The false promise of the ownership agenda Alastair Fraser In today’s aid system donors dominate decision-making over what aid is spent on and what conditions attach to its release, and yet consistently deny their desire and capacity to do so. In order to understand why this is we must place the aid relationship within wider global shifts in economic, military, political and ideological power. This essay argues that the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process and the ‘Paris agenda’ for aid reform represent a final attempt to legitimate the donor-dominant pattern that has characterised most aid since the debt crisis of the 1980s and which matured in the post-Cold War period. These reforms nonetheless contain a debilitating paradox: donors have more and more power to set the terms and less and less sense of how they should use it. Many interpretations of Western foreign policy in the post-Cold War era reflect Fukayama’s ‘End of History’ thesis.i Robert Jackson argued in 1992 that: “the West is now far more secure and confident in the superiority of its values than at any time since the end of the Second World War.”ii Killick applied a similar logic to the aid regime, identifying three key trends that allowed for a deepening of economic conditionality and a widening of its remit to encompass explicitly political issues: the collapse of the intellectual argument for state intervention in the economy, the demise of communist states that could provide an alternative sponsor for non-compliant states, and the gradual fading of colonial guilt. Killick argued that by devaluing the motive for aiding strategically placed countries, the end of the Cold War increased the self-confidence of donors in pressing their views on development and democracy.iii The PRSP process can be interpreted as reflecting this end of history thesis. It operates on the assumption that the conflicts of interest and ideology that divided recipient and donor countries have been resolved and that in place of two sovereign bodies negotiating on behalf of their citizens we can have ‘partnerships’. Recipients are seen as unlikely to adopt positions that challenge donor preferences because domestic social forces that might drive policy change are also assumed to be in a state of permanent quiescence. As a result, PRSPs aim to build a national consensus and to include foreign donors as ‘participants’ in the process. However, there is another way of telling the same historical story. The Western powers experienced the end of the Cold War as a victory, but also as a moment of anxiety. Without an obvious contrast against which to claim the superiority of the capitalist mode, and no obvious threat against which to legitimate their political and military power, arguments for the free market and interventions in other countries would have to stand up more clearly in relation to performance. Thus Zaki Laïdi argued that since the Cold War, Western elites have struggled to convince themselves, let alone the states and populations of developing countries, either of models of the free market and democracy available for export, or of their applicability in different contexts.iv Thus the Western elite has lost confidence in itself and its key political project and yet, in the absence of an alternative
    
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    project, continues to govern and to impose its will across the world. Let us remember that Laïdi wrote before the Iraq debacle and the credit crunch. Nowhere was anxiety about the market model more keenly felt than in the World Bank. From the late 1980s, particularly in relation to its African portfolio, the Bank came to realise that structural adjustment was unlikely to succeed in the short or medium term. A series of internal reviews told the Bank its programmes were not working and as food riots broke out across borrower countries the Bank recognised that adjustment had become a liability for governments tasked with implementing it. v The political management of liberalisation therefore came more clearly into focus and donors moved beyond macro-economic policy, seeking also to re-shape the government systems, and political and popular cultures of aid recipient countries such that they might better be able to swallow the cures being prescribed. Paul Collier presented the central question succinctly. Tight conditionality explicitly ‘bought’ reform but, “if donors price reforms, they buy them and governments sell them. Who then owns the reform?”vi The problem, as donors saw it was that although conditionality, surveillance and governance reform could encourage, maybe even force, recipients to adopt reform measures, they could not make them or their citizens believe in such policies. Indeed, conditionality may have precisely the opposite effect. Because it is widely understood within recipient countries that governments are heavily constrained by donor priorities, state elites are able to avoid making a political case for reform, and thus evade responsibility for programmes that they would rather blame on external forces. In the absence of either high level political support for liberalisation or popular social and political constituencies making the case, reform programmes have been easily derailed by local political imperatives. Donors have thus become concerned to find ways of securing political support for liberalisation, both inside the state and in civil society in recipient countries and, in its absence, to politically manage any fall-out from liberalisation. This implies generating and supporting those forces that agree with the Bank’s analysis. The Bank’s Conditonality Review thus describes ownership as “a concept that denotes a high probability that the policy and institutional changes associated with a policy-based operation will be adopted and implemented, even if there is internal opposition.”vii The ownership that donors are endorsing is not a defence of the sovereign right of African countries to define their own policy commitments. It is a demand for their commitment to a predetermined policy agenda. New donor policies can perhaps best be described as attempts to ‘move conditionality upstream’, incentivising adoption of donor preferences in economic, governance and social welfare systems without the need for coercive measures to achieve the same outcome. However, there are two logically prior conditions for making this shift: leadership by recipients and donor trust in recipients. It is because donors generally do not believe that the former is in place that the latter does not follow, that conditionality remains in place and the promise of new aid partnerships remain largely rhetorical. In their efforts to overcome the problem, and because they only really trust themselves, donors accord their
    
