Accountability for Development Assistance and Aid Effectiveness

1. Accountability for Development Assistance and Aid Effectiveness John Gershman The Seoul Post-2105 Conference: Implementation and Implications October 7, 2013

2. 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

3. Coalitional Analysis

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

5. 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: • IATI, OGP, IBP, PWYF, national level right to information frameworks

6. 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 broadly • Range from journalists, auditors, ombudspersons • Twaweza • Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation Approach to Capcity Building • 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)

7. 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” (RosEyben)

8. Walking the Talk • Positive Signs: More organizations have signed on to IATI and similar initiatives (EITI, etc) • A renewed focus on “rigor” and “evidence-based policy” • Open Data Movement • Partial Democratization of debates due to new media • 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 themselves • These can include vertically monitoring and advocacy strategies • Challenges: • Quality agenda is more challenging for citizens and states to monitor than access; requires new capacities and more sophisticated tools of M&E • 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? • The rise of climate finance will almost certainly involve the return of conditionalities, with all the associated challenges • Institutional Reforms among some donors that may compromise the relative autonomy of the development agenda even more from geopolitics

9. 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

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11. 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 South • 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.