Overview Report on Multi-Stakeholder Consultations for South Asia and West Asia on Aid Effectiveness

Overview Report on the Kathmandu CSO and Multi-Stakeholder Consultations for South Asia and West Asia on Aid Effectiveness

October 29-November 1, 2007

1. Introduction

1.1 Participants:

The four-day process was attended by about 80 participants representing thirty Nepali civil society organizations (CSOs), 15 international CSOs from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, five Northern CSOs, four international donor agencies and institutions (CIDA, OXFAM, UNDP and FAO), as well as the Nepali government and Nepali media organizations.

Several of the foreign participants were not present during the first day due to difficulties in securing direct flights as the consultations coincided with the peak tourist season in Nepal which was celebrating two festivals.

 

1.2 Organizers:

The consultations were organized by the Reality of Aid Network in the Asia-Pacific Region and were hosted by two Nepali CSOs -NGO Federation of Nepal (NFN) and Nepal Policy Institute together with two Regional CSOs- South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE) and LDC Watch. The government of Nepal, through its National Planning Commission, actively supported the consultations.

 

1.3 Structure:  

The first two days were designed to be the CSO preparatory workshop, attended primarily by CSOs from the region, though some representatives from Northern CSOs based in Nepal were allowed to attend in the second day. This workshop focused on two aspects of the mandate of the Advisory Group, consecutively: 1) Civil society aspirations for deepening the national and international aid effectiveness agenda and in particular the agenda represented by the Paris Declaration; and 2) The issues that shape the aid effectiveness of civil society organizations as development actors.

The third and fourth days were a multi-stakeholder process involving Southern CSOs including participants who were not present in the first two days, along with government, donor and international CSO representatives.

Both workshops started with presentations on the Paris Declaration and the Advisory Group process to provide context to the proceedings. This was followed by panel discussions and breakaway workshop groups structured around thematic issues and presentations of country experiences and CSO viewpoints on the aid regime. Due to time constraints, the organizers scrapped the breakaway workshop groups in the last two days. See Appendix One for a brief summary of case studies and presentations.

 

2. Implementation of the Paris Declaration and Deepening the Aid Effectiveness Agenda

2.1 Awareness

CSOs generally have a limited knowledge of the Paris Declaration, but already have strong positions on the broader aspect of aid effectiveness, particularly on the question of conditionality and tied aid, accountability, and aid relationships.

Most CSOs view aid as necessary, but recognize its effectiveness primarily on the basis of its impact or benefits to target communities. Their strong positions on aid effectiveness come from shared experiences of the lack of accountability and coordination among the major stakeholders in the aid regime as shown by case studies of IFI-funded projects that are supposed to benefit the majority of their populace, if not the poor and most vulnerable sectors.

As for the Paris Declaration, when known, CSOs saw the immediate need for the mechanism to include civil society groups as equal stakeholders, for its agenda to better respond to development and aid issues that concern communities the most.

 

2.2 CSO Approach to Aid Effectiveness           

Most participants view aid as a necessary component of development. But CSOs recognize that the primary beneficiaries of aid and the CSOs that represent them are not fully acknowledged in the present aid regime. They see the issue and concept of aid effectiveness from their communities' perspective, as to how aid addresses poverty, human rights, and the development aspirations of people, especially from marginalized sectors.

CSOs agree that achieving aid effectiveness face a lot of challenges, such as the imposition of donor interests, the inability of governments to invoke sovereignty or their constituencies' interests in aid programs and reforms, and the lack of genuine consultations with communities to ensure their participation in the process.

For CSOs in South Asia and West Asia, aid reforms must be pursued in the context of strengthening democracy, governance and rights-based development in their respective countries. Any reform to make aid more effective must deal with the following concerns of CSOs:

• Aid should be focused not from the donor's perspectives or agenda but from the people's perspective

The geopolitical interests of donors, especially major funding institutions, provide the major stumbling block in aid effectiveness. Donors are generally unaware of the needs of communities in Southern countries, while processes and procedures in aid rarely take into account actual conditions of beneficiaries and limit their access to resources and participation in decision-making.

• Communities and beneficiaries must be empowered

Aid policies should be developed from the target group. Empowering them would mean ensuring not only participation but also ownership or proprietor of reforms.

• Social inclusion in all aid efforts

Efforts to achieve aid effectiveness must include concerns and issues of all sectors, especially the marginalized sectors such as the indigenous groups, Dalits, the differently-abled and senior citizens, migrants and refugees and the youth sector. Women's issues must also be taken into account, not through tokenism or rhetoric, but in enabling full participation of women on aid reforms to contribute their perspective.

