The donor-recipient relationship: national ownership and extensive donor presence

Conveners: Malin Hasselskog and Isabell Schierenbeck, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg

Contact: isabell.schierenbeck@globalstudies.gu.se

A key aspect of international development cooperation has always been the donor-recipient relationship. Its inherent inequality is a major concern and it has been a recurring ambition to transform it, moving away from paternalistic charity towards more equal collaboration. When, from around the millennium shift, there was a surge in the attention to global development and the international aid sector started to be restructured, this ambition was reflected in the re-articulation of the donor-recipient relationship as ‘partnership’. Since then, ideals and approaches have continued to be revised at a series of major summits, with recipient and donor states as well as civil society represented, that have generated numerous declarations emphasising mutual interests and responsibilities. The overarching goal is aid effectiveness and a central concept and ideal is national ‘ownership’ based on the notion that, for aid to be effective, it should be allocated only if consistent with a recipient state’s own priorities.

Along with these relationship ideals, international development cooperation has become increasingly focussed on national policy and donors have become increasingly concerned with recipient states’ economic policies, quality of governance and soundness of policies. The emphasis on ownership and policy has changed the ways donors are involved in recipient countries. The result has been interpreted as more or less permanent donor presence, which has made scholars talk about far-reaching ‘enmeshment’ in policymaking, ‘institutional entanglement’, ‘transgression of the internal realm’, intervention as an on-going process, and development practices ‘beyond intervention’. This is something that both national officials and donor representatives must relate to.

Papers are sought that explore this relationship between donors and national policies in the wider area of development studies. The panel invites theoretical or empirical studies around themes such as (though not limited to) the following: Negotiation and follow-up of aid agreements, Donor involvement in the policy process, and New/emerging actors and forms of aid.

Session A: 23 Aug., 14:00–15:30, Nordenskiöld Lecture Hall

• Putting Paris into practice: Foreign aid, national ownership and donor alignment in Mali and Ghana. Stephen Brown, University of Ottawa.
• Development of health financing policies in Cambodia: Where is national ownership situated in the relationships between Development Partners and national counterparts? Keovathanak Khim, University of Health Sciences.
• Aiding Regionalism in Africa from Outside: The Perils of Donor Control. Fredrik Söderbaum, University of Gothenburg.
• East Asian donor countries: More ownership and less interference? Sabine Burghart, University of Vienna.

Session B: 23 Aug., 16:00–17:30, Nordenskiöld Lecture Hall

• Decision making in aid dependent countries and the challenge for democracy, the case of Tanzania. Jonas Ewald, Linnæus University.
• Development relations and the results agenda – examples from Swedish development cooperation with Mozambique. Therese Brolin, University of Gothenburg.
• Doing good or looking good? The paradoxical function of international development communication abroad and at home. Florencia Enghel, Stockholm University.

Abstracts

Putting Paris into practice: Foreign aid, national ownership and donor alignment in Mali and Ghana. Stephen Brown, University of Ottawa.

This paper draws on a five-year research program that analyzes the application of aid effectiveness principles in Africa. This paper will focus specifically on how the Paris Declaration’s principles of national ownership and donor alignment play out “on the ground” in Mali and Ghana. To what extent do Mali and Ghana “own” their development strategies? To what extent do donors align their programs with national priorities? What explains the degree of commitment? What are the consequences? The fieldwork for the Ghana portion will be conducted in July 2016. I am therefore not yet able to outline my analysis of that case. For Mali, however, I have found that the Malian government, to a great extent, “owns” its development plans. However, its multiple planning documents deliberately encompass almost every area imaginable, allowing national and international actors to claim that all their development activities are compatible with national ownership and that donor programs align well with national priorities. Without strategic prioritization, the concepts of ownership and alignment lack content and, as a result, provide little practical benefit in Mali. The quality of the national development strategy is essential for ownership and alignment to have a positive impact, a factor ignored in most discussions of the Paris Principles. To the extent that donor officials in Bamako recognize these deficiencies, they attribute them to a lack of government capacity. However, the government’s lack of political will and commitment to the principles, linked to domestic incentives, better explain inaction, which also suits donor officials’ interests.

Development of health financing policies in Cambodia: Where is national ownership situated in the relationships between Development Partners and national counterparts? Keovathanak Khim, University of Health Sciences.

Cambodia’s reconstruction of the health sector started following the first United Nations-Sponsored democratic election in 1993, with influx of support in financing and technical assistances from Development Partners. Several forms of Results-based Financing in the demand and supply sides of health services were initiated and expanded in the country. The evolution of the financing schemes in the past 20 years was accompanied by changing landscapes of socio-economic development, local capacities in policy making, the on-going public sector reforms and the growing sense of national ownership. This paper examines the roles of and relationships with Development Partners and discusses how these interact with the sense of national ownership in Cambodia health financing policy between 1997 and 2015. Results from review of literature, documentary analysis, and interviews with officials involved in the initiation and implementation of the schemes show that the forces driving the development of health financing strategies and policies were the considerations of national ownership, sustainability and institutional development. Manifestation of these varies by scheme and is influenced by local management and financing capacity. While demand-side schemes received much attention from Development Partners, integrating them into the public system is complex and raises controversies. The opposite is observed for the supply-side scheme. Close involvement of policy makers in the design, implementation and evaluation of the schemes is necessary to sustain their support and secure a place in the policy agenda. Scheme design is intrinsically related to national ownership which may facilitate scheme integration in the public system and improves sustainability of financing schemes.

