Supporting Inclusive and Democratic Ownership. A 'How to Note' for Donors

Even in stable democracies broad-based, inclusive policy ownership is rare. It is even more unlikely in country contexts that are more institutionally and socially complex and experiencing rapid economic and social change. With an aid effectiveness agenda that promotes ownership and accountability in partner countries this means looking critically at how 'ownership' is constructed in the policy process and the role of donors in support. Policy is never just technical. It involves politics and power. Donors have to understand how policy works in practice (as distinct from theory) in any particular country context. It requires undertaking power analyses with themselves factored in - as organisations and individuals - who can make a positive or negative contribution. They need to be self-aware to avoid disempowering others in the policy process. At the same time, they should engage with a wide and diverse group of policy actors in state, civil society and the private sector and whenever possible support debate and locally driven independent research. While taking a back seat in providing policy advice, they should seek out and support pro-poor reform policy networks, particularly those straddling state-society divisions. Supporting the realisation of human rights for all and facilitating poor people's empowerment in all the programmes they support are two key measures that donors can employ for long term strengthening of inclusive and democratic country ownership. Following a brief discussion of context and challenges, this 'how to note' is drafted in the form of some 'frequently (donor) asked questions': How can donors support pro-poor policy change? Why do donors have to do power analyses? How can donors avoid interfering politically? With whom should donors engage? How should donors work with civil society for inclusive and democratic ownership? Is supporting the realisation of human rights a violation of inclusive country ownership? How can donors facilitate poor people's empowerment for more inclusive and democratic ownership?Swiss Agency for Development Co-operation (SDC

Hovering on the Threshold

This is my principal methodological paper about the challenges of researching aid donors, one that positions the anthropologist as a reflexive auto-ethnographer, retaining empathy for the insider’s position while sufficiently distanced to cultivate a critical faculty

The rise of rights: rights-based approaches to international development

International development agencies are increasingly using rights-based language. But how can their policy and practice support people’s own efforts to turn their rights into reality

Supporting Pathways of Women's Empowerment: A Brief Guide for International Development Organisations

Most international development organisations include women's empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. This brief by Rosalind Eyben informs that debate with empirical evidence from the five-year international research programme, Pathways. Pathways researchers from West Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the UK used quantitative surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, life histories, storytelling and film-making to discover how empowerment happens.UKaid from the Department for International Development with co-funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affair

Power, mutual accountability and responsibility in the practice of international aid : a relational approach

Drawing on both theory and experience, this paper takes a fresh look at current efforts to strengthen mutual accountability in international aid relations. What additional possibilities become available when we conceptualise aid as a field of interdependent and dynamic relations that are played out in the absence of pre-established consensus or shared vision concerning desired changes? The tendency is to understand mutual accountability as holding each other to account for performance against pre-established objectives. It reflects a perception of aid as a contract and exemplifies the dominant ‘philosophical plumbing’ of donor organisations, one that views the world as a collection of entities. From this substantialist perspective, mutual accountability is about strengthening mechanisms for regulating behaviour between autonomous parties. But such efforts are constrained by the global political economic structures that sustain the very inequities in aid relations that make mutual accountability so difficult. Can a complementary perspective help? Relationalism understands entities as mutable, shaped by their position in relation to others. Relational notions, married to ideas of process and complexity illuminate the messy and contradictory quality of aid relations that substantialism finds difficult to cope with. Yet, arguably much of what proves with hindsight to be effective aid may well be an outcome of relational approaches, although such approaches are rarely valued or reported. Associated with these perspectives are different concepts of power. Whereas mutual accountability requires identifying specific power holders, diffuse or relational power links to ideas of mutual responsibility and the effect we have upon each other and the wider system. In that respect the paper concludes with some practical steps that aid agencies could immediately start to take to encourage mutual responsibility. In so doing they might also make more effective the mutual accountability mechanisms that until now have been the sole focus of attention. Keywords: substantialism, power, complexity, aid, accountability, results

Caring for Wellbeing

‘Care’, and the associated idea of ‘social reproduction’,2 are concepts originally developed by feminist scholars and activists to describe a responsibility and a set of activities defined for the present paper as meeting the material and/or developmental, emotional and spiritual needs of one or more other persons with whom one is in a direct personal relationship.3 Until challenged by feminists, care was seen as something that women ‘naturally’ did and thus not identified as an issue requiring a policy response. This is often still the case today. For example, the framing of ‘food security’ excludes unpaid care, ignoring the fact that even when sufficient food is available and accessible, individuals can only eat if someone collects water and fuel and spends the time and skills to transform the raw ingredients into a palatable meal. Care is not just a private matter for individuals. It needs to be thought of at the macro/structural level about how the wellbeing of some may be at the cost of wellbeing or others, often the powerless and vulnerable. It requires examining deeply embedded societal assumptions to recognise that the division of responsibility in caring is informed by ideologies of what it means to be male and female (Edholm, Harris and Young. 1978).4 Many cross-country comparative studies (Budlender 2010) have shown how prevailing gender norms mean that women undertake the bulk of unpaid care work including minding and educating children, looking after older family members, caring for the sick, cooking and collecting water and fuel. Although there has been a shift towards a more equal distribution of responsibilities between the sexes in the past 40 years – particularly in Scandinavia – in most countries the provision of care continues to lie chiefly with women and girls. At the same time increasing numbers of women are taking up paid work. Because they have to juggle their responsibilities, women are frequently employed on a part-time or piecework basis where wages are lower, employment less secure and collective action or negotiation more difficult (Chen 2007). With many women thus employed, the young and the elderly have to take on more care responsibilities to the detriment of their own wellbeing. In some countries these changes have coincided with a decline of state provision and everywhere an increased involvement of the market in care. Women who can afford to do so hire poorer women, often underpaid and overworked (Razavi and Staab 2010) and in many parts of the world subject to racial discrimination. In this context of global change our paper considers the centrality of care for human wellbeing and the damage caused by its sustained neglect in policy and practice. Section 2 looks at care 2 within the prevailing development paradigm. Section 3 makes a case for care based on a relational approach to wellbeing. Section 4 proposes that philanthropic organisations play a leading role in making care visible and in facilitating the debate about the changes required for building more people-centred economies.The Rockerfeller Foundatio

Choosing Words with Care

Women’s empowerment’ is a fuzzy concept as used by international development organisations. Historical textual analysis and interviews with officials in development agencies reveal its adaptability and capacity to carry multiple meanings that variously wax and wane in their discursive influence. Today a privileging of instrumentalist meanings of empowerment associated with efficiency and growth are crowding out other more socially transformative meanings associated with rights and collective action. In their efforts to make headway in what has become an unfavourable policy environment those officials in development agencies with a commitment to a broader social change agenda juggle with these different meanings, strategically exploiting the concept’s polysemic nature to keep that agenda alive. With this in mind, we argue for a politics of solidarity between such officials and feminist activists. We encourage the latter to challenge the prevailing instrumentalist discourse of empowerment with a clear well articulated call for social transformation, while alerting them to how those with the same agenda within international development agencies may well be choosing their words with care, even if what they say appears fuzzy