Post-2015 MDG Idea of the Day: Inspiration as a Substitute for Accountability

January 4th, 2013, 8:00 am . . | . . 1 comment

Post-2015 MDG Idea of the Day: Inspiration as a Substitute for Accountability

[Millennium Development Goals] that are psychologically, morally, and politically salient are more likely to change behavior. Terms like “maternal mortality ratio” and “halve the proportion” and “gender disparity” simply do not have the moral resonance of terms like “torture” or “dissidents.”

That is Varun Gauri, summarizing a World Bank working paper of his.

He argues that in the absence of “a system of legal accountability” to the world’s poor, the least that aid agencies can do is to become more accountable to their donors, the only people to whom they are de facto accountable anyway, and they can do that by choosing MDGs and targets and language that inspires them to do right by the world’s poor.

An interesting, if provocative idea. Provocative because the current zeitgeist is that if anything aid agencies need to become less accountable to their donors and more accountable to the poor (see here for example); and interesting for a lot of reasons, not least because it’s a product of realism, something I’d like to see more of in aid and development – it assumes that “there is no reason to expect” aid agencies to become any more or less accountable to the poor post-2015, so given that fact let’s just try to do our best within the bounds of what’s possible, as opposed to reaching for what’s desirable irrespective of expectations, by inspiring global citizens to press their governments to achieve the MDGs, even though they aren’t legally accountable to the world’s poor.

An alternative idea would be to flesh out what legal accountability might look like and see if that’s possible (it would seem to be desirable, and have something to do with democratic institutions).

There are lots of practical examples of what inspiration-in-lieu-of-accountability in a post-2015 MDG framework might look like. Here is one example, from Gauri’s working paper:

“If there is to be a target for official development assistance, for instance, the “standard” target of 0.7% of GNI, which has the disadvantage of including both a percent and technical term, should be replaced. A more salient number would be dollars of development assistance per person, from each donor country, which intuitively informs people how much of their tax money is going to development assistance, and allows them to compare that contribution to how much they spend on their own purchases. Consider, for instance, how much easier it would be to imagine the impact of a decline in ODA if it were expressed, not as a reduction from 0.5% to 0.27% of GNI, but as a contribution of, say, USD$218 person falling to $132 per person (roughly the decline in Austria from 2007 to 2011).”

See the post and paper for lots more.

PS — Gauri also proposes what I would call the “Inspiration Heuristic”:

“Before you propose a new MDG goal or target, ask your parents if they approve.”

http://twitter.com/morealtitude morealtitude

Nice post. I really like your reference to realism- I think it’s something that’s frequently overlooked and underthought in the aid world- there’s definitely way too much fluffy ‘but this is how the world ought to work’ conversation going on. I’d like to see a lot more pragmatism in the sector. I also love the concept of translating %GNI spent on aid into dollars per citizen. Great tool.

I query Gauri’s suggesting that in the absence of a legal framework, aid agencies should seek greater accountability to donors. I think it makes an assumption that donors themselves have a framework that, should aid agencies adhere to it, would achieve more effective poverty reduction. MDG language makes for laudable goals, but in my experience the nuts and bolts of donor accountability comes down to the timely completion of project management cycle stages, and the demonstrated accomplishment of activities as agreed with said donor.

The real issue here is that true poverty reduction is based on impact- impact at the field level. Even when donor targets are explicitly linked to MDGs and other targets we all agree should be reached, the problem comes in the frequent breakdown between the achievement of planned activities and outputs, and the result of those activities and outputs leading to real change. It’s a tangled dynamic relating to inaccurate assumptions, complexity in context systems, macro-level context trends, and, sometimes, piss-poor planning.

Accountability to donors- either their high-level goals, or their micro-level management targets- becomes meaningless if the activities of agents are not appropriately geared to fix the problem at hand.

Personally I’m a big fan of the idea you posit suggesting that we look at bolstering/creating legal frameworks that do make aid agencies more accountable to communities, however that might look. Recognizing, of course, that this would instantly create costs and complexities from an organizational management perspective in complying and demonstrating compliance. There is also a pitfall in that downward accountability requires some thought around the capacity and perceptions of the communities themselves (let’s avoid the Noble Savage paradigm here). I’m currently working in a context where there is a very high level of accountability from aid agencies towards government (national and local), which causes hefty challenges at times due to the government’s lack of understanding of how aid agencies operate.

Great discussion/debate to be had though, and needs way more creative thinking around, imho.