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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Interview with Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul:
“Financial resources must not be pooled”
Bastian Loges and Ulrich Menzel:
State disintegration and humanitarian intervention
Anne Jung:
Neither war nor peace in Sierra Leone
Interview with UNDP-Administrator Mark Malloch Brown:
“Aid needs to be more evenly spread”
Sheila Mysorekar:
DynCorp and the privatisation of wa
4/2004
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“Efforts to spread aid more
evenly are vital”
Violence emanating from failing states poses a threat to the international community. The challenge is twofold: Prevent countries from disintegrating but also be able to jumpstart nation building whenever catastrophes do occur. United Nations peacekeeping interventions tend to make the headlines of international media. Efforts to spawn development, on the other hand, are just as important.
[ Interview with UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown ]
Relief organisations tend to compete with one another. They become most active in catastrophes, which are well covered by international media, as this enhances their public profile. Consequently, help is disbursed according to international attention rather than to local needs. What should be done to spread relief activities more evenly? What is the adequate role for the UN and for member governments?
The UN has, under the leadership of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, developed a good system for the coordination of humanitarian relief, but I think it is clear that we are still very poorly organized to intervene effectively during the immediate post-crisis recovery phase. Why? Because all too often the humanitarian intervention has been declared a triumph and the humanitarian donors have moved on. Meanwhile development intervention is in the planning stage: but careful planning and budgeting takes time. The whole organisation of international intervention is set up to deal with humanitarian relief on the one hand and longer-term reconstruction and development on the other. We only have to consider the current situation in Liberia as a case in point, although a year ago I would have cited the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an example, or at another time Angola, or equally the Balkans or Sri Lanka to see the gaps that have repeatedly emerged between emergency relief and development efforts, which continue to be a persistent challenge to how the recovery process is managed in crisis and post-conflict countries.
What needs to be done in an emergency area as Liberia is today?
The greatest threat to renewed conflict is that young men with guns are not quickly disarmed and given alternative economic livelihoods. The only institution with the resources to address similar situations is the World Bank. But it cannot spend those resources in the context of an immediate recovery phase precisely because it is a bank. The funds must be in the hands of those who can do so. UNDP assumes this role within the UN system. What we need now is to scale up our resources in order to be able to intervene in a timely and effective way. Thus the UN development system can make sure it stays with countries in all its phases from early humanitarian and peacekeeping missions throughout the transitional phase to longer-term reconstruction and rebuilding phases. Models of post-conflict interventions that are not rooted in the multilateral frame have proven to be at large costs. There has never been a more necessary time to scale-up the politically neutral multilateral capacity to respond to conflict. It is also important to remember that despite the attention on immediate crises, the UN’s development efforts are consistently focused on Africa and other least developed countries, where most of our resources are spent and where most of our work is directed.
Concern over aid effectiveness has led to a bias in favour of well performing states. On the other hand, there is a tendency to focus on disaster areas. As a result, countries, which are neither particularly promising in terms of development nor particularly affected by civil strife risk being neglected by cooperation efforts. How can the international community reduce this risk?
Bilateral aid is often disbursed according to current crisis needs or good performance where results are tangible, while less spectacular cases are crowded out of the market. While maintaining flexibility to react to acute crisis as well as rewarding good performers, the funding that is provided to UNDP unearmarked is distributed by a formula based on local income levels, which strongly favour the least developed countries. Nonetheless, we share the concern of many donors that aid has to be effective. It is critical to analyse the nature and the extent of the efforts that a developing country is undertaking and, based on this work, to remove the factors undermining performance. For countries that are performing less well, UNDP does therefore work with governments to help build the necessary capacity to use development assistance more effectively. Our interventions are concentrated in capacity building and policy making, working with civil society organisations and at grassroots community level.
But that is surely not enough in terms of coordinating donors.
