Aid Thoughts

Digesting the difficult decisions of development

Archive for category Governance

A Human Thing

Sep 6

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Governance, History | No Comments

Chris Blattman recently asked if Human Rights might be a morally dubious concept, following Adam Martin’s unearthing of an old interview with the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek. Hayek, who was making the argument that apartheid South Africa should have been left alone to run its own business as a ‘civilisation of a kind’, made the claim that intervention was being encouraged by the recent acceptance of human rights in America, just a few years prior to the video being recorded.

Leaving aside the irony of a libertarian regarding a situation in which 90% of humans had severely restricted liberty as unworthy of intervention, I really have to take issue with another point he makes: that human rights were a recent concept to the US when he was interviewed in the 1970s. Martin quotes:

I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd.

- An absurd statement itself, considering the contents of the Declaration of Independence. In the comments, Adam defends this statement, arguing that Hayek was referring to a new, modern conception of human rights:

… human rights are claims about how governments should act to produce particular patterns of outcomes

Adam contrasts this with the idea that classical human rights were statements about how individuals should treat each other. I’m dubious; a glance at the history of the ideas underlying statehood and rights suggests that the concept of rights was far more amorphous than this dichotomy would indicate, and spoke directly to the actions of the state as well as individuals. In fact the revolutions of America and France were specifically about the responsibilities of the state.

Human rights emerged as the basis of modern states (including the independent America) more than two centuries ago and their expansion from their original base began almost immediately – first incorporating new people and then new rights. The American and French Revolutions pioneered the ideas of ‘human rights’ as actionable concepts. The Declaration of Independence famously holds certain truths to be self-evident, notably that ‘all men are created equal’. France’s revolution was founded on the principles of liberté, egalité, fraternité – still the central elements of the French identity.

Nor were these the first time that universal rights had been invoked. The intellectual foundations for universal rights were laid by the very first Greek and Roman philosophers, and independently by Asian philosophers. These philosophers attempted to isolate the conditions for happiness, rightness and dignity that apply to all men: and thus laid the foundation for the idea of human rights as conditions that must be protected to allow the pursuit of these. As early as the third century BC, Mencius took these ideas further: he claimed that a ruler who tyrannises his subjects loses his divine right to rule and the people have the right to revolution – thus directly linking rights to the actions of states and leaders. The 1776 and 1789 revolutions made this explicit through the ideas they laid at the foundation of the new states they created.

What was amazing in the 1776 and 1789 revolutions was that they established as part of their basic justification the idea that Government had responsibilities and requirements that gave or denied it legitimacy, and that this was a truth that did not derive from exclusively from divine mandate (as with Kings who were either ‘chosen’ or descendent from Gods or the heavens) nor divine knowledge (i.e. from textual religion) – rather that these concepts were immutable, and derived from the condition of humanity. It was the failure to meet these responsibilities that motivated revolution.

The ideas of basic human rights established in these two revolutions have had an incredible enduring power. It is ahistorical to claim that the Sen-inspired approach to rights-based development is anything new. Rather, it’s a further modernization of a conceptual basis to the state that has existed for a great deal of time. The modification and expansion of rights is also not a new phenomenon. The original ideas were immediately passed into common currency and modified even in the few years following the revolutions. And these ideas have always been controversial and open to debate.

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Religion and the Legal System do not Mix

Aug 20

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance, Middle-East | 4 Comments

From the Grauniad:

A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals whether they would punitively damage a man’s spinal cord after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralysing him, local newspapers reported today…

Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi, 22, was left paralysed after a fight more than two years ago, and asked a judge to impose an equivalent punishment on his attacker under sharia law, reports said.

Fortunately:

King Faisal specialist hospital said that it would not do the operation. The article quoted a letter from the hospital saying “inflicting such harm is not possible”, apparently refusing on ethical grounds.

No doubt Wronging Rights will come up with something pithy and insightful to say about this, so I’ll sign off with this: gah.

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We’ll always have Paris…

Aug 17

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Development, Governance, Worst practices | 2 Comments

Of all the Declarations, in all the world...