 

2.3 Critique of the Content of the Paris Declaration

The workshops were effective in providing CSOs with a better understanding of the Paris Declaration (PD) as the present global mechanism in monitoring aid effectiveness. The major criticism is on the limitation of the PD in addressing the fundamental problems of the aid architecture. Since the PD is concerned only on donor-government relationships in enhancing aid delivery and management, the mechanism has no clear guidelines on CSO participation, as well as issues of conditionality and tied aid, and the need for accountability and reforms of international financial institutions (IFIs).

CSOs acknowledge that the five principles in the PD are good starting points to address aid effectiveness but are compromised by realities on the ground such the power relations between donors and recipients, and the neoliberal policies that represent these relations, as well as corruption, inefficiency and lack of coordination among development acto0rs. There is a gap between policy and implementation, and the differences in approaches to aid effectiveness of the major actors are not reflected in the PD.

The presentations and open forums raised the following in particular:

• Donors tend to influence the government to push their agenda; while governments tend to accept donor policies without a critical look, the PRSPs being a good example. State strategies are sometimes not reflective of people's needs and instead follow the imperatives of international trade commitments. Lack of coordination among government agencies was also noted, as well as corruption and dominance of political interests.
• CSOs and the people most affected by foreign-funded projects are not properly consulted in the process; especially groups run and consisted of women. Projects in Southern countries are usually designed by foreign consultants, while information is not adequately provided to target communities.   
• The impact of aid is not sufficiently measured. The Second Primary Education Development Program (PEDP II) in Bangladesh for example is seen as a good practice model in the sense of coordinated approach among donors and government agencies, but not in the sense of achieving aid effectiveness by its impact on the ground. Moreover, cases of threats to resource control by communities such as the situation of fisherfolk in Pakistan are not addressed.
• Harmonization is more oriented towards process, rather than policy. Present mechanism of harmonization can also lead into further corruption as exemplified in the case of donors in the education sector in Pakistan.
• Lack of mechanisms to enable CSOs to hold their governments and donor accountable. Donors are not made accountable if aid results in development devastation such as ADB projects in Bangladesh. The issue of conditionality is also not addressed such as the case of hydropower projects and water privatization project in Nepal, wherein JBIC and the World Bank respectively imposed conditions on procurements and approval guidelines, among others. Some participants raised the need to democratize these institutions or bring them under the UN framework. The question was also raised on how CSOs can make donors accountable to follow policies they already have such as World Bank mechanisms on working with indigenous communities.
• For communities that face conflict and security problems, there is a need for sustained flow of resources, but donor assistance falls short and inconsistent as represented by the situation of CSOs in Iraq.

In addition to the recommendations made in the CSO policy paper, the participants made the following recommendations:

• Recipient countries should have inclusive ownership over aid projects through a process that is participatory and democratic. Country ownership means that people directly affected by foreign-funded projects should have the rights to accept or reject such projects in their area. Access to information is also crucial to empower communities and enable them to negotiate on an equal position. Women, indigenous people, vulnerable groups, and dalits, among others should also be direct subject of ownership of aid.
• Governments, instead of IFIs, shld act as gatekeepers of aid policies; Local authorities should consult with communities about allocation of resources for better prioritization of their needs.
• Increased share in decision making of Southern countries
• Increased efforts in capacity-building measures to make all aid actors democratic
• The present system of up-down approach of policy formulation should be overturned. Development prospectives should come from below. Communities should be made aware that the aid money, the projects or programmes are theirs and only through their engagement can such initiatives be successful.
• An effective monitoring and evaluation system should be developed that is based on the actual impact of aid on the ground or on the beneficiaries' satisfaction.

 

3. CSOs Aid Effectiveness

3.1 Roles and Voice of CSOs as Development Actors  

During the presentations and discussions, the common definition of CSOs as a group of people carrying common interests and pursuing both the task of watchdog and as development actor was affirmed by participants.

CSOs agree that they should be recognized as major partners in aid and development, based on their special role as working for social transformation in solidarity with and among poor and marginalized sectors.

Operationalizing this concept however remains a challenge for some participants in relation with ongoing socio-political conditions. In Nepal, points were raised regarding an identity crisis of local CSOs resulting to varying levels of understanding of their role and scope. The April 2006 political and civil movement provided opportunities for Nepali CSOs to expand their role and advocacy, but there is still a general unfamiliarity with how to go about working for social transformation.

Some participants also raised reservations on the CSO terminology itself, preferring to call their groups as volunteer organizations, non-government organizations or social movements. The diversity of Southern CSOs, representing various sectors and issues, include social movements, volunteer groups, as well as "delivery organizations" that may or may not have long-term working relationships with communities. CSOs understand that this diversity should not be used as means to discredit their representativeness and their capability to be coordinated and able actors in the aid regime, but as means to define their distinct character from government and donors. Government and donor participants, for their part, urged CSOs to clear their role and space and be convincing partners in development.

