1)      ONE’s Policy Pitch (contact me)

2)      UK Aid Network HLF-IV update (October) available here

3)      3^rd Draft of the Busan Outcome Document available here

4)      ONE’s comments on the 3^rd draft of the Busan Outcome Document (contact me)

5)      ONE’s comments on the Building Blocks on “transparency” and on “results and accountability” (contact me)

6)      The Gates G20 report

7)      Addis Ababa statement on development effectiveness available here

8)      Commonwealth Finance Ministers Statement available here

9)      UK Aid Network – Shaping the future of aid available here

Other useful reading

10)   Tunis consensus on development effectiveness available here

11)   Action Aid – Real Aid 3 available here

12)   David Booth – Aid effectiveness: Bringing country ownership and politics back in (exec sum in attached) available here

13)   Jonathan Glennie / Andrew Rogerson – Global reach is the prize for Busan available here

14)   CABRI Position Paper on aid transparency available here

15)   Brian Atwood – The road to Busan: Pursuing a new consensus on development cooperation available here

I completed it way back in 1996, when it was still possible to read everything that had been written on globalization!

Here it is. Enjoy?!

I’m not sure whether I’m happy or not about the fact that I’m still basically working on issues of globalization, governance and borders. At least I’m now more at the pushing for policy-change rather than “let’s conceptualise place” end of the spectrum.

Reshaping the regulatory landscape: Border skirmishes around the Bahamas and Cayman offshore financial centres,Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 5, (1998).

Placing trust, trusting place: On the social construction of offshore financial centres, Political Geography, Vol. 17 (1998).

Beyond the border: Globalization, sovereignty and extra-territoriality, Geopolitics, Vol. 3 (1998).

Offshores onshore: New regulatory spaces and real historical places in the landscape of global money, pp.139-154 in Martin, R. (ed.) (1999), Money and the space economy, Wiley.

Offshoreness, globalisation and sovereignty: Post-modern geo-political economy?, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 25 (2000), No. 3, pp.269-283, Royal Geographical Society.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) looks set to be an important forum for sharing experience, encouraging and assisting governments to become more open. Africa’s involvement is currently limited with just three African countries – Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania – joining South Africa within the OGP. However, the partnership has great relevance for Africa and for ONE: the ability of African citizens to hold their governments to account is shaped by the actions of the USA, the EU and other countries that provide aid to Africa and whose companies operate in Africa; African governments can share experience with other emerging economies as regards transparency and accountability; and, over time, we hope that many more African countries will choose to take the path towards more open, transparent and accountable government.

We know that in 2012, Brazil will continue to lead the way on the open government agenda, hosting meetings of the Open Government Partnership, the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency and the International Anti-Corruption Conference, and perhaps joining with the USA in requiring its oil companies to publish what they pay to the governments of the countries where they operate. And we trust that Mexico will pick up the baton of transparency and accountability as it takes over the leadership of the G20 from France.

For ONE’s introduction to OGP and a link to our policy pitch see here. For ONE’s full analysis of the Country Action Plans from a development perspective keep reading …

Brazil

Brazil’s Action Plan sets out a wide range of domestic commitments and reaffirms the country’s support for the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Public Officials in International Business, the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. The Action Plan also notes Brazil’s active participation in the G20 working group on corruption and other global forums working on the issue, including the World Economic Forum. On budgets Brazil pledges to open up their Resource Transfer Agreements and Contracts System which provides information on resource appropriations of the Federal Fiscal and Social Security Budgets. The Transparency Portal, of which Brazil is rightly proud, has been in operation since 2004 and now publishes all government expenditure daily. This will be revamped under their OGP commitments with enhanced usability and a full historical database.

Indonesia

Indonesia’s Action Plan addresses three sets of challenges: poor public service delivery; corruption; and a lack of transparency about the management of public resources. Building on recent progress – significant improvements in budget transparency and becoming a candidate country for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in 2010 – the Action Plan clearly sets out how the government will improve public services, including in health and education, increase public integrity, and ensure that public resources are managed more effectively. Indonesia aims to improve its score on Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index from 2.8 in 2010 to 5.0 in 2014, to publish information about budget allocations and spending at the level of individual schools and hospitals, and to be fully-compliant with EITI by October 2012, in part by publishing in full information about revenues earned from the oil, gas and mining sectors.

Mexico

Mexico’s Action Plan gives strong endorsement to important international agreements including the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Public Officials in International Business, the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. This is in line with ONE’s asks in previous G20 policy pitches. On natural resources, Mexico identifies fossil fuels as a key sector for transparency, but at this stage focuses on publishing domestic geological and geophysical information. On budget transparency the Action Plan commits Mexico to improving public finance examination procedures in order to implement accounting practices that improve the efficiency of public spending. Mexico also plans to improve corporate accountability, mainly through voluntary measures.