Aiding Regionalism in Africa from Outside: The Perils of Donor Control. Fredrik Söderbaum, University of Gothenburg.

During recent decades many donors have become enthusiastic supporters of regionalism and regional organizations in Africa. Most donors perceive themselves as neutral and outside financers of home-grown African projects. Although this is of course problematic, it is not until recently that scholars have started to problematize the incentives, logic and effects of regional aid. Drawing on the results of an on-going research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, this particular paper concentrates on the donor-recipient relationship and the quality of aid. Focus is placed on the largest and most influential donors (such as the EU, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, UK, UN, USAID) that are active in the four policy areas that have received most attention (regional economic integration, infrastructure, transboundary waters, and peace and security). The analysis reveals that the very large donor funds given to institution-building and capacity-building of African regional organizations (such as the AU, EAC, IGAD, SADC and numerous river basin organizations etc) sometimes undermine rather than improve the performance of these organizations. This is intimately related to the fact that regional aid often contravenes the core principles of the Paris Agenda on Aid Effectiveness. For instance, compared with national aid, there is very weak donor coordination of regional aid. Furthermore, many donors try to maintain ‘control’ through their aid delivery channels and a heavy focus on short-term project implementation. In combination with the donor-driven agenda of results-based management, these donor-controlled implementation mechanisms and the focus on ‘projects’ undermine both African ownership and the quality of aid.

East Asian donor countries: More ownership and less interference? Sabine Burghart, University of Vienna.

Why are East Asian donors engaging in a more horizontal partnership with aid recipient countries? To what extent do they strengthen local ownership and respect the principle of non-interference? On what kinds of structures and procedures is the alleged equal partnership based? What role do volunteers dispatched to the recipient countries play? With the emergence of a growing number of donor countries and new institutions, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a “silent revolution” (Woods 2007) of the aid architecture has been underway. South Korean aid experts discuss – as the author observed – the introduction of new rules “made in Korea” in international development cooperation. The existence of new donors has also resulted in more competition while contributing to a further fragmentation of the aid system. Whereas Japan, the first Asian OECD-DAC member, has traditionally channelled its grants and loans to Asia, China has become an important player in Africa, allowing recipient governments “more aggressive bargaining” (Whitfield 2009: 364). South Korea joined the OECD-DAC in 2010 and is still a relatively small donor concentrating its ODA in Asia. Based on qualitative research, this paper analyses the features of East Asian development cooperation in terms of local ownership and non-interference, and discusses the role of volunteers in this process.

Decision making in aid dependent countries and the challenge for democracy, the case of Tanzania. Jonas Ewald, Linnæus University.

