allAfrica.com: Africa: Paris Declaration Undermines Policy Space Through Aid (Page 1 of 2)

Celine Tan argues that "the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness may have the effect of circumscribing national sovereignty and country autonomy over development policies contrary to its stated principles of country ownership and mutual accountability."

Two recent studies have highlighted the propensity of new modalities of aid and aid harmonisation processes under the Paris Declaration framework to increase rather than reduce donor interventions in aid recipient countries and exacerbating the imbalances of power between donor and recipient countries.

The Paris Declaration was adopted in 2005 as a roadmap to increase the quality of aid, and development assistance is increasingly influenced by whether the recipient developing countries comply with the Declaration's principles.

In a report prepared for the UN Human Rights Council?s High-Level Task Force on the Implementation of the Right to Development released earlier this year, Roberto Bissio, executive director of the Third World Institute and Social Watch based in Montevideo, Uruguay, argued that the relatively minor gains in efficiency and reduction of some transaction costs in the aid process are often overridden by the asymmetrical conditions under which negotiations are taking place between donors and recipients within the Paris Declaration framework.

Meanwhile, the findings of a study by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) released two weeks ago showed that donors have continued to undermine policy ownership in low-income developing countries by imposing their own priorities and policies on developing country governments through new aid instruments while marginalising the voice and participation by citizens and civil society groups in the process.

Taken together, these studies highlight the danger that the new architecture for negotiating and delivering concessional financing to developing countries under the rubric of the Paris Declaration may have the converse effect of reducing rather than improving the efficacy of development assistance.

They demonstrate that increased coordination of aid policies by developed countries can in practice work towards undermining rather than supporting global partnerships for development, including those under the Millennium Declaration, and create new forms of conditionalities on developing countries.

The Paris Declaration is a non-binding declaration that was endorsed by a group of developed and developing countries in 2005, following on from a series of high-level inter-governmental forums on aid effectiveness and harmonisation.

It has a total of 115 signatories to date and claims to lay down ?a roadmap to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development with 56 partnership commitments organised around the five key principles: ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results, and mutual accountability.

Compliance with the principles of the Paris Declaration is measured using 12 different indicators and development financing is now increasingly channelled through countries? compliance with these indicators.

According to Bissio's extensive study of the Paris Declaration framework, the Declaration fails to provide the institutional mechanisms to address the asymmetries in power between donors and creditors on one hand and individual aid recipient countries on the other. He argues that institutional ownership of the Paris Declaration process remains vested with the OECDs Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and the World Bank where donors and creditors have exclusive or majority control, with little or no developing country voice or vote.

Bissio's report further points out that for recipient countries, the Paris Declaration creates a new level of supranational economic governance above the World Bank and the regional development banks, with the OECD?s DAC comprising of the same western governments who control the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and who contribute to the Bank?s concessional lending facility, the International Development Association (IDA).

At the country level this new international governance increases the asymmetry between the aid recipient country and its donors and creditors, which gather together as a single group in the new aid modalities ... While this is intended to save costs and make procedures easier for the recipient country (and thus make aid more efficient), the inherent risks of such an increased imbalance in negotiating power at the country level are not compensated in any way by the international mechanisms set in motion by the [Paris Declaration].

Although developing and developed countries are represented in equal numbers in the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness which has the responsibility for managing the operationalisation of the Paris Declaration principles, the presence of institutions controlled by OECD members tilts the balance in favour of the latter, said the report.

Further, in such an ad hoc new body, developing countries lack the tradition and expertise of their own negotiating groups that they have put together over the years in other international negotiating fora (such as the G77 in the UN or G20 and G33 and other regional groupings in the WTO).

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