The fable of the palace in Kathmandu

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about a moment some eight or so years ago when international aid donors began to realise that they needed to be more responsive and effective in conflict countries. Adopting the terminology that these countries were fragile states, they decided to pilot a new approach. To do this, since aid is a government-to-government affair, they needed some fragile states to agree to do the aid recipient side of the piloting. One choice was Nepal, which seemed appropriate since there was a decade-long civil war still raging, corruption was rampant, development was stuck in neutral and the king had just declared absolute personal rule.

And thus, so the story goes, an aid official took the invitation to the palace door asking the absolutist monarchy to take part in the programme as a fragile state. Whereupon the palace door was slammed shut on him.

Regard it as a fable of the dilemmas international aid donors face. They know it’s hard to support development in conflict-affected and unstable states. But how do you get the government that is part of the problem to become instead part of the solution?

The fable suggests you don’t do it by telling the government of a fragile state what condition it’s in and what it ought to do.

Dialogue and deal

A much better approach is to listen to the voices in those countries and find out where and with whom there is enough of a shared agenda to move forward together. That means a dialogue to start and an agreed course of action moving forward. And for the donors, it means agreeing not to take the lead.

That’s the path that has been taken with the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. It brings the g7+ group of governments of conflict-affected countries to the table

along with donor governments, inter-governmental agencies and civil society organisations. Its major product so far is the New Deal arrived at in November 2011. Progress is being assessed at a global meeting of the New Deal partners in Washington on 19 April. It’s potentially a decisive moment.

For, nearly a year and half on from signature, the New Deal is approaching the point where it either delivers or fades, to be replaced in a few years’ time by another attempt.

Inspiration and aspiration

The New Deal sets out ways of working for both donors and recipients of development aid and indicators for judging progress. It is currently being piloted in seven countries – five in Africa and two in Asia. Initial work in the pilot phase focuses on what are known as fragility assessments.

These assessments are done by the conflict-affected aid recipient.  They offer an analysis of each of the conflict-affected countries to see how they do on five Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals: political inclusivity, the economic foundations, citizens’ access to justice, security, and the ability of government to raise tax revenues and provide public services.

In principle, there is something here that is not just positive but positively inspirational. Government of conflict affected countries analysing themselves with civil society participation to report on how they are doing and where they need to direct their efforts next: a few years ago, this was the stuff of dreams.

On the other side of the deal, the donor governments buy into the strategy for addressing these issues that is identified by the recipient and support it rather than backing their own pet projects and approaches. And together the two sides undertake to act with greater transparency and accountability, as evidenced by having civil society involved throughout.

Following through – or not

The intentions have been set out, very many (though not yet all) of the details are in place, and yet there is a growing feeling that it is time for the New Deal to produce. Progress in the pilot countries is zero-to-stalled at worst, slow at best. Slow progress is all very well if it’s because of a great deal of careful consultation. It is not at all well if it results from simply not doing anything about it for months at a time.

Of course, nobody should think it’s easy to follow through on the New Deal commitments. The lesser problems are on the donors’ side. The question there is whether what’s been agreed at headquarters level and in international meetings has traction in the country offices.

Shifting out of default mode is a big problem for all institutions and their career professionals – but this challenge has been taken on reasonably well in many different contexts before. In part the issue is whether the political leadership is engaged; in part it’s a question of institutional detail and seeing through the necessary changes in such things as staff development and incentive structures.

In the conflict countries, change is tougher. Governments have signed up to the proposition that how they do governance is part of the problem they want to solve. This is a big step forward from Kathmandu in 2005. But it is an even bigger step actually to change how governance is done, when almost by definition the government is not united in this commitment, when capacity is limited and energy needed for long-term thorough-going reform is persistently absorbed by short-term crises.

Continuing the dialogue

Here perhaps is the role for the continuing International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. It has set out the reasons why reform is necessary for both conflict-affected countries and donors. It has set out the goals that this change must encompass. Now, perhaps, it should focus on the reasons why not – on both sides, openly and with some humility – so the obstacles that lie within can be confronted. Only then will the logjams be unblocked.

