How Can Donors Become More Accountable to Poor People? This chapter from ‘Inclusive Aid: Changing Power and Relationships in International Development’ explores the new pressures placed on stakeholders who have begun to adopt a rights-based approach to accountability in terms of power, procedures and relationships. Although highly problematic, this process is a positive step towards Northern governments being prepared to be held accountable by poor people in the South.
Rights-based accountability involves transparency and responsiveness. It includes the active involvement of stakeholders in defining an institution’s responsibilities and monitoring the fulfilment of those responsibilities. There are five categories of institution or persons to which bilateral aid agencies in particular should be accountable: taxpayers in the donor country; government in the donor country; government in the recipient country; poor people in the recipient country; and the international human rights framework. In this context, the following characteristics of donor accountability are identified:
- Government donor agencies usually see taxpayers as the principal stakeholder. Many donor countries also nurture special interests in business and elsewhere in return for political support for the wider aid programme. Responding to these special interests creates potential conflict with donors’ other lines of accountability.
- Recently, aid practitioners have drawn an important distinction between accountability to taxpayers and to government, allowing donor agencies to take a longer-term view. Aid agencies have also introduced horizontal accountability through a peer review mechanism between major bilateral donors.
- The promotion of ‘good governance’ and responsibility towards recipient governments through partnerships has become a fundamental part of donor assistance. However, the ‘good governance’ agenda may in fact contribute to the reproduction and reinforcement of the prevailing patterns of patronage.
- The shift to budget support aims to reduce conflicting donor projects and strengthen state–citizen relationships. Yet, when donors fund civil society to increase state accountability, they risk distorting the lines of accountability and imposing new forms of conditionality.
- The idea of rights has developed as a way of standing up for the interests of poor people without imposing conditions on governments. Development aid is no longer seen as mere ‘technical’ assistance, but a moral obligation for donors.
Donor procedures are changing and principles of accountability seem to generate their own momentum and processes of change. Donor agencies can be genuine agents and influence the global political economy in favour of a more just world. Nevertheless, any gains will be small, and incremental achievements in the power of ideas and changed personal behaviour are likely to be more significant than the power of money. A number of steps are recommended to increase donor governments’ accountability to poor people:
- Donor agency staff need to map out lines of accountability and facilitate alliances between stakeholders.
- Donor governments must hold a vision of accountability as central to all of their work, procedures, and relationships.
- Donor governments must persuade their own citizens to hold them accountable for aid programmes.
- Donors can avoid imposing conditionality by supporting the strengthening of formal democratic machinery, rather than funding civil society to increase state accountability.
