the parties, we should debate them. But making false claims about parties development policies does not contribute to a serious debate about the best way to approach development.