Let’s talk real ownership

As long as donors deny aid recipients a free hand to decide on what to do with aid, and still attach substantial conditions to that aid, there can only be little or no ownership by the receiving governments. In the newly published Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors, the Paris Declaration’s ability to deliver real change in aid effectiveness is being scrutinised. Lindsay Whitfield edited and contributed several chapters of the book. The extracts here are compiled by James Kimbowa.

In 2003, a serious debate was taking place among aid agencies about “reforming the international aid architecture”. While in the Development Assistance Committee (of the OECD) donors were also discussing how they should better coordinate their aid efforts. International agencies were seriously considering the suggestion that they should better define their respective roles and find more ways to work together.

Competing agendas
Over the years, hundreds of agencies have got into the aid business and their multiple competing agendas now jostle for space in poor countries that are administratively and financially swamped by donors hungry for information, plans, reports and success stories. The situation is only getting worse as new concerns such as the war on terror, new philanthropic foundations, new funds for challenges like HIV/AIDS and the expanding activities of non- Western donors such as China and India emerge into an already chaotic setting.

More harm than good
Critics argue that imposing policies, sequences of reforms, and spending priorities has done more harm than good, overriding national sovereignty, demanding democracy and displacing local concerns and solutions. Donors demand that their money is spent on their priorities and insist that, in return for much needed finance, recipient governments change their economic and social policies.

Ownership emerges
While donor coordination remains a central objective of efforts to reform the international aid system, it has now been joined by ownership. This emerging consensus was codified in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, signed by over one hundred donor agencies and recipient governments. The declaration adopts ownership as the key pillar of a new aid paradigm, proposing a shift away from donor fragmentation and externally imposed conditionality. Instead it encourages donors to align their efforts with recipient governments’ own development strategies and administrative systems.

The term “ownership” in the discussion of aid can be traced back at least to donor concerns in the mid-1980s that recipient governments were signing up to all sorts of policy conditions as part of aid agreements, particularly World Bank structural adjustment programmes, but were failing to implement them. The World Bank diagnosed the problem as insufficient ‘ownership’ of the policies on the part of either the elites or local populations to whom they were more or less answerable.

Uncertainty on declaration
There are many reasons to be sceptical of the Paris Declaration’s ability to deliver real change. First, it is an international agreement rife with diplomatic compromises. Although all major donors signed the Declaration, it is not clear that all are equally committed in practice. Secondly, the behaviour of donors has not changed significantly. In spite of shifting rhetoric and some reforms, substantial conditions are still attached to aid from most donors. If we are to see any significant change in the way aid is delivered, the onus appears to be on recipient countries to take the initiatives and in so far as they can, to remake the aid system to suit their own needs.

Defining ownership: a site of struggle
In much of the current literature, two distinct and potentially contradictory concepts are still confused: ownership as commitment to a pre-determined or externally determined policy agenda, and ownership as control over the process and outcome of choosing policies. We define ownership as the degree of control recipient governments are able to secure over implemented policy outcomes.

Why not just talk about ‘control’ and drop the reference to ‘ownership’? The concept is increasingly used by development NGOs and some donors to discuss the inclusiveness of the domestic process through which polices are decided, or the breadth and depth of consensus within recipient countries around the policy agenda. These multiple definitions make the term useful as a lubricant in development diplomacy. Recipient governments, donors and NGOs all use ‘ownership’ as a proxy for the deference others show to their claimed right to influence policy. As such, they can all agree ownership is a good thing, and everyone can sign up to collective statements such as the Paris Declaration.

This flexibility of definition has obvious implications. Firstly, the term requires significant clarification before it can be of any analytic use in answering questions about which of these actors are having the greatest influence. Secondly, the term remains a site of struggle over definitions even after consensus on it is achieved. All actors remain aware that the very haziness of their ‘shared value’ has enabled everyone to sign up. The continuing battle over what ownership might mean then becomes a means to try to hold others accountable for delivering things they never thought they had signed up for.

By claiming that policies will no longer be imposed on unwilling recipients, donors are searching for a renewed legitimacy for their activities. Where donors do not wish to allow aid recipients a free hand in deciding what to do with aid, we argue, they should refrain using the term ownership and admit to and justify, their own attempts at influence.

A young girl in Karamoja - North Eastern Uganda, Photo by Paul Menya

Donor obstacles to real ownership
Extensive participation of donors in recipient government policymaking processes has become a new norm in donor agencies, particularly after the introduction of the general budget support mechanism. How can governments create aid policies that set new limits on donor involvement when donors have come to see this involvement as their right and challenges to it as illegitimate and hostile behaviour on the part of recipient governments? Civil servants in some aid dependent countries have accepted the idea that donors have a joint role in planning and financing development. This new donor norm of participation is linked to a lack of trust in recipient governments. Donors say that they require trust in order to give up control and let governments take the lead, but aid practices in the country studies show that for donors to really trust recipient governments, donor staff (or the consultants they fund) must be heavily involved in decision-making.

Domestic obstacles to real ownership
The fragile or weak domestic political support of recipient governments combined with their dependence on aid to shore up their political legitimacy provide strong incentives for those governments to accept a subordinate position to donors in negotiating the use of aid. And the conditions of permanent negotiation with donors and institutional entanglement between donor and government institutions through ‘joint planning’ processes provide strong disincentives for recipient governments to challenge their subordination. Where survival of the government is linked to the continuation of aid and where the ruling party or government members derive rents from aid, those providing the aid will have the upper hand in aid negotiations.

Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors is published by Oxford University Press, 2009. Lindsay Whitfield was a Research Fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme (2005 – 2008) and is currently a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark. She completed her doctorate in Politics in 2005 at the University of Oxford. Email: lkw@diis.dk