Tanzania is an interesting case study in the wider discourse on donor-recipient relationship, national ownership and extensive donor presence. The country has a long history of intense international development collaboration – as well as an aim to be more “self-reliant”. From 2006 a “new “ policy for coordination of donors where decided upon, the “Joint Assistance Strategy for Tanzania (JAST). But did it strengthen the government of Tanzania – and other Tanzanian stakeholders, like the parliament, political parties, and CSOS to have an influence over decision making on key policies? This paper present fresh findings from a field study with the title “Decision making in aid dependent countries and the challenge for democracy, the case of Tanzania”, based on interviews conducted with stakeholders at the government, donor community, parliament, media and civil society at three various field studies from May 2014 to January 2015. The aim of the study was to identify how different stakeholders perceived theirs (and others) influence on the policy making process in Tanzania. Decision-making, governance and ownership are complicated in a country like Tanzania where international development assistance is such an important source of funding, both for the state budget and various projects outside the state budget. One challenge for the Tanzanian government has been the great number of multilateral, bilateral and other actors who involved in development cooperation. which makes it difficult to have an overview of the total funding available, as well as on-going activities. All donors demand contacts, time for negotiations, development of programmes and projects, reports, evaluations and goodwill. Moreover, different donors have different modalities for aid, programming and reporting. This places high demands on meagre administrative and political resources. Reliance on donor funding is also a challenge for the democratisation process. To whom is the government accountable, to donors who provide crucial funding or to the citizens, who have few resources to pay taxes? For “the international development partners” it is a delicate balance between the post-Paris Agenda’s objectives to strengthen country ownership, and the need to hold the aid recipients, accountable. The discussion on aid coordination mechanisms and strengthening Tanzanian ownership (re-) started in the mid-nineties. In 2002, the government decided on a Tanzania Assistance Strategy (TAS), in dialogue with the donors. The aim of TAS was to strengthen aid coordination, harmonisation and alignment as well as national ownership and government leadership of the development process. In 2006 the follow up Joint Assistance Strategy for Tanzania (JAST), was developed, largely by the government, but in close cooperation with the donors. Relatively well-developed structures and capacities for coordination were created between donors, and to a lesser extent between the donors and the government. The biggest challenge, from a democratisation point of view, is that this structure is highly complex and difficult to access for most actors outside the process. This includes actors within the ruling party, and even more so the opposition parties, and the citizens in villages or townships. It should thus, be noted that the CSOs were invited to participate in the various sector groups and budget and that the dialogue structure in that way opened up for the CS to engage with policymaking process. The problem is exacerbated by the prevailing culture within the government that limits access and information for non-government actors. The policymaking capacity and agenda setting power of the donors should not be underestimated. Apart from providing access to much needed funds, the donor community has a high number of officials and technical specialists compared to the staff resources of the government. They work in well-equipped offices, with access to professional literature and the Internet and often benefit from head quarter backstopping.  Even if the Paris agenda put the government in the driver’s seat, it is not always able to play that role. Government official perceived that the development partners at times “ganged up” with CSOS and NGOs in order to press through their agenda, most notably related to the governance working group. Government officials interviewed found the dialogue structure demanding, with many foras to attend and reports to deliver. It was also felt that there was a fast rotation of donor staff, which hindered work in the committees. In some committees, e.g., governance, there was a perception that DPs were pressing for an agenda that the government was not ready to take on. These factors might explain why the government, from the DPs point of view seemed to lose commitment in the dialogue structures. A new streamlined dialogue structure is now developed. Tanzania is now in a progressive process to reduce its aid dependency with increasing national revenue collection and the use of non-concessional funds to finance its projects. New economic actors, not the least from the BRIC countries, are changing the rules of the international game. An increase in foreign direct investments is creating an opportunity for political actors to challenge the traditional reliance on western donors promoting western perspectives. As a result, support for a western-type liberal democracy from some factions of the political and economic elite might be weakening and, BRIC states and the developmental state could bring about new and less demanding role models. But would it strengthen self-reliance and deepend democratic forms of governance?

Development relations and the results agenda – examples from Swedish development cooperation with Mozambique. Therese Brolin, University of Gothenburg.

The increased demand for reporting on results, or the so-called results agenda, has been a top-priority for many development actors over the last decade. The demand for evidence of results has intensified and new instruments for aid delivery, such as results strategies and payment by results, are now dominating many donors’ development agendas. One of the main features of these instruments is that they focus on results, rather than on planning and implementing development cooperation. Sweden is one of the donor countries that have embraced the results agenda, and Sweden’s bilateral development strategies should focus on achieved results, rather than on how Swedish development cooperation is implemented. However, findings from a recent study in Mozambique suggest that there also have been changes in Swedish requirements on how results should be reported. Instead of focusing on evidence of results, the recipients of development assistance are also required to report on how results are achieved. Planning and implementation are thus still considered key issues in Swedish development cooperation. The reasons behind this focus are often described in terms of accountability and control. Concepts such as learning and trust are, on the other hand, seldom, or never, used in relation to implementing and reporting on development cooperation. Reporting requirements thus affect the relations between donors and recipients of development assistance. The aim of this paper is to explore how Sweden’s development relations with Mozambique are influenced by these changes in requirements on reporting development results.

Doing good or looking good? The paradoxical function of international development communication abroad and at home. Florencia Enghel, Stockholm University.

Following the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, donors must now harness mediated communication to promote it on two fronts: to advance it abroad (by doing good in recipient countries) and to secure citizens’ support for it at home (by communicating do-gooding to their national constituencies). Existing research tends to approach these uses of mediated communication in international development separately, following rather than challenging theoretical divisions. Yet, recent studies argue that donors combine them in practice, with potentially undemocratic consequences for citizens' communication rights at both ends of the donor-recipient equation (Enghel, 2014; González Cahuapé-Casaux and Kalathil, 2015). Based on a qualitative study of a high-profile case of intervention mandated by the British and Dutch governments to promote reconciliation and democratize media systems in the Western Balkans in 2005, this paper unpacks the interconnection between the localized practice of development communication aimed at promoting peace in a post-conflict setting, and its communicative reverberations in the donor countries where the project was envisioned and decided upon. Although the citizens of the successor states to the former Yugoslavia were defined as the “who” of the intervention, in practice the “what” was not democratization at the recipient end, but public relations in donor countries (Fraser, 2008). By scrutinizing the ambiguous outcomes derived from the conflation between uses of mediated communication to ‘do good’ and ‘look good’, the analysis reveals the complex politics of mediation that underpins them and illuminates an under-researched aspect of the donor-recipient relationship (Swedish Research Council, 2014).