Owen abroad

Archive for November, 2008

I am in favour of more openness in government, and against leaking by civil servants.

Almost everyone recognises the need for secrecy in some discrete areas of government, such as security and defence, and for information about individuals to be protected. But there is debate about whether information about other areas of government policy should be protected.

There are some – including my father, Brian Barder – who argue that governments are entitled to retain some information privately to permit effective decision-making.  On this view, Ministers are entitled to advice and analysis before a choice is made, and if that advice is likely to be published then it is less likely to be sought, or it will be provided in phone calls, text messages or in un-minuted meetings to avoid the need for disclosure. This will result in less comprehensive and frank advice, and less well-informed decisions.  That is a serious concern.

The alternative view is that if officials know that advice will be published, they will do a better job in providing evidence-based, impartial and comprehensive advice; and Ministers will do a better job of making decisions consistent with what the evidence and analysis is telling them.  Transparency makes it harder for Governments to do irrational things.  It reduces the power of insider lobby groups and creates political pressure for better government.   It makes it more likely that governments will take a longer-term view rather than seek short-term political advantage.  Furthermore, controlled release of information is sometimes used by government to “spin” the message and to create an unhealthy dependency between the media and government spin doctors.

A lot of government information is classified to avoid embarassment rather than to avoid harm to the interests of the nation.  (The use of the classification “sensitive but unclassified” is a case in point.)

But although I am in favour of greater transparency in government, I am not in favour of leaking of government information by civil servants.

The media and MPs seem to have sided with Damian Green MP on the basis that democracy requires a flow of information from government to, err, the media and MPs, and that this information would not be available within the current law.

Parliament should debate and decide the amount of transparency it wants of the executive part of government, and ministers and officials should then comply with that law.  Parliament has done this by way of the Official Secrets Act (1989).   Having passed the law, there is no excuse for those same Parliamentarians to collaborate with civil servants who break the law by receiving or using that information, still less by encouraging them.   If MPs believe that the good functioning of democracy depends on more information being made available than is currently required and allowed by law, then they should change the law, not break it.

For the police to enforce the law, as passed by Parliament, is not an intrusion of police power into democracy.  Enforcing the law is the job of the police; and if Parliament doesn’t like the law then they are in a peculiarly strong position to do something about it.

In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve.

1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It’s hard to identify a good project for a small community. Community buy-in is no guarantee of success; possessing deep local knowledge doesn’t make a person omniscient. Projects that have little chance of success include vocational training in sewing and handicrafts, beekeeping, and raising chickens. If you waste a year of the community’s time on a broiler chicken project that never makes a profit, that’s a year of time and effort which could have gone to real income generation or looking after children.

2) You can leave communities convinced that they need outsiders to solve their problems. If you raise $3000 for a backhoe to clear irrigation ditches, then what happens next time the ditches silt up? The farmers’ cooperative will never realize they could have cleared it with hand shovels, or raised the money by charging a membership fee.

3) You can damage beneficial community structures, or solidify harmful structures. Your choice of community intermediary elevates that person or group, by putting them in control (real or perceived control) of valuable assets. If you work with existing power structures, you can support and entrench inequalities, such as sexism or racism, which are already present. If you chose partners who are not part of the current elite, you can destabilize delicate community balances, and erode resilience.

4) You can construct a building and then not provide funds for maintenance or staffing. A school needs a teacher. A clinic needs a doctor or nurse. All buildings need upkeep – painting and repairs at the very least. A building with not funds for maintenance is a drain on community resources in perpetuity, or an eyesore.

Those are all serious risks.  I can think of two more:

5)  You hire good people to deliver the best service you can. But those people would otherwise have been working for government or another local organisation.  The good they could have done in government might far exceed the good they can do in your organisation.  There are donors here in Addis Ababa who pay their drivers more than twice what an experienced doctor will get paid in a government hospital. Where do you think the doctors want to work?  Reckless hiring by donors can create skills shortages in key institutions and drive up wages so that provision of services becomes less affordable.

6)  You establish yourself as an influential player in the sector you work in; you become friendly with Ministers and senior officials; you are invited to key meetings.  This is good: you can help to push things in the right direction. But the people you are influencing should be accountable to their own citizens, not to you.  And there are three more like you, all pushing in slightly different directions, making it very difficult for any government to maintain a common sense of purpose.  And who are you accountable to?  With the aim of doing the right thing, you are undermining the legitimate accountability of the system you are influencing.