Norway

Norway’s Action Plan makes a number of commitments on: opening the public sector and making government more inclusive; on promoting gender equality; and, on transparency in the management of oil and gas revenues, and sovereign wealth funds. On natural resource revenues, Norway – although now soon to be joined by the USA – remains the only OECD country that has implemented the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Beyond its own oil-fields, Norway supports developing countries’ efforts to join the EITI, including through supporting international NGOs such as the Revenue Watch Institute and through Norway’s Oil for Development programme. Norway’s Action Plan also signals a commitment to consider introducing legislation – either in connection with planned EU legislation, or separately – to require multinationals to publish tax information on a country-by-country basis, a move that would go beyond what is currently being considered by the European Union.

Philippines

The Philippines’ Action Plan aims to enable citizens to participate actively and meaningfully in public policy and programmes, improving public services, increasing public integrity and enhancing the management of public resources. The Philippines’ new commitments on open governance include: measures to improve the transparency of government agencies; initiatives to deepen citizen participation, for instance through greater use of participatory budgeting and social audits; moves to enhance accountability of key government institutions; and innovative efforts to use technology to enhance transparency and accountability, for instance through the development of an interactive platform for citizens to find about budget allocations and to file citizen reports on budget implementation.

South Africa

South Africa’s Action Plan focuses on three key areas: tackling corruption; increasing citizen engagement in service delivery and policy development processes; and, holding public servants accountable to the public and the communities they serve through the development and implementation of an accountability management framework for public servants. On international action the OECD bribery convention is named as a key agreement, and South Africa’s world-leading performance on budget openness as measured by the Open Budget Index is rightly trumpeted. Eye-catching new commitments include strengthening the National Anti-Corruption Forum (including civil society representation) and Anti-Corruption Hotline, creating new guidelines on sanctions for corruption-related cases and a wide ranging budgets pledge to: ‘Enhance the involvement of civil society at every stage of the budgetary process across all spheres of government to enhance the progressive realisation of socioeconomic rights and enable citizens to track public expenditure.’

United Kingdom

The UK’s Action Plan is focused on enhancing public service delivery through open government. The UK’s Action Plan is focussed primarily on transparency and feedback in relation to domestic issues. It does however set out some measures that the UK Government will take to make aid more transparent and accountable, building on the UK’s leadership on transparency and accountability in relation to aid. Measures outlined include: the use of OGP-eligibility criteria and datasets to inform decisions about whether to provide budget support; the use of funds already earmarked for transparency and accountability to support OGP-related goals in developing countries; and, the publication – in an IATI-compliant manner – of information about aid spending by departments other than solely the Department for International Development. The UK’s Action Plan is silent as regards transparency about natural resource revenues in developing countries, a surprising omission given the UK Government’s stated support for EU legislation to match the USA’s ground-breaking legislation on extractives transparency.

USA

The USA’s Action Plan gives three key reasons for supporting OGP – as a means for accountability, to give people information they can use and to allow the public to have a greater say in how government is run. On aid transparency, the USA has committed to publish information about budgets, disbursements and project implementation on its Foreign Assistance Dashboard, in an internationally comparable manner – but not, it seems, as part of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) – with the data to be updated on a quarterly basis. The USA’s Action Plan emphasises that aid transparency supports evidence-based, data-driven approaches to foreign aid, approaches that can – where appropriate and feasible – make use of randomized controlled experiments). The USA has reaffirmed its position as a global leader on extractives transparency by committing to implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) domestically. This makes the USA the first G8 country to implement EITI and the second major developed producer after Norway. This will put ONE in a stronger position to advocate for African countries to implement EITI without being accused of double-standards.

I am currently working for ONE as their Senior Policy Manager on Governance, Transparency & Accountability. Click here for more information about me, my skills and experience. Drop me a line at alan@alanhudson.info or follow me on twitter  @alanhudson1 NB: This blog and my tweets reflect my views, not necessarily those of my employer.

Donors need to think carefully about their role in promoting governance and domestic accountability for at least four sets of related reasons.

• 1) Track record: Donors don’t have a great track record of helping to strengthen domestic accountability in developing countries.
• 2) Knowledge: Donors’ knowledge about how to strengthen domestic accountability is patchy.
• 3) Context: Donors don’t understand the contexts in which they work very well, with the informal dimensions of politics/society/culture a particular challenge (the spread of political economy analysis has helped a bit, but the fact remains that it’s not easy for expats on short postings to really get to grips with what’s going on)
• 4) Blueprints: Donors have a tendency to apply blueprints based on what they regard as ”best practice” rather than helping to nurture institutions that are well-suited to the local context. See Brian Levy’s recent blog on “beginning with things as they actually are”

[You will note that issues of legitimacy/sovereignty don't appear in that list. Those issues are clearly important - and I am firmly of the view that country ownership matters a lot and that donors can hinder rather than help with the emergence of country ownership - but at the end of the day I think that the responsibility to help to lift people out of poverty transcends borders.]

