There was something in the Economist of a couple of weeks ago that got me thinking:
Unless a government is wholly corrupt (and Liberia’s is not) it has two big advantages over a donor. First, it is mostly interested in outcomes. Aid agencies and charities often focus on inputs—the number of clinics built, the number of farmers using superior hybrid seeds. Governments care more about mortality rates, food prices and the like. Those are what matter in the end.
I thought it was simplistic but not incorrect: how accountability for aid organisations works is inevitably shorter term and accountability to donors almost invariably boils down to inputs – an example of how emphasising value for money is problematic in aid. This is something that I have seen to be a perpetual struggle, regardless of how donors try to emphasise outcomes over inputs. Governments have accountability to their electorate (though limited or even non-existent), but states do have acocuntability within an international system in which they get money to deliver on certain minimum expectations. In the post-war United Nations world, and especially since global goals started to be set and funded, the role of a state is, consensually, to deliver or at least appear to be trying to deliver a minimum standard of public health, education, nutrition, rule of law. A major part of the role of aid agencies and international development more broadly is to define that consensus. For example, the SDGs represent an agreement (however flawed) of what states should deliver. The details of this are, effectively, guided by international development because that is how funding, technical assistance, loans etc are channelled. And that, perhaps, is the real role of international development: to define what a state should be. In this understanding, the shift in international aid to a more overtly transactional framework (rather than the moralistic and security-oriented on one seen in past decades) with China rising has interesting implications for what a state’s job is.