aidinfo.org

Can lessons from aid transparency improve climate finance?

Alex Beech — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:52:46 +0000

Today we've launched a new study with Publish What You Fund that examines the intersection between aid transparency and climate finance.As countries start to report on their climate funding, researchers are poring over the results to make sense of the funding flows; Are pledges being delivered? Is the money new and additional? Does it add up and how should it be measured?A key lesson from aid transparency is that while high quality statistics are crucial, so too is detailed, accessible and timely information to meet the needs of different information users – international, national and local. As climate finance begins to flow in earnest, and in larger volumes, the key questions will not just be ‘Are developed countries meeting their commitments?’ but ‘Are resources being effectively used in addressing climate change impact?’The International Aid Transparency Initiative offers the potential to provide a bridge between different systems and users, unlocking data from individual databases and reports, and enabling standardisation and flexibility.Ultimately, the question is not how to build the most elegant system to track volumes of finance, but how to use transparency to enhance and demonstrate the effectiveness of international collaboration in creating both environmental and economic benefits. We hope this paper provides a useful basis to bring together those working on different areas of this question to explore synergies and gaps and to work together towards this common aim.Read 'Towards Climate Finance Transparency'.

The Vital Contribution of Transparency to Development Effectiveness: Video

aidinfo — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:44:34 +0000

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the (transparency) movement...will produce the most important transformation in the 50 years of modern development experience. Transparency will lead us to new achievements in poverty reduction.
Brian Atwood, Chair of the OECD DAC

Brian Atwood, Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), has pledged the full support of his organisation to the principles agreed at Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in November, 2011. In a speech, which you can view above, given at Church House Conference Centre in Westminster, he emphasised the crucial role that transparency has in increasing the effectiveness of aid and development.Mr Atwood confirmed the support and cooperation of the OECD DAC to join the movement:

We within the DAC very strongly support IATI (the International Aid Transparency Initiative). We’re committed to do what the Busan Agreement has called upon us to do, which is to implement a common, open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources provided through development cooperation.

At Development Initiatives we feel this commitment is crucial. As the emerging global partnership takes its place alongside the DAC, it's important that it has a clear role and is not perceived as a talking shop. Building on the critical mass that has now developed around IATI, it is our desire that the emerging global partnership has responsibility for the governance and delivery of the initiative.This would help to ensure that developing countries see IATI as something in which they have a shared interest and of which they have shared ownership - and it will clearly distinguish IATI from the valuable role that the DAC continues to pursue on reporting donor performance.Mr Atwood also outlined the DAC’s belief in the power of transparency to improve the nuts and bolts of the development process, highlighting its role in reducing waste as well as providing the information which is essential for planning and budgeting.The role of partner countriesA key issue, stated Mr Atwood, focuses on the involvement of, and benefits for, developing countries in the outcomes of the transparency movement:

If there is one message that should come through clearly from Busan it is the effort to try to empower partner countries . . . and that is the primary thrust of Busan.

One of the basic needs that the transparency movement has reacted to is the need for accountability, to taxpayers in the west but also, and more importantly, to those who are supposed to benefit from aid. Mr Atwood refers strongly to these priorities and draws on the needs for developing country governments to have access to the information they need to be able to properly plan and execute their own budgets:

We can only demand accountability, and we can only foster accountability, if we give our partners the basic means to manage their development resources so as to achieve the best results.

Forward-looking dataA main focus of the transparency movement and one of the key benefits of IATI concerns the issue of forward-looking data and future-funding plans. Mr Atwood said:

They (partner countries) need to have information about the future . . . we also need information on publishing what you plan to fund over the next three to five years.

Progress is being made towards these goals, with IATI placing focus on signatories publishing forward-looking data. Three-quarters of the DAC membership have now agreed to publish this information, but we need full support from all DAC members, so there is still work to be done. There is real evidence that IATI is already improving the effectiveness of aid. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, the government has been able to access donor’s forward-spending plans published through IATI and integrate them into their aid management system. This will allow them to plan their budget in a more informed way, resulting in more effective aid outcomes and poverty reduction spending.Mr Atwood summed up by highlighting the DAC’s commitments to implementing those terms agreed at Busan:

The DAC is in a new era. We are as much behind transparency as we possibly could be . . . there is no negative reaction to our embracing the Busan commitment to integrate these important initiatives, the CRS and IATI, and to create a common standard and begin implementing it, with full force . . . It will change the behaviour of donors, it will change the behaviour of partner countries, and it will make it easier for us to implement all of the other provisions of Busan.

