Posted by Dr Tom Harrison
There was not that much on international affairs in yesterday’s ‘international affairs’/‘foreign policy’ debate, so it is not particularly surprising that there was no direct focus on the parties’ policies on international development, but several of the issues covered (such as policies on climate change and immigration) have major implications for developing countries.
In the build-up to the election, the vast development blogosphere (see the list on my website for some of the more influential ones) has been turning its attention to the parties’ policies on development (see Lawrence Haddad’s blog for a detailed comparison of the different parties’ positions, a blog from Duncan Green at Oxfam on what impact the election might have on the development sector, and the One Campaign for statements by the leaders of the three main parties). Much of the focus has been on the points of consensus. All three main parties have committed to meeting the longstanding UN target of spending 0.7% of GDP on aid by 2013. They are also committed to keeping the Department for International Development (DFID), which was established in 1997, as an independent department with its own cabinet minister.
There is therefore an important element of consensus that aid levels should be not only sustained but increased (aid will, of course, remain a small proportion of government spending in comparison with any of the major departments). This is evidence of the effectiveness of the vigorous campaigning of development groups, including the Make Poverty History coalition and others in 2005 around the G8 summit at Gleneagles. DFID’s international reputation has also played a part: DFID’s work is by no means perfect, but it is pretty uncontroversial to say, in the words of a recent IPPR report, that ‘DFID is recognized as a world-leading development agency and is widely seen as an example of best practice’ (more on this below).
However, this consensus on the 0.7% target obscures a number of important areas of difference, or potential difference (in some cases we just do not know enough to judge):
1. Although the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have followed Labour in declaring their proposal to make the 0.7% target legally binding, there are still questions over what such legislation would mean (see Lawrence Haddad on this). One of the issues here is the thorny question of what exactly counts as development spending – should it include spending on climate change adaptation, for example, or should that money be additional? In practice, agreement on a 0.7% target does not mean there is full agreement on the size of the aid budget or on how much of the aid budget should be spent through DFID (on this point, see a recent piece in The Observer).
2. The biggest differences are probably over the way in which aid money should be utilised, with the Conservatives putting more emphasis on the private and voluntary sectors based on what, in their Green Paper on International Development, they call their ‘natural scepticism about government schemes’. Conservative proposals include, for example, a plan to ‘consider funding insurance schemes, bursaries, or targeted vouchers for the poorest children to attend a school of their choice’ (see Kevin Watkins in The Guardian for a critique of this proposal) – evidence from past experiences suggest such schemes risk diverting attention from the quality of government-run services and that the poorest are least able to take advantage of ‘choice’ due, for example, to a range of hidden costs (transport, school uniform, books, etc.).
Another Conservative proposal, highlighted on their website, is for ‘cash on delivery’ or ‘payment by results’ (eg a government would receive aid money for education retrospectively based on how many children reached a specified level of education). CAFOD produced a useful briefing on the pros and cons of the idea last year (see also a response by Owen Barder, one of the key advocates of the approach, and an ODI blog from last year raises some relevant issues). It seems to me that the biggest issue with ‘cash on delivery’ is that it assumes that where governments do not provide key public services it is because they lack the incentive to do so rather than because they lack the capacity to do so, and that this risks penalising some of the poorest countries where state capacity is weakest. It also seems to take a rather narrowly economic and depoliticised view of the nature of incentives and how they impact on government actions (a good example of the need for interdisciplinarity?).
Other Conservative proposals feel more like gimmicks. There is a proposal for a ‘MyAid fund’ initially worth £40 million where people can vote on how aid money is spent and for a Poverty Impact Fund, also worth £40 million initially, ‘to support innovative British NGOs which find it hard to access government funding at the moment’. It is hard to see how the ‘MyAid fund’ could avoid increasing the proportion of money going to high profile causes that are already relatively over-funded at the expense of issues that receive less media attention. It is also hard to see the need for a new dedicated fund for small NGOs – it is inevitably harder for smaller and newer NGOs to access funding, but this is only a problem if we think it is a priority to have more such organisations and, if the grants are going to be small, then the costs of administering the fund are presumably going to be rather high.
Collectively, these proposals do indeed reflect ‘a natural scepticism about government schemes’, but what is not clear is how wide-ranging the impact of that scepticism would be. DFID’s reputation is based not just on a sustained commitment to aid spending but, more importantly, on the way in which that money has been spent. Under the so-called ‘country-led model’, efforts (not always perfect by any means, and sometimes a very long way from perfect) have been made to utilise aid money in a way that does not undermine the capacity of recipient country governments by channelling it through government budgets and in accordance with the priorities of developing country governments (or at least priorities agreed with those governments). We probably do not know enough about Conservative proposals to assess exactly how far they would diverge from this approach.
3. Policies on international aid are definitely important, but the UK’s policies on a range of other issues – such as climate change, migration, trade rules and decision-making processes in international institutions – are at least as important for developing countries. See a recent blog from Alison Evans from the Overseas Development Institute for more on these wider issues and also a blog by Owen Barder who offers his own list of key issues.
While the cross-party consensus on the importance of international development spending is important, it is the willingness to deliver on those spending commitments and (most importantly) the nature of the policies to be pursued that will matter for developing countries. Looked at like this, the areas on which we know there is cross-party consensus on international development are actually rather limited.
