Paris is dead. Busan is dead. What the hell happened to aid effectiveness? I’ve got an idea.

The GPEDC should become a Recipient Caucus.

Jonathan Glennie, December 2022

In 2011 I attended a meeting in Busan which was meant to evolve the Paris Agenda on Aid Effectiveness to the next level. I remember the euphoria that swept the conference when it was announced that China had signed the outcome document. This was seen as a huge win heralding new approach bringing together “traditional” and “new” donors in a much larger partnership.

But as I walked out of the conference centre on my way to another karaoke session with the Latin American contingent, one of the authors of the Paris Agenda turned to me and said, “Paris is dead.”

What he meant was that the imperfect but respectable attempt over the previous five years to hold powerful donor countries to account and move them towards more effective spending practices was over. The Paris Agenda’s teeth were not especially sharp – but at least they existed. The newly agreed agenda, my friend predicted, would result in a loose talkshop with gradually reducing engagement from major donors.

How right he was. And the talkshop has a name: GPEDC.

Problem 1: No teeth

The Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) is the successor to the Paris Agenda on Aid Effectiveness and it is meeting in Geneva this week. But it is noticeable how little power there is in the room.

Under the Paris Agenda, donor countries were under some pressure to improve if they were found to be wanting in a particular area (say harmonisation, or money to support country systems etc). Senior donor ministers would care about their index rank. But today OECD countries send only low-level representatives to GPEDC meetings. Looking at this week’s conference agenda I couldn’t find a single minister from an OECD country, nor even a more junior representative from the UK, USA or France.

Interest in the GPEDC from the major donors has been gradually declining over the last decade. The talk at donor head offices has moved on from the aid effectiveness principles of ownership and accountability to more tangible issues like results and value for money. The northern civil society sector is also allocating very little resource, and the private sector has many other spaces closer to power where it is spend its limited energy. Meanwhile the longstanding hostility from major Southern countries (like China, India and Brazil) towards a partnership housed primarily in the OECD continues.

It all makes one reflect on that ambiguous claim of “partnership”. What did it ever mean? What does it mean now? The OECD donors must be over the moon. How did they arrive at this perfect situation where no-one is any longer scrutinising their poor spending habits in a serious coordinated way? That scrutiny now seems to be applied almost entirely to recipients of development finance! Nor are the private sector or foundations scrutinised. All these actors seem to get their seat at the table at this “partnership” for no significant price.

Problem 2: Unwieldy scope

The scope of the “effective development cooperation” concept is much bigger than “aid” and “aid effectiveness” and has proven too big to handle. (Have look at the definition I wrote of development cooperation with José Antonio Alonso if you are interested). This was always going to happen. A clear focus on quite techy issues “aid effectiveness” issues like mutual accountability processes expanded to include discussions about e.g. gender equality and the role of the private sector – all very important but not necessarily priorities in this space.

Some think that the role of the GPEDC should be to convene discussions on the “big issues” in development cooperation. This raises alarm bells. I understand the desire to make the GPEDC relevant, but I am not sure that the way to do that is by latching on to the latest fads. The GPEDC builds on the Paris agenda which was built on some of the best evidence in the business. It should be careful not to be bustled along by the winds of “latest thinking”.

Promising “dialogue” can be an excuse for having no clear line to push or evidence to share. In my experience GPEDC meetings comprise widely ranging discussions on interesting topics, without anyone having a particular reason for being there.

Read the everything-and-therefore-nothing outcome document for this week’s conference if you dare. Its authorship is ambiguous and its value unclear. This is a roadmap desperately in need of a road.

Does aid effectiveness still matter? Yes

There is a line of thinking (and I have heard it from very senior aid directors) that the concept of aid effectiveness is no longer a priority – it is in fact now so embedded in the DNA of the development industry that the huge post-Paris push is superfluous. Why reinvigorate something that is already vigorated?