At Development Initiatives, we were very pleased to be able to invite Mr Atwood to speak on these themes in London, described by him as the ‘epicentre of transparency’. Mr Atwood acknowledged the key role that UK-AID and the Department for International Development (DFID) had in creating and promoting the IATI standard. Our view is that transparency is now a key and inescapable part of the contract between citizen and state. It underpins efficiency and accountability in the use of resources and ultimately impacts on poverty and development.Judith Randel, Director of Development Initiatives, says:

Access to information and transparency has to be a core part of the 2015 settlement, as important as access to water and sanitation and education in terms of delivering poverty eradication.

View the full version of the speech followed by the question and answer session in the video above.

We’re recruiting! Wanted: Open Data specialist

Alex Beech — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:58:02 +0000

Do you want to play a key role in an international open data initiative that will deliver a step change in greater transparency and accountability of aid resources? We are looking for an open data specialist to join the aidinfo team at Development Initiatives and manage a team that supports the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The successful candidate will lead the Technical Advisory Group secretariat, which leads on development and management of the IATI standard and infrastructure; supports donors, NGOs and private organisations to publish open data; and facilitates a large international community focussed on advancing aid transparency.It now is a crucial time for IATI: it has reached critical mass - the recent addition of the US means that donors providing 80% of official aid are now committed to being ‘IATI-compliant’, as well as many other NGOs, UN agencies and private organisations. We now need to make it happen and ensure it is effective.View the Open Data Specialist role for aidinfo and a range of other roles for our wider organisation Development Initiatives. For more information please visit our aidinfo recruitment page and our Development Initiatives recruitment page.

Logging monitors support transparency initiative

aidinfo — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 08:50:48 +0000

This week we have a guest blog from Resource Extraction Monitoring (REM), who have just published their first set of data on their current projects to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). REM specialise in independent monitoring of law enforcement and natural resource extraction. They have offices in Congo Brazzaville and DRC and work in the field to identify and investigate illegal activity. Here they explain why publishing to IATI is important to them as an organisation and detail the type of REM data you can now find in the IATI registry. We started with publishing the data on our first fisheries-based independent monitoring project: “Assessing and Developing the Role of Independent Monitoring by Civil Society to Support Good Governance in the Fisheries Sector in Sri Lanka”, which is a requirement of our funding by the UK Department for International Funding/Civil Society Challenge Fund.Transparency is particularly important to REM given that we are a monitoring and reporting organisation ourselves and promote transparency within the government partners we work with. Given this we have also published data on our other two current independent monitoring and capacity building projects based in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and will continue to publish data on all our projects as they develop.Our current set of data includes descriptions of the projects, as well as their duration, their budget and expenditure so far. The financial summaries of each project will be updated after every financial report submitted to our funders, which will ensure that the data we publish is accurate, presenting a reliable picture of the cost of our work.At the moment, REM publishes regular reports on the results of our project activities on our website, which can be easily accessed through our project pages:In the future, we are planning to add more project information to the registry and/or our website, such as logframes and other planning documents. Our partner organisation, Forests Monitor, who leads our joint project in the Congo Basin, will also be publishing their data to the registry, which means that you, the public, will have an even more accurate view of our activities.

