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The door to development

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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)




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