Hypercollective action and the aid effectiveness problem

Thus the “aid industry” comprises thousands of official agencies, firms, foundations, and research bodies, most of them located in the Global North, with many business models, but with of course their business goals directed at the billions of people, the vast bulk of humanity, located in the Global South. This is not to speak of South-South cooperation itself, born in Bandung in 1955, five years before the DAG and six years before the first meeting of the DAC, with principles based on mutual benefit (win-win) and knowledge-sharing, since developing countries did not at that point have capital to share.

The aid effectiveness agenda – at the core of the DAC’s mission from the outset – attempted, in the first decade of the 2000s, to bring some order into the sprawling “aid industry”. Indeed, the first High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in 2003 in Rome, was inspired by the concern of then World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, at the staggering number of discrete aid projects in play. Thus, the focus on “harmonisation”. Then, as recounted in Chapter 11, the second HLF in Paris went on to lay out in the now classic “Paris Declaration”, the five principles of aid effectiveness:

ownership, alignment, harmonisation, managing for results and mutual accountability. A monitoring system was established and an independent evaluation organised. At Accra in 2008, the main issues were the use of country systems and the role of budget aid in that context, and the small matter of aid predictability, shockingly low in fact, even from the MDBs.

Then in Busan, the attempt was made to bring all development partners

14 The work of I.M.D. Little and James Mirrlees at the Development Centre on project appraisal became a state of the art reference point, though its scepticism of social cost-benefit analysis was much debated (Little & Mirrlees, 1974).

into a broader development effectiveness paradigm – official agencies, civil society organisations (CSO), the private sector, and the South-South development paradigm where, on this last big quest, Busan produced a drama and ultimate failure on that front (see Chapter 11 and Bracho, 2017).

While the South-South paradigm continues to generate contestation and joint efforts are still the exception (trilateral cooperation is the frontier here), the DAC did find points of communication with China during this period with ongoing effect, as related in Box 5.

Box 5: Interacting with China – Two Chapters

While the DAC Secretariat had undertaken periodic reviews of Chinese aid (OECD/DAC, 1978), it took until 2008 for any significant interaction with Chinese development cooperation actors to emerge; on one front the birth of the China-DAC study group, and on another front, a relationship with the Ministry of Commerce (MofCom), where the management of the Chinese aid programme was then located.

The China-DAC study group originated in a DAC seminar in Paris in early 2008, conducted by three Chinese experts on China’s own poverty reduction programmes. With the high interest generated by this event providing momentum, Eckhard Deutscher, then chair of the DAC, undertook a mission to Beijing (accompanied by this author). In a morning discussion with the Leading Group on Poverty Alleviation (reporting directly to the State Council, the Chinese Cabinet), the idea and the name of the China-DAC study group were conceived, with the host institution as the International Poverty Reduction Centre in China (IPRCC), a new joint venture between China, the UNDP and other partners. That same afternoon, Deutscher and Carey briefed the World Bank Beijing Chief (David Dollar, with adviser Phil Karp) who gave immediate and concrete support. The organisation of this venture in Beijing was led on the DAC side by the UK, with other DAC members in strong support of this new channel of interaction with Chinese counterparts. Very quickly, a support group formed of Beijing-based and home-based DAC officials with China responsibilities. It was essentially via this route, not via the DAC in Paris, that the China-DAC study group operated and was financed, but with Secretariat support based in Paris. Much of the logistics fell to the welcoming and efficient Chinese officials and researchers at the IPRCC.

Box 5 (cont.): Interacting with China – Two Chapters

Co-chaired by the deputy director of the IPRCC and this author, and with Professor Li Xiaoyun as director, the first months were invested in defining a strategy, with agreement reached that it should be an event-based programme, involving also African participants. On this basis four substantive events were organised and carried through:

• Development Partnerships, Beijing (October 2009); Agriculture and Food Security, Bamako (April 2010); Infrastructure, Beijing (September 2010);

Enterprise Development, Addis Ababa (February 2011).

• A final policy seminar was conducted in Beijing in June 2011, with the participation of the DAC chair, J. Brian Atwood.