The transparency of process

aidinfo — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:06:38 +0000

It’s time for the third and final segment in our three-part guest blog series from the author David Shaman. You can read the first two parts of this series here and here. David is the author of “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was the communications manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council.It is remarkable to think how much more we know about international development agencies today than we did just two decades ago. In part, this is an acknowledgement of the active effort of the agencies themselves to make information available to the public. Information disclosure policies, public information centers, websites and online directories, email communications and newsletters, and social media tools now provide us with so much content it is often difficult to digest. And, with this profusion of information, government officials are better able to administer projects affecting their citizenry and academics, activists and communities are better positioned to understand the impact of those projects.External stakeholders have fought for this and have been rewarded with access to millions of documents. They know more now than ever before. Nevertheless, the question remains: Do they know the right and the best information in which to make informed decisions about development issues in their country? More specifically, stakeholders know more about what development agencies produce and what they decide. What is less clear is whether stakeholders know enough about how development agencies approach their work, why they act the way they do and how they make their decisions. To a significant extent, the “what” is there, but the “how” and the “why” are missing. This is because much of the focus by the development community has been on the products of development rather than the process of development. The process – the discussions, debates, arguments, meetings, research, back-and-forth – that formulates policies, positions institutions and moves projects largely remains out of view and behind closed doors. We get the final products. We know less about how they came to be.What if a system existed that would allow the public to view the policy dialogues taking place within our public institutions so we could better understand what they were doing and why the decisions they made were taking place? In fact, there are two extraordinary initiatives that have changed how we view public institutions. The first, C-SPAN, began in 1979. C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) is a cable television network that provides coverage of the U.S. federal government. C-SPAN’s “gavel-to-gavel” format of the U.S. Congress means that viewers watch live and unedited coverage of its floor discussions and debates and many committee hearings. This transparent coverage has expanded over the years to hearing and briefings of other federal agencies, most notably the regular White House press briefings. Initially, C-SPAN covered only the U.S. House of Representatives, because the U.S. Senate refused to allow access. However, after years of watching favorable opinion polls for the House climb at their expense, the Senate finally followed suit in 1986.By establishing a completely neutral environment where cameras film events without comment, biases are eliminated from coverage. This is critical for viewer opinions are shaped only by what the participants say or do. As a result, C-SPAN has separated itself from the partisan political talk shows that populate airwaves and is seen by the public as a truly objective lens on American democracy. A 2010 poll estimated that 79 million Americans watched C-SPAN during the previous year. More Congressional decisions are made under public scrutiny and a strong argument can be made that it is to the benefit both of Congress and the public. Substantial polling reveals the electorate is better informed about issues than in previous generations and political leaders are better at internalizing public sentiment into their voting records. Public interest and policy groups are also able to gather information that allows them to more effectively rally their constituencies and lobby politicians for their cause. The political establishment benefits as well. Political players can now comprehensively spread messages to their constituencies, mobilize key advocates and allies and monitor positions taken by counterparts.Two decades after C-SPAN, a second experiment began unfolding within the confines of the World Bank. B-SPAN, launched by Bank economist David Wheeler and by this writer in 2000, had three objectives: To give Bank staff a mechanism for communicating with their stakeholders and expanding their influence; to give government officials, economists, academics, development practitioners, the public and Bank staff access to information being created and shared within the Bank so they might use it to further their own economic development and poverty reduction activities; and, to bridge the divide between the Bank and its external critics who viewed the institution with skepticism and concern. The system began during a period when civil society organizations and activists were holding massive demonstrations because they considered Bank and IMF policies detrimental to the world’s poor.The webcasting station’s principle of complete transparency – meaning no editing of webcasting streams – allowed the system to operate as conduit of information to the public free of spin. During its initial five years of operation it produced more than 700 webcasts and by 2004 had a quarter million viewers and captured nearly 2% of the Bank’s Internet traffic. However, in 2005, the institution, still evolving over issues of internal transparency, reduced B-SPAN’s funding and the system went into a sharp and immediate decline.Though