I don’t agree. There are aspects of the aid effectiveness agenda that are mainstreamed now (e.g. a focus on results), but core aspects of the agenda (mostly around ownership and participation, but also e.g. alignment) are low priority for major funders. This is in part because it is easier politically to ignore them and spend money on quick results rather than institutional development, and in part because a new generation of development professionals have hardly heard of the Paris Agenda.

For too long I have taken for granted that the impressive research gathered around 20 years ago that led to the Paris Agenda was simply now a given, but I now realise that is not the case. I hadn’t fully grasped that a new generation doesn’t appear to know well the literature on effectiveness, mostly on aid effectiveness e.g. on tied aid, harmonisation, reducing transaction costs for recipients, placing recipient strategies at the heart of a planning etc.

So, in short, there is a great deal of work to do to reinvigorate the effectiveness agenda. The question is whether the GPEDC as it is currently organised is the right place to do it. I think it could be, but it will need to make a radical shift, one last evolution…

The Global South still wants this to work

The GPEDC has some very important strengths to build on, including a historical link to a respected, effective and evidence-heavy global process (the Paris Agenda), a broad and inclusive governance structure, and mechanisms in place to produce high-quality and relevant primary research.

Crucially, some important elements of the aid and development ecosystem do still come to the meetings and engage with the monitoring mechanisms, even if the main decision makers in OECD countries appear to have better things to do. Back in 2018, 81 recipient countries engaged in a monitoring process implying that they still see the value of the monitoring exercise in particular, and the partnership more broadly. Look again at the programme for this week’s conference, and many senior ministers from the Global South are indeed showing up.

Southern civil society is also still somewhat engaged with this process. This . This strong support from the Global South is a great strength that the partnership should capitalise on. This is not just a group of interesting insightful people, it is a power base. And it implies where the GPEDC should go next.

From amorphous partnership to Recipient Caucus

If the GPEDC is to regain momentum (and re-inspire powerful backers) it should evolve from a debating chamber to a Recipient Caucus. It would be a mechanism to enable recipients of development finance to voice their concerns and propose ideas, empowering better management of an increasingly complex ecosystem.

The OECD used to have an aid recipients caucus. Today, as far as I know, southern aid recipients have nowhere to sit and plot and organise to better hold donors to account. The nearest thing they have is the GPEDC – so why not formalise it?

What would that mean in practice?

·       The partnership would reframe its objectives explicitly to centre the empowerment of the recipients of aid and other development interventions. Everything it did would be with a view to helping recipient countries (their governments, bureaucracies and social organisations) better manage the complex universe of development finance (including but not limited to ODA).

·       Governance of the partnership would shift decisively towards recipients. Donors would continue to have a say, of course, but the direction would be set by recipients of all types (LIC, fragile, MIC). 

·       Funding for this work would continue to come from the usual suspects – enlightened donors would have to be persuaded of the importance of this new approach.

There needs to be a serious re-education exercise in the major donor capitals about the importance of effectiveness i.e. looking at systems and institutions not just results. The principles of aid effectiveness need to be re-embedded in the major institutions of development cooperation. But the very strong empirical evidence the GPEDC brings to this is not being fore-grounded successfully.

The way to get the issue of effectiveness back high on the agenda is to centre the clear demands from recipient countries – no amount of dialogue or research can match such political pressure, which would be backed by NGOs.

The (re-)establishment of a powerful voice for southern countries would attract much more attention from the power players in development cooperation - from OECD donors to the private sector and even eventually China – because it would have a clear raison d’etre and would emerge with a strong moral urgency and authority. (The old problem of OECD involvement in the secretariat would continue to impinge on engagement from some countries, but it might be lessened in this new set-up.)

Particularly after watching some of the heinous decisions in the Covid-19 response, Global South countries are looking for ways to better organise and influence global decisions. This could be one of them. “Recipients insist…” is a far more powerful message than “Some people at a conference suggest…”