The aid industry is characterised by a serious deficit of accountability mechanisms, a lack of transparency in aid allocation, priority setting and performance assessment, and little information about action taken with staff concerning failed projects or wider negative impacts. To what extent may human rights be used to hold aid agencies to account in a meaningful way? This paper finds that integrating human rights into political or managerial mechanisms within donor countries can establish powerful incentive structures for improved accountability.
Power relations between donor agencies and recipient governments, communities, and individuals are grossly unequal. Focusing on bilateral and multilateral aid agencies providing development aid, this paper principally examines non-legal channels of accountability through which the balance of power may be somewhat redressed.
Aid agencies can be held to account for the processes they follow and the outcomes they contribute; human rights can add another dimension to internal guidelines or policy frameworks. Accountability frameworks include: domestic liability to taxpayers, accountability towards aid recipients, and the pressure exerted by peers and the international community.
Domestic donor government agency accountability operates at several levels, including political/strategic (macro policy objectives, overall aid allocation), legal, managerial (civil servants delivering at macro-level on policy objectives), financial (civil servants’ use of public funds in policy implementation), contractual, and informal accountability such as to the media, NGOs, and academics. Human rights can be integrated into existing accountability mechanisms in the following ways:
- Managerial and financial accountability mechanisms are extremely powerful in impacting aid agencies’ daily decisions; however, various policy frameworks dominate internal incentive structures (such as achieving Millennium Development Goals or increasing aid levels). Political/strategic level mechanisms are also subject to competing priorities (for example, security and anti-terrorism concerns leading to restricted civil liberties inconsistent with a human rights agenda).
- New approaches to aid are aiming to put developing country governments at the centre of accountability frameworks, giving them far greater responsibility for the use of aid resources; therefore accountability is principally from governments to their own citizens, rather than from governments to external aid agencies.
- Human rights can be used to enhance mutual accountability between donors and recipients, by introducing human rights not just as a source of negative conditionality (where aid agencies have imposed sanctions for human rights violations) but as positively contributing towards aid modalities and instruments such as poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs).
- Donor accountability directly to recipient country citizens is still important, despite the emphasis on governments’ responsibility for aid use. The inflated degree of power that finance ministries hold in wielding an aid budget requires compensatory support for parliament, the judiciary and other accountability structures such as civil society organisations.
Human rights can enhance the accountability of aid agencies, improving existing mechanisms and introducing new approaches:
- Attention should be focused on integrating human rights into aid agencies’ policy guidelines and programmes at political/strategic, managerial and financial levels as a powerful incentive structure for building accountability.
- There should be strong congruence between enhancing national ownership and the primacy of national governmental accountability for human rights. This shift towards partnerships and national ownership provides a crucial entry point for human rights accountability.
- Existing accountability mechanisms of aid agencies towards the populations that benefit from aid are still relatively weak. They and need to be strengthened through improving human rights assessments, greater access to information, participatory approaches in government and NGO projects, initiating or strengthening remedy and redress mechanisms, and greater monitoring and advocacy by local actors.