both were successful in terms of public interest, a key difference between C-SPAN and B-SPAN led one to survive and the other to disappear. American politicians saw the advantage of using C-SPAN as a tool for getting messages to constituents to solidify their popularity. Though supported by the wide majority of Bank staffers, key bureaucratic insiders who controlled B-SPAN’s funding were less comfortable with its transparency. The constituency of these unelected officials was not millions of people living in poverty, but rather direct superiors and the notion of harboring a medium that provided no filters on the gavel-to-gavel coverage of Bank dialogues was highly unsettling. Since 2005, B-SPAN has remained largely muted.In 2011, however, its saga took a new twist. The New York Times published a lengthy expose on the Bank’s progress on transparency, but noted that B-SPAN remained closed. The Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, subsequently called upon the Bank to reinvest funds into B-SPAN to close this gap in its evolving transparency agenda. Then, during the fall annual meetings, a coalition of more than 100 civil society organizations and activists wrote President Zoellick urging him once again to fund B-SPAN. In response, Bank officials have suggested that a new platform that aggregates technologies, including webcasting, to foster greater two-way dialogue between the Bank and its stakeholders might be created. While promising if completed, it seeks a far different objective than what B-SPAN sought to achieve.During the past year, a dialogue has emerged between the Bank and external actors, including this writer, on the merits of B-SPAN. Some in the Bank have suggested the webcasting system was a dinosaur of another epoch, an invention whose time had come and gone. The evidence, B-SPAN’s previous popularity, C-SPAN’s current popularity and the explosive growth of online video content, however, does not support this position. Some officials have suggested viewers are not interested in watching two-hour Bank seminars. This notion unfortunately places the Bank in a logic trap. Managing Director Caroline Anstey recently noted “Increasingly, it’s our knowledge … that countries and policymakers want to tap.” The Bank repeatedly states it has state-of-the-art knowledge and its future security resides in expanding beyond its traditional role as a financial instrument toward one as a knowledge resource. If the Bank thinks B-SPAN doesn’t have a market, wouldn’t that also suggest the Bank has doubts about the quality of its knowledge? Moreover, if the Bank believes there would be no demand for webcasts of its knowledge, then why hold seminars and conferences at all? Finally, some officials have suggested audiences would not be interested in watching long seminars. That is erroneous. Again, B-SPAN attracted a quarter million viewers in 2004 using old technology. A Bank webcasting system would not and should not be designed to appeal to the same audience as a CNN, which caters to news junkies flipping through three-minute streams of breaking news events. B-SPAN was focused on government officials, economists, academics, and development practitioners who wanted or needed to become immersed in the nitty-gritty of a particular subject. And, careful analysis of webcast traffic can allow the Bank to focus resources primarily on events of most interest to its stakeholders.Some have wondered about costs. Even in a time of shrinking budgets, the cost of running the system is minimal – about $250,000 when I managed B-SPAN. In fact, a pricing mechanism could be implemented that would make a webcasting system generate revenue. More importantly, with advances in streaming technologies and new social media tools and mobile phone applications, B-SPAN streams could now reach the Bank's 185-country membership instantaneously and at little cost. Envision then the following scenario: The Bank hosts a hypothetical event where a Bank health expert along with counterparts from PAHO and WHO convene a session at headquarters to discuss “Preventing the Next Cholera Outbreak in Haiti: New Ideas and New Information Technologies.” The event concludes at 2pm and is webcast live or instantly archived on Bank servers. Shortly afterwards, the Bank and event participants are Tweeting their followers about the event and its availability. Corresponding photo content and links go online via Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. Later that afternoon, NGOs, health and aid workers in Port-au-Prince receive Tweets and immediately begin watching the event on their mobile phones and iPads – and they, in turn, contact their networks through Retweets, texts or emails. Multiply this example exponentially if all the regional development banks did this as well. If the Bank wants to retain or increase its clout as the focal point on development knowledge, this would be one fruitful and cost-effective way to do it. Bank clients would increasingly focus on the institution as a one-stop shop for administering their development needs. Just one project generated from a webcast could finance the system for years.Changing bureaucratic cultures – not just the Bank’s - tend to occur at glacial speed. Communication technologies such as the Internet, email and social media are, like global warming, changing institutional cultures more quickly today and the Bank’s evolution on transparency is an example. But the development community needs more than the products international development agencies produce. The community needs to be more involved in the process through which development agencies make their strategic business decisions. This means access to their dialogues and debates. Webcasting will allow this to happen, but it is up to the development community, as it did with information and document access, to compel the Bank and other international development agencies to act.

