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Africa: From Aid to Entitlement
Africa: From Aid to Entitlement
Date distributed (ymd): 020628
Document reposted by Africa Action
Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
Committee on Africa). Find more information for action for
Africa at http://www.africaaction.org
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+
SUMMARY CONTENTS:
This posting contains brief excerpts from the new book from Zed
Press by David Sogge, Give & Take: What's the Matter with Foreign
Aid?. Sogge's book combines a comprehensive critique of the
conventional aid industry with proposals for alternative
perspectives for a new framework for international public
investment.
Another posting today contains several comments from Africa Action,
including an article by Salih Booker and William Minter entitled
"Aid - let's get real," appearing in the July 8 issue of The Nation
magazine (http://www.thenation.com).
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
David Sogge, Give & Take: What's the Matter with Foreign Aid?
London: Zed Books, 2002. 236 pages. To order click on the following ISB
numbers: U.S.:
1842770691; UK:
1842770691
Chapter 9: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?
(excerpts
reposted with permission of the author)
A Summary Glance
Official aid and its institutions are vehicles of foreign policy.
They may operate from a mixture of motives, but their mercantile
and political purposes are never far from the surface of
humanitarian and development discourse in which aid is packaged.
Only rarely has official aid been harnessed to emancipatory
purposes, such as to redistribute assets (Taiwan) or to bring about
majority rule (South Africa). Official aid is but one of a number
of foreign policy vehicles, and seldom the most important. Other
instruments of trade, armed intervention and investment not only
take precedence over aid, they can nullify it; policy incoherence
is serious and widespread. ...
From its earliest decades, foreign aid has been exposed to attack.
Failures at the receiving end are attributed to recipients, who are
charged with incapacity, bad governance, foot-dragging on reform
and aid dependence. The aid system itself is also under fire, even
from within the industry, reflecting rivalries within and among
agencies, banks, and countries. Failure to find the right
technical formula is a common type of criticism, as are
overcentralisation and subordination to realpolitik. Some of these
criticisms are valid, but they begin to make greater sense when set
against wider patterns of power who wields it, and who doesn't
and the democratic deficits such controversies bring into the open.
The structure and workings of aid chains, and of the ideas that
constitute and drive them, add to democratic deficits. At the
receiving end, the deficits tend to deepen and become more opaque.
Pressure to tackle these problems, and thus to bring issues of
power and powerlessness to the surface, has been growing in the
South and North. Today, public processes of decision-making and
how to promote them have at last come up for official discussion.
That is good news. Shifts are also detectable among a few aid
agencies such as those of Denmark and Britain, and the UNDP. Some
units in them seem ready to grasp the nettle of emancipatory
politics. The bad news is that the top of the aid system, while
deploring (for some audiences) the 'top-down economic focus of the
eighties', is not about to abandon market fundamentalism, nor its
powers to coerce and intrude at the receiving end.
... As this book has illustrated, the conventional aid system has
not been a great success. Yet even failure has its uses. The aid
system can't be consigned to the rubbish heap and ignored. It still
represents a large and versatile constellation of money, expertise
and networks that make and transmit ideas about how societies,
polities and economies can be shaped and steered. Aid may no longer
be first among equals, but it still counts.
It also enjoys a kind of residual popular indulgence. Public
readiness to help the afflicted, come up for the underdog, and even
to accept some redistribution as the price of social cohesion are
also, miraculously, still around in most countries. Public support
for aid is still somewhat buoyant, despite leakage due to
increasing doubts that it does much good. When ranked with other
issues, foreign aid is not a high priority for Western publics.
Yet majorities in rich countries ritually affirm their wish to see
misery curbed, especially at moments of catastrophe. Such attitudes
rest on shifting and culture-bound mixes of guilt, duty, despair,
fear and the wish to be seen to belong to respectable society. ...
For decision-makers, the opinions of publics at large appear to be
far less important than the influence of action groups, policy
specialists, firms and nonprofits in a word, the aid lobby.
...
Obligations to respect capacities and promote talents
In their earnest pursuits of improving the human condition, most
aid actors' grasp of capacities at the receiving end has been poor
- often over-pessimistic, occasionally over-optimistic, and almost
always non-historical, de-politicized and gender-blind. It is
therefore not surprising that aid often fails to respect capacities
and talents. How can these blinders be removed? On many
practical fronts, bookcases, hard-drives and workshop agendas are
already full; there is no need to rehearse those discussions here.
In the heading of this paragraph, however, the operative word is
obligation.
The 1990s saw the forward march through aid institutions like
UNICEF, UNDP and Oxfam of the notion that poverty should be fought
on the basis not of beneficence, but of rights. UN covenants and
scores of official and civil institutions continue building grounds
to protect civil and political rights. However, social and economic
rights (ratified internationally in 1948) and even a 'right to
development' (1986) have met resolute opposition from the IFIs and
the US. That is no surprise. Market fundamentalist doctrine
basically forbids anything that smacks of public claims by those
disadvantaged by market forces unless of course the claimants are
rich and well-connected.