News from this weekend suggests that DfID will be reversing its hitherto strong backing to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. My initial reactions were of shock and disappointment. Shock because DfID has been an ardent supporter of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action. Disappointment because it was so unexpected: it has a strong, highly competent aid effectiveness department and has also used the Declaration to push Government reform.

I’ve noted after viewing the original leaked memo that the original advice was in favour of maintaining the Paris Declaration as a commitment by DfID. Most of the other commitments dropped simply serve to cut the amount of ringfencing of DfID’s budget and therefore increase its flexibility to meet the needs of different developing countries.

The decision to rescind their commitment to the PD is a much more problematic one, however. The issues essentially break down as follows:

What has DfID Reversed?

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD) is an agreement signed by donor agencies and Governments and aid-recipient Governments in 2005. The Declaration establishes a number of best practices in aid management that all parties promise to adhere to, and twelve targets which all parties are to be assessed on. These targets and commitments were strengthened by the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) in 2008.

The idea behind the PD and AAA is to make it easier for Governments to manage, use and report on aid by simplifying the way aid is contracted, disbursed and evaluated. It also seeks to maximise the benefit to the developing country by untying aid and ensuring that aid be channelled through the working local process of the aid-recipient Government. Thus aid is promised to be channelled through the local budget process, use the local accounting and audit procedures and be evaluated according to local processes. It further stressed the need to make aid as flexible as possible by using fungible General and Sector Budget Support.

Recipient Governments also made pledges to improve their own systems: of audit, budgeting and so on, and to be assessed independently on them.

The Paris Declaration has two very big positive points. The first is that it seeks to increase the ability of local actors to respond to their own problems flexibly and not be dictated to by a multitude of individual donors. It thus helps reduce the coordination problem of aid and encourages local solutions and visions of development.

The second major benefit, related to the first, is that it moves the lines of accountability of aid. Instead of aid money being handled by the donors, in which case the donors are accountable to their own taxpayers and no-one else, it creates dual accountability. First the donor gives money to the recipient Government to use. That Government is thus accountable to the donor, and must show that the money was used appropriately. But far more important than this, because aid money is now on budget and managed by local Governments a second line of accountability is created: of the recipient Government spending the money to the local electorate. Through the budget debates in Parliament, these people have the chance to contest the use of aid through their elected representatives; they also have the ability to vote a Government out of power if it doesn’t use aid money well. The Government now has to justify aid money in the same way it does tax money.

Additionally, the PD addresses lots of smaller, niggling issues that seriously hamper the capacity of Governments, for example setting a target for the reduction of cumbersome and time consuming donor missions by combining them.

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The More Things Change…

Aug 13

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance | 1 Comment

A paragon of transparency

A paragon of transparency.

Today’s Guardian runs an eye-opening piece on expenditures made in the last year of the Labour administration. The Tories are, in their drive for transparency, publishing expenditures made by various Government departments online. The documents relating to the Department of Communities and Local Government show:

Among the expenses revealed was £1,673 to a company called Stress Angels, which offers massages, acupressure, Indian head massage and reflexology…

Then there was £626 on a trip to a nature reserve in Nottingham and £539 on an awayday to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Accommodation at a hotel – the Rubens, opposite Buckingham Palace – cost £17,000. Another £3,670 went to Halfords cycle shop.

The litmus test for the Tories will, of course, be whether they maintain their drive for transparency when it is going to expose even their own Government.  We see this kind of thing happening all the time in Africa, relating to corruption. A new Government comes in promising change and a war against graft. For the first year they push hard to identify and punish culprits, making high profile arrests and prosecutions. These arrests and prosecutions damage the previous administration, normally the opposition party in Parliament.

Then as time goes on, the anti-corruption agency exhausts its ability to prosecute the opposition. It’s eyes turn towards current or recent corruption scandals – those that implicate the current regime. Suddenly, the political will dissipates – they’ve ‘done enough to show that corruption will not be tolerated’. Quietly, the support and direction of senior officials is withdrawn. The old bad habits reassert themselves and the Government continues to make merry with public funds.

