Human Rights Reader 276

The human rights-based framework opens our eyes to the outdated traditional model of aid. Since the new human rights narrative focuses on global justice and on pluralism, it criticizes international development agencies as ‘a cosmopolitan elite that is wrongfully embracing Globalization’ and it challenges the latter’s supremacy.

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*: Also referred to as foreign aid, development aid or overseas development cooperation (ODA).

For foreign aid to be effective in reducing poverty it must first and foremost be disbursed in good faith for that purpose –without political naiveté or double talk.

Unfortunately, aid is still seen as ‘temporary assistance’, a sort of noblesse oblige on the part of rich countries (whose riches, to begin with, derived in good part from the impoverishing exploitation of many of the present aid-dependent countries). (S. Taylor and M. Rowson)

1. The notion that today’s aid dependent countries can, with the right macroeconomic framework and new trade rules, grow into fiscal independence within an ethically-defensible-time-frame is simply mistaken. (S. Taylor and M. Rowson)

2. The evidence that foreign aid presents to us, namely that mostly technology will save the world is, these days, less and less plausible.**

**: Take two examples:

i)The UN-sanctioned human right to nutrition is often –but should not be– interpreted as the right to food aid. It is communities that have to decide their own food policies thus exercising what is referred-to as food sovereignty. (M. Arana-Cedeno) From that perspective, the right to nutrition should also be understood as an economic right, a cultural right, as well as to include the right to safe water, the right to participate, the right to information and the right to a sustainable environment. (D. Alhindawi)

ii) As regards the human right to health, foreign aid investments on quality health care services and on actions that tackle the social determinants of health (SDH) are not alternative pathways; they are indeed complementary. In the case of AIDS, this means that HIV is more than a virus; as someone said, AIDS is about power relations in the bedroom and in the boardroom of both donor and recipient governments. (M. Sharma)

3. Actually, foreign aid disarticulates the state from the citizen; governments listens to the concerns of donors rather than those of their own citizen.

4. Foreign aid cannot work when it is donors who identify the different needs of people rather than letting the people concerned actually articulate their needs. So donors must get away from doing so much of the talking and moving more towards listening. (A. Vaatz)

5. What is essentially missing in development cooperation is for it to consistently strengthen the people’s understanding of democracy and of their rights as individuals and as communities.

6. Therefore, for foreign aid to work, it needs to move towards a convergence of different, but compatible interests between donors and end-recipients (claim holders)…and, so far, human rights (HR) are not part of those converging compatible interests.***

***: Moreover, too often, politicians and civil servants have interests at odds with ODA.

7. Furthermore, to comply with foreign aid conditionalities, governments make administrative reforms as required by the donors rather than in response to the civic and political struggles of its citizens.

8. Let’s call a spade a spade: Donors have a clear political presence in many a country; they seek to influence change in that country through their financial leverage. In that effort, there are intense internal political struggles. Donors thus exert patronage through networks of clients within and outside government.**** This, because aid officials need to demonstrate to their head offices that they are having a tangible influence on the local scene. ****: If needed, donors use informal ‘shadow conversations’ that are at odds with government policy. (R. Eyben)

9. Putting many foreign and national experts in a room does simply not guarantee that one will get the best answers. [Not unless one starts by asking the key right questions… which is more important than knowing all the answers]. The same applies for guru-like experts and jet-set consultants that are regularly brought in from the North.

10. Development agencies purport they know the solutions to given problems… and others should benefit from that. For instance, the World Bank considers itself a ‘knowledge bank’; it thinks progress is intrinsically linked to knowledge and knowledge transfer is supposed to be the key to accelerate progress in poor countries. This raises expectations in the latter: People there hope-for and expect advice and expertise from outside.

11. The recipient country ownership rhetoric only hides the fact that the donors continue to pull the strings. Donors do not want to make themselves superfluous. Period. The talk of ownership is thus a lie; wouldn’t you agree? (A. Vaatz)

In human rights work, we put our money where our ideals are…i.e., where the risks are.

Human rights activists oppose aid more because it is borne out of compassion than because it is ineffective. (G. Garcia Marquez)

12. Donors have a continuing obsession with project management tools –prominently so with the logical framework matrix (or logframe for short). This allows them to pin everything down from the outset. Logframes are  primarily used in an effort to (narrowly) demand and interpret accountability. Ask yourself: How much detail can/should a logframe contain? With too much detail it becomes cumbersome and, over time, inaccurate. From the HR point of view, the most important part of it is the rightmost column which lists the Risks and Assumptions –most of them falling under the structural causes of underdevelopment.*****  In that case, the logframe’s Objectively Verifiable Indicators (OVIs) should then measure changes in structural conditions and in HR principles (rather than measure the achievement of sectoral objectives and activities).

*****: A typical example, of an assumption with structural implications would be: “The government will be actively responsive-to and will complement project-launched activities by, alongside, investing its own resources and demanding a participatory decision-making planning and implementation”.

13. How can a logframe address HR accountability then? The project implementation process must be focused on overcoming the structural ‘risks and assumptions’ and this requires continuous active engagement of both claim holders and duty bearers. For accountability purposes, the challenge is to identify and move to change the constraining structural conditions thus fulfilling all HR principles. (D. Curtis)  Given the inadequacies (and abuses) of the foreign aid system, the corollary to this is that the actual processes that foreign aid sets in motion must be more important than its volume. This additionally means that, when providing technical assistance or policy advice, donors must be guided by both HR principles and standards.

Foreign aid: Can human rights impacts be foreseen?