These risks apply to official government donors and multilateral organistions as much as they do to NGOs.

An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries.  According to the Daily Telegraph

Figures from the Department for International Development show that over the past five years the UK has handed £1.6 billion to 15 of the world’s poorest countries. But research from campaigning group Transparency International shows that many of these rank highly in its corruption index of 180 countries.

There are several points to make about this:

1. There is no evidence that aid has been subject to corruption
   Transparency International does not claim (pdf) to have found any evidence of corruption in the use of UK aid. The Daily Telegraph report says that that some countries to which the UK gives budget support score poorly on the TI corruption index. But it does not follow that any of that aid is being corrupted and there is no evidence in the TI report that it is.
2. Budget support is no more likely to be subject to corruption than other forms of aid
   A major, multi-donor review of budget support found

   “Corruption is a serious problem in all the study countries, but the country study teams found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.

   Indeed, the Conservative Party policy review on Globalisation and Global Poverty notes:

   Many oppose Programme Support, and particularly General Budget Support, because of worries about corruption. However, other modes of delivering aid are also prone to corruption.

   The same TI report hightlights extensive corruption in conflict, reconstruction and post-conflict contexts (which are not typically the places to which the UK gives budget support). The report highlights the risk of corruption in tied aid and the risk of bidder collusion in aid tenders (both of which are reduced by budget support).  In other words, in countries in which corruption is high, all aid will be at risk of corruption.  Moving aid from budget support to other forms of aid does not reduce that risk.

3. Giving budget support enables donors to tackle corruption
   Corruption is very bad for a country, especially for the poor.  If donors are serious about corruption, they should be trying to reduce corruption as a whole, and not just protecting their own money. Experience suggests that when donors bypass a country’s budget, procument and auditing processes they are less likely to take an interest in tackling broader corruption. When they are interested, they have no basis on which to get involved, since none of their money is at stake.  If donors want to help to reduce corruption they have to engage with the country’s processes. Budget support not only forces donors to do so, it turns them into legitimate stakeholders in helping to improve those systems.  This engagement helps address corruption in the whole of the government budget, and not just that part financed by foreign aid.
4. Using other forms of aid is a less effective way to reduce corruption
   Again in the same report, Transparency International say that making aid more accountable to donors is less effective at reducing corruption than steps to increase domestic accountability:

   Upward accountability by recipient countries to donors has demonstrated its serious limitations in terms of relevance as well as in its ability to detect corruption. Rather strengthening the accountability of aid toward intended beneficiaries is the most effective way of limiting abuses.

   In other words, Transparency International itself does not believe that replacing aid that is locally accountable with aid that is accountable to donors is a good way to reduce corruption.

5. Budget support improves local accountability and so tackles the broader problem of corruption and financial management
   The Conservative Party policy review observes:

   “if aid is channelled through the government budget and is accompanied by steps to strengthen public financial management, the handling not only of donor funds but of tax revenues is improved. In addition, Budget and Programme Support make it easier for parliaments, the media and electorates to hold government accountable for how aid money alongside tax revenues are spent.”

   Because budget support provides donors with an opportunity to engage in reform of the public finances as a whole, and because it increases rather than reduces local accountability, it is likely that  budget support will result in less corruption in the long run than alternative forms of aid.

6. There is a cost to switching away from budget support
   Switching aid away from budget support to other forms of aid comes at a cost: on balance it reduces the effectiveness of that aid, so reducing the the overall impact on development; and it may reduce the ability of the country concerned to tackle the very problem of corruption that we profess to be concerned about.  The Conservative Party policy review said that:

When donors create parallel structures to deliver aid they can undermine both government ownership of policy and its ability to deliver (by recruiting scarce talent). So where aid can be effectively delivered through government or departmental budgets that is desirable.

In conclusion: donors are right to be concerned about corruption, but there is no reason to think that corruption is reduced, either in aid or in the country as a whole, if donors switch their aid from budget support to other forms of aid. On the other hand there are costs to doing so – in the form of reduced aid effectiveness, which means more people dying, as well as slower progress towards systems that are more accountable and less susceptible to corruption in the future.

