The door to development
Accountability,
transparency, participation, and inclusion have emerged as crucial aid
priorities and principles as part of the broader opening of the door to politics
in development work over the past twenty-five years. This opening was driven by
a change in thinking about development that occurred at major aid institutions
in the late 1980s—the realization that bad governance is often a key driver of
chronic underdevelopment, and that the donor emphasis on market reform would
only succeed if developing countries built capable, effective state
institutions. Developmentalists at the time framed this insight in politically neutral-sounding
terms as “good governance.” Yet by incorporating this concept into mainstream
development work, they inevitably recognized the pressing need for greater
donor attention to political institutions and processes.
The
dramatically changed international political landscape opened the door to
politics in aid work in several additional ways. The end of the superpower rivalry
between the United States and the Soviet Union weakened some of the political
constraints that had characterized much development work in the second half of
the twentieth century—chiefly the need for major Western donors to maintain friendships with
strategically useful partners in the developing world in spite of their records
of domestic repression. The U.S. and European governments of course retained
close military and trade relations with various authoritarian governments for
the sake of security and economic interests— including, for example, with Egypt
and Saudi Arabia. Yet in a number of places no longer ensnared in a global
ideological contest, such as sub-Saharan Africa, they proved increasingly
willing to raise problematic domestic political issues with aid-receiving
governments. In addition, the onset of a startling global wave of
democratization, which Western governments generally perceived to be in their
political and economic interest, prompted Western aid actors to find new ways
to support this trend. Providing politically related assistance quickly emerged
as a crucial tool in this regard.
The end of the
global ideological schism as well as rapidly growing civil society activism in
many countries attempting democratic transitions also brought about a greater
international consensus on human rights frameworks and their role as tools for
social and political change. Some Western donor governments that had previously
emphasized only the political and civil sides of human rights began giving
greater attention to socioeconomic rights. This emerging agreement in turn
triggered heightened attention to human rights issues and approaches as an
integral part of development work. Human rights advocates argued for
disempowerment and exclusion to be understood both as root causes and
consequences of chronic poverty, and stressed that economic growth should serve
as a means rather than the end goal of human development.
Reflecting this emerging perspective, the
Vienna Declaration issued at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights
emphasized that “democracy, development, and human rights . . . are
interdependent” and affirmed that development efforts themselves should respect
and enhance human rights, rather than pursue economic prosperity at the expense
of the latter.
As a result of
these varied drivers of change, the development community started to shed the
apolitical mindset and technocratic habits that had characterized it since the
1950s. Three new streams of assistance took hold, reflecting the impetus toward
a greater integration of politics into development: aid to strengthen
governance, to support democracy, and to advance human rights. Governance
quickly became a focus at many mainstream development organizations. Democracy
was taken on as a priority area by a smaller number, initially USAID and
several more specialized political aid organizations that were funded by
governments but at arm’s length from them, such as the National Endowment for
Democracy and various European political foundations.
Rights-based
development became a growing preoccupation of several northern European donors
as well as a number of multilateral institutions, especially within the United
Nations family.
Although these
three different streams all grew out of a greater attention to political
methods and goals in development work, they took shape as somewhat separate
areas of aid. Governance assistance aimed at strengthening core institutions of
public administration and financial management, and gradually expanded to also
cover service delivery. Democracy aid concentrated primarily on assisting the
formal processes and institutions regulating and shaping political competition,
such as elections, political parties, and parliaments.
And
rights-based programming tried to define core socioeconomic areas— like food,
shelter, and education—in terms of rights-holders and duty-bearers and to
translate this conception into more forceful policy attention to the power
inequalities underlying core development problems.
These three new
rivers of international aid were separated not only by different programming
foci, but also by different philosophies of development and some degree of
mutual distrust among their respective communities.