5 criteria for Busan

Just before the meeting, working with colleagues at International Alert, I proposed five criteria by which to judge the success or otherwise of the outcome. Here they are in summary form:

1. Change and uncertainty: A successful HLF4 would be one that recognised that much has changed in this field since the start of the century, causing a great deal of uncertainty – and would set out a way to meet that challenge.
2. Fake consensus: A successful HLF4 would resist the temptation of  shallow consensus and acknowledge that there are different interests, perspectives and approaches – it would, in short, agree to disagree in a grown-up way.
3. More effective collaboration: A successful HLF4 would promote deeper - which necessarily means more selective – collaboration between different actors.
4. Development, not development aid: Success at HLF4 would be reflected by focusing on development and not sliding unthinkingly from the extraordinarily difficult questions of what development means and how countries develop, into the usual concentration on technically better aid instruments.
5. Operationalisation: Finally, a successful HLF4 would encourage countries and organisations either individually or in small coalitions to pursue innovative activities.

So how well did they do at Busan? Does the Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation that was launched with the HLF’s final statement offer real benefits and gains for conflict-affected countries? I wasn’t at Busan nor was anybody from International Alert (and by the end of this article you’ll know whether I regret that), so the scores that follow are based only on the final statement. And note that I am only looking at its relevance for conflict-affected countries.

Change & uncertainty

Change, yes – it frames the opening discussion in the final statement. And by all accounts, the role of China at the meeting made one aspect of change vividly present. The document does reflect on the increase in co-operation between developing countries and the emergence of new aid providers. But that’s not developed as the statement proceeds. Taken as a whole, the flavour is just more of the same.

Uncertainty is barely acknowledged. To be realistic, it’s not really permitted in official communiques of this kind. But that means that a lack of humility is still hardwired into international aid discourse and into its architecture.

And as for conflict-affected countries, in which 1.5 billion people live – they get a mention on page 1 and a paragraph to themselves later on. Not good, not enough and certainly not good enough.

Score: 3/10

Consensus

In paragraph 8 of the final statement, we read, “Our partnership is founded on a common set of principles that underpin all forms of development co-operation.” And that’s it, right there – that’s the fake consensus.

These shared principles are not bad but nor are they profound or inspirational:

• Ownership of development priorities by developing countries
• Focus on results
• Inclusive development partnerships
• Transparency and accountability to each other

The focus on results is new at this level but otherwise this is familiar terrain in which re-statement is easier than investigating why implementation is more complex than was initially anticipated. Rehearsing these unobjectionable and largely technical points masks a wide range of different interpretations about what they mean, which themselves reflect different strategies, goals and underlying principles.

Because there is a great deal of diversity of interest and opinion, it is surely better to agree to disagree – but to nobody’s surprise, the Busan forum reverted to type for such meetings and promoted agreement on technical rather than strategic goals. The final statement lists numerous examples of how actors can cooperate with each other but is silent about what they can and should aim to achieve.

Score: 2/10

Honest collaboration

In the same vein, a sign of success would be that recognition of the need for more effective co-operation (and not just quantitatively more moments of co-operation) would feed through into encouragement for a more selective approach. There could be diversity within this approach, with any government deciding to work most closely with these organisations and states on one issue and those organisations and states on another.

The one place where a push for honest collaboration comes through is in relation to the New Deal developed by the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. This is a valuable statement – drafted well before the Busan meeting – that is specifically directed at the development and peacebuilding needs of fragile and conflict-affected states, made by a group of governments of such countries plus donor government and international agencies. The Busan final statement welcomes the New Deal and continues, “Those of us who have endorsed the New Deal will pursue actions to implement it” – thus distinguishing between those who give the New Deal a passive welcome and those who want to make it work.

Had it not been for this willingness to forego trying for unanimity in action – which usually produces unanimous inaction – the New Deal would have been seen as an initiative that failed at Busan. Instead it comes out of Busan as a going concern with heightened international legitimacy.

Score: 7/10

Aid – or development

In the all too common elision between development and development aid, the latter tends to dominate discussion of the former. Yet in the end aid is merely a potentially important but relatively limited component of development – not the central element. So a successful HLF4 would have agreed that future forums  should be about promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid. HLF4 did not go so far but does include this statement:

“Aid is only part of the solution to development. It is now time to broaden our focus from aid effectiveness to the challenges of effective development. This calls for a framework within which:

“a) Development is driven by strong, sustainable growth.

“b) Governments’ own revenues play a greater part in financing their own development needs. In turn, governments are more accountable to their citizens for the development results they achieve.

“c) Effective state and non-state institutions design and implement their own reforms and hold each other to account.

“d) Developing countries increasingly integrate, both regionally and globally, creating economies of scale that will help them better compete in the world economy.

