Category Archives: Learning and Ideas

Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 4 – Power and policy

The PolyBlog
March 18 2015

I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 4: Power and Policy: Lessons from Aid Effectiveness” by Molly den Heyer. I confess that I have little interest in power dynamics in most policy discussions, mostly because the literature often focuses on uni-dimensional aspects of power (such as one issue, or one policy area) or relative power (governments vs. people), when what is often more important is the personal power of the individuals involved, the power of the context itself, or the incremental power differentials (i.e. slightly more power on economics than social) and corresponding offsets (i.e. more give and take in certain areas that end up with more take because there was more give in another area).

These competing policy frameworks (aid effectiveness and accountability) and associated formal institutions illustrate how other forms of visible power often stand as obstacles to or diversions from the implementation of aid policy and its intended change.

I think there is a lot more meat behind this issue, and may not be one of power so much as the difference between ideals and practical realities. Den Heyer outlines how aid effectiveness policies argued for country ownership (that would include practices like general budget support) and accountability policies (that argue for clear pots of money with direct attribution of results). Negotiators of international agreements face a clear challenge when it comes to language and the individual capacity and mandates of each country — do you use high-level, idealistic, hortatory language (with the hidden implication that each member will try to live up to it to the best of their ability, within their national constraints) or do you limit the wording to something everyone can live with (lowest common denominator)?

I’ll use a couple of very different examples to explain what I mean. When the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was being negotiated, you can easily imagine that not only did countries like the Nordics have different approaches to human rights than a country like China or the Sudan, they also had vastly different capacities to implement. But if you only agree to explicit language that everyone could live with, or that 51% could live with, the commitment would be pretty low. And if you went with what everyone could live with, there’s no point to the agreement — you wouldn’t be moving the measuring sticks at all. So international agreements are always written in language that is meant to be hortatory — encouraging countries to move closer to a higher ideal, sometimes thought of as a “future highest common numerator” as a percentage of the theoretical denominator of everything that “could” be done. So, to use the example of aid effectiveness, every country signed on for “developing country ownership”. For some, whose Parliaments and systems allow for easy budget support, that was what they were agreeing to; for Canada, it was, is, and probably always will be “best efforts”. One of the differences is that Canada often discusses this issue opening in international negotiations, i.e. the difference between theory and reality, while others sign on with no intention of changing anything. So we can’t do direct budget support over $20M; instead, we do several sectoral supports of less than $20M. Not as ideal as it could be, and may even be skirting accountability rules, but it is the “best” Canada has been able to do within the system we have.

A related question shows up in the discussion of grants vs. contributions and goes to what den Heyer discusses in terms of “adaptation”. For those in the business, contributions are agreements between the partners and CIDA where it outlines who is going to contribute what, with what process in place, what results there will be, how often the reporting will be done, etc. It’s detailed, and spells out everyone’s (mostly the partners’) responsibilities with a lot of conditions. Put a different way, it says “CIDA will give you this amount of money to do x project with y activities to produce z results that you will report to us here and here”.

Grants, by contrast, are supposed to be condition-free. What that means is that we (as the government) have reviewed an organization, such as UNICEF, like what they’re doing in general, think they have good systems in place to manage money and results, and so we want to give that organization a grant. Few conditions, few audit controls, no direct attribution of results to our specific funding, but they’ll give us a copy of their overall report when they’re done. No muss, no fuss, low reporting burden. Except lots of program managers don’t like grants — they give up control (the power issues that den Heyer discusses — and so they take the grant agreement and tweak it. They add more reporting. They add more expected results. They add more conditions. And suddenly you have a new beast called a “grantribution”. This is essentially the same issue central agencies have with direct budgetary support — so they bastardize the standard approach to get a whole bunch of the missing “elements” without much push-back to say “Nope, that’s not the ideal” and “we can live without it”. It would be the bravest of politicians or officials of any stripe or level to say publicly, “No, it’s okay, we don’t need to know what results you achieved with our funding.” Some of this goes to the lack of in-depth knowledge discussed in Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 2 – Refashioning Humane internationalism and Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 3 – Ethical Foundations. Some of the NGOs like to criticize direct budgetary support for its apparent lack of demonstrable results, for example, while still screaming for “country-led ownership”. What some of the more cynical interpret that to mean is “but direct budget support goes to GOVERNMENTS who don’t give it to the Canadian NGOs!”.

Overall, though, I think what is missing is the recognition that it is not that countries are being evil and pursuing their own interests, or lying when they sign on to agreements. The truth is both simpler and more insidious — all the players in the room and elsewhere know that a document is nothing more than an abstraction of reality, and that while everyone will make best efforts towards the outcomes, the outcomes are not destinations but journeys in a certain direction. In human rights terms, at least for economic and social rights, it is about progressive realization over time, not the immediate realization of civil or political rights. Such a recognition would get some of the NGOs and academics out of the ivory tower and closer to a connection to the real world that the aid workers have to face every day.

The Paris Declaration calls for partner countries to strengthen their government systems and for donors to use these systems to distribute aid. Yet, within the aid corridors, donors are reluctant to relinquish control of aid dollars over concerns around accountability to taxpayers, corruption in recipient countries, and general lack of capacity. As a result, some donors (including CIDA) set demanding preconditions and effectively stall policy implementation under the rubric of feasibility.

