Final Draft December 2009 Bhavna Sharma, Marta Foresti and Leni Wild Table of contents

4.2. The EC and aid effectiveness

The European Consensus (2006) outlines the EC’s commitments to the aid effectiveness agenda, and accepts the Paris principles as the core principles for its engagement with partner countries. Whilst it is recognised that EC aid instruments can be used in a complementary fashion to deliver development assistance, emphasis is placed on general and sector budget support as the relevant aid instruments that can ideally strengthen national ownership, support partner's national accountability and procedures and improve transparent management of public finances.

Coordination and complementarity of aid instruments remains at the heart of the aid effectiveness agenda for the EC. The best way to ensure complementarity is to respond to partner countries' priorities, at the country and regional level. Thus, the EC strongly encourages partners to lead their own development processes, and engage donors in a national harmonization strategy. For its part, the EC intends to promote donor coordination by investing more time and resources in to working towards joint multiannual programming (based on partner countries' national development plans and budgets), common implementation mechanisms, joint donor wide missions and the use of co-financing arrangements.
In this context the EC has made four additional commitments for improving aid delivery:

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  to provide all capacity building assistance through coordinated programmes with an increasing use of multi-donors arrangements;
  
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  to channel 50% of government-to-government assistance through country systems, including by increasing the percentage of our assistance provided through budget support or sector-wide approaches;
  
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  to avoid the establishment of any new project implementation units;
  
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  to reduce the number of un-coordinated missions by 50%.
  

The EC also emphasises the role of NSAs in making aid more effective. It highlights the role of NSAs as watchdog, implementer, donor and recipient. Thus, NSAs are development actors in their own right, distinct from governments and donors. Therefore, if aid is to have the optimum impact, all three groups must examine how their policies and activities complement and/or undermine each other, and work together for best effect. This study is part of an ongoing process by the EC to analyse and assess how best it can support and promote the role of NSAs in the context of aid effectiveness and new aid modalities.

4.3. Programme Based Approaches and the Paris Declaration

The Paris Declaration and subsequent follow up at Accra include strong commitments to Programme Based Approaches – as opposed to conventional aid mechanisms focused on individual projects. For example, the ninth ‘Indicator of Progress’ under the Paris Declaration commits to increase the use of common arrangements or procedures by donors so that 66% of aid flows are provided in the context of Programme Based Approaches. However, this does not necessarily mean General Budget Support or sector-wide approaches. As Handley points out “The Paris Declaration is pointedly agnostic on aid modality choice, so long as aid is delivered as part of a vaguely defined ‘programme based approach’”.³⁰ Therefore, it is important to understand that the aid effectiveness agenda, enshrined at Paris and most recently Accra, has some overlap with the new aid modalities discussed in this report, but also entails a much broader agenda for aid effectiveness.

4.4. The Accra Agenda for Action

In September 2008, donor and recipient countries met again for a High Level Forum (HLF3) in Accra, Ghana, to assess progress in the implementation of the Paris Declaration and to agree an ‘Agenda for Action’ going forward. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in particular mobilised around this Forum to call for the aid architecture to be more inclusive of all development stakeholders and actors, including NSAs. Regarding the use of new aid modalities, fears were voiced regarding the impacts on accountability at the country level: “CSOs are worried that the PD [Paris Declaration] has an exaggerated focus on state to state relationships, and has ignored the critical role that citizens, movements, and organisations have played in affecting social, political and economic change”.³¹ An Advisory Group on Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness was established by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to contribute to the aid effectiveness agenda through national and regional consultations. In the run-up to the Accra HLF3, a number of reports were produced by this Advisory Group, including collections of case studies which emphasised the varying roles and functions played by NSAs in aid effectiveness³². A parallel CSO Forum was held during the HLF3, to facilitate debate and discussion within a broader range of development actors.

Some significant progress was made at Accra. The Accra Agenda for Action emphasised the contributions made by a range of actors, including parliamentarians and a range of NSAs such as CSOs, in taking forward the aid effectiveness agenda. For example, donors committed to “support efforts to increase the capacity of all development actors – parliaments, central and local governments, CSOs, research institutes, media and the private sector – to take an active role in dialogue on development policy and on the role of aid in contributing to countries’ development objectives”. Recipient countries committed to “engage with their parliaments and citizens” in shaping development policies and to work more closely with a range of development actors, including CSOs. Commitments were also made regarding strengthening transparency and accountability for results, and limiting conditionality. ³³
It is too early to comment on the implementation of the Accra Agenda, but some CSOs and umbrella networks expressed disappointment that the policy dialogue around Accra was not more inclusive of their perspectives. Despite a number of preparatory processes which CSOs fed into, and the existence of the Parallel Forum, a dominant perception among CSOs was that this process did not adequately address their concerns.³⁴ Moreover, there was little evidence of the engagement of a variety of NSAs, such as political parties and the private sector.