CSOs nevertheless were in unison in saying that there is lack of recognition of CSOs in the Paris Declaration and their role in the whole aid architecture. They are rarely given space in the process of big project formulation and implementation.

Information on gender issues was also discussed. The role and voice of CSOs become murkier for organizations representing women's rights. Women's groups advocating reproductive rights are seen as bringing social disharmony, and integrating these issues into the civil society challenge continues to be a challenge. Similarly, the advocacies of groups representing indigenous communities are also sidelined and rarely forwarded along with other CSO advocacies.

CSOs raised the need for more capacity-building efforts to strengthen CSO engagement in the development process, and put forward the following recommendations:

• The Accra Agenda must recognize CSOs not only as development actors, but also as governance actors.
• The aid reform process must not only be open to CSOs but allow for participation of CSOs, in the sense of decision-making. CSOs should be recognized as major partners in decision-making equal to the roles played by donors and governments.
• On the recommendation to ensure meaningful participation of CSOs in the Accra High-level Forum, other groups must also be included such as groups defined by ethnic or caste such as dalits, as well as differently-able individuals and senior citizens.

 

3.2 The Applicability of the Paris Declaration to CSOs

During the discussions, questions were raised as to what mechanisms in particular CSOs themselves can propose to operationalize the applicability of the PD to CSOs as development actors in the aid regime. Rather than focus on PD in particular, most presentations approached on the broader aid effectiveness agenda, and raised recommendations on ownership and mutual accountability. For the other PD concepts, such as harmonization and alignment, these were understood and discussed in the context of government-donor activities in aid delivery.

The direction of debate and discussion showed the CSOs contention that for the PD to be directly applicable to CSOs, it must first define a clear role for them as CSOs working not under the context of governance, but in the context of social solidarity with poor and marginalized communities on a broad spectrum of issues. It is this dimension of applicability that CSO ownership, accountability or harmonization can be discussed. There should be mechanisms of how CSOs can better coordinate with each other and how CSOs can be more accountable as aid and development actors.

 

3.3 CSO Relationships with Government

There is a general love-hate relationship of CSOs and their governments as shown in the presentations and discussions. The enabling environment nevertheless varies across CSOs in the region. Nepali CSOs for example face a more favorable environment after the 2006 political change, but legal instruments are still inadequate and create divisions among them. Indian and Pakistani CSOs face difficult relations with their government, as well as Bangladeshi CSOs, while security and political will are some issues cited by CSOs in Iraq and Yemen.

CSOs deal with various issues regarding their governments, from corruption to lack of coordination of government bodies, to legal instruments that limit the growth and advocacy of CSOs such as the Foreign Contribution Registration Act in India. In many cases, CSOs are seen as adversaries by policy makers and is manifested in lack of direct engagement and recognition of the roles of CSOs in national development.

A common point in the discussions was the weak capacity of Southern governments to engage donors and IFIs in ensuring aid effectiveness, as well as developing national strategies that are more representative of their people's needs and interests. There is also the question of accountability to the people.

Thus, CSOs forwarded the following recommendations:

• Southern governments should be made more aware of the role of CSOs in development and to support this role of CSOs by working more closely with people's representatives and other CSOs, as well as other means.
• Enabling legal environment for all development actors to play a proactive role in development programs.
• Ownership of governments, alongside local communities, should be guaranteed. It should develop policies emanating from actual conditions of target groups.

 

4.4 North / South CSO Relationships

Most participants view donors and northern CSOs in the same bucket, but still treat the big donors such as WB, IMF and ADB as still having the biggest influence into the aid regime in their countries. As much as there are common elements between northern CSOs and donors, there are also common elements between the former and their Southern counterparts, particularly on commitment to the ideals of democracy, justice and human rights.

Among the issues raised by CSOs are the following:

• Northern CSOs tend to dominate relations or partnerships with Southern CSOs both in terms of financial areas and ideological perspectives.

They have the tendency to ignore alternative strategies or area-specific thinking of target communities, and decide and design projects based on what they think is best for the South. The Association of International NGOs in Nepal reported the code of conduct they have worked with international and bilateral donors towards implementing operational guidelines on accountability, but some local CSOs asked on the consultation process, if their particular issues and views were taken.

• Southern CSOs tend to adapt whatever package Northern CSOs bring to the table

CSOs note that corruption can also rise in some North-South CSO relationships especially when northern CSOs are not careful in selecting CSOs based on their actual work on the ground.

