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