Transforming the international aid architecture Historically, concerned citizens have tended to focus on the need to increase only the quantity of aid provided by donors. Increasingly, however, civil society is mounting pressure on donors to improve the quality of their aid by freeing it from political and commercial interests, removing damaging conditions attached to its provision, and mitigating the negative impacts it can have on local communities and national development [see box 13]. Although governments have officially recognised the problems plaguing aid by signing up to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness since 2005, the process fails to give a meaningful role for southern countries in assessing donor progress towards a set of relatively weak targets.47 Current reform initiatives by the OECD-DAC, United Nations, World Bank and other donors have failed to resolve the entrenched geo-political and commercial interests that prevent aid from realising its potential to forge a more equal, balanced and stable global system. In the longer term, donors need to move beyond a ‘targeted’ approach to poverty reduction and embrace a more comprehensive and sustainable model of development based on universal social protection and nationally-anchored production and consumption.48 The recent shift within the development community to focus on helping low-income countries develop their domestic taxation systems is an important step in the right direction, and one that demands further support from donors and international agencies [see section 4].49 It has long been argued that aid should be pooled at the international level and channelled through a more representative body, such as a World Development Fund managed by the United Nations, in order to remove the short-term political interests of donors and ensure that ODA is redistributed efficiently through binding long-term commitments.50 Some analysts are calling for more genuinely redistributive systems to replace ODA as the primary method of funding development, such as those based on a global system of progressive and redistributive taxation.51 Ultimately, an end to world poverty will never happen without a reformed architecture of global governance, a shift in power relations from North to South, and major political-institutional changes in the global economy.
Learn more and get involved AidFlows: Flash graphics on how much development aid is provided and received around the world, provided by the OECD, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Users can select individual donors (providing the aid) and beneficiaries (receiving the aid) to track the sources and uses of aid funding. <www.aidflows.org> AID/WATCH: An independent watchdog on aid, trade and debt. Based in Australia and working with communities in the Global South, they challenge practices which undermine the ability of communities to determine their own futures, and promote development alternatives based on social and environmental justice. <www.aidwatch.org.au> The DATA Report 2012: For five years, the ONE campaign’s annual DATA reports monitored the historic promises that the G8 and EU made to sub-Saharan Africa at the Gleneagles Summit in 2005. The latest report assesses Europe’s progress in keeping its promises for aid increases and aid effectiveness. <www.one.org/data> Does foreign aid really work?: Book by Roger Riddle with a comprehensive analysis of the aid system, and practical conclusions for how to make aid an effective force for good. Published by OUP Oxford, 2007.
Increase international aid
101