Three challenges for the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation

Earlier this year, I published a list of milestone events for shaping the policy field of development cooperation in a post-2015 context. Among these milestone events is the first Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) high-level meeting, convening in Mexico next week.

GPEDC members will meet amid uncertainty regarding what sort of momentum the forum will be able to generate. First announced in 2011 at the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HFL4), the GPEDC would ensure accountability for the implementation of the five HFL4 commitments at the political level: ownership, results, inclusive development partnerships, transparency and mutual accountability. 

Two years onwards, not only the quantity but also the quality of aid seem to have increased. According to the OECD, official development assistance (ODA) rose by 6.1% in real terms in 2013 after a two years of falling volumes and reached the highest level ever recorded (USD 134.8 billion). A OECD/UNDP report covering 46% of total ODA highlights that country ownership continues to strengthen, donors are sharing information on development cooperation more transparently, and there is greater recognition of the important role played by non-state actors in development. 

However, in an evolving international architecture for development cooperation there is much more that needs to be done to shift the global debate from "aid effectiveness" to "effective development cooperation" and actually transform cooperation practices. Under this scenario, some of the issues GPEDC members will face next week in Mexico and beyond are: i) the legitimacy of its agenda; ii) the effectiveness of its monitoring framework; and iii) its relevance to the development cooperation debate. 

Whose interests at stake

The GPEDC high-level meeting next week is expected to provide development actors an opportunity to review what has been achieved since the HFL4 and identify ways forward to effective development. However, a quick look at the agenda of the meeting sheds light on the actual composition of the debate and some of the interests at the table. 

The meeting is organized in five plenary sessions on the following topics: i) progress since Busan, ii) taxation and resource mobilization for development, iii) SSC/TrC and knowledge sharing, iv) development cooperation with Middle Income Countries, and v) business as a partner in development. Could such agenda be understood as an attempt to extend GPDEC's mandate beyond monitoring post-Busan performance to a role in helping frame the Post-2015 development debate? If so, what is the need for such stronger mandate given the already existing MDGs and other UN processes? Could the GPEDC more prominently feed into the post-2015 process on the 'how' global, regional and national development efforts should be undertaken, rather than the 'what' the global development agenda would be?

In addition to the plenary sessions, 37 focus sessions (side events) are expected to engage GPEDC members in in-depth discussions and gather support to voluntary initiatives around the topics of the main meeting. From the 33 focus sessions with information available on GPEDC website [1], 27 are organized by at least one OECD-DAC member and/or think-tank funded by an OECD-DAC country [2]. Only five South-South cooperation partners and/or non OECD-DAC countries (Colombia, El Salvador, Indonesia, Mexico and Mozambique) are co-organizing focus sessions with a traditional donor. The governments of China and India are not leading nor co-organizing any focus session, but one Chinese and one Indian think-tank are co-organizing a focus session with a German think-tank. The governments of Brazil and South-Africa are neither leading nor co-organizing any focus sessions. How representative of the breadth of development players is an agenda apparently dominated by traditional donors?

The unfinished aid effectiveness agenda

Consensus is emerging on the need to adopt a new set of rules and standards that are inclusive of the different development actors. The GPEDC global monitoring framework tracks progress on the commitment and action agreed at the HLM4 based on ten indicators in areas like gender equality and women's empowerment, untied aid, and partners using results frameworks. 

However, questions remain on whether the HLF4 partners beyond OECD-DAC countries (e.g. South-South partners, private sector, civil society and philanthropic foundations) have the incentives to report their development assistance according to this framework, and how the issues of capacity and differentiated commitments tie into this.

For example, three indicators in the GPEDC global monitoring framework measure progress towards the HLM4 principles of transparency and accountability. Indicator #4 specifically measures the state of implementation of the HLM4 common, open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources for development cooperation by cooperation providers.

The 'common standard' referred in Indicator #4 combines three complementary systems and processes for tracking development cooperation flows. These are two OECD reporting instruments (the DAC Creditor Reporting System - CRS - and the Forward Spending Survey - FSS), which contain comprehensive statistical information; and the International Aid Transparency Initiative, a self-publishing system with notifications to a registry that provides current management information on cooperation providers' activities. 