... A major problem with social and economic rights is that no one
is tasked with their enforcement. They remain dead letters. ...
More promising is the counterpart of rights: entitlements. These
rest on political contracts between the state and citizens. Public
institutions guarantee reciprocal rights and duties, but they
extend beyond public services and taxation into the market (such as
in regulating labour processes) and even the household (such as in
juridical enforcement of paternity obligations).
Inspired by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the entitlement approach
takes capacities and talents seriously as 'capabilities'. These
include, but going beyond the simple, and often Euro-centric,
calculus of income and education levels. Where capabilities are
denied or stunted because of market or other settings where
bargaining strengths are unequal, the result is 'entitlement
failure'. Addressing that systemic failure should become the core
business of a new regime of redistribution to replace the current
regime of aid.
Is this hopelessly utopian? There is a well-supported view that
the consciences of Western publics have entered a 'twilight of
duty'. There, Westerners expect to fulfill obligations to help the
disadvantaged only if it is painless, and preferably fun, such as
in TV extravaganzas and rock concerts for charity. Yet on wider
planes of public policy, public sentiment is stronger. Principles
of social solidarity and entitlement may be under attack, but they
still underpin public policy in European social democracies.
Toward an Agenda
In light of these principles, what changes in the aid system would
open ways toward emancipation from poverty and exclusion? What
ways and means might be adopted, by whom, to secure whose
entitlements?
Public Action Not Private Pre-emption
To halt the decay of governance and of reciprocal give and take
between citizens and the state problems at the heart of so many
aid failures two straightforward norms should be brought to bear:
- Promoting capabilities is, in general, a matter for public
action; andN
- Aid matters are, in general, public matters.
The public action approach, as developed by Dreze and Sen and
others, insists that for-profit, non-profit and community-based
sectors have public roles alongside the state. 'Public action
includes not just what is done for the public by the state, but
also what is done by the public for itself. The latter includes
not merely the directly beneficial contributions of social
institutions, but also the actions of pressure groups and political
activists'. Public action involves collective, openly
accountable means to combat public bads like pollution, crime and
precarious livelihoods. It is also promotes public goods like water
and drainage, efficient small claims courts, criminal justice
systems and affordable transport. It allows definitions of
entitlement, and of who warrants them, to change over time. It
frames how problems and alternative solutions are identified, who
takes decisions, and how joint endeavors may be organized in
combinations of state, for-profit and non-profit actors. Choices
of investment and the loans needed to realize them, about fighting
inflation and unemployment, about access to and use of "the
commons" and choices about how socially excluded or vulnerable
people are to be protected are thus no longer matters of private
actors nor of the state alone.
As a cluster of ideas, the public action approach has not yet
crystallized. Thus far, national and sub-national settings have
been its chief focus. For the aid system, a public action approach
would mean paying attention to all levels, from the macro to the
micro. Experiences from places like India, Philippines, and Brazil
(and also the ghettos of Chicago and the northeast of Britain)
suggest the ways public action can take root. Distilled and noted
briefly here, focal points for overhaul of the aid system include:
Financial disarmament. In proportion to their colossal means,
private financial interests contribute little to productive
investment either directly or in tax revenues. Rules favouring
them, especially freedoms from regulation and taxation, make
possible dangerous criminal and military activities, and make
impossible the fair sharing of rights and duties and reciprocity
with public sectors. In short, they nullify aid's potentially
positive effects. Those interests' influence over, among other
things, the US Treasury, IMF and World Bank is unacceptable and
should be broken.
Good Governance is for Aid-Givers Too. Democratic control is
the obvious counterpart to financial disarmament. If bankers and
bond traders wish to continue running things in our name, let them
compete openly for votes just like ordinary politicians. Sermons
about good governance at the receiving end would carry far more
conviction, and chances of success, if public policy of aid
providing lands were indeed more "public", and political
competition financed far less by vested interests.
Transformation of the IFIs. Given their quasi-monopolistic
positions in markets for development finance and public policy
ideas, the IFIs should subjected to norms analogous to competition
(or anti-trust) rules. They should be broken up. Ideally, their
main functions should be moved out of the United States; the
lopsided influence of that country's elites is inconsistent with
democratic principles that could be reasonably expected of
institutions claiming to respond to the global community of
nations, especially the poorer ones. Private, policy activist
pressures for reform merit support, but other initiatives, such as
to fill the large democratic deficits in parliamentary control over
the IFIs, and public commissions of inquiry into IFI impacts,
should be promoted.
Move toward bloc transfers. Aid institutions must learn to let go,
to end their preference for projects and hobbies, to smooth out the
peaks and dips in flows, and to expand simple bloc grant transfers,
exemplified today in publicly-controlled local development funds.
