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Tackling challenges and moving forward

Civil society organisations (CSOs) continue to lobby for effective implementaiton of the Paris Declaration (PD) on aid effectiveness. This policy paper outlines some of the key CSO critiques and concerns about the Paris agenda, as well as some specific recommendations for the High Level Forum (HLF) to be held in Accra in 2008.

The paper argues that politics is central to aid effectiveness and the measures should be taken to ensure democratic ownership of citizens in recipient countries. It argues that aid must ensure mutual accountability between donors, government and citizens. Furthermore, donors need to ensure high standards of aid quality by fairly allocating aid toward poverty reduction, untying aid and limiting technical assistance, as well as ensuring predictability for recipient countries.

The paper makes a number of recommendations ahead of the Accra High Level Forum on aid effectiveness, which include:

• donors should recognise the centrality of poverty reduction, equality and human rights
• all donor-imposed policy conditionality should be ended 
• donors and Southern governments must adhere to the highest standards of openness and transparency
• donors should recognise CSOs as development actors in their own right and acknowledge the conditions that enable them to play effective roles in development
• an effective and relevant independent monitoring and evaluation system for the Paris Declaration and its impact on development outcomes should be developed
• mutually agreed, transparent and binding contracts to govern aid relationships should be introduced
• new multi-stakeholder mechanisms for holding governments and donors to account should be created

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