AidView – we need your help!

Alex Beech — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:07:07 +0000

We’ve recently launched our new aid data platform – AidView – in beta. Aidview allows you to easily access detailed and timely aid data published through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), via a series of interactive visualisations.Available through iPads, Andriods and all modern web browsers, AidView enables you to have the information you need at your fingertips, when you most need it.All data on AidView has been published directly by donors via the IATI Registry. You can browse for data by sector, funder or geographical location of aid. Once you’ve found the data you’re looking for, you can match it up against other files and then save your selection to come back to whenever you want.We are confident that AidView is a useful tool for aid-data users, but we know that the system can be improved. We’d like your help to show us what these improvements might look like, and so we’re conducting some user-testing to feed into the final round of AidView developments.The first stage takes the form of a short user-test, which includes 10 questions and should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. It has been designed to test the functionality and usability of AidView. The second stage asks for your feedback on the live version of the website via email or phone, whichever you prefer.If you are happy to help us please follow the link below to take part in the online test first, then follow links at the end of the test to view the live AidView website, where you can complete the second stage of the test. At this point you will be asked to download a word document listing some further questions about the live site.To help shape the future of AidView click the link below and take our test. Thank you!http://participate.usabilla.com/cf20731cc1e518189658806232c780482aa01ddcIf you have any more thoughts or comments we’d love to hear from you, just get in touch. We’ll be posting the outcomes of the test here in a few weeks, see you then.

Energy and focus: where transparency and international development have merged in the 21st Century