Governance
practitioners were often wary of emphasizing rapid democratization in
developing countries with weak state institutions, afraid that premature
political liberalization might pave the way for fragmentation and populist
pressures that would undermine efforts to foster governance efficiency and
effectiveness. Democracy promoters in turn worried that governance programs
emphasizing the strengthening of central state institutions might reinforce
anti-democratic governments resistant to the distribution or alternation of
power. The human rights community, for its part, viewed the new democracy
promotion cause with considerable suspicion, worried that it might be the
handmaiden of ideologically driven political interventionism serving interests
far removed from development.
And rights
specialists were equally wary of governance assistance, which they thought too
often involved uncritical, supportive partnerships between aid actors and
abusive governments seeking to improve their economic performance without
addressing human rights concerns.
Governance work
initially concentrated on public sector efficiency and competence, with a
programmatic focus on public expenditure management, civil service reform, and
privatization. Yet this narrow conception steadily broadened to take on board
the principles of accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion.
This change occurred for multiple reasons. Starting in the mid-1990s, the World
Bank and other major donors began concentrating on corruption—which many aid
providers had traditionally avoided confronting head on, viewing it as too
politically sensitive—as a key obstacle to poverty reduction. Public sector
accountability and transparency emerged as crucial concepts in the effort to
reduce opportunities for corruption and strengthen internal and external
monitoring mechanisms.
The emergence
in those years of transnational advocacy movements that were focused on
government transparency and accountability further pushed the aid community to
begin tackling these issues in their work. Transparency International and other
groups helped push anticorruption onto the agenda.
Nongovernmental
groups in developed as well as developing countries led a widening campaign for freedom of
information that in many places produced new laws and regulation guaranteeing
citizens’ right of access to government information. More recently, the global
civil society push for open government has further solidified attention to
public sector transparency in domestic and international policy circles.
The gradual
shift from project aid toward budget support also reinforced
donor interest
in accountability and transparency as prerequisites for aid effectiveness.
As donors
channeled more assistance directly to central governments to strengthen state
capacity and country ownership, they put greater emphasis on governance reforms
that would ensure the responsible use of these resources.
In addition,
frustration with the meager impact of the first wave of technical assistance to
improve government effectiveness pushed donors to broaden their thinking about
how institutional change might be achieved. Faced with the recognition that
technocratic inputs were not enough to overcome entrenched resistance to
reforms, they began to look for ways to encourage greater citizen engagement,
hoping that those groups suffering from the consequences of poor governance
might constitute a more effective driver of positive change.
The rising
emphasis on the citizen side of the equation therefore naturally prompted
greater attention to accountability and participation. The United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) was a leader in this area in the early 2000s,
pushing for the concept of democratic governance—by which it meant the infusion
of elements of accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion—as a
fruitful formulation of a broadened governance agenda.
The 2004 World
Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People, further
specifically highlighted the importance of accountability in addressing the
catastrophic failure of service delivery to the world’s poorest people, and pointed
to citizen engagement and direct interaction with service providers as a
crucial part of the solution. It recommended, for example, that donors should not
only focus on channeling resources and technical assistance to underperforming public
education systems, but also support citizens in addressing local challenges
such as teacher absenteeism and bribery by monitoring performance and directly
engaging with responsible providers and officials.
This broadening
created a bridge across some of the divisions between the governance community
on the one hand and the democracy and human rights communities on the other.
Democracy aid practitioners embraced accountability, transparency,
participation, and inclusion as intrinsic democratic values, viewing their work
on democratic elections, political parties, and parliaments as support for
these very same principles. The democracy community therefore felt that developmentalists
who were giving greater attention to the four principles were simply catching
up with progress it had already achieved. Similarly, those aid practitioners
pushing for greater donor attention to human rights frameworks and instruments
viewed the four concepts as core operational principles of a human-rights-based
approach to development. They supported their adoption by mainstream aid
organizations as crucial elements of good aid practice to be included in aid planning,
implementation, and evaluation. In particular, they focused on reaching the
most marginalized groups, deepening participation and local control over
development processes, and enhancing accountability structures by drawing on
international human rights norms and instruments.
(from Thomas Carothers and Saskia
Brechenmacher, article)
تعليقات
إرسال تعليق