From the Paris Declaration (2005) to the Accra Declaration (2008)
The aid debate is confined to a tight framework defined in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) which was written by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and ‘endorsed by’ (read, imposed on) beneficiary countries.
Western powers and international institutions such as the World Bank, through the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), expect to implement the principles that they themselves have unilaterally defined.13.2.1 Legitimacy
If, as is professed, there are two ‘partners’ in aid—in principle equal—the donor and recipient states, the architecture of the system should have been negotiated between these two ‘partners’. Yet, the initiative has been unilateral with the Development Assistance Committee (DAC)-a department of the OECD-taking sole responsibility for the drafting of the Paris declaration.
Like the Millennium Declaration, drafted by the State department of the United States to be read by the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) at the UN General Assembly, the Paris Declaration did not engage the international community. In fact, ‘non-western’ countries that are not recipients of potential aid, and in particular those that are themselves donors, have, with absolute legitimacy, refused to associate themselves with the ‘donors club’ proposed by the declaration. To truly engage the international community, a UN commission on ‘aid’ would have to have been created that would have been inclusive from the beginning and truly put each state on an equal footing. However, the process has been inscribed by the triad (the US-Canada-Australia, Europe and Japan) as part of a strategy to diminish the UN and substitute the latter with the G7 and its instruments, which falsely qualifies itself as the ‘international community’.
13.2.2 What Constitutes Aid?
The DAC definition of what constitutes international aid (ODA) is disputable.
The definition is itself a product of a political strategy, that of ‘liberal globalisation’, established by dominant powers in the global system (the triad) and is fraught with ambiguity and contradiction, since, on the one hand, the definition proclaims some important principles, in particular the right of countries to appropriate aid (defined in terms of ownership) and that of ‘partnership’. But on the other hand it details modalities that render enforcement of these principles infeasible.General conditionality, defined by the alignment to the principles of liberal globalisation, is omnipresent: at times with explicit reference to giving preference to liberalisation, open markets and becoming ‘attractive’ to private foreign investors; at other times, through indirect expression such as ‘respecting the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)’.
Within this framework, the Paris declaration is retrogressive as compared to the practices of the ‘development decades’ (1960-1970) when the principle of free choice by Southern countries regarding their system and their economic and social policies was acknowledged.
The asymmetric relationship between donors and recipients is reinforced by the insistence on ‘harmonisation’ of donor policies. This appealing term is in reality a call for alignment to the ‘Washington Consensus’ and the ‘post-Washington Consensus’ (barely different), that is to say still within the framework of liberal globalisation. This harmonisation (the donors club, integrating the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union etc.) reduces the margin of gains afforded southern countries during the development decades. Some Scandinavian countries however, courageously decided not to support the program of centralized development and to support the establishment of autonomous think tanks in the South mandated to freely develop alternative development models.
Rather than ‘partnership’ the current aid and development architecture ‘strengthens the control exercised by the collectivity of triad states on recipient states.
Again, this is a regression, compared to the achievements made during the Bandung era. The term ‘partnership’ has been used precisely because that is not what is wanted. As George Orwell notes, diplomacy prefers to talk of peace when it is preparing war—it is more effective.The Paris and Accra declarations, certainly as an attempt to compensate for the contradictions between declared principles and strategies for implementation, focus on, what the South Centre accurately calls, the ‘litany of false problems’, among them:
1. The Capacity of Absorption
The ‘volume’ of global aid doesn’t depend on this capacity, which is impossible to define. Rather, it depends on the political objectives of the triad. When the budget of a country is 25 or 50 % dependent on external aid, that country no longer has the means to ‘negotiate’ its participation in the global system. It is no longer truly independent, analogous to the semi-colonies of the 19 th century, thus, extravagant volumes of aid are useful, perhaps necessary.
2. Should global aid volumes be increased or reduced?
The endless debate on the 1 %, become 0.7 %, defines the terms of this false question. The volume of useful aid is that, associated with adequate strategies, which allows gradual reduction until aid is no longer needed. The terms of the false debate elude the true question focusing instead on doubtful and ineffective terrain regarding morality and charity.