The CRS, the FSS and the IATI standards are primarily designed to track ODA flows down the delivery chain. Despite ongoing efforts to broaden their scope (e.g. through the inclusion of indicators to measure humanitarian flows in the IATI standard for instance), these standards are not yet ready to capture non-ODA flows like South-South and triangular cooperation, non-concessional finance, and climate finance, among others. Consequently, neither should the common standard be. 

Rule makers, rule takers...‘rule spoilers'

The GPEDC adopted a multi-stakeholder governance mechanism for itself, portrayed as “global-light and country-heavy” with high-level meetings every 18 to 24 months. However, this governance mechanism "has not been subject to an encompassing intergovernmental negotiation and has never been endorsed by the UN membership"[3]

Skepticism persists among the big emerging economies in terms of continued association of the GPEDC with the OECD-DAC. China and India openly criticize the new set-up as “too Northern” and have yet to engage. Brazil in its turn argues that discussions on development cooperation effectiveness should start among the country focal points. In a second stage, it should be taken to the High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation (in the case of South-South partners), and ultimately to the Development Cooperation Forum.

On the other end of the spectrum, Mexico, Korea and Turkey (all new members of the OECD) have agreed to participate in the DAC systems and report more systematically on their aid. Other middle-income countries like Colombia, Indonesia and Peru have also taken an active role in the GPEDC Steering Committee.

Although these emerging economies are not a unified block and have very different policy approaches to development, they generally share a disapproval of the mainstream aid-effectiveness agenda and a preference for engagements with other developing countries on the basis of horizontal partnerships, exchange, friendship and solidarity.

Many of these emerging economies have been developing their own definitions, standards, information databases and measurement systems to support the accountability of their development cooperation at the domestic and/or regional levels. 

At the global level, however, there is still an overall lack of leadership in defining norms, frameworks and instruments for such modalities of development cooperation and/or for meeting the needs of some of these countries which still play a dual role as both recipients and providers of development cooperation. 

One of the challenges for a greater engagement of emerging economies in the global development debate is the lack of a natural 'home' for South-South cooperation in the same way that the OECD-DAC is the reference point for the North-South cooperation. In fact, as the lead intergovernmental bodies within the UN for coordinating South-South and overall development cooperation, the High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation and the Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) would have such role. However, the DCF has no mandate to negotiate political outcomes and has achieved few tangible results since its creation in 2008. The forum meets every two years and has few follow-up mechanisms in-between the meetings.

The efforts to strengthen the DCF are also hampered by the political incentives that countries have to maximize their individual influence through parallel discussions on the GPEDC and the DCF (or even through the absence of discussion!). Countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Peru and Turkey would still be able to negotiate at the DCF through the G-77 and China, as well as individually through the GPEDC. Others like Brazil, China, India and South Africa have been sending strong messages against the current state of affairs but have yet not shown their leadership in shaping the new development cooperation debate. 

This 'sequestration' of the global development agenda could have a detrimental effect on the efficiency of cooperation. First, by missing the opportunity to substantively contribute to the implementation of the post-2015 agenda. Second, by creating additional structures with dubious legitimacy. For example, one of the proposals for the GPEDC meeting next week is the re-launch of the Task Team on South-South Cooperation, a 'spin-off' from the OECD Working Party on Aid Effectiveness with no participation of the big emerging donors. 

The way forward

Could the GPDEC concentrate on its mandate to monitor HLM4 commitments? Knowledge exchange on how this agenda links with broader development cooperation issues and how existing ODA-focused norms, standards and systems could contribute to the development of norms, standards and systems on broader modalities of development cooperation would also be welcome. These exchanges could feed into the DCF, which would have the normative power over the broader development cooperation agenda and its links with the post-2015 process.

In order to increase the legitimacy of GPDEC's agenda; improve the effectiveness of GPDEC's monitoring framework; and ensure GPDEC's relevance to the broader development cooperation debate, at least three questions need to be answered:

Whose and what interests are really at stake during the Mexico meeting and beyond? 

Can the GPEDC set standards and indicators that are truly inclusive of the different developments actors? 

Could the GPEDC be an 'implementation arm' of the DCF? 

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[1] http://effectivecooperation.org/first-high-level-meeting-draft-agenda/

[2] Only the organizations that were listed as (co) organizers and that provided a contact person were considered.
[3] See D.I.E report