| Parliaments and Aid Effectiveness |
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Hon. Brendan Howlin, AWEPA Vice President, calls for parliaments in donor and recipient countries to reassert themselves for the common good. *** AID EFFECTIVENESS: HIGH TIME
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By Hon. Brendan Howlin |
As world economic conditions become more difficult, there is intense international debate on the effectiveness of aid delivered to developing countries. Billions of Euro have been spent and both donors and recipients are questioning its impact on poverty reduction, health improvement and development.
This analysis and debate is well advanced within governments and civil society. However parliaments, the elected representatives of the people - whose principal function is oversight - must be at the heart of this review.
In modern democracies, parliament expresses the people's will. It is parliamentary assemblies which approve how money can be raised from citizens in taxes and which vote on how these funds can be spent. In donor countries, aid budgets are approved by parliaments and the duty falls on elected members to ensure that it is spent in accordance with the mandate of parliament. Similarly, in developing countries, democracy requires that elected parliaments have knowledge of and a say in how money is used; not only locally raised money but revenue provided by external donors too. Yet all too often parliaments have been weak in fulfilling these responsibilities.
In some developing countries, external donors provide a significant portion of all money used in providing public services - health, education, clean water and infrastructure. Often the money is provided on a government-to-government basis or by international institutional funds and NGOs. Parliament is often excluded from the process, diluting the ability of parliamentarians to hold their own executive to account or even to ensure local democratic oversight of spending. Development planning is therefore not the exclusive right of sovereign parliaments working with civil society, but is regularly shaped by the priorities of external donors.
Frequently there is the twin exclusion of the voice of parliament in both donor and recipient countries. In certain cases donor governments create conditionalities on aid without the knowledge or approval of their parliaments; and recipient governments set spending priorities without the approval of their parliaments.
In much of the debate at international level, the distinction between government (the executive) and parliament is blurred or misunderstood. It is now time for parliaments in donor and recipient countries to reassert ourselves in the common good.
The first priority in determining aid effectiveness is transparency. Aid must be democratically tracked from donor funds to point of use. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness set out a number of partnership commitments. Among these are:
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Ownership (i.e. donors basing their assistance on partner countries' national development plans).
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Harmonisation (i.e. donors acting collectively for greater effectiveness).
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Managing for results (i.e. donors and partners managing aid to deliver agreed results).
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Mutual accountability (i.e. openness in oversight of development strategies and budgets in donor countries and partner countries).
It is clear that, in all of these tasks, no body or organisation is better placed and entitled to play a key role than is parliament.
To date many key decisions have been made by governments (and their civil services), by international organisations and by non-governmental organisations. The democratic deficit needs to be addressed by placing the peoples' representatives into the core of decision-making, rather than as rubber stamps whose role is perceived as being simply to validate the conclusions of others.
Over the last year, a group of parliamentarians led by The Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA) has begun to re-assert the role of parliaments in the oversight of aid. We have campaigned at a number of international events and conferences, our ultimate goal being to establish parliamentary oversight as an extra indicator of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.
As aid funding comes under pressure more and more, the championing of effective aid delivery becomes more urgent. It is a job we cannot leave to others.
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Please click here to read more on AWEPA's Aid Effectiveness Programme.