Eventually they get voted out, and the whole cycle starts again. This happened in Kenya (though it all went a bit pear shaped when John Githongo showed the tenacity of a bull-terrier); it happened in Malawi and in almost identical circumstances, in Zambia.

It’s easy right now for the Tories to attack the culture of expenditure in Government, because the punches are landing on their opponents. The real win will be when they let the expenditures be published on a monthly or quarterly basis, and let the whip fall on themselves. After all, this is what we demand of developing country administrations. Why should the standards we hold for ourselves be different?

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Counting desires

Jul 27

Posted by Matt in Aid, Economics, Governance, Research | 4 Comments

Preference aggregation can be tricky business

A key assumption behind the Global Burden of Disease project is that it is possible to come up with a “Disability Weight” for each health state.  Diseases conditions that are considered worse than other carry higher disability weights than others.  A very important issue in the development of such weights is the question of who should define these conditions?  Should those who have the conditions be the best judge or are they biased?  Should healthy people who have never experienced these conditions be the judge?  Should doctors decide?  Should policy makers?  Should health economists (gasp!!)?

In the past, the GBD has relied upon “expert opinion” to make such decisions.  Well, it seems for the next update of the GBD, which is currently underway, you can also be an expert.  I came across a link to the following survey earlier today that allows you to have some input in these weights.

That’s Karen Grepin discussing an attempt to aggregate beliefs over disease burdens to better define the weights given to different ailments. This is a very similar exercise to preference aggregation, where we attempt to construct a unified set of beliefs that will govern public policy. The result is something approaching a social welfare function, which allows us to make statements like “Society strictly prefers A to B.” One way of doing this is to get a sample of individuals to compare different states and to try and tease out an overall ordinal ranking of these states. Using Grepin’s example, each person has to make a pairwise comparison:

The first person has swelling and tenderness in the testicles and pain during urination.

The second person has lost part of both legs, leaving pain, tingling, and frequent sores in the stumps. The person has great difficulty moving around and has episodes of depression, anxiety and flashbacks to the injury.

By asking enough people to compare different states with different combinations of symptoms, we can tease out their overall ranking of those symptoms – how this is done can sometimes be contentious and quite technical. That ranking then represents the best approximation of everyone’s relative rankings of disease burden.

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On the Weakness of States

Jul 27

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Governance, History | 1 Comment

Did you ever see the original hulk TV show? They basically dusted Lou Ferrigno with green powder and asked him to growl. He was still more convincing that Edward Norton.

Weak or Strong?

It was not the case that old states were uniformly ‘weak,’ more that they husbanded their moral and physical authority for specific tasks… Where complex bundles of royal privileges and powers had come into existence, there was often a tendency for them to be broken up, becoming part of the patrimony of some other prince or noble. Kings and emperors often found it lucrative and convenient to ‘farm out’ their rights to the highest bidder…

In China… initially the emperors had been content to cede their power in one area in order to strengthen it elsewhere. In the longer run, however, the decay of these imperial functions gravely compromised the regime’s legitimacy. Recent work on the West African Asante [one of the great pre-colonial African kingdoms] has also shown that this aspiring centralized power was severely limited by local feudatories and lineage groups….

So Government in all of these great states was often something of a trick of the light. State power was powerful and purposive in defined areas, though constant vigilance was needed to stop it seeping away to magnates and local communities. Elsewhere it was patchy and contingent. Over large areas it was deliberately not exercised at all…In the monsoon areas of Asia where great kings vaunted their magnificence, warfare and tax gathering regularly came to a halt when the roads annually became impassable. The state could only deploy a small number of officials or exercise royal justice in particular cases. Everywhere, therefore, the panoply of state and imperial power rested in the longer term on the co-option and honouring of local elites or self-governing local communities.