Expanded to national levels, such approaches could boil down to
donor-recipient negotiation, and the writing of checks to recipient
authorities against publicly verified results, but without further
agency involvement. Aid chains would be radically reduced, being
maintained chiefly to ensure space for authentic public oversight
and control. Aid can help protect and enlarge the political space
where citizens can follow the money and results, and call those
responsible to account if things go wrong. Such chains might
preferably run via professional, municipal, and membership
organizations rather than private aid agencies.
Bloc transfers to redress regional inequalities, neighborhood decay
and disadvantage suffered by specific social groups is an old and
hardly controversial idea. Northern European countries spend more
than a third of their GDPs in redistributive programmes; the bulk
of the European Union's total budget rests on them. They also
influence thinking about aid to some of Europe's neighbors to the
east. At global levels, official commitments reflected in
anti-poverty targets agreed at conferences in the 1990s are but
short steps away from public guarantees of effort (though they lack
penalty clauses open to enforcement in courts of law); they are
stepping-stones toward widening the global political constituency
for entitlement- based approaches.
Redistribution downward, not upward
Redistribution from rich to poor is not what foreign aid really
does -- nor supposed to do. Today, however, obstacles to that
purpose are weakening and movements in support of it are reviving.
The proposition that inequality is an inevitable and probably
necessary feature of growth for forty-five years a major pillar
of trickle-down economics has been demolished. Indeed inequality
has been shown to hinder growth. Promoting greater equality is a
good thing for other reasons, including greater socio-political
inclusion and reduced social tension, resentment and violence.
Redistribution downward thus has both pragmatic and ethical
arguments on its side. Concrete suggestions are emerging. The
director of a major aid think-tank proposes as an additional global
development goal, a ceiling on inequality. Political economists
studying the feasibility of redistribution have identified seven
types of policy instruments, and have estimated their usefulness in
three kinds of settings: middle-income countries capable of
redistribution with current income and assets; middle and most
lower-income countries in which policies would work under a
growth-with-redistribution regime; and very low-income countries
where policies are unlikely to make much difference, so that growth
itself would have to carry the burden for the time being. ...
Social movements and analysts in many countries have many options
worth pursuing; some have already begun testing them, such as land
reform in Brazil and public job schemes in India.
Cross-fertilization of these ideas, and working alliances are
clearly worth developing.
In every case a complex and delicate constellation of power factors
will demand close attention. Targeting is one of them. If
redistribution measures are to gain political momentum and be
sustained, and if they are to avoid stigmatizing or marginalizing
the poor as a distinct category, they will need support across
social strata. Redistribution addresses poverty, but it is more
than merely "anti-poverty". Social welfare policies in richer
countries are secure because they are politically anchored in
(lower) middle classes. This underscores the importance of a
strategic aim: to "lock in" pro-poor entitlements by anchoring them
in the broadest political constituencies possible without their
being "captured" by the better-off. End trusteeship, build public
politics.
Most of the above requires public politics, not merely
administration, management and cookbook versions of "good
governance". It requires filling democratic deficits. That is of
course no simple thing. It needs great care and self-restraint.
Where aid providers do not hold membership in emancipatory social
movements (and most do not), they should avoid direct support to
such movements. Rather, they can help expand the civic spaces in
which emancipatory movements can flourish. Not blueprints, but
processes are needed. This means paying attention to settings, and
improvising. A typical process moves step by step from achievement
of small victories to the gaining of confidence and allies, to the
winning of wider victories, thence to challenging the rules of the
game and negotiating new ones.
Even in settings with no traditions of public decision-making about
collective goods, ways are being found that enable citizens to
steer outside (conventional aid, and, eventually bloc grants) and
local resources through public processes. The slow, culture-bound
work of building institutions is vital. For outsiders the task is
not, as in the conventional aid system, the imposition of models
but the opening, analyzing and testing of alternatives among
institutional frameworks (land reform, water access, market
licensing, social insurance coverage, &c.) known to improve poor
peoples' entitlements.
Similarly, public authorities and social movements can be helped
not to march to the beat of the donors' drums but to gain policy
knowledge useful in campaigns and negotiations. Public processes
may be helped not by indoctrinating more technocrats in
fundamentalist orthodoxies, but in promoting "economic literacy"
and the oversight of public choices by way of local media, civil
society watchdog groups, international monitoring bodies within
regions, and technical advisory bodies with autonomy from both
business and government. These measures can be combined in ways
that strengthen trust and public control at the receiving end. If
trust between citizens and states improves, so too do the chances
of give and take, of collecting taxes and fees, and thus of ending
aid dependence.
It may be clear from a reading of this book that aid agencies are
themselves part of an institutional framework -- the aid regime --
that continues to fall far short of its potentials. Conventional
aid and its chains have too often been constraining, even
crippling. Their replacement will not herald a millenarian end to
suffering and injustice. A more modest, even boringly normal aim
would be the mere provision, broadly and fairly, of that to which
people are entitled.
This material is distributed by Africa Action (incorporating the
Africa Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the
American Committee on Africa). Africa Action's information
services provide accessible information and analysis in order to
promote U.S. and international policies toward Africa that advance
economic, political and social justice and the full spectrum of
human rights.
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