Who is in the driving seat?: development cooperation and democracy

Development cooperation is experiencing a dramatic range of new understandings and approaches that appear on the surface to amount to a “new way of working”, both in how development cooperation takes place and in how it includes the knowledge and wishes of its assumed recipients in the South. New possibilities of information and communications technologies (ICTs); new understandings of the role of knowledge in development; and a new rhetoric of North-South partnership form the core of the new discourse.

The emphasis on the importance of knowledge includes a strand that stresses the centrality of local knowledge for development. The concern with partnership highlights the key role of more equitable partnership in development and talks even of the “country being in the driving seat” of development. Importantly, the country is taken to encompass civil society rather than just the government in an apparently radical shift from previous formulations.

However, a series of questions need to be raised about these trends:

• Can arguments about the empowerment of the South through the new approach to knowledge be sustained in the face of concerns about a “digital divide” through which ICTs serve to magnify rather than eliminate exclusion from knowledge, from power and from wealth?
• Do notions of partnership ignore issues of power and assume consensus?
• Does the greater collaboration amongst development cooperation agencies and the strong convergence of official Northern views on the merits of themes such as globalisation and liberalisation limit severely the possibilities for alternative models of development to be pursued by Southern countries?
• Are the International Development Targets (IDTs) undesirable to the extent that they anrrow and foreclose debate about development priorities?
• How far do trends in development cooperation facilitate greater democracy in the policy arena?

[authors]