Every time I open The Birth of the Modern World, I read a passage in which Chris Bayly exposes the complexity of historical reality and dangers of simplification. In this example, he looks at the period leading up to around 1800, in which states were beginning to take modern form. In examining the phenomenon of weak or strong states, Bayly emphasises that states are not static over space, time or function. As such, naming a state ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ may simply cloud the real story, that states choose to exercise power in some areas and not others, not always in the best long-term interest of the state itself and often simply in response to basic opportunity or aims that owe more to symbolic rather than rational ends. The Great Russian Empire existed primarily on paper, for example, with large swathes of land ungoverned – almost a textbook example of a ‘weak’ state. Yet when the state was called upon to exert its authority, it always found the means to, at least until 1917.

We talk a lot about weak states now, and even of ‘failed’ states. These are not new ideas nor new phenomena. When we think about modern failed states, we need to bear in mind that for most there are functions in which they are strong and there are areas in which they govern effectively; it’s from these that strategy on how to incorporate the rest of the nominally governed area must be generated. This may involve subjugation or devolution or both – states are about the exercise of moral and physical authority, which is not always pleasant to witness or be subject to. The process by which a patchily strong state becomes a uniformly strong state is rarely without severe conflict.

In the extreme cases, where ‘states’ govern a few square miles and little else, we are in uncharted territory. Historically, these have never succeeded, and gave way to successor states or anarchy. Our attempts to forestall this may be futile or we may find a way to build a new moral and physical authority to reinforce the state. Given that outside interference almost always involves an abdication of moral authority in the eyes of an insular or jingoistic public, it’s may be that only force can support these.

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Unity and Fragmentation

Jul 8

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Africa, Development, Governance | 2 Comments

I was in Cape Town last week for the World Cup, and watched the Ghana – Uruguay quarterfinal in the FIFA Fan Fest there, together with several thousand supports from South Africa and abroad. For those who have missed it, Ghana lost in controversial circumstances, and the trend of blatant cheating in this World Cup continued.

What really struck me during the whole experience was quite how much almost everyone there wanted Ghana to win. South Africans white and black, Africans from elsewhere – all supported Ghana. Almost every face had a Ghana flag painted on, Ghana scarves, t-shirts and flags were everywhere, no doubt encouraged by the TV campaign on DSTV encouraging all Africans to wear Ghana’s colours for the match, and the numerous newspaper headlines and posters extolling this pan-Africanism, including one I ‘liberated’ from its mooring: ‘We are ALL Ghana’. And the allegiance did not seem to simply be skin-paint deep, either: after Ghana scored one of their penalties, the big South African behind me literally lifted me off the ground with a powerful hug, while simultaneously obliterating the sound of the vuvuzelas (and the skin on my ears) with a primeval roar of joy. Meanwhile, a string of supporters in front of me were on their knees with arms linked, praying for Ghanaian success in the penalty shootout.

I was talking about this with a couple of friends afterwards. One asked why this happens. After all, he said, European nations would rarely cheer for each other on principle, and North and South Americans are more likely to boo their neighbours than will them on. As a counterpoint, my other friend pointed out that with the exception of Egypt and Algeria, pretty much all Arab nations would cheer for each other in lieu of their own team. It has something to do with a shared sense of oppression, an ‘us against the world’ attitude that is often brought about by shared misfortunes. Many Africans don’t partake in this form of supra-nationalism, but far more do.

Particularly in the immediate post-colonial period, pan-African nationalism was a major intellectual force in Africa: the countries that had been agitating for independence often did so together, and their intellectuals, who had traveled to Europe for education and to further their cause, met to exchange ideas and develop friendships. There’s a great passage in Wole Soyinka’s autobiography You Must Set Forth At Dawn that captures this moment – the excitement of being a black African fighting for a new future meeting peers, artists and intellectuals who shared that goal and saw success in one country as success for all.

After independence was achieved, Nyerere and Nkrumah in particular pushed pan-Africanism as a ideological basis for the continent’s advance, leading to the founding the Organisation for African Unity, now succeeded by the African Union. None of this is to say that Africans primarily identify themselves as African as opposed to more specific markers such as (for example) Kenyan or Kikuyu. But there is an identity ‘African’ that many people choose to use in many situations, and it certainly appears to be one of the most powerful supra-national identities around (not as much, of course, as religious identification).