14. In a way, HR impact assessment (HRIA) overlaps with poverty and social impact assessment exercises. The three of them offer empirical evidence on the likely social consequences on the living conditions of different social groups in society. The information that comes from them has the potential to foresee and thus mitigate negative consequences or even prevent them. These impact assessments determine whether measures are politically feasible by considering existing power relations and possible opposition to the new measures. They open up space for dialogue among claim holders and duty bearers. But unless policy makers take into account the results of HRIA exercises, even the best analyses will be useless. HRIA ownership thus matters greatly. Findings usually support the position already for long held by large parts of civil society. They provide claim holders with a negotiating platform with donors. HRIAs are best if implemented by independent teams.

15. Economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) simply must have HR impact assessments and audits. To us in PHM, this is non-negotiable.

Foreign aid: wrong focus?

Often trapped in a ‘growth-only’ delusion, development cooperation vows to focus on poor people, but instead primarily focuses on poor countries…The HR-based framework definitely focuses on poor people –everywhere.

16. This is most important, because 72% of the world’s poor live in middle income countries (MICs). And there, the ratio of bilateral to multilateral aid is 2/3:1/3.

17. MICs can, in principle, support and emancipate their own poor people, but their poor lack power (are not empowered) and their governments lack any real determination and commitment to end poverty.

18. Mind you, even if –with foreign aid– the MDGs are met, there will still be one billion poor people by 2015… almost ¾ living in MICs.

19. Donors complain of unresponsive governance there; they consider ‘bad governance’ the most dangerous trap. They purport to address it face-on. The question is: What changes do they insist on? For them to engage in debates on frontally tackling inequality should not be considered an infringement on sovereignty, but a step towards HR. But do they?

20. If rich countries purport to provide poor countries with development resources, it is not at all against their own interests to do so. Otherwise, why would they do it? Much more ‘real aid’ would be for them to:

• cut subsidies to agriculture in the North,
• forgive the overpowering foreign debt of the South,
• not steal the resources (both human and material) of the poor countries,
• not dump their cigarettes, their toxic waste, their genetically modified seeds… on the countries of the South,
• not sell weapons and train the South dictators’ armies, etc.

But this would be too costly, drastic and inconveniencing for them.  Traditional ODA is just a more cozy niche to be in…

21. Does the reader really think any of the above is ever going to happen in our rich-countries-dominated-unfair-world?

22. Any time people start talking about development aid, I just automatically assume they are on the wrong side of the horse, no matter how well intentioned they are. (M. Anderson)

23. Bottom line, donor governments have been and are very selective in their support for HR (focusing mostly on civil and political rights –especially in their conditionalities). The selection of HR which donor governments choose to address (mostly chosen by narrow self-interest considerations) more often than not ignores addressing economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) and its principles (participation, non-discrimination, rule of law, etc.).

24. But the violations of ESCR destroys social relationships, the social fabric, social cohesion and overall trust. Donors can indeed contribute to stop these violations and thus prevent these tensions from flaring up –which seems to me is in their long-term interest. But the million dollars question is: Will they?

25. After all the above is said and done, consider: A domestic fair progressive taxation system and other redistributive policies (including decisive action against capital flight) are, in last instance, more important than ODA.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan@phmovement.org

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Adapted from Contact, WCC, Issue 186, Nov., 2008; Development in Practice; Globalization and Health: Pathways, Evidence and Policy, R. Labonte, T. Schrecker, C. Packer and V. Runnels Eds, Routledge Books, 2009; D+C, 36:12, Dec.2009; D+C 37:5, May 2010; D+C 37:7-8, July/Aug 2010; D+C, 37:10, Oct 2010; The Broker, Issue 19, Apr 2010; The Broker, Issue 23, Dec.2010/Jan2011; and The Broker, Issue 24, Feb/March 2011.

Human Rights Reader 271

Accountability in foreign aid

The international legal regime established through the various human rights treaties is the existing global accountability framework which we should  be drawing upon much, much more.

1. Efforts to increase the type of foreign aid that strengthens human rights institutions and accountabilities should go in tandem with the actual disbursement of foreign aid funds. But is this the case?

2. As I had said earlier, mutual accountability is the least developed Paris Declaration principle that would definitely benefit from a human rights (HR) perspective so that civil society’s capacity to hold donors and their own (recipient) governments accountable needs to be strengthened.

3. A number of the deep-seated problems in the current foreign aid system stem from an imbalance of accountabilities –with ‘upwards’ accountability to donors prioritized over ‘downwards’ accountability to the poor countries and to the people aid is supposed to help. (ActionAid) Such an accountability towards the ultimate recipients of aid is simply missing.

4. Domestic accountability requires a certain level of democracy and of functioning institutions for individuals to be able to claim their rights and participate in decision making. In a democracy, this duty must be met by the  recipient government. But, as long as many governments are far from democratic, it is legitimate to expect the donors to take up such a duty.

5. In the donor countries, citizens can better hold (and have a history of holding) their government to account for the way their money is spent and by providing leverage for the negotiation of HR issues. So, through demanding greater legal accountability of donor agencies, leverage can be used to demand the respect of HR standards and principles in foreign aid, as well as the setting of annual benchmarks to measure progress in that aid.

6. The ever-present pressure on donors of showing results turns accountability further outwards on them instead of supporting the national inwards processes necessary for achieving ownership and domestic accountability.

Aid darlings and aid orphans

-We have to recognize the existence of aid darlings and aid orphans and must, therefore, improve the unfair global allocation of aid resources.

-On the other hand, aid is not the route to development anyway; it creates dependency and erodes self-reliance.

7. Many of the bilateral donor agencies and development banks use the phrase ‘respect, protect and promote’ instead of the correct phrase ‘respect, protect and fulfill’. The omission of ‘fulfill’ is deliberate (!), reflecting these countries rejection of the Right to Development which is seen