aidinfo — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:45:09 +0000

It's time for the second segment in our three-part guest blog series from the author David Shaman. We will run the last blog in this series at the same time next week. You can read the first blog that we published last week here. David is the author of “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was the communications manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council.In 1994, after lending missteps that negatively impacted the environment and indigenous cultures in key developing countries, the World Bank genuflected to an outcry from civil society activists for greater scrutiny by creating a Public Information Center in its Washington headquarters. This step was taken five years after the Bank’s adoption of its first public information disclosure policy. It would be another five years before the Bank opened similar centers in its satellite offices around the world. These new facilities allowed interested citizens to access selected Bank documents and provided them with a more educated perspective on what the agency was doing in their home country. Things are moving a bit faster these days.Transparency means something different for different actors. What follows then are several visions of transparency that are currently being pursued by development activists. These crusades are often pursued concurrently by the same actors rather than as competitions between them. The following list should not be viewed as comprehensive, but simply as important recent developments or debates now unfolding.Perhaps the longest standing activity among transparency advocates has been to reduce corruption in poor countries. Corruption devalues the potential impact of development assistance to eliminate poverty and promote growth, but prior to Bank President James Wolfensohn’s 1996 pledge that anti-corruption would garner closer attention during his term the issue had generated little urgency among development officials. Few doubted corruption impacted development, but for institutions such as the Bank where careers were made by funneling monies through the lending pipeline, the issue was unofficially considered taboo. Into this black hole entered numerous civil society groups such as Transparency International that have sought to examine, codify and expose the impact of corruption. Over the intervening two decades, attention has been paid to transparency and reform of procurement processes, corporate sustainability practices, fair and free elections, whistleblower protection and capacity building of public institutions and civil society stakeholders in poor countries. Development banks have implemented internal anti-corruption units and poured resources into making their procurement processes more transparent. Participants suggest there has been progress, but also acknowledge the problem remains immense. We should also acknowledge there is ample evidence to suggest corruption affects all societies to some extent, so it would be naïve to think corruption is a problem plaguing only poor countries.Piggybacking on the Freedom of Information Act, civil society actors have pressured international financial institutions (IFIs) over the past two decades for greater access to their information products as a means of monitoring their activities. As noted earlier, institutions such as the Bank responded by opening up document centers. Nevertheless, the global economic crisis, the growth of global Internet access and the emergence of social media tools has provided the impetus for important progress over the last few years. In 2009, when the G-20 agreed to invest $1.1 trillion into the IMF, Bank and regional development banks, significant pressure was raised by poor countries that these institutions needed internal reform and needed to share power more equitably between industrialized and developing nations. Thereafter, the international financial institutions acknowledged a need to be more responsive to their stakeholders. In 2010, the Bank revised its Access to Information Disclosure policy to assume all its information is publicly available unless it is specifically exempted. The new policy also provides an appeals process for stakeholders who are denied information. The revised policy reverses the institution’s previous approach of assuming information was not available unless specifically listed. Observers acknowledge this represents an important step by the Bank, but they also believe further improvements can be made to the new policy. Following the information disclosure policy revision, the Bank launched an Open Data Initiative that provides the public with free access to its vast database of development indicators. And, more recently, the institution has made its audited financial statements and its Sanction Board decisions on contractor-corruption cases available for public scrutiny.In an area where the Bank once moved slowly, it has made important progress. Other development banks are taking similar steps to review and revise their disclosure policies. This is an important point. External observers and stakeholders have long recognized that the World Bank acts as a catalyst for other IFIs. Once the Bank acts, these players tend to follow, so where critics can pressure this key agency to move, the results will be felt liberally throughout the IFI community.On another front, for the last decade, development officials have been convening high-level deliberations on how to improve aid effectiveness. One thread has caught fire: The need to make aid flows transparent. In 2008, principals attending a ministerial-level forum on aid effectiveness in Ghana launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI provides a standard for aid providers to publish their aid data to, in order to show how aid monies are spent. The standard was designed to counter the issue of donors, recipients and civil society stakeholders having little information about aid flows. This lack of information led donors to duplicate one another’s efforts by spending too much in some areas while neglecting others. Aid recipients did not have a clear understanding of what they received as this lack of knowledge impacted their ability to plan and apply the aid more effectively. Nor did taxpayers and citizens know what their governments were donating or receiving or how to measure accountability for aid monies spent. Civil society organizations, including aidinfo.org, have pushed strongly to demonstrate how development effectiveness is improved by increasing the transparency of aid flows. Today, these actors are scoring important successes in getting development banks and donor governments, including the United States as of late 2011, to formally adopt IATI as a platform for making their aid flows known. IATI is still in the early stages and has shown much progress to date, with over 75% of all ODA now being covered by IATI signatories. However, there are still many donors yet to sign up to the initiatives and so much work remains to be done.Finally, as many development activists are aware, there has been an informal gentlemen’s agreement between the United States and European powers that harkens back to the formation of the Bretton Woods institutions: The U.S. government selects presidents for the World Bank and the Europeans select managing directors for the IMF. Starting with the process that anointed Paul Wolfowitz as Bank president in 2005, activists have questioned whether the ongoing quid pro quo arrangement is legitimate. The global economic crisis expedited tensions as poor countries pressured richer counterparts for increasing their representation and voting power on both financial bodies. The behind-closed-doors results of subsequent selections of Robert Zoellick, a U.S. national, to the Bank in 2007 and Christine Legarde, a French national, to the Fund in 2011 continued to escalate calls that future elections be open, transparent and merit-based. A key criticism from numerous civil society organizations and academics is that the current process is unrepresentative because final selections are not necessarily supported by the majority of poor countries. Critics also argue qualified candidates from poor countries are being denied posts that directly influence developing economies. Zoellick recently announced he will not seek a second-term when his current term concludes this June, and this puts the U.S. government in an interesting position. The U.S. has stated it supports an open and merit-based process, but key domestic political players will seek to insure the next president is an American. Expect the debate on transparency of the selection process for the next World Bank president to go into warp-speed this spring.These are exciting developments. They augur a new era and a new sensibility of what transparency means and why it is worthwhile. Just the debates themselves suggest that actors on all sides, including those traditionally resistant to greater openness and accountability, recognized these principles can improve development effectiveness and improve the legitimacy of implementing agencies. But there is a gap in the story, and one I suggest that even transparency’s most ardent proponents have not fully recognized as imperative. In my final note, I will seek to breach this divide.