• Northern CSOs do not consider national diversity in terms of gender, caste, class or ethnicity.

Local CSOs during the open forum pointed out that some foreign NGOs are not aware of concerns from marginalized groups such as differently-abled persons.

• Remains limited to a give and take relationship; there was also the issue of availability and accessibility of Northern CSOs to their Southern counterparts.
• Relations are still guided by the neoliberal framework; some northern CSOs are beginning to accept corporate sector as stakeholders despite opposition by communities they are working with.
• Socio-political conditions such as political instability in the case of Iraq also prevented better coordination between local and foreign CSOs and increasing capability of local CSOs to develop relationship with other international aid actors.

The following are areas of work to improve North-South CSO relationships:

• Increased collaboration among Northern and Southern CSOs to reduce conditionalities of Northern donors associated with donor-recipient relationships.
• Increased information sharing to enable Northern CSOs to understand ground realities and priorities the knowledge and sensibilities of target communities.
• Guidelines that allow Northern CSOs to partner with Southern CSOs that have proven experience in working with communities, as well as improve on aid delivery and management.

 

4.5 Donor-CSO relationships (Donor Support Models)

CSOs identified four major areas of donor support available (direct support to core funding and to program/project-specific endeavors, support through intermediary and joint fund involving a number of donors) but noted the absence of mechanisms to enable states, citizens and CSOs to hold them accountable. They raised the issue of IFIs and Northern donors still dominating the aid process, from project planning to implementation, with almost no space for CSO participation or genuine consultation toget the actual needs of beneficiaries. CSOs added that donors do not find it necessary to compromise with local authorities, the civil society and beneficiaries.

The discussions also noted a major difference in perspective by donors in that they see people's needs from the perspective of efficiency and limited to delivery enhancement, and not in the broader sense in terms of human rights and democracy. CSOs also noted donors' tendency to downplay their economic and political influence in the poverty reduction strategies of Southern governments. The issue of donor dependency was also raised following discussion on factors behind decreasing donor support, and it centered on how Southern CSOs can work on developing alternative sources of funding.

Among the recommendations are:

• Revision of Recommendation #6 of the draft policy paper:

While introducing mutually agreed, transparent and binding contracts to govern aid relationships, instead of keeping only sanctions against donors that fail to meet their commitment, donors should be penalized (fined) or should be compelled to make compensation in such case.

• Revision of Recommendation #10 of the draft policy paper:

Donors must commit to giving aid for poverty reduction, promotion of human rights, and for promoting social and economic development from UN perspective.

• Donors must be aware of people's needs on the ground and should provide timely information on conditions and terms of aid; Openness and transparency should be encouraged from donors (i.e. negotiations should not be done in close room).
• Mechanisms for accountability of donors to communities affected by its projects.

 

4.6   How Can CSOs Collaborate Better?

CSOs also noted the lack of coordination among CSOs especially between national networks of NGOs and district-level, community-based NGOs. In the case of Nepal, where the enabling environment has slightly improved due to political changes, small CSOs are still left in the process of coordination and capacity-building. There are still challenges for coordination such as the non-transparent and patriarchal characters of some CSOs within Southern countries.

Nevertheless, the resources, network and influence of national-based CSOs can also be seen as opportunities they must immediately exploit to help smaller CSOs further elevate their grassroots concerns to the over-all agenda of the CS movement, and improve capability in advocacy and management.

CSOs recognize the importance of working in consortium as united movement for better information campaigns to the people, gaining bargaining power as well as pressuring governments to work for the public interest. Bangladeshi CSOs cited the formation of an aid accountability group involving other stakeholders, while Pakistani CSOs mentioned their work for including indigenous concerns.

CSOs strongly recommended that:

• Further hold consultations towards building forums or network at both national and regional levels that link with grassroots initiatives for all development programs.
• Improve capacity-bulding to better respond not only to immediate needs but to long-term strategic issues.
  

 

4.7 CSO Accountability to Members and Constituencies

A common point in several of the discussions is the need for CSOs themselves to have accountability mechanisms that can improve their work for communities. CSOs understand that the challenges they continue to face with regards their role and scope, management and coordination is reflective of particular socio-political conditions, which they must continue to reflect towards transforming themselves as more inclusive and efficient actors in development.

Many CSOs face various reactions from people they work with. Communities have high expectations for CSOs, seeing them as their link to state machinery, but at the same time harbor perceptions of mistrust that some CSOs are elitist or concerned only with cornering resources. CSOs saw the need to overcome these challenges by working closely with people on the ground, improving organizing and capacity-building efforts. The major recommendation thus far is for CSOs themselves to formulate a self-regulatory accountability mechanism that ensures transparency and democratic participation.