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November 28, 2011
This post was originally featured on Owen Barder’s Owen Abroad: Thoughts on Development and Beyond blog.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?
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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.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:- Blog by Nancy Birdsall: Busan Alert: The United States Is Still a Unilateralist
- Related Publication: Measuring the Quality of Aid: QuODA Second Edition
- 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.
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CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.