It is the use of the term rubric that pulls that excerpt from analysis into rhetoric, and gets at the point I made above about accepting the reality of the aid worker’s world as an equally valid paradigm, not an aberration. Later, the author talks about the compromises leading to “significant policy drift”.

The aid workers are not “hiding” reality. They are not adding the preconditions for no reason. Accountability, corruption, and capacity are real — and they do impact feasibility. More so than simple power dynamics, yet are tossed aside as mere inconveniences. Even when you take out accountability to the taxpayer who provides the funds or potential corruption siphoning off resources, if the remaining money cannot be managed with enough capacity to deliver results, then not only was the project a waste, but it likely did more to cement existing “power” relations than any “successful” project ever could. While not usually put in any writing document, some public relations people in development agencies have a small guideline called the “power of fifty rule”. Put simply, they have to review the results of about fifty “successful” projects just to find one that might resonate and can be turned into a workable promotion item. But it only takes one bad project to have the same level of negative impact. The corruption scandal, the empty school, the ambulance converted into a military support vehicle — these examples carry far more weight than the governance meeting that went well, direct budgetary support, or a health literacy project.

Second, Western managerial standards extend to all facets of development.

I’ll be curious to see if any of the rest of the book gets into this area. Beyond what den Heyer refers to, there is a rich area here ranging from the management-by-numbers approach of the late 80s/early 90s to the consultative processes loved in the late 90s to a resurgence of macro governance issues in the early to mid-2000s. And not just for the projects pushing those managerial concepts into the zeitgeist of development implementation, nor only for the aid agency reporting burden on project managers, but also for the aid agencies themselves — new reporting requirements, the move to more data analytics in-house on operations, etc. All three areas are adjusting to an enhanced focus on management, and I’m hoping some of the other chapters might look at them individually or the linkages between them.

First, the complexity of international politics continues to grow with multipolar international politics and the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRICs). The BRICs, along with many recipient countries, are questioning the traditional postcolonial approach to aid. […] Second, global poverty can no longer be described neatly by a North–South distinction. Instead, extreme wealth and poverty reside side-by-side within the same countries — or in Michael Edwards’s (2013, 3) words — there are now “pockets of extreme poverty and conflict.”

I’m a bit surprised this section about the BRICS and coexistence of wealth and poverty are left to the end and given so little attention. The BRICs, for example, are indeed changing the nature of development discourse, and while many see them as the “saviours” in that they may better understand the developing country reality, my personal opinion is that not only do they indeed understand it better, they are actively using that understanding to exploit the other countries for their own self-interest. While lots of NGOs decry the debate in Canada and elsewhere about “self-interest” and aid policy, in China and Brazil, the debate was over before it began — it is entirely about self-interest. China’s aid to Africa directly mirrors their commercial and political interests, and votes at the United Nations and elsewhere directly mirror their influence. Taiwan, for example, led the way in some respects by giving aid to countries that would recognize it as a country, with China quickly following along with other aid to prevent the same country from speaking. For most of the BRICs, they see aid in a longitudinal fashion — they have seen how many of the main OECD countries in the past have maintained ties and influence to developing countries with their aid, and they intend to shift global power through the same measures. Yet the same group of four also have huge income disparities within their own countries that are not yet resolved — the number of people in Brazil, China and India living below the poverty line dwarf the entire populations of all other developing countries combined. Distributive politics should be a much bigger area for study as the BRICs move farther into the donor world, mainly because issues of tied aid, donor harmonization, aid effectiveness, country-led development — the buzzwords of the discourse — are completely missing from their vocabulary except as afterthoughts. Some who are quite cynical about the BRICs summarize it as simply “their turn to exploit developing countries”. Now that’s a power play that would be worth analyzing.

Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 3 – Ethical Foundations

The PolyBlog
March 14 2015

I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “Chapter 3: Revisiting the Ethical Foundations of Aid and Development Policy from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” by John D. Cameron.

The absorption of CIDA into DFATD and explicit subordination of aid policy to broader foreign policy suggests two possibilities for how we analyze aid and development policy. The first is to abandon any expectation that aid is connected to or inspired by moral concerns for the well-being of other people and to employ realist methodological perspectives that analyze aid purely as an instrument of foreign policy. […] The alternative […] is to re-examine the ethical basis for aid and to analyze aid in the context of a more theoretically consistent and coherent normative framework that draws attention to the broader range of government policies that affect developing countries.

I admit that I’m excited by the idea of putting aid ethics in a larger ethical framework, and while the first is an easy throwaway, the second argues for looking at policy coherence. I’m interested to see how deep he goes in defining coherence because there’s an assumption out in the literature, and particularly in many NGOs, that aid policy and foreign policy or more accurately trade policy are incoherent. They trumpet examples such as giving $40M in aid to a country while clawing back $25M in tariffs as obviously “incoherent”. Except that they haven’t first defined what they mean by incoherence, or which is the starting point and which is the ending point.

