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Donor assessments

Governance assessments and domestic accountability: feeding domestic debate and changing aid practices

Governance assessments and domestic accountability: how can donors aid the process?



Authors: S. Meyer
Publisher: Fride, 2009

Full text of document

This paper follows on from recently completed research that investigated the impact of donor harmonisation on domestic processes of democratisation. The aim of this research is to further inform donors on how they can operationally redirect their day to day work, if the rhetoric of both partnership and domestic accountability is to be taken seriously.

The author highlights how donors are being called upon to avoid the proliferation of diagnostic tools through harmonisation and rely on country processes and capacities and domestically generated evidence. In addition the paper advocates for governments to engage in new mechanisms for transparency and redirect the justification of their policies and public actions from the current outward orientation towards donors to an inward orientation towards an ever-strengthened domestic public sphere.

The author explores issues, including:

  • The rise of governance
  • Experiences with assessing governance
  • Governance assessments and political analyses
  • Challenges in the partnership
  • Challenges for agencies and academics
  • Advancing towards better assessment practices.

Conclusions

  • The choice of the assessment methodology impacts both donor-partner relations and the likeliness that their outputs will make a difference to aid practice on the ground
  • The operating mode of agencies, their self perception as technocratic problem-solvers, their project planning horizons of around three years, and increasing spending pressure make it difficult for sophisticated analyses to be taken up
  • There is a conflict between the aid effectiveness principle that calls for harmonisation and the democratic conviction that, in pluralist societies, diversity of opinions should compete amongst themselves
  • The need for donor engagement with the local public sphere. This can be defined as a public space of interest-articulation and -aggregation in which government institutions are embedded.