It is also vital that efforts are made to spread aid of all donors more evenly. The UNDP Human Development Report 2003 has provided important inputs into this issue, by exposing the cases of over 50 countries in need of urgent support in order to approach the needed track and pace to meet the eight Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs) to halve poverty and hunger in our world by 2015. It provides an objective basis to urge donors that aid should reach those that are both most in need and potentially off-track and therefore potentially exposed also to future humanitarian emergencies. The Millennium Declaration, from which the MDGs emerged, represents one of the most far reaching and widest political agreements by the international community. All UN Member States have committed themselves to support global development, not just those cases where individual donors may have a preference or where there is media attention. It is a global compact, reaffirmed at the Monterrey conference on financing for development, which demonstrates the shared responsibility for development among all nations and should be consistently applied.
But as with many good interventions, attempts to live up to them may prove less convincing.
Developed countries also have to make much stronger efforts to deliver on their end of the global partnership as it is captured in the Goal 8 of the MDGs. Here developed countries pledged to open markets, reduce external debt and provide more official development assistance (ODA). Currently, however, ODA does still not live up to commitments made in Monterrey and the multilateral aid share is not keeping up. But it is precisely the multilateral channel that can improve distribution of aid allocations, since it is based on objective criteria and build the national capacity necessary to use aid of all development partners more effectively.
The OECD's Development Assistance Committee has made proposals to streamline the technical procedures by which donors disburse their aid funding. Will that help to spread the funds reasonably?
The Rome declaration on harmonization of aid procedures, made by 40 multilateral and bilateral development institutions last February, including UNDP, are geared at better coordinated and managed aid. This process will hopefully lead to more policy coordination and integrated country approaches. The success or failure of this entire concept depends overall on the partnership between developed and developing countries and support provided by multilateral organisations. UN agencies in development, which form the UN Development Group and which I chair, have just undergone a strong harmonization exercise which has resulted in common country policies, joint programming and a more coherent UN voice. The much-needed technical harmonization of donor procedures helps to build trust among partners.
Wouldn't political coordination be equally important to make sure that countries don’t disintegrate in violent disorder?
Yes, but that can only happen in the countries themselves. The instruments for identifying and prioritising national development priorities and aligning donors around them are the Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) and the MDGs. In fact, the PRS emerged from the idea of political coordination originally captured in the World Bank’s Comprehensive Development Framework. While the MDGs are the targets to achieve, the PRS is the midterm operational strategy on how to get there. Poverty Reduction Strategies have to be fully nationally owned and really MDG-driven to make them the pro-poor economic strategies that we all want to see. Effective national ownership requires strong capacities on the side of the local development actors. This is where UNDP comes into the picture again, building the capacity of local actors and connecting governments to knowledge, experience and resources through our global network.
So far, donor countries have often focused on regions in which they are particularly influential – for example because of former colonial ties. What might be a better basis for a “division of labour”?
To some extent this is probably unavoidable in the immediate future and constitutes a de facto partial division of labour. As a result some countries may lack the attention of bilateral donors and are therefore fully dependent on an under funded multilateral structure. Therefore, multilateralism, which can make aid distribution more equitable and rational, should see its relative share increased.
Officials from German donor agencies tend to claim that their organisations work more efficiently than multilateral bodies.
Multilateralism should not be seen as a competitor of individual donor efforts, but rather as an instrument at the service of both donors and recipients to achieve a better and more effective distribution of international development efforts. Again, the MDGs constitute a significant, if not perfect, framework for international cooperation around which OECD/DAC donor countries could discuss a new division of labour, for example different donor countries championing different MDG targets. If the global partnership agreed upon in Goal 8 gained momentum, trade barriers hampering access to markets for developing countries were removed, market distortions like agricultural subsidies drastically cut, it would leave many developing economies with sufficient resources to advance their human development effectively. If on top of that ODA increases to at least the doubling of ODA required to meet the MDGs, targeted on recipient country MDG priorities, the present geographic differences and preferences would have less relative weight. That means that major donors like bilateral agencies, the EDF and the Bretton Woods institutions have to coordinate around nationally owned country strategies.
Questions by Hans Dembowski and Tillmann Elliesen.
Mark Malloch Brown
is UNDP Administrator
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