For example, if your opening “framework” was that you deal with all countries for trade on an equal playing field, and if they don’t support human rights, labour laws, environmental sustainability i.e. if they race to the bottom that unfairly “subsidizes” production by not incurring costs that more responsible producers incur, then that country pays tariffs (the above mentioned $25M), then you have a perfectly coherent trade policy. If you then say, “But wait, that’s a poor developing country that needs our help”, and the government turns around and gives them $40M in aid, including for human rights, labour, social development, education, governance, and the environment, it’s tantamount to giving them their $25M back and giving them an extra $15M. Still perfectly coherent trade policy — taxing the exploiters and pushing the country to raise its workplace regulations to match international standards. It even is perfectly coherent aid policy — helping those who need it, giving them money to help while still engaging them in trade which will pull them into the international community, laying the groundwork for long-term economic sustainability.

However, what is missing from the original complaint is “policy coherence for something” — you need an overriding policy that is the dominant one to resolve conflicts if/when conflicts arise. The Dutch and the OECD looked at this in the early 2000s and quickly found multiple levels/types of policy coherence — simple coherence where two policies conflicted (i.e. one said to do A, another said to do B), almost an administrative coherence; moderate coherence where two policies could work together for a common goal; or true coherence for a specific policy objective and everything that didn’t directly meet that objective was changed. This is what Cameron refers to as “policy coherence for development” and too often those last two phrases are left out, so I’m glad to see it so strongly highlighted.

What intrigues me too is that Cameron looks at two frameworks while studiously ignoring a third possibility — that while the humanistic portrayal says “poverty reduction”, there are many ways to meet that need, some of which are perhaps better delivered by Foreign Affairs and Trade than other forms. For example, if one of the priorities is economic development, and one of the sub-areas is private sector development, there are lots of micro-credit experts in development, but very few who know much about building coalitions of companies to advise governments what their negotiating strategy or positions should be at the WTO. That’s mainly Trade Commissioner territory. Put another way, there is another framework that says not just that there are “other policies” but one that says “other approaches are perfectly valid forms of poverty reduction, even approved as such by the OECD Development Assistance Committee”.

Ethical consistency and political responsibility suggest that scholars of aid should give equal consideration to positive and negative ethical duties. In practical methodological terms, this would require the expansion of our analytical frameworks beyond aid as an expression of positive duties to also include greater examination of the potential harms caused by both aid and non-aid aspects of development policy, in particular the ways in which other policies might undermine the impacts of aid.

While Cameron is quick to assume that we review the benefits of aid, and both the benefits and costs of non-aid, there are serious risks to the aid side too that are difficult to measure and evaluate, but no less concerning. Greater integration into the world economy opens those countries to shocks, building human rights institutions and strengthening rule of law helps stabilize aspects of governance but can also create new tensions that fragile governance systems are ill-equipped to manage. We do projects that are gender-sensitive, respect the environment, don’t displace Aboriginal communities, emphasize education and health, all with the latest tools. Except if the culture was not like that to begin with, there is a piece of it that must adapt or die. If that seems too esoteric, too remote, then let’s look at the number of projects that in conflict-torn regions provided mobile health services, complete with a vehicle so that the doctors and nurses could get to the injured. Sounds simple, right? Except that a week after the vehicle arrived, it was suddenly gone — and look, the military has a new troop carrier of the same size and shape, allowing them to attack farther afield. Not all development projects go according to plan, not all outcomes are foreseen. I wrote on Chapter 2 about the challenges of infrastructure projects (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 2 – Refashioning Humane internationalism) and the long-term unintended consequences. If you go farther back and look only at the “good intentions” of development projects, early projects that looked a lot like modern “Manifest Destiny” didn’t have very positive outcomes for Aboriginals. And all done with the best of intentions.

While the OECD/DAC emphasizes policy processes to enhance policy coherence for development, the Commitment to Development Index focuses explicitly on six non-aid policy areas (as well as aid itself) in its analysis of rich country development policies. Those six policy areas are trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology transfer (CGD 2013).

Having witnessed a number of the early discussions of the CDI, I am not as optimistic of the interpretation given to it. Most countries seemed to interpret it as “simple coherence” that eliminated externalities only, few were willing to go deep into the analysis. I love the idea of expanding to other areas, but I wish there was more “meat” to Cameron’s initial call to arms.

Take migration for example. The example given early is how Canada steals the medical professions from other countries, thus undermining their original health care system. It seems simple, seems obvious. So much so that many harp on it repeatedly and use it to beat the drums of injustice. Except there are three very big questions that any ethical framework would have to address, beyond those simplistic terms.

First, the UN Conventions on Human Rights (economic, social, political, civil) have mutually re-inforcing clauses that say labour mobility is a human right. A human right, full stop. Yet, the NGOs who advocate for strong human rights want foreign governments to limit a medical professional’s right to labour mobility because the origin country needs them. Some who are quite well-versed in labour mobility call that being held hostage; those more aggressive in their rhetoric call it slavery or at the very least indentured servitude. The ethical framework has to resolve that, or it cannot stand.

Second, there is a practical issue. How do you address the economic disconnect? There is a reason the doctors and nurses want to leave their home country. Not because they don’t like it, not because they hate their families, not because they don’t want to stay where they are — they leave because there aren’t enough paying jobs to sustain their families and they can make more money elsewhere. While the first part is purely on the “pull” factor of countries like Canada recruiting abroad, this is the internal push factor.