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    own agency a central role in bringing into being the recipient agency on which the new system is allegedly founded. Graham Harrison thus argues that ‘second generation institutional reforms’ the major focus of donor supported capacity-building, aim to generate a specific form of recipient agency – a state administration capable of pursuing reform, winning domestic political support for it, and managing relations with donors.viii Harrison provides a compelling description of the process by which aid donors have attempted to colonise the decision-making machinery of certain aid recipient states in order to bring this beast into being. Increased efforts to ‘capacity build’ both civil service and civil society structures represent an attempt to secure within these institutional formats the values of restraint and delayed gratification that donors previously pressed on state elites via conditionality. Society is being asked to play a role not in holding the state accountable for the delivery of popular local demands, but in holding it accountable for responsible public financial management and for its delivery of valorised global norms and ends. There are now fractions of the local state and local civil society in many recipient countries that are so heavily penetrated by international actors as to be indistinguishable from them. And yet the ends towards which this state and societal restructuring occurred remain hazy. Despite a decreasing conviction with which donors were able or willing to cohere an ideological justification for their preferences, the death of classic left-right politics allowed a flourishing of technocratic and managerial style of politics in which microprinciples developed in a vacuum, giving minimal coherence and legitimacy to policy and governance. The shrillness with which donors insisted that everyone ‘sign up’ to development objectives that are largely vacuous and offer little guide to policy reflects the way in which aid has increasingly been used to prop up the legitimacy of political elites that no longer have faith in their own mission. Witness the ghastly, almost compulsory, trip to an African village for any Western leader in a tight spot domestically, or who needs to be seen in a more ‘human’ light. The situation has granted a free reign to ‘norm entrepreneurs’ in a somewhat faddish development industry. However, it is far from clear that the new tropes they generate are capable of moving policy-making beyond the negative identification of ‘bad things’ to be eradicated – dictatorship, torture, small arms proliferation etc., towards the identification of clear political goods. A sense of overall purpose would allow a balancing of these many claimed rights against one another. Without it, who can make an assessment of the relative importance of environmental sustainability? As against technology transfer? Multiculturalism? Human rights? Good governance? Gender equality? Policy has taken on a rapidly changing and somewhat arbitrary nature. For recipients, keeping up with the latest tropes, let alone assessing their potential for a national project, or negotiating in this new field of meanings, is hugely challenging. It is in this context that I think we must understand the emergence of the ‘ownership’ agenda. Having developed a system of conditionality through the 1980s and 1990s that worked to impose development from above and from aboard, donors gradually, hesitantly, arrived at the view that their own leadership of planning was a central problem in instituting reform. The UK Government thus delivered a new policy paper on
    
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    conditionality in 2005 that states baldly: “We will not make our aid conditional on specific policy decisions by partner governments, or attempt to impose policy choices on them”; “We believe that it is inappropriate and has proven to be ineffective for donors to impose policies on developing countries”; “conditionality which attempts to ‘buy’ reform from an unwilling partner has rarely worked”; “developing country governments were becoming more accountable to donors than to their own people, and that this distorted national priorities in the process.”ix The paper accepts huge swathes of the arguments laid out by critics of conditionality since the publication, over thirty years ago, of Hayter’s ‘Aid as Imperialism’.x At the same time, in more honest moments, donors recognise that recipients now face a more intimate supervision of all aspects of national planning, budgeting and development programme implementation than at any time since independence. Former DFID chief economist Adrian Wood has described the system of national planning backed by budget support that has emerged since 2000 as “conditionality squared” because recipients now contract many of their conditions, on a huge range of policy issues, in one package, funding for all of which can be turned on or off by donors in one move.xi This principle is operationalised in the PRSP, the EU’s EDF, the US’s MCA, the Global Fund, and a raft of new best practices in aid giving: SWAPS, Budget Support, MTEFs etc. etc. While each inscribes a central role for donor agency and judgements about ‘best practice’, each claims to ‘empower’ recipients. In order to describe and legitimate these new arrangements it becomes necessary to contrast them favourably with a previous system and to theatrically deny that they relate to conditionality. At the same time the set of donors most deeply embedded within the machinery of these states are empowered by new joint planning processes to enforce their priorities on recipients, and through them, on other donors. They legitimate this effort by describing the outcomes of their joint-planning as an expression of recipient ‘ownership’. We may therefore be left with a process of consolation, in which recipients are asked to come to terms with their lack of political agency, rather than to try and overcome barriers to its expression. Unsurprisingly, few of those engaged find significant dignity in the pretences involved. The insistence that PRSP processes generate ownership can be understood then as a therapeutic intervention in a broken relationship. The Paris process is designed to affect how the ‘partners’ feel about themselves and their efforts, rather than principally to bring about change. The therapy goes both ways. Western elites have become nervous of their own ability to achieve the goals they set. Insisting on ownership offers a chance to evade responsibility. Finally, precisely because none of the parties engaged in contemporary aid partnerships really believe in them, new global economic, military, political and ideological trends may result in rapid change. The loss of leverage for traditional donors resulting from debt relief and the global commodities boom, the potential for an extended Western recession and the emergence of China as a significant player in fdi, debt relief, aid and development loans all remind us that we are not yet at the end of history.
    
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    Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press. Jackson, R. H. (1990). Quasi-states: Sovereignty, international relations, and the Third World. Cambridge studies in international relations, 12. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. iii Killick, T. (2004). Politics, Evidence and the New Aid Agenda. Development Policy Review. 22 (1), 5-29. iv Laïdi, Z. (1998). A world without meaning: The crisis of meaning in international politics. London: Routledge. v World Bank. (1992). Effective implementation: key to development impact. Report of the World Bank's Portfolio Management Task Force. Washington, DC.: World Bank (Known as The Wapenhans report) vi Collier, P. (2007). The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. Oxford: Oxford University Press. vii World Bank. (2005). Review Of World Bank Conditionality: Summary Findings Operations Policy And Country Services. World Bank: Washington, D.C. viii Harrison, G. (2004). The World Bank and Africa: The construction of governance states. Routledge advances in international political economy. London: Routledge. ix DFID (London). (2005). Partnerships for poverty reduction Rethinking conditionality : a UK policy paper. London [etc.]: Department for international development (DFID). x Hayter, T. (1971). Aid as imperialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. xi Wood, A. Challenges to the country-led model of development assistance, Presentation to the Global Economic Governance Programme Seminar, Oxford, November 11, 2005
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