It is often pointed out that the EU contributes more than half the world's development aid, but how effective is it? Development cooperation has ‘received criticism from many quarters in recent years’ admits Paul Hoebink in his introduction to this book. But is it justified, and what can be done to address it?
The key problem is made clear by Rolph van der Hoeven's discussion of ‘policy coherence’. What the rest of this book makes clear, whether wittingly or otherwise, is that policy incoherence is partly the product of demands for an ever-widening circle of involvement in the development ‘business’.
Thus, Maurizio Carbone's article focuses on the involvement of civil society in the development process, a major feature of the Cotonou Agreement. There is a problem of coordination, with some organisations failing to provide spokespeople or reluctant to be involved. Moreover, ‘there are still a number of cases where the participation process has been unsatisfactory, with consultation often equated with information sessions’. Widening the number of participants in a process too often fails to mean widening the number of decision-makers.
Lars Holstenkamp considers strategies to involve the private sector in programmes to support energy projects in Africa, stressing the need for ‘cross-sector linkages’, particularly between the private sector and microfinance. Once again the problem of coordination is highlighted, in this case of the EU itself, in which different Directorates General are responsible for different projects.
Jan Pospisil and Stefan Khittel focus on security-related development cooperation on the part of four smaller European states, and yet again we find coordination the problem. The traditionally strong role of civil organisations in Austria becomes a reason for ‘inconsistencies in designing programmes and country strategies from bottom-up’ (which might explain the reluctance to widen the circle of decision-making lamented by Maurizio Carbone). They stress that ‘a formidable obstacle to a strategic policy development is the interaction of the various institutional levels of foreign and development policies’. It's the same old story – pride at breadth of consultation and involvement colliding head-on with failure at the level of organisation and coordination. As many ‘actors’ as possible have to be involved, but none of them know their lines.
Francesco Burchi and Sara Turchetti consider the highly topical and urgent issue of delivering food aid. They recognise key elements of the problem, such as that food must not only be available but accessible – people starve not only when there is no food but when food is there and they can't afford it – and that donors spend nearly half their food aid budget on product preparation and delivery via national transporters. It is a pity that the authors don't know of John McClintock's pioneering work in the area of food security, since his proposals are the only ones that tackle all three factors inhibiting effective aid – namely the need for local purchase, for preventing corrupt or inefficient responses on the part of recipient countries, and for avoiding organisational confusion. This is a good article at seeing the problem (another is Stephen Dearden's excellent account of the difficulties involved in trade agreements in the Pacific), but is not so good at suggesting the solution.
Part III examines the development policies of Central and Eastern European states. These countries have been reluctant participants in overseas development projects, not least because under communism they were caught up in a number of highly politicised ‘development’ programmes aimed at building world socialism (or advancing the interests of the Soviet Union). Their attitude reminds us that the focus on African, Caribbean and Pacific countries is a product of Western European history, and it is unsurprising that the rest of Europe is sceptical about the priorities of the older member-states. As Ondřej Horký points out, the familiar problems of lack of organisation appear once again in the semi-reluctant movement of the Central and Eastern Europeans into the development area. Ministries fail to cooperate, thereby failing to make use of connections (such as those between development and migration) that are obvious even to a sceptical public.
The last part of the book, entitled ‘From the Global to the Local’, focuses on the role of local and regional authorities in development aid. Local governments, Mariken Bontenbal tells us, ‘have stepped into the international development cooperation arena all over the world’. In particular, city partnerships have become popular on an increasingly urbanised planet. Once again, however, adding new ‘players’ leads to problems of coordination. We are told that local governments have been ‘walking into the aid business with none of the knowledge which has built up in NGO circles over the years’. These ‘players’ not only don't know their lines, then, but don't know how to act. Bontanbal points out that development aid is not a ‘core’ activity of local government (is this surprising?), yet the response is not to reflect that perhaps development aid can function without these additional ‘players’, but to fret about how they can somehow be brought into service.
The EU's unique contribution to international relations is its system of partial sovereignty-sharing. Unfortunately, development aid is divided between areas where sovereignty is shared (‘community competences’) and areas where it is not. This in itself is bound to produce a mess (a ‘problem of coherence’, to use the favourite euphemism). In order to deal with the mess, new ‘actors’ are introduced, rather as a chef with something disagreeable bubbling away on the stove might hurl a few extra spices into the pot in an act of desperation. Local authorities, regional authorities, private firms, civil society organisations, voluntary groups – all are fed into the cauldron in a desperate attempt to produce something edible.
What is needed, however, is not more ‘actors’ but a coherent play, and here the EU's unique model of sovereignty-sharing is vital. The recipients of development aid should be drawn into a sovereignty-sharing mechanism such as that which defines the relations between member states of the EU. But this is not the sort of strategic issue that the writers wish to consider. Instead, this is a book (to rework the metaphor) that has no idea of how to win the game beyond forcing more and more players (including the groundsman and a few potential heart attack victims in their 80s) onto the pitch. Very democratic – and an opportunity for endless cooperation as the stretchers are produced – but is this a strategy for winning the game?