Eveline Herfkens used to tell a story of her first trip abroad as the Development Minister for the Netherlands. She went to Ghana and was going to renew a project that sent Dutch doctors to Ghana for sabbaticals basically to work and train new doctors in Ghana. When she announced to the Minister of Health the renewal, she asked why he didn’t seem happier. He said that sending a Dutch doctor was welcome but would cost her $200K. For the same money, he could pay maybe 4 doctors $50K more a year or even 10 doctors $20K more a year, and get 4-10 doctors instead of just one. Brilliant, she thought, so she changed the project, cancelled the Dutch doctors and agreed to fund the Ghanaian doctors. It seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Except that the next day, in the Dutch papers, the headlines read, “Herfkens kills African babies”. Because the reality was that she wasn’t going to send the Dutch doctors anymore, and they had the support to go plus wanted to go, and they wouldn’t get the results that they had before. Maybe similar results, or maybe different, but not the same. Was the headline inherently racist in its assumptions? Of course, but hiding in the weeds is that the only way to get the Ghanaian doctors to stay is to pay them more. They want to stay, few want to leave a stable home if the country isn’t going to pot, and many want to stay even if it IS going downhill (maybe even more so). But the ethical framework has to figure out how to remove a strong economic incentive to move. Oh, and by the way? There are some who view it a lot like paying polluters not to pollute — you’re paying them to “do the right thing” and not leave their country. It’s a bit messy.

Third, and perhaps most important, you’re going to have a framework that decides (on some basis, maybe GDP?) what is “best” for the origin country. It sounds simple, at first blush, stay and save people. Except here’s the kicker. What’s the biggest challenge? Poverty. How do you fix that? An influx of capital. What do all those medical professionals do when they start working elsewhere? Send home remittances. Money from outside the country.

In fact, back in 2002-2003, African countries put on their collective website of the African Union articles about the same topic, how foreign countries were stealing their medical professions. What happened? Other countries told them to take them down and shut up. Because a couple of the countries had looked over at the Philippines, realized that they too had little to develop to “export” other than people, and started investing in medical training. So they too could send their newly trained citizens abroad and get the remittances coming back. There are numerous countries in the world where remittances outpace trade, development and several other types of flows in/from the countries. Some OECD countries have even proposed the remittances count as development assistance.

So, that ethical framework that says Canada can’t steal health professionals needs a broader context to resolve not only the “why” but how to measure the impact. And, more pointedly even, who decides — the individual who wants to exercise their mobility rights and earn money for their family; the origin country’s government that wants them to send money back, have factored future remittances into their development plans, and doesn’t have the money to pay them themselves; the host country that wants and needs their skills; or the NGO or academic who thinks it’s wrong?

As with my previous infrastructure examples, the ethical framework has to be able to deal with really complex messy issues, some with no clear answers. I’m not sure the call to arms in Chapter 3 gets us there, but it’s a start.

Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid: Chapter 2 – Refashioning humane internationalism

The PolyBlog
March 11 2015

I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “CHAPTER 2: Refashioning Humane Internationalism in Twenty-First-Century Canada” by Adam Chapnick.

The opening of the chapter talks about the policy divergence between humanitarian assistance and development assistance and is more eloquently presented than my complaints in reviewing Chapter 1 (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 1 – Humane internationalism). But this next point could be even further emphasized.

Even the realists, then, embrace the spirit of altruism in times of crisis, although some might still emphasize the anticipated diplomatic benefits arising from so-called humanitarian initiatives.

Without getting into specifics, an emergency crisis in a country not on the recipient list prompted Ambassadors in DFAIT at the time to demand that CIDA hand over millions of dollars in unneeded assistance, with the caveat that the cheques could be handed out by the Ambassador in $15K increments, complete with photo ops. Even some of the hardened found the request a bit unethical, highly unprofessional, and well, downright distasteful.

…They condition the public to believe — incorrectly — that paying for a single child to eat a healthy breakfast and attend school will have a lasting impact on the overall ability of that child’s larger community to grow economically and provide a sustainable, prosperous environment for future generations.

Despite the various explanations offered by Chapnick as to the differences between support for humanitarian vs. development assistance, all of which are possible, I think there are slightly different forces at work that collapse the list to just two in practice.

First and foremost, there is the one above. The “save the children” campaigns, complete with pics of starving children, even better with flys buzzing around them, are effective in addressing the altruist’s support — the strong ethical pull matched with immediate need = support for humanitarian assistance. The quick need, the quick response, the quick result. Unfortunately, the need for gender equality might be acute, but there is no quick response or quick result. It isn’t any less “altruistic”, but the direct “logic chain” from input to result is less clear, and far less immediate. In some ways, it’s no different than the patient who wants a treatment for a health problem rather than advice for long-term health improvements. They believe in both, but the hook is less palpable for the second.

The second element that I find hidden is that not only are the “hooks” different, but the actions are fundamentally different. Health analysts frequently talk about the idea of downstream and upstream activities. Downstream ones are the ones that take place on the ground and save lives. Antibiotics, surgeries, blood transfusions, medicines. Upstream ones are the ones that take place in research labs, curriculum development to train doctors and nurses, networks to collect blood, safety guidelines, and food inspections. Handing out a blanket and some food is far different in action, expertise and function than having a governance discussion with the central government about the role of women in government or even society. Having expertise in one does not lend itself to expertise in the other, the practical realities of one don’t lend itself to supporting the other easily, even with Red Cross guidelines.

