While the governments of rich nations want to streamline their global-development efforts in the OECD context, those of many developing countries are less enthusiastic.
The Paris Declaration’s performance conditionalities are defined by the donors in conjunction with the World Bank.
If “recipient” countries do not perform, they are subject to penalties. If “donor” countries do not perform, there is no penalty. But in the aid architecture proposed by the DAC, only the “recipient” ever bears risks.
It will come as no surprise that, on issues of governance, it is once again the donors’ procedures that determine the methods of harmonisation, with neither input from developing countries, nor even an understanding of their reality. Although the PD talks about “ownership”, its thrust goes in the opposite direction.
Another disturbing issue is the PD’s shift from project lending to programme based lending. There are three inter-related issues here:
– the pooling of donor resources,
– the injection of such funds into the national budget of a “recipient” country (“direct budget support”) along lines defined by the donors in a Joint Assistance Strategy (JAS) for each individual country, and
– the scaling-up activities and funding, according to the donors’ collective assessment of good or bad policies.
The conclusion is unavoidable: under the pretext of making aid more effective the Paris Declaration project is a form of collective colonialism by Northern “donors” of those countries in the South that (because of their weakness and vulnerability and psychology of “dependency”) may allow themselves to be subjected to it at the Accra September Conference.
By Yash Tandon, executive director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental policy thinktank of developing countries based in Geneva.
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Filed under: Beyond WECA