International spending on disaster risk reduction (DRR) requires dramatic review

Alex Beech — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:55:54 +0000

Today, our partner programme GHA have launched a new report: Disaster risk reduction: spending where it should count. The report provides a comprehensive view of the levels of international DRR spending, placed in the context of need and vulnerability, and reveals the shockingly low levels of investment and inequities of funding in this area at a time when the need for enhanced focus on the reduction of risk is paramount.Recent disasters such as the Pakistan floods, the Haiti earthquake and the famine in the Horn of Africa have raised substantial debate around the need for more strategic investment in disaster risk reduction within aid programmes; the impact of these disasters could arguably have been lessened and recovery quickened if risk had been reduced before the event, which could have resulted in lower requirements for assistance later on.This new report examines the levels of donor investment in disaster risk reduction in the top 40 humanitarian recipients over the last 10 years, and compares and contrasts these totals with overall aid figures. Questions are posed about the equity of this funding, and whether it is being appropriately directed to meet needs. All this is in the context of a current model of year on year increase of humanitarian expenditure in the same countries, and a humanitarian system which is increasingly under pressure (aid from governments reached US$12.4 billion in 2010, the highest figure on record, and for the first time in five years the level of needs met fell significantly). The sustainability of this is questionable. The report argues that there is a clear need for a shift in the focus of spending. Some headline figures for the top 40 humanitarian recipients, 2000-2009: Only US$3.7 billion out of a total US$363 billion of official development assistance (ODA) went to reduce disaster risk; 1% of all development aid is directed at DRR. Four countries alone (Pakistan, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh) accounted for 75% of all DRR funding. In 2009, 68% of DRR financing came from humanitarian funds.At a time when humanitarian needs are at an historic high, and donors are under considerable pressure to spend less and prioritise value for money, a reassessment of spending is essential. This report reveals the critical need for a revised financing model which places greater emphasis upon the reduction of risk, based on comprehensive assessments of need and appropriate prioritisation of funding, as well as improvements in the quality of reporting.View, download, or print the report. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the report, or to speak to the report’s authors, please do get in touch.