1. Rather than criticizing the international realists’ thought process, emphasize a shared desire for common outcomes.

2. Avoid reinforcing the common perception that development assistance is no different than common charity.

3. Build public support from the top down.

As three solutions go, these aren’t bad. The first seems to me to be a natural outcome of #2 and #3 however, but #2 and #3 continue to be a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Do you build awareness of the complexity of development to get leadership support from the top down or do you get support from the top down to build awareness?

Personally, I think awareness has to come first, and if the NGOs are all-fired sure of their altruistic pursuits, I’d suggest somewhat sarcastically and hopefully that they put their money where their mouth seems to be. I’ll give you two examples from the United Nations.

There’s a dam built in Africa, the location unimportant to the story. Generates power, drives industry, and while it’s being built, all the locals’ lives improve dramatically with the wages from working as labourers. Great. Case closed, definitely development progress. Yet, the dam is finished, the work disappears, and the area suffers economically. The men go off to the cities and find work, send home money, another mini-boom. Six to eighteen months later, the men stop sending money home as they become disconnected from their families, and the area suffers. Next, the women go off to the cities, sending money home, another mini-boom. But most of the women are working as prostitutes, many contract AIDS, and come back home to die.

A second story — building a road through the wilderness, aiming to connect two distant cities, including building a bridge across a hard-to-cross river. Wages pay for labourers, economic boom, more trade between cities, increased prosperity. Except for a small problem. While the men were working on the road, the prostitutes followed them, setting up shop in little shanty towns along the road. And spreading many diseases, including AIDS, all along the road route. Once the road is complete, the city that was remote on the other side sees its infection rates for all diseases rise dramatically to match the rest of the country.

Both the dam and the road are examples of infrastructure projects, and every development expert on the planet knows that a country cannot grow without infrastructure. And while there are ways to address some of the problems in the above models, it would be a rare NGO who could communicate any part of that complex story well to anyone in a soundbite, which is about all they get to say. Both of the stories above came from publications of the United Nations, and are buried deep within reports of the FAO and UNAIDS. Communicating any of it tends to have the opposite effect on people — once they see how large, complex and near-intractable development projects are, the less they support them and the more they want to do humanitarian aid only.

I agree that “education” and awareness is a key to better support, but to draw upon Chapnick’s concern — will an NGO risk going out of business and be unable to help anyone in order to tell a more ethically accurate story?

Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid: Chapter 1 – Humane internationalism

The PolyBlog
March 11 2015

I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “CHAPTER I: Humane Internationalism and the Malaise of Canadian Aid Policy” written by one of the co-editors, David R. Black.

He takes Pratt’s analysis and identifies three conceptual constructs.

First, he argued that Canadian political culture incorporated a robust and persistent, though eroding, element of “humane internationalism” (HI), defined as “an acceptance by the citizens of the industrialized states that they have ethical obligations towards those beyond their borders and that these in turn impose obligations on their governments” (Pratt 1989, 13). This orientation was, he argued, understood by its adherents to be consistent with the “real long-term interests of the rich countries,” but remained at its core ethical and cosmopolitan in orientation (Pratt 1989, 14).

Put more simply, there is a role to be played if you’re an international actor. I think it would be good if Black went a little beyond aid though — there are ethical obligations for peace-keeping and entries into war, going back to the time of feudal kings. Even if you yourself were not threatened, you had an obligation to aid an ally under attack. In those times it was more self-interested (mutual protection), but it was also the basis for chivalry and knights. It certainly was part of the argument for getting involved in European wars that didn’t directly threaten non-European borders.

The idea of the counter-consensus was Pratt’s second main conceptual contribution to the framing of Canadian foreign policy. It foreshadowed the growing interest in the role and influence of “civil society” and the “democratization” of foreign policy that came to the fore in the 1990s. […] Given what he understood to be HI’s public resonance and firm societal roots, the puzzle was why it had not had greater influence on the policy and practice of Canadian aid, which virtually all scholarly commentators saw as bedevilled by “mixed motives,” among which ethical considerations were typically (though not unremittingly) subordinated to more narrowly self-interested priorities.

One complaint I have with the characterization of an NGO consensus is that it represents a consensus at all, particularly in Canada. Consultations have shown again and again that when NGOs et al are asked what the Canadian government should do about problem X or in country Y or in sector Z, those same NGOs who argue for humane ideals (on which they do agree) are the same ones submitting extremely self-serving and divergent solutions. That’s not completely surprising on one front — if an NGO is focused on famines, they are obviously going to suggest that the world needs to do more on food security. Those who focus on water are going to suggest more needs to be done on water issues. Yet in most cases, it isn’t that “more” needs to be done but rather that there is no consensus as to what the priorities should be. In fact, there is an old joke at CIDA that it should have been renamed ATTAP — all things to all people. No one wants to talk about the old saw that up until about 1992, 80+ percent of all “aid” money was actually spent in Canada on Canadian NGOs. We have a strong history of supply-driven aid, much of which belies a “consensus” on anything more than “help people”.

To explain this puzzle, Pratt elaborated a “dominant class” approach, combining an emphasis on the relative autonomy of permanent officials within the state with an understanding that their conception of the “national interest” showed a persistent bias towards the interests of “capitalism in Canada.” Influenced by structural Marxism, combined in a “non-doctrinaire” manner with international realism and, in later versions, a neo-Gramscian attention to the precepts of neoliberal globalization, Pratt’s emphasis on the enduring influence of dominant class interests provided a basis for understanding the policy choices that were made (e.g., regarding tied aid, the choice of recipients, and the use of aid funds to promote private sector activity in developing countries) under the ethical cover of the aid program.

