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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
World Bank: Only poor countries have reformed
State-centricity is the problem
Deciding on the Food Aid Convention’s future
“Poor choices for poor countries”
02/2005 |
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[ Poorly performing countries]
State-centricity is the problem
Is development co-operation possible only with countries, which have reasonably intact political structures and whose ruling classes handle money responsibly? Are countries, to which this does not apply, only entitled to emergency aid at best? Their people would be punished twice: by their incompetent or unwilling governments as well as by the inactivity of rich nations. For a while it did look as if the international development train would bypass poor performers. For instance, the World Bank argued in its study “Assessing Aid” in the late 1990s, that focussing on good performers could markedly increase aid efficiency.
However, interest in unstable countries with poor development performance has been growing in the last few years, particularly after 11 September 2001. Admittedly, this interest is predominantly based on security concerns, but the international consensus has been for a long time that security is not possible without development. Donor governments and research institutes ponder how to cooperate with poor performers. The governments of Germany and Britain have already taken institutional steps: The German Federal Government created a “Civil crisis prevention” group involving several ministries. In the UK, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) have set up a joint programme, “Countries at Risk of Instability”, meant to help identify fragile states and recommend policies on how to deal with them. In autumn 2004, the same UK bodies announced they would establish a “Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit” in cooperation with the Ministry of Defence.
Institutions such as these meet a challenge, which Katja Roehder of the German Development Institute (DIE) elaborates on in a new paper. Development, foreign and security policy should be co-ordinated – and not only so in exceptional crises. Rather, she states, a coherent approach is also essential for early prevention strategies. Roehder lists other requirements for successful development cooperation with unstable countries. These include the willingness to make long-term commitments, to remain flexible in the choice of instruments, to continuously analyse political and socio-economic trends in the country, and to co-ordinate donors.
Roehder suggests looking at countries in terms of their ability to develop (stability) and of their ability to cooperate. The resulting matrix would then indicate policy options. In countries with partnership ability (such as, according to Roehder, Ghana, Benin and Mali), the issue is to stabilise legitimate state structures and to reform problematic polity aspects. In countries, which lack this ability (Roehder gives Togo, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Liberia as examples), cooperation must be directed at changing structures, irrespective of how stable the country in question is.
While Roehder thus comes to a rather unsurprising conclusion she does raise an important question: how should cooperation be structured with entities such as Somaliland? Somaliland cannot be regarded as having partnership ability as it is not a state at all. The issue has also been tackled by a group of scholars from the British Overseas Development Institute (ODI). In a recent study commissioned by the DfID, they even challenge the very notion of poorly performing countries. Like Roehder, the ODI establishes that the categorisation of countries will vary depending on the indicators used. There are only very few cases, in which the judgements of all donors and research institutions converge. For donors, according to the ODI, poor development performance per se is not the problem. What bothers them is “the absence or perceived weakness of legitimate authority, and the perceived ineffectiveness of state institutions with which to engage in many countries”. The ODI team, therefore, sees the “growing state-centricity of aid” as “a key problem in formulating approaches to aid in difficult policy environments”. In a similar vein, Roehder advocates greater inclusion of non-state groups, and even perpetrators of violence, in cooperation efforts with fragile countries.
Tillmann Elliesen
Further information:
Countries at Risk of Instability:
http://www.strategy.gov.uk/output/Page5426.asp
Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit:
http://www.postconflict.gov.uk
DIE-Study on fragile countries:
http://www.die-gdi.de
ODI-Study on poor performers: http://www.odi.org.uk/publications/poorly_performing_countries/Aid_to_PPCs.pdf
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