Yet, in an apparent paradox, while Africa is tightly bound by this self-identification, there seems to be an increasing talk about whether the countries of Africa make sense, and specifically, if they should be much smaller than they are. Lee mentioned a few such discussions in this blog, and Jina Moore at Change.Org blogged about an even more radical idea: redrawing the national boundaries of Africa altogether. This is, of course, only a paradox in a superficial sense. When you get down to it, it’s perfectly possible to celebrate one identity, ‘African’, that binds you to another group while simultaneously fighting a second identity ‘Nigerian’ that also binds you to some of the same people, because these identities have different functions and relate to different aspects of one’s life.

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The baby and the bath water

Jun 18

Posted by Matt in Africa, Aid, Governance | No Comments

If UNESCO does not act decisively to reject the Obiang Prize in October, the United States must deny UNESCO’s 2011 budget request for $84 million. Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State and Foreign Operations, played a key role in today’s decision by expressing his concerns about the Obiang prize. Senator Leahy should be ready to go one step further to cancel UNESCO’s funding altogether if the organization continues to entertain the idea of accepting money from one of Africa’s worst dictators.

That’s from the folks at CGD again. Is there not room for a more pragmatic approach? See my thoughts here.

And what about Obiang himself?  Rather than trying to establish legitimacy via UNESCO, he can redeem himself by returning the money he stole from his country, making investments in health, education and infrastructure, and considering direct cash distribution of oil revenues to the impoverished people of Equatorial Guinea.

Which he’s never going to do unless we use more direct political and economic tools to push him to do so. Neither denying him a prize nor wiping out a decent hunk of UNESCO is going to accomplish this task.

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More on Romer’s Great Folly

Jun 14

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Development, Economics, Governance, History, Political Economy | 7 Comments

"You too can have this city, if you just purchase a simple, easily applied set of rules. Retails at $49.99"

Reader Adam alerted me to a piece in The Atlantic on Charter Cities. Long-time readers will know I’m profoundly critical of Paul Romer’s ahistorical, acultural thinking on the idea, which reveals a basic lack of understanding about how cities, migration and laws actually arise and work.

The article is full of badly reasoned logic, too. It says that Romer has been criticized for his Charter Cities idea, but then defends him by saying that he came up with New Growth Theory. So what? Clever people have stupid ideas sometimes, and people who are expert in one field might turn out to be ordinary or worse in another.

A lot else in the piece, some of which comes direct from the mouth of Romer worries me. Here are a few quotes, the first of which Adam pointed out in his e-mail:

“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.

This is the closest that Romer comes out advocating colonialism outright. Never mind that my earlier criticism pointed out some of the hundreds of holes in his story about how Hong Kong came to be so successful, Romer is decided: Britain made Hong Kong successful by importing new rules. The fact that Hong Kong’s legal code took something close to half a century to evolve, and a further 20 years to be enforced correctly, is completely ignored. I know – my family are all lawyers, and some have been key players in the evolution of that legal code and witnesses to the creation of a police force and institutional structure to enforce it.

“Anything that involves land can be manipulated by people who want to rise up against a leader,” [Romer] began. “You have to find a place where there’s a strong enough leader with enough legitimacy to do this knowing that he’s going to get attacked. It narrows the options quite a bit. But we shouldn’t give up without trying a few more places.” In short, a disappointment with one client is no excuse for failing to pitch other ones. Any entrepreneur knows that.

So, in other words, the only kind of places where a Charter City might actually work are where the Government is strong, has a legitimate leader, and able to resist opposition. Sounds like the kind of Government that least needs a foreign power to come in and govern a city for them.

When you listen carefully, you realize that much of what Romer is saying should not be controversial. A few development economists argue that geography is destiny, but most share Romer’s conviction that decent rules are paramount.