Yesterday I mentioned one of my complaints (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Introduction) with academic analysis looking like intellectual masturbation, particularly when it comes to political economy, and this sort of sophistry is where it falls apart for me. The short short short version is that we have a liberal democracy with a capitalist economy. What a shock to say that many of the government policies of the day reinforce the dominant ideals in both domains and that they also influence aid policy. It’s hard to imagine a large-scale government policy that doesn’t reflect the dominant ideologies in most western-style democracies. That’s how they work. It doesn’t create a separate “class” (economic or political) nor is it doing it under “ethical cover”. It doesn’t NEED ethical cover as if it is hidden or subversive. We have identical influences in every department — why would aid be different? And why would the government “apologize” for it?

Not that Black is wholly embracing of the Pratt analysis, noting that

[…]such ideal-typical contrasts have important analytical utility. However, they also have certain risks and ramifications when applied to the “real world” of policy. First, the ethical clarity of purpose associated with the “pure” articulation of HI is virtually impossible to approach in practice.[…] On the other hand, a discussion of development that does not embed a forthright and sophisticated discussion of ethical purpose will be an impoverished one. A policy domain that is centrally preoccupied with addressing the causes and consequences of global poverty will be infused, inevitably, with conceptions of and arguments about obligation and justice. What is needed, therefore, is a discussion that better captures the dilemmas and ambiguities of ethical purpose, without (implicitly or explicitly) discounting it as somehow “too hard” or too naïve.

I agree with the intent but not the direction. Black wants to take the NGO claim to “true” ethical concerns while tossing out “wrong” concerns for Canadian interests — but there is no normative basis to say that a Canadian government official that is appointed to work “for Canada” is somehow morally corrupt because they are interested in Canadian interests. The pillar of self-righteousness assumes the moral high ground, but with no ethical basis to do so. Person A wants to help foreigners, Person B wants to help Canadians — that isn’t an ethical dilemma that can be solved through rhetoric or solved at all. In fact, there are a lot of people who think that Person A is actually “wrong” in their approach and that the “right” or “true approach” that will work is self-interest. With equally compelling “ethical” arguments going back to Kant and Rousseau. The fact that one is more “attractive” to the NGOs doesn’t make it “the one true way”, like a religion.

I’m going to digress here for a moment with more of a personal revelation. Despite the fact that I work for the government, and support its policies and programs in as non-partisan fashion as I can, I think the NGOs are correct that our aid policies and practices should be primarily if not exclusively based on altruism and serving developing country interests. However, having studied ethics, political economy, philosophy, human rights, and law, I also believe that there is a limit to normative views and that on some levels, when consensus is not “self-evident”, relativism has to invariably creep in. Person A may have an absolute belief in self-interest or at least “national self-interest” (to be more precise), but they have no greater or lesser claim to normative roles for government than the altruist unless one of those “beliefs” eventually rises to the level of a human right. Only at that point does it become normative; up until then, it’s all choices.

David Morrison, in his landmark 1998 history of CIDA, noted that “while polls have consistently shown humanitarian sentiment as the leading reason people give for supporting aid, they have also revealed scant general knowledge about the nature or extent of Canadian development assistance — and, except for a small minority, a low ranking in comparison with other public goods” (Morrison 1998, 440). Noël, Thérien, and Dallaire (2004) used publicly available polling data to elaborate on this point, and further noted that there was a deep divide between a soft majority of Canadians who were broadly supportive of aid and a substantial minority who were deeply sceptical or even hostile towards it.

I don’t think this type of analysis actually moves the yardstick forward. What is actually needed is a more nuanced survey that also asks what people (including Parliamentarians) think development actually IS. That sounds pedestrian, doesn’t it? Asking them what development means? Yet even the NGOs can’t agree. In OECD terms, there’s a division between humanitarian assistance, transition programming, and regular development. Yet when CIDA engages with the NGOs and more importantly the average Canadian, they ask about “development”, yet the support from Canadians is for humanitarian assistance. It’s why the average Canadian talks about earthquakes, and floods, and tsunamis, and does stupid things like shipping a box of used shoes around the world to “help”. The level of understanding and the broad support that NGOs claim exists is a very large but extremely shallow puddle.

Let’s take a practical example. If you ask most Canadians if food and shelter are development, they’ll say “of course”. (Note, it’s probably not, just humanitarian aid that acts as triage on a gaping wound – the patient stays alive, but they’re not living.) If you ask them if organizing a meeting of NGOs to talk about the country’s needs is “development”, about half say yes. The other half say no because they don’t see it as doing anything — just talk. Yet the governance people would cry “of course”!

Now, go one step further, and say the NGOs have got together and agreed that the people need a water irrigation system for their crops. And look, there’s a Canadian company with the technology and time and availability to do it. Can I hire them to do it, maybe even using local labour to install and run it? And is it development? The locals say of course; the Canadians would say about 80% yes; and the NGOs in Canada would scream “No, that’s self-interest, you can’t do it.”

While I hesitate to go Machiavellian and look more to the end than the means, the definition of development is fairly clear. A development activity that aids a developing country. It doesn’t care WHY we did the development activity, as long as there were benefits to the developing country. How and Who benefits, not an ethical debate of motive.

