Accountability for Development

Assistance and Aid Effectiveness

John GershmanThe Seoul Post-2105 Conference: Implementation and Implications

October 7, 2013

Accountability and Effectiveness

• Preliminaries: • Accountability and Effectiveness debates and

initiatives shouldn’t be dominated by the aid agenda

• Accountability and Effectiveness Matter Much More for Public and Private Sector Institutions

• Aid Can Help in Limited Areas and Ways. Most Importantly, it should not be an obstacle

• Tensions Between Effectiveness and Accountability

• Need to Move Firmly into Development Effectiveness Agenda

Coalitional Analysis

Five Steps• Follow the Money• More Bang for the Buck• Walk the Talk• Evaluation, Monitoring and Learning• Don’t Forget the North

Follow the Money• Transparency is the key necessary but not sufficient condition for this process.

• There needs to be an intersecting and overlapping set of transparency norms to facilitate this:o IATI, OGP, IBP, PWYF, national level right to information frameworks

But Transparency is Not Enough• Information needs to be actionable and accessible to

beneficiaries• Require effective and capable intermediaries to translate

information into usable forms and distribute it broadlyo Range from journalists, auditors, ombudspersonso Twaweza

• Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation Approach to Capcity Building o Andrews et al; Roche and Kelly

• Problems Not Solutions Should Define Capacity Building Exercises

• Transparency Initiatives in Aid are often dominated by Northern constituencies relatively narrow focus on anti-corruption Rosemary McGee (2013)

Getting More Bang for the Buck• Funding organizations that push for monitoring and

accountability beyond aid projects and programs (investigative journalism, open government, right to information, social accountability, etc).

• It’s About Relationships, Not Just “Results” (Ros Eyben)

Walking the Talk• Positive Signs: More organizations have signed on to IATI and

similar initiatives (EITI, etc)o A renewed focus on “rigor” and “evidence-based policy”o Open Data Movemento Partial Democratization of debates due to new mediao But, where is the politics?

• Task: Beyond transparency, donors should be supporting innovations in monitoring and accountability and effectiveness strategies for aid-funded programs and projects themselveso These can include vertically monitoring and advocacy strategies

• Challenges: o Quality agenda is more challenging for citizens and states to monitor than access; requires

new capacities and more sophisticated tools of M&Eo Balancing top down and bottom up approaches to M&E; Can we do do monitoring and

evaluation for accountability of effectiveness that doesn’t mean condemning poor people to attending a lot of meetings?

o The rise of climate finance will almost certainly involve the return of conditionalities, with all the associated challenges

o Institutional Reforms among some donors that may compromise the relative autonomy of the development agenda even more from geopolitics

Evaluation, Monitoring, and

Learning• Evaluation and reporting receive disproportionate emphasis

relative to monitoring• There is a rhetorical tendency to privilege one type of evaluation

tool (RCTs) as a “gold standard,” as opposed to seeing them as one tool among many in the toolbox

• Incorporating evaluation results into ODA programming is not primarily a technical issue..it’s about politics and the framing of evidence

• The degree to which aid agencies shift to more results-based programming (Cash on Delivery, etc), the greater the demands on recipients for capturing the learning associated with programs

• We need to be distinguishing answering academic researchers questions, funders questions and implementers questions, and sometimes there are trade-offs

H

Don’t Forget the North• The development partnership was perhaps the weakest of

the MDGs• Current political and economic situation suggests

unreliability of focusing on 0.7% target• Aid accountability and effectiveness reforms will need

mobilized citizenries as well as assertive leadership in the North to overcome vested interests in the aid chain

• The shift from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness as an overarching framework will depend active, informed, and mobilized citizenries in the North and the Southo Small Arms Treaty, Climate

• Beyond the ongoing fiscal crises in some OECD donors, recent institutional reforms in some OECD donors may result in challenges to the autonomy of the development mission for donors.