So it does not follow that because some countries perform badly on the TI corruption perceptions index, that it is a bad idea to give those countries aid in the form of budget support.  Perhaps that is why the TI report itself explicitly counsels against that kind of reasoning:

Some governments have sought to use corruption scores to determine which countries receive aid and which do not. TI does not encourage the use of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in this way.

On his first day in office in 2001, President George W. Bush  reinstated the so-called Mexico City Policy — known to critics as the global gag rule. It prevents the US government from giving money to organizations that provide counseling and referral for abortion, lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country, or perform abortions except in cases of a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest (even if those activities are funded by somebody else).

On Development Drums this week, we heard about the impact of the global gag rule on women in Africa, in an interview with Dana Hovig from Marie Stopes International. (Full disclosure: my partner works for MSI.)  My expert guests were sceptical that Barack Obama would give priority to reversing the global gag rule any time soon.

But this weekend, we have heard that Obama is preparing to reverse some key decisions that President Bush took using executive authority, including on stem cell research, oil and gas drilling and – according to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Bloomberg – the global gag rule:

President-elect Barack Obama will reverse U.S. family-planning and AIDS-prevention strategies that have long linked global funding to anti-abortion and abstinence education, a public-health adviser said. Obama “is committed to looking at all this and changing the policies so that family-planning services — both in the U.S. and the developing world — reflect what works, what helps prevent unintended pregnancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality, prevent the spread of disease,” Wood said.

These seems like a good time to raise the profile of this important issue, to make sure that reversing the global gag rule is on the list of decisions for President Obama to take in his first day in office.  The Center for Reproductive Rights has written to Barack Obama calling for the repeal of the global gag rule.  Now is the time to make as much noise as possible about this to generate political support for an early decision to reverse this policy.

For more information about the global gag rule, listen to the interview with Dana Hovig in Episode 6 of Development Drums (about 30 minutes in to the podcast).

Jean Michel Severino says something you don’t often hear:

What is at stake with the MDGs is the creation on a global scale of the same sort of public redistribution mechanisms that were progressively established in the world’s richest societies over the course of the twentieth century. As most of today’s financial, environmental, or sanitary crises are unpredictable and ignore borders, it is in everyone’s interest to create a global “social safety net” that will span an indefinite period of time.  If we accept the logic behind the more pragmatic and ambitious philosophy of international aid that underpins the United Nations’ “Millennium Declaration,” we must quickly adapt our instruments to ensure more sustainable and predictable modes of financing.

As I argued the other day,it has become conventional to say that aid is temporary and transformational. There is political resistance to saying that transfers from rich countries to poor will be, and should be, a permanent part of a global society.

Foreign assistance is the modern equivalent of Victorian charity, as documented by Charles Dickens. It is given at the discretion of the rich to causes they consider worthy, surrounded by rhetoric about giving a helping hand.  Over time, it must evolve into a framework for global social justice and solidarity – provided as of right from those that hath, to those who hath not.

Severino’s view, which I agree with, has profound implications for how we conceive of foreign assistance, in terms of how we think about success, how we design activities and, as he says, how we make arrangements to pay for it.

As a West Wing junkie, I’m thrilled that Rahm Emmanuel may become President Obama’s Chief of Staff.

Emmanuel is apparently the model for the character of Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford – pictured right) from his days in the Clinton White House.

Lyman has always been my hero in West Wing (except for that are-they-aren’t-they thing with Donna, his assistant).

Of course the West Wing scriptwriters foresaw that Emmanuel would become Chief of Staff: in Series 7, Lyman becomes Chief of Staff to Matt Santos, the first non-white President of the United States (played by Jimmy Smits).

There are two new episodes of the Development Drums podcast now online.

Episode 4 with Shanta Devarajan discusses the impact on developing countries of the financial crisis; latest developments in the food crisis; the award of the Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa.  Sheila Page discusses moves towards a Free Trade Area from Cairo to Cape Town.

And there is a special extra edition of Development Drums about currente events in the Eastern Congo.  Patrick Smith of Africa Confidential explains the background to the crisis.

You can use this link to subscribe to Development Drums:

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If you have Google Alerts for your own name, or your company or website, you can now get your alert by RSS not just email:

Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

A deceptively small, but rather important, announcement.