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Domestic accountability and agency reform
08/02/2010 By Bjoern Foerde, Stefan Meyer, Nadia Molenaers
This paper summarises the current debate on governance assessments. It describes the emergence of the ‘governance’ concept in international development cooperation and identifies implications of the aid effectiveness principles for conducting governance assessments.
It is argued that a dilemma exists between the effectiveness dimension, which calls for a single consolidated set of institutional appraisals, and the demand for more diversity in public opinion. Supporting governments’ ability to diagnose their capacities and reform steps must include the effort to project these to citizens so as to enable them to engage with the evidence.
Donors seem to be badly equipped not only to make their knowledge production useful for governments and enter into a dialogue with the domestic public sphere, but also to ensure the uptake of more sophisticated analyses of their own practices, which are still largely determined by their self-perception as technocrats and institutional incentives such as disbursement pressure and rapid staff rotation.
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Keywords
Aid effectiveness Aid management Aid policy GovernanceRelated publications
Bio author: Bjoern Foerde
Director of the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre
Bio author: Stefan Meyer
Stefan Meyer is a Political Scientist (FU Berlin) and holds a Masters degree from the IDS in Brighton, UK. He worked as a consultant on aid instruments and in conflict impact assessment for a number of NGOs and for the German Development Cooperation (GTZ and KfW).
Bio author: Nadia Molenaers
Researcher at the Institute of Development Policy and Management (IOB),
University of Antwerp (Belgium).