“To this effect, we will rethink what aid should be spent on and how, in ways that are consistent with agreed international rights, norms and standards, so that aid catalyses development.”

As far as verbal commitment goes, this is real progress. But there are also a lot of silences and recycled general commitments in the document. Nothing much new is said about international trade or crime and nothing at all about policies that reinforce repressive governments in fragile countries.

It remains to be seen whether the words will be matched by action. But the statement provides a useful marker for future intentions, to which governments can be held to account in the future.

Score: 5/10

Operationalisation

The high ambition of getting global agreement tends to lead to an unambitious convergence on the least demanding positions and commitments. By contrast, some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be based on global undertakings but on commitments made between a smaller number of actors. This will give them a chance to put into practice the new thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding.

The role of a global gathering should not be to control, limit or even initiate such innovative work – but rather to highlight and encourage it.

There are some good points in the final statement on this – the endorsement of the New Deal, an acceptance of the need to be less risk-averse, encouragement for development agencies to delegate greater responsibility to their in-country staff, a general welcome for diverse approaches and actors. But overall the final statement falls pretty flat.

Score 4/10

Overall score

To repeat the reservations entered at the outset, the final statement contains more than I have covered here and doesn’t have much about conflict and fragility. Moreover, not being in Busan means I don’t know some the detail that lies behind the statement.

But taking the Fourth High Level Forum at its word as reflected in its final statement, and having set out my stall beforehand to say how I and colleagues would be assessing it, the average of the scores given above is 42%. That’s not a pass mark. If a student got that, the professor would surely add, not good enough – more effort needed.

But others who were there and saw more may judge it differently and have good grounds for doing so.

(This post is co-authored with Phil Vernon, with input and comment from several colleagues at International Alert.)

The Fourth Forum

To the initiated it’s HLF4. The previous three were in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). The central output is the final statement – the Outcomes Document. For Busan HLF4 the wording is largely agreed and builds on the output from the previous three.

In one way it’s all a well-oiled piece of machinery. Yet economic and social development and international development assistance are anything but well-oiled. There’s a disconnect between what leads up to and out of Busan and the reality both of development and of development assistance.

A successful Busan HLF4 is one that finds some way to bridge that gap and address the realities.

New thinking on development and conflict

More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict. None of those countries has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDGs).

For all that the MDGs are, as I have argued in previous posts, flawed, generic and blunt instruments for measuring and guiding progress, they are what the international development assistance community has committed itself to – both to be guided by and to be assessed against.

And by that standard, for conflict-affected countries, it’s not working.

There has been a lot of reflection on this over the past few years:

• The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 outlined a new approach to development assistance in conflict settings. It emphasises jobs, inclusive public institutions and the confidence of ordinary citizens in their state and their future.
• There has been renewed focus on the need for concrete results from aid, to help citizens in recipient countries hold their governments to account. This chimes well with the growing emphasis on transparency among aid donors, recipients and intermediaries.
• There is an increased recognition that development is not just about the economy, health and education but also about how people are governed, their access to justice and whether they are safe from danger. And some development assistance is being used  on the lines of these insights.
• Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are providing increasing amounts of aid, bringing different approaches that are not part of the old aid orthodoxy.

Understanding complexity

Programming aid effectively is difficult, especially in conflict countries. It is not just a question of being more efficient, getting more coherence between donors without wasting time in endless committee meetings, and emphasising projects that produce quick and visible impact.

The very purpose of aid has changed in recent years to embrace the previously unfamiliar language of peacebuilding and statebuilding. It has thus become far more ambitious – and rightly so. Any number of successful development aid projects do not necessarily equate to promoting development, unless peace and the institutions of the state are being built at the same time.

Twenty years ago an aid programme might have built schools and trained teachers. Ten years ago it might have strengthened a government’s capacity to plan, provide and oversee education, including a grant for school building, operating costs and teacher training, while looking to a parallel programme to increase tax revenues to cover recurrent costs. Now some donors want to foster better relations between the state and the people, increasing responsiveness, responsibility and citizenship. This requires change in some of the institutions at the heart of governance and society.