Another worrying statement. The problem is not that economists think that rules are important. The problem is that they are not independent entities. They do not exist in a vacuum, apart from the culture, history, geography, and so on they relate to. Romer’s approach is wrong not because he thinks rules are important or that countries should invite rich Governments to enforce them, but because Romer thinks he already knows the rules, and that they can be imported anywhere. That’s not how it works. In a recent post I pointed out how different rich countries are from each other. That’s partly because their rules, evolved over hundreds of years in some cases, are specific to each of their own contexts. Romer doesn’t see this. He just sees the rules of today, and imagines that they can be peeled off a society and pulled over a new one, like a one size fits all t-shirt.

Finally, one of the old clichés:

But when African teenagers do their homework under streetlights, isn’t Romer right to think the unthinkable?

Romer is right to think outside of accepted conventions, of course. But when his ideas are so misshapen, so at odds with the reality of the world, no amount of poverty in the world justifies their continued advancement.

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In Need of Sexing Up: Audit

May 2

Posted by Ranil Dissanayake in Aid, Development, Governance | 6 Comments

The art of defenestration.

Sidney J. Mussberger did not want to talk about the Audit.

We’ve said before that some of the most important issues in development are the least romantic and photogenic. One of the issues missing a glass slipper is audit. Let’s be frank for a moment: audits are boring. They are boring to do, boring to read about (except in the rare occasion that they bring to light spectacular mismanagement of funds) and they are boring to talk about, except in their most condensed forms. I have never been the most patient meeting attendee, but two things are guaranteed to have me pining for the release of defenestration: macroeconomic data reconciliation meetings and audit meetings.

Yet, I actively seek out both. Beneath the stolid veneer of number crunching, these are the areas where the Government’s intentions for economic management and the use of public funds are best revealed in their most unforgiving light. After the complaints, arguments and counterarguments that the Lancet article about resource management brought up, this is a timely point to make. The only really legitimate argument that can be made against Governments substituting aid money for their own spending in a sector is if the allocation of funds by Government is grossly inappropriate – otherwise the complaints make a mockery of good budget management and the concept of local ownership of development processes. Yet for all the cry and hue, it’s interesting that no-one has actually looked and examined how many of the countries ‘guilty’ of reallocation have been audited.

If a Government is audited, it should be relatively clear where money has gone. Once this is the case, the whole fungibility argument becomes obsolete: it doesn’t matter what money facilitates bad spending. Bad spending should be minimized regardless. If this is done and reveals no horrorshows, then fungibility of aid is not an issue: all spending is at least justifiable, with no money spent on a new Range Rover for the Minister of Finance’s nephew or a shopping expedition to Paris for the First Lady. The role of donors here is crucial, because it must be played very carefully. A donor that bullies the Government into submitting to an audit by auditors appointed by the donors will face a serious backlash: it is not their Government or money to audit (they can of course audit their own programmes) and they are infringing upon the sovereignty of the state in question. Any canny politician can easily spin this as a case of ‘modern imperialism’ and reject the audit findings, however well-intentioned they were.

Rather, a donor can only advocate for an audit to be initiated by a third party, following legal procedures put into law by the Government. The donor’s role here is to remove all excuses for not holding the audit: to train the supreme audit body, to make sure they have the equipment they need, to provide the legal experts to make sure that the laws governing audit are drafted adequately. This is all fairly obvious and very common. But this is of course only half the story. If the audit is released without any explicatory documents and very little press, its impact outside a small coterie of finance geeks and development agencies will be minimal. The power of audit is to stimulate accountability, and a Government should be accountable to its electorate, those who pay tax to fund it and expect services in return.

This is the insight that lies behind the recent increase in interest in demand-side accountability. Essentially, the idea here is to give civil society groups the ability to scrutinise the myriad information that a Government can produce and to articulate the demands of the electorate better. Again, this is a tricky role for donors to play, because it leaves them open to charges of political partiality. What they must do, therefore, is focus on providing skills to all parties that desire them – and not advice. In Tanzania and Malawi, I have noticed an upswing in this kind of work, and initial signs that NGOs and CSOs are engaging more with budget processes, audit and the like are encouraging. This is probably the one area where I think donors tend not to spend enough time working with non-Government actors. Read the rest of this entry »

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