Those 4 sets of reasons - bad track record, patchy knowledge, failure to understand context, preference for blueprints - are pretty big. So, what role does that leave for donors? Should they pack up and go home? Or, beat a well-ordered retreat to the rather uninspiring land of “do no harm”?

Anyway, with these questions in my head for the last several months , I read Owen Barder’s blog on development 3.0 with great interest. Development 3.0 – a term coined by the World Bank’s Chief Economist for Africa - is about bringing together the power of citizens with the power of new technologies (mobile phones, GPS, crowd-sourcing etc.) in a new super-charged version of social accountability with people empowered to take greater control of their own development. In this version of development enhanced transparency and accountability fixes the broken feedback loops, facilitating learning and enabling local solutions to development challenges to emerge or evolve. Such an approach would, it seems to me, address some of the problems with donors’ traditional approach to enhancing governance and accountability.

• 1) Track record: it’s a different approach
• 2) Patchy knowledge: it doesn’t prioritise or depend upon donor knowledge about what works
• 3) Limited ability to really understand country context: it doesn’t require donors to engage in the same way with the complexities of country context.
• 4) Preference for blueprints: it’s not about saying how things should be

Owen concludes in a great piece on what development policy can learn from evolution that “as would-be change-makers, we should not try to design a better world: we should concentrate on building better feedback loops.” I think that’s spot on. But working out what role donors and other external actors can play in development 3.0 remains a work in progress and -  at a time when the demands of domestic accountability in donor countries are pushing for better evidence about results and value for money – adapting to such an approach will be a challenge for donors.

Watch this space.

NB: This blog is written in a personal capacity and does not necessarily reflect the views of DFID.

Being in Policy Division has stimulated my thinking in recent weeks about a couple of things. First, about what donors can do to enhance governance in developing countries. And second, about how the effectiveness of donors’ efforts to enhance governance in developing countries can be measured. Both huge issues that I will certainly return to but for now two quick observations:

1) Governance is very complex. Donors don’t really understand the politics – particularly the informal politics – of developing countries and as such are not in a great position to dive in and say “do this, and that will lead to this improvement”. This issue is made more challenging still by the fact that developing countries offer different contexts for reform – a fact that a recent World Bank blog puts front and centre with its notion of a spectrum of reform space with different approaches employed for countries at different points on that spectrum.

This – leaving aside other big questions of legitimacy - raises some big questions about whether and how donors can contribute to enhancing governance. I think that Owen Barder’s recent blog about evolution and complexity is very thought provoking on this. He concludes that “as change makers we should not try to design a better world, we should make better feedback loops”. So, accountability still matters, but donors role in nurturing accountabilities and feed back loops is rather different?

2) Governance is very complex. Therefore, it seems to be that the enthusiasm for Randomised Controlled Trials as a way of getting a handle on what works is misplaced. RCTs are – as far as I understand it – about isolating the impacts of specific interventions. This might be all well and good when the effects of an intervention, or a series of interventions, are additive. But when interventions are part of complex social systems whose qualities emerge through the interaction of various elements, it seems to me that isolating impacts in the RCT way, a reductionist way, won’t cut it. A recent paper on measuring impact in the Millenium Development Goals era, in the Lancet, makes a similar point. That of course, leaves those of us who think that complex social systems are best understood in a holistic manner with the challenging of explaining how that can best be done. Outcome Mapping might provide a useful way forward?

I’m looking forward to seeing how the governance agenda moves forward at DFID and elsewhere and to see whether it faces up to the complexity of governance and the huge challenges that donors face in working out how best they can contribute to enhancing governance.

There are a number of factors to consider, some of which don’t feature below despite being particularly important (Hello Amanda!), and time-scales to play with. I’ve come up with criteria, scoring systems and weighting systems that are too embarrassing for public consumption. However, I thought it would be good to get some advice from the friends and colleagues and fellow development wonks who occasionally have a look at my blog.

I’ve whittled it down to three simple questions:

• What would be the most interesting thing to do?
• What would be the best thing to do in terms of learning new stuff? (I like learning new stuff, and it looks good on my CV … a CV which is a bit short on long-term developing country experience)
• What would be the most useful thing to do? (my goal is to contribute to global poverty reduction – yeah, I know it might sound crazy …)

I’m happy to take suggestions as to better questions to ask, but those three will do for now.

In terms of options, let’s keep that simple too for now. Some of this is slightly wishful thinking, but let’s say that I have 4 options:

• Option A, doing policy-relevant research at a place like ODI, in the developed world.
• Option B, doing a policy job at a development agency in the UK.
• Option C, being a governance adviser in a development agency’s country office.
• Option D, being a UK-based freelance development consultant (perhaps while I decide amongst A, B and C)

What do you reckon? With those criteria and those options, what should I go for? Putting voting buttons on my blog is beyond me, but if you have any thoughts please do drop me a line or add a comment!

If you’ve got other options that I should be considering, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I’m available for weddings, christenings, barmitzvahs, and short or long-term consultancies on governance and accountability

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