3. Aid performance
The principle criteria for aid performance can only be the appreciation of results. Has aid enabled growth, employment, improved income, strengthened the autonomy of the productive system nationally with regards to external pressures? Has the aid itself enabled its own redundancy? Instead of this criteria, the Paris and Accra declarations have created a jungle of twelve (illegible) performance matrices and a rating system inspired by that used for the solvability of banks. This procedure is no doubt attractive to bureaucrats but it is certainly useless for the rest of us.
The declarations reinforced the means of political control of the triad by the adjunction of general economic and political conditionality of liberal globalisation: respect for human rights, electoral and plural democracy, good governance, amongst others.
Democratisation of societies is a long and difficult process, produced by social and political struggles within the country itself.
This struggle cannot be replaced by sermons from the heroes of good causes, national and a fortiori foreign, or by ‘diplomatic’ pressure. The declarations attempt to ease the gravity of the consequences of the strategies of (structural adjustment, liberal globalisation) by creating a new discourse: that of ‘poverty’ and ‘poverty reduction’, to which aid should give priority.13.2.3 Poverty, Civil Society, Good Governance: The Weak Rhetoric of Dominant Aid Discourse
The dominant discourse defines the objective of aid to be the reduction (perhaps eradication in the most ‘radical’ discourse) of poverty, by supporting ‘civil society’ and replacing governance that is deemed ‘bad’ by ‘good governance’.
The word ‘poverty’ comes from the old language of charity (religious and otherwise). This language belongs to the past, not the present, let alone the future. It is antithetical to the language developed by modern social philosophers, looking to be scientific, that is to discover mechanisms that engender an observable and observed phenomenon.
The way it is proposed, the ‘civil society’ that is called to assist aligns with the consensus that: (1) there is no alternative to the ‘market economy’ (a vulgar expression to substitute analysis of ‘real and existing capitalism’); (2) there is no alternative to representative democracy founded on an electoral multi-party system (conceived as ‘democracy’) substituting the democratisation of society, which is a continuous process.
Civil society is therefore the combination of neighbourhood collectives, of ‘communities (the concept being inseparable from ideology of communitarism), of local ‘interests’ (school, hospital and open spaces) themselves inseparable from the segments of crumbling ideologies, separated one from the other (‘gender’ understood in a restrictive sense, respect for nature, equally instituted in objectives separable from the others). Even if the demands of these assemblies that constitute the claimed ‘civil society’ is perfectly legitimate (and it is), the absence of, whether desired or not, their integration in a united social vision implies the accession to the dogma of consensus.
In other words, even if these demands were met, nothing would change. This ideology comes from across the Atlantic and is not derived from the historical political cultures of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Despite their varying degrees of difference, these political cultures are those of recognized conflicts of social interests, attributable to creative democracy and the power to imagine alternatives, not merely alternations in the exercise of an unchanged pattern of power.In their place, the fashionable and dominant discourse gives eminence to NGOs and sees the state as the adversary. In the ‘third world’, favoured NGOs are often GONGOs (governmental NGOs) or MNGOs (NGOs operating like mafias) or TNGOs (NGOS carrying out donor politics), etc.
‘Governance’ was invented as a substitute to ‘power’. The clash between good or bad governance is reminiscent of Manichaeism and moralism, substituting scientific analysis of reality. Again, this framework comes from the US, where sermons have often dominated political discourse.
‘Good governance’ implies that the ‘decision maker’ be ‘just’, ‘objective’ (has the ‘best solution’), ‘neutral’ (accepting symmetrical presentations of arguments), and above all ‘honest’ (including, of course, in the financial sense of the word). Reading the World Bank literature is like re-reading grievances written by men (and few women!) of religion and/or of law in the ancient Orient to the ‘just’despot (not even ‘enlightened’!).
The inherent visible ideology is employed to evade the real question: what social interest does the power that be represent or defend? How do we transform power so that it progressively becomes the instrument of the majority, in particular, the victims of the system? Within this framework, the multi-party electoral recipe has proved its limits.
13.3