A set of main lessons, for China, for DAC members and for African policymakers was published in two volumes (OECD, 2011). This programme involved a wide range of Chinese officials and experts in extensive and intensive policy exchanges with DAC and African counterparts.

The relationship with the MofCom had two beginnings: Chinese participation by MofCom officials at the Accra HLF in September 2008; and the working visit of a researcher from the MofCom research arm CAITEC to the Secretariat. Both these engagements have turned out to be foundational. Following the Accra HLF, where in paragraph 19 the outcome document recognised South-South cooperation concepts and history (OECD-DAC, 2008), the Chinese participants inspired the project to write China’s White Paper on Foreign Aid of 2011 (China State Council, 2011), with reference to effectiveness issues, followed by a second White Paper in 2014. When a new aid agency, the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA), was established in 2018, its constitution embraced core functions very close to those of DAC aid agencies – articulation of country strategies, development of a statistical system, and an evaluation programme.

A third White Paper, published in January 2021, elaborates these functions and brings Belt and Road Initiative projects inside the country strategies (China State Council, 2021). The DAC Chair and the OECD-DAC Secretariat have built connections to the CIDCA leadership, which has visited the OECD in Paris. And the MofCom research arm continues to be a key point of contact on aid modalities and statistical issues. Separately, China (a “Key Partner” of the OECD), became, in 2015, a full member of the OECD Development Centre, with connections to the Development Research Centre (DRC) of the State Council and its International Centre for Knowledge on Development (CIKD).

These various experiences of interaction with China in the development cooperation field have established a basis for a potential “ideational convergence”

based on “coalition magnets” (Janus & Tang, 2021).

Successfully though, the DAC WP-EFF proved a major opportunity for the voice of developing countries to be heard finally around the DAC table.

Indeed, it became stronger with each meeting, and in the final year the working party was chaired by a senior adviser to the Egyptian government, who has written the definitive history of the aid effectiveness endeavour (see Abdel-Malek, 2015). The aid effectiveness disciplines are challenging for aid agencies, essentially for bureaucratic and domestic accountability reasons.

Nevertheless, the verdict of the independent evaluation of the Paris Declaration was summed up thus:

Comparing current practice with the aid situation 20 years ago presents a global picture of far greater transparency and far less donor-driven aid today. It is fair to say that the “free-for-alls” of competitive, uncoordinated, and donor-driven activities that were commonplace 20 to 25 years ago are now unusual enough to attract rapid attention and criticism, except in some fragile and humanitarian relief situations, where they are still all too common. Comparing the period since 2005 with the immediate pre-Declaration situation, one must conclude that the Declaration has disseminated commitments and instruments for reform which were previously being developed and tested in a fragmentary way by a few leading countries and donors. It has raised expectations for rapid change, perhaps unrealistically, but also strengthened agreed norms and standards of better practice and partnership. There is ample evidence here that these standards have been used to reinforce or legitimise demands that good practice be observed (Wood et al., 2011).

In the context of the Addis Ababa Financing for Development Conference of 2015, the aid effectiveness paradigm from the HLFs was integrated into the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA), which then became an integral part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) adopted later that year in the UNGA. In paragraph 9 of the AAAA, the common vision is stated briefly but powerfully, and remains a huge challenge for all five of the Paris Declaration Principles. It opens thus: “Cohesive nationally owned sustainable development strategies, supported by integrated national financing frameworks, will be at the heart of our efforts”.

Nevertheless, the fundamental existential fact of an aid industry with

“actors proliferating and collaboration fragmenting” prompted in 2010 one of the most penetrating analyses ever of the issues and challenges involved (Severino & Ray, 2010). The articles published by Jean-Michel Severino and

Olivier Ray on the birth of hypercollective action and the end of ODA sought to replace the ODA concept with a global policy framework. Severino and Ray did not in the end propose that the ODA concept be killed off. But the idea they presented of a set of internationally agreed global policy missions was to be realised in effect with the SDGs five years later. And in her most recent book, Mariana Mazzucato has proposed exactly that – making the 17 SDGs into global missions around which actors and collaboration can be organised, not in any set of super institutions, but in terms of common goals and interfaces, communications and progress tracking (Mazzucato, 2021). This existential issue is explored further in the final two chapters of this book.