New challenges – and persistent ones

Progress has been made, then – especially in the analysis – but many problems remain, especially in the practice:

• It’s widely agreed that building responsive and responsible citizen-state relations is key to peace and prosperity but not much is known about how to do it, especially at the speed and on the scale that meets people’s expectations. How to get the balance right between progress and stability?
• The lack of decent work for young people is widely acknowledged as a failure of development and a major threat to stability. The orthodoxy says the private sector should create jobs – but that won’t happen at the scale and speed, or with the dependability and stability, that are required in the aftermath of violent conflict or repression. Should we ignore the orthodoxy and go for externally funded 30-year public works programmes?
• Climate change brings new challenges – pressure on resources like land and water, the collision between growth and green priorities, the task of adaptation – together with huge new spending budgets. These are largely managed separately from other aid, raising the risk of increasing incoherence among donors and recipients.
• In conflict countries and fragile contexts, the practice of aid organisations has not kept pace with new understanding of the purposes of aid. Without urgent change, they risk being unfit for purpose.
• We have not yet got the right metrics for assessing progress towards stability. It cannot be done with the same metrics that suffice for health or education and it is increasingly tiresome that aid agencies seem to be pulled towards inappropriate indicators by the results agenda. Rigorous qualitative indicators and a time-frame appropriate to the task are key components.
• The behaviour of governments continues to hinder development. The foreign policy of some donors undermines their own aid goals while some recipients use aid primarily to hang onto power.

A new road after Busan

As so far drafted, the Busan Outcomes Document reflects a lot of new thinking on aid – statebuilding and peacebuilding, human security, transparency and results. But it fails to reflect the scale and complexity of the challenge of supporting development in conflict-affected countries in a changing world.

There is a fairly widely shared view that this is the time to end the High Level Forum process. Let Busan be seen as fourth and last. The world is changing and however the actors in international development want to come together in the future to discuss common issues and concerns, this format belongs to the world before the 2008 crash, before the collapse in confidence within the EU, before the recognition of how important the new big players are.

Changing format will – as any organiser of major events and processes will tell you – have a big impact on how participants will view their gathering. Changing format will permit them to break painlessly from old orthodoxies and assumptions that have served their purpose. It will let them get to grips more decisively and clearly with the challenges identified in the World Development Report 2011 among others.

Success at Busan

All that said, how will we know if the Busan High Level Forum is a success, justifying the presence of 2,000 busy people? Five critical factors in the speeches and statements at Busan will offer evidence of success:

1. Recognising change and uncertainty: The way development and aid need to be framed in policy discussions has fundamentally changed over the decade since the MDGs were agreed. They looked progressive then, unimaginative now. We need new tools and methods to achieve and to measure success. Good work has been done – more needed. Participants at a successful HLF4 will define this challenge and set out a process for meeting it.
2. Getting a balanced combination of agreement and disagreement: Beneath the technical language of aid, development is political and contentious. It speaks to different theories of progress and change. International forums about aid in the past have glossed over this, focussing instead on agreements about process issues. Not unimportant, but when consensus is achieved that way, it is a shallow and artificial agreement that often leaves aid practitioners trapped by official niceties into policies they know are flawed, targets they know are unreal and actions they know are ineffective. Alongside that, the emphasis on the technical masks the big power political, strategic and economic rivalries that are also part of the context. Participants at a successful HLF4 will recognise that their different interests and perspectives lead to quite different views about how development happens and how to aid it. This will allow the issue to be debated more openly as the international community starts to prepare for the world beyond the MDGs after 2015.
3. Improving the effectiveness of collaboration: Regardless of the difficulties of getting agreement beyond the technical and surface level, international agencies, governments and civil society do need to work together. But  – and this especially applies in conflict-affected countries and regions - they need to work together where and when they have a deeper level of agreement that covers more of the core problems. Thus, in line with getting recognition (and therefore respect) for differences of view and approach, participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to promote and mandate a more selective but deeper collaboration among the different actors.
4. Development – not aid: Aid is important and the way it is planned and used matters. But the time for meetings about aid effectiveness is over. Future meetings and processes should be about development strategies. They should debate what constitutes development and identify the policies and behaviours of citizens, governments, businesses, NGOs and IGOs that are most likely to promote progress, and figure out how to encourage them. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree that future international forums should be defined in terms of promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid.
5. Operationalisation: Getting global agreement on critical issues is hard and results in a convergence on least demanding positions and commitments. So it is worth recognising that some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be at the global level. Rather, it will be found at the level of specific countries, organisations, working relationships and programmes of activity. This implies a need to encourage individual countries and organisations to push ahead with operationalising some of the new development thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to prioritise the operationalisation of these new approaches to promoting development in conflict-affected countries.