If one wants to go down that rabbit-hole, there is a much bigger and simpler ethical dilemma that the NGOs can`t answer. Is it better to do something that aids Canada and helps a developing country grow and survive, yet has a moral taint according to the NGOs, or to risk doing nothing for lack of domestic support and let them remain unaided in poverty, yet Canadian consciences can remain calm that doing nothing was for the right reasons? NGOs would argue that the question is a strawman that wrongly frames the question, and I don’t disagree. But if the NGOs want to stand on high ground and claim ethical normativism, then their position has to be able to answer these types of questions unequivocally, not just reframe them to make it an easier one.

I have to confess that Black loses me when talking about CIDA forming alliances with other departments.

It meant, as well, that development analysts and practitioners were less attentive than they might have been to opportunities for forging strategic relationships and alliances with people and branches in other government departments, so as to enlarge and strengthen the constituency for development assistance within government. It would be naïve to think that this could be easily or widely achieved, but it could potentially broaden the range of opportunities and support for development issues within the apparatus of the state.

So, going back to what I said above, I don’t think CIDA reflecting “government of Canada priorities” is any different from any other department. Yet, for some reason, it is assumed that forging alliances with those other departments (who by their nature are even more domestically and nationally oriented than DFAIT) would help entrench more human internationalism. Having worked in CIDA and DFAIT for 12 years, I cannot think of a single time when interacting with other government departments didn’t have the officials at CIDA arguing for more poverty reduction focus and less national interest focus demanded by the other partners.

Nevertheless, the increasingly pressing question for many aid sceptics, on both the right and the left, was whether aid was doing any good at all for those it ostensibly sought to assist. Would, for example, a more generous aid program translate into better life prospects for poor people and communities? Would the gains made be sustainable, or would they deepen distortions and dependencies? Would the good work undertaken by aid agencies be effectively undermined or even negated by macroeconomic policies or foreign investments (e.g., in the extractive sector) promoted by other arms of the Canadian state?

Ultimately, when you take out the normative claims, results are pretty much all you are left with, which still sounds quite Machiavellian, although the ethical argument is about motive, not actually the means. Which approach produces better results? Evidence is extremely mixed on a good day, and involve a lot of assumptions of relative value. Some who operate on purely capitalist ideology would argue that if the standard of living goes up, everything is good — they may not care about rule of law, gender equity, the environment, human rights, or social mobility. If a culture is destroyed but the patient lives, the operation was a success. Others obviously have different measuring sticks. Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen debated the proper “stick” at length when ul Haq was creating the UNDP Human Development Index, and even they couldn’t agree (including on what eventually became the Millennium Development Goals).

In doing so, however, Canadian development scholars and analysts arguably neglected a series of critical trends in migration, remittances, investment, ecology, and the like. To be sure, they (or rather we) did not ignore these important trends. Nevertheless, given the ongoing emphasis on the study of Canadian aid policy and the debate about its underlying motivations and purposes, less attention was given to the interconnections between development assistance and these broader trends than their importance warranted.

While I disagree with some of the conclusions and approaches of Black throughout the chapter, I love this last section. I’m hoping others pick this up in more detail in the rest of the book, but with not much foreshadowing here in his text, I have my doubts. Development includes many things, and aid is but one; even in considerations of development “flows”, and financing, there are some sources that eclipse aid dramatically. I have hopes that someday we will see a full framework enunciated by someone that talks about the various flows in a coherent fashion, including knowledge, people and resources, and stops assuming it is only about resources.

Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid: Introduction

The PolyBlog
March 9 2015

I can often be harsh when reading various academics’ take on the government and what it “ought” to do, or even sometimes what it “has” done. Rather than the longitudinal view inspired by political economy, most of the decisions made are more about short-term politics, operational and management issues, and, hiding in the background, a general belief as to “how government works or ought to work”. Sometimes it is in response to pressure, sometimes it is jumping in front of a parade. But rarely does it rise to the rhetoric or analysis that academics have the time and luxury to concoct to explain what should happen or has happened.

I’ll give you an example. There was an article I read some time ago about HRDC and the spending “scandal” that hit the papers in the late 90s. The article did this great longitudinal political economy analysis of how this was a result of Weberian bureaucracy interacting with Keynesian economics, and how there was this eternal disconnect, etc. There were a couple of other high-flying paradigms thrown in, and it was basically academic intellectual masturbation. By contrast, I read a decent public admin article (written by ex-public servants) talking about how there had been a strong pressure to disburse money quickly and efficiently, with no counterbalancing controls to focus on documenting transactions for audit purposes. Hence, when the audit came, tons of papers were “missing” (i.e. they hadn’t been printed, they were saved electronically but not in the files) and although the scandal said “millions missing”, the result after printing and tracking everything properly, there was a discrepancy approximating a rounding error. While an academic prof of mine explained the difference as “sometimes political economists ask questions where the public servants leave off”, I can guarantee not a single public servant could validate the political economy article as representing anything they had seen or experienced on the ground.

For me, it is the paradigm of the professional government manager and policy analyst that I use when reading these articles — do they accurately reflect what is happening on the ground, do their assumptions match with operations or are they assuming things that only them and other academics would find remotely true, and can their conclusions lead to anything practical for a government or is it just sophistry to justify publishing?

Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black have edited a new doc called “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and I confess that I’m of two minds in starting to read it.

First of all, one of the articles is written by a friend who knows what he’s talking about and whom I respect, which leaves me hopeful, and a number of the sections are written by ex-public servants who worked inside the government machinery and saw its workings. Second, by contrast, my general suspicion of academic papers regarding government is multiplied almost exponentially when they write about how governments do aid.

Nevertheless, I’m “in” for the long haul on this one and I hope to read each of the articles over the next six weeks or so.

The opening intro raises some fundamental questions, and I’m hoping their analysis goes to more than their initial assumptions. It starts by noting:

There has been no shortage of recent calls for “reinventing” or “reimagining” Canadian foreign aid to respond to the litany of problems that emerged over the forty-five-year lifespan of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), including excessive bureaucracy, slow delivery and frequently shifting priorities (Carin and Smith 2010; Gordon Foundation 2010). Yet there was general surprise in March 2013 when the Canadian government announced its institutional solution: merging CIDA with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, creating in June 2013 the new Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD).

Everybody in the department will argue that there is excessive bureaucracy; those in the OAG would likely argue otherwise, as they have when they do audits and don’t find enough controls in place. Similarly in finance (not Finance with capital F, just finance people in general, i.e. the beancounters), enabling services in general, and even the OECD who likes to argue for streamlining and effective aid while ensuring performance measurement tracking and comparable statistics on spending. Even the Senate committees are in favour of reduced bureaucracy yet ask more and more detailed questions about metrics.

Slow delivery is probably a valid concern, but note that in most cases, the bureaucratic processes and slow delivery models are based in comparison on donors with completely different governance models (a valid criticism in its own right) or the private sector and NGO sectors that have none of those pesky constraints called the constitution or taxpayer reporting. Put differently, many of those complaints reduce to simply that CIDA is a part of a complex government structure that slows it down. Every department has programs with identical complaints, by the way. When I worked at CIDA, you could find a fairly large number of people working there who would actively argue very straight-faced that “CIDA isn’t really government, we’re separate”, and thus all the constraints grated even harder. Not sure if they ever looked at the logo on their paycheque, or were just simply in denial that they were now “the man” that they wanted to rage against.

However, the “problem of shifting priorities” issue is not as settled as the editors would have us think. Ministers haven’t seen it as a problem; Prime Ministers haven’t seen it as a problem either. In fact, they’re the ones who shifted them. More importantly, up until about 1999 or 2000, one could make a pretty good argument that the bureaucrats didn’t even see it as a problem because they were really good at ignoring the priorities of the day. The problem was that starting in 2000 and continuing through to 2008, the technical and administrative priorities for operations (aid effectiveness, country concentration, sectoral concentration) DIDN’T change, the pressure didn’t alleviate, and CIDA actually HAD to change, whereas in the previous 30+ years it just waited out a change in Minister or a change in government, while merrily doing exactly what it had been doing the year before.

But to argue that the decision to merge the two departments was an institutional solution to those problems is almost completely false. I don’t doubt there was some spin to take some of the credit against those reasons, but the Government decision-makers didn’t see those issues as actual problems, except in the general sense of CIDA priorities not adequately matching broader Government of Canada priorities. The solution to merge was really about three issues just as it has been about the same three issues in just about every donor that has done the same or any time it has even come up as an option in Canada — bolstering the weight of Foreign Affairs abroad (they now not only have a single “self-interested” voice, they have money to back up their presence); solving the supposed incoherence between narrow development policy and broader macro foreign policy; and achieving efficiencies of scale (many of those popular donors abroad that are integrated also have lower costs because they have 1 set of enabling service providers, not 2 or 3 or 4). The OECD used to publish a guide to “managing aid”, and it listed those as pros of the model adopted.

However, I do think the editors are absolutely right about their conclusions:

A more fundamental “rethinking” is required, linked to a national conversation on the topic. Why do Canadians provide foreign aid? What is its role in the international arena? How is Canadian aid delivered and who benefits from it? How does, and should, aid relate to other foreign, security, economic, and commercial policy priorities? Where and how has aid been successful in improving development prospects? Conversely, what persistent weaknesses are associated with aid policy and practice? To what extent can these weaknesses be identified, addressed, and corrected?

NGOs have said the same thing repeatedly, as have many activists on the social scene. The part that is lost in that “wish” is that once opened, that can may not contain the worms everyone expects.

For example, as I expect the subsequent articles will address, the link between altruism and aid is not as obvious a conclusion as one might think and I look forward to that section the most. Often the NGOs only preach to the converted and thus think there is widespread support for altruistic aid. Then when the rubber hits the road, such as a national consultation on aid effectiveness, they find that most of the people tell the Minister that “change is needed” as long as it doesn’t affect their specific funding. DFAIT and the broader government priorities for greater attention to commercial interests did not spring out of nowhere, there is a strong and vocal group, particularly out west, that supports that direction quite heavily. It is also more in line with some of our like-minded non-Nordic partners like the U.S., Britain or Australia.

At any rate, I’m hoping the individual analyses is more illuminating than the above sections quoted, but regardless, it will at least be interesting reading. I don’t have the luxury of the detailed research that they have, so my views are more potshots from the cheap seats, but at least I’ll be candid while giving an alternate perspective.