The Meaning of Transparency – A Perspective

aidinfo — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:48:59 +0000

This week sees the first in a three-part guest blog series from David Shaman, we will run part two of this series at the same time next week. David is the author of “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was the communications manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council.Transparency has been one of the hot buzzwords in the international development field over the last decade, and one so hot that it dominates or influences many discussions and initiatives taking place in the industry. For advocates of greater openness, it has been fruitful to watch and to borrow a phrase from the American civil rights movement it has been ‘a long time coming.’Given man’s natural proclivity to look over his shoulder, it is possible to identify underlying drivers of why “transparency” is in vogue. For example, in 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act. C-SPAN began gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. In 1986, in response to the Bhopal, India tragedy, the U.S. Congress passed The Community Right-to-Know Act that created a Toxic Release Inventory, a public record of pollutants released by manufacturers. In the mid-1990s, the rise of the Internet and email communications allowed isolated groups and individuals to interact with alacrity on issues of mutual interest. Over the past five years, the emergence of social media tools expanded and accelerated this reach. And, perhaps of most relevance to international development organizations, in the aftermath of the Cold War, civil society focused more closely on the international financial architecture regarding its role in reducing poverty in developing countries, improving the environment and fostering the global economy. (This list is by no means comprehensive, so please feel free to offer other events and opinions below.)Transparency, however, has not historically been a natural inclination for development institutions. Development agencies have been instinctively wary of greater openness of information about institutional activities and actions. Internal actors have reasons and those reasons when put into perspective are not unreasonable. Public disclosure reveals mistakes as well as successes, but mistakes are much more interesting to scrutinize: Remember it is bad news that sells newspapers. And just as in any other type of bureaucratic institution, many employees are focused on long-term careers and personal security. Exposure of missteps is an anathema. From their perspective, transparency has other important shortcomings. Bureaucratic players accrue power and responsibility over time and by increments. Greater transparency allows additional actors to participate, thereby reducing the power and ability internal actors have to regulate policy and events. Nor do they find comfort in how external participation may dilute and delay the decision making process. Over the years however, pockets of transparency advocates have grown within development agencies, working on the inside and at the forefront of the transparency debate to encourage their respective organizations to join the movement. Their involvement has been important in terms of influencing aid providers to adopt transparency measures and policy.The counterfactual, in my view, is far more important for it focuses less on the gain or loss for the institution or the individual and focuses more on the gain or loss regarding the end objective. When public institutions are free to make decisions behind a veil, then it will be less likely those decisions will be made with full information. It will be less likely these institutions secure support for their objectives, because it will be harder for stakeholders to understand how and why those decisions were made. Moreover, in the case of international development agencies, it will make the likelihood that policy or project implementation will be less successful if targeted audiences are simply recipients of aid as opposed to participants in the decision-making process: In other words, to increase their influence, international development institutions would better serve their constituencies and themselves if they are orchestrating rather than dictating. Finally, it will be more difficult to determine accountability for decisions involving public funds that negatively impact stakeholders thereby reducing their trust of those institutions.It has been suggested that greater transparency will result in development institutions becoming more risk-adverse. This argument has validity. By further opening the decision making process to public scrutiny, development agencies will take fewer chances in an industry where some risk taking is necessary. Instead, these organizations will engage in safe or sure bets, institutionalizing incremental gains over protracted time frames in an environment where people living in abject poverty need help now. However, one may also argue that greater openness would reduce the amount of decisions that lead to bad results. These advocates would also suggest that over time, as greater transparency assimilates within a culture, it will evolve to be seen as an appropriate process for making decisions and allow greater risk taking over time.In my 2010 book, The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency, I offered a personal interpretation on the meaning of transparency. “Transparency means openness and accountability, but it also suggests something else: Inclusion. Without it, the rest of what transparency’s proponents seek to achieve is hollow.” Please note, this did not suggest that I believed transparency was the end goal, but rather a means to an end. I think of transparency as a three-sided paradigm: Openness, accountability and inclusion/participation. When one side of the equation is missing, then the others are weakened and the paradigm becomes powerless. Also note, I did not say everything should be open to public view or scrutiny. In the international development field, it is appropriate that some information shared by and with government clients should remain confidential. The argument, for advocates on all sides, is where that line in the sand should be.Why then is transparency so important? It leads, I believe, to better and more holistic outcomes. James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, offer his viewpoint on the subject. “I have made fighting corruption a core activity of the Bank’s agenda during my tenure,” he once said. “The key to fighting corruption is promoting transparency in developing countries. Transparency reduces opportunities for corruption. The reduction of corruption leads to good governance. Good governance leads to development. Transparency is the key.” I think that it a useful interpretation on the value greater transparency provides.In my next note, I will identify how transparency is interpreted by other actors in the development field and some of the key battlegrounds today.

Post-Busan group meet for the first time in Paris

Alex Beech — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:10:25 +0000

The Busan Partnership Interim Group (BPIG) met for the first time earlier this week in Paris to decide what the post-Busan architecture on aid effectiveness will look like. As well as looking at how the Busan Partnership will be implemented and managed, they are also making the important decision of what indicators will be used to monitor progress, and how these will be applied to the task at hand. One of the more popular options is a “country-heavy, global-light” mechanism that monitors progress mainly in a country-specific context. We’re keeping a keen eye on the proceedings and there are a number of key issues in this process that we feel need highlighting.Firstly, that any monitoring mechanisms used are targeted at a country level and with a small number of global indictors. It’s imperative that one of these indicators is transparency, as derived from the commitments made at Accra and Busan on transparency.Secondly, that whatever monitoring framework is used, it must be open and transparent. One way to ensure this would be to use an IATI – International Aid Transparency Initiative – approach, as opposed to the proposed monitoring survey. An IATI approach would mean that all involved parties would publish their own data in an open format to the IATI standard, as many have done in the past. All published data would then be collated to give a whole picture; this would be a far less cumbersome way of operating an open and transparent system than the use of a monitoring survey.The outcomes of this first meeting will be made public in March and we’ll be reporting on them here along with any recommendations we have for further amendments. The final draft proposal comes out in June and we’ll be covering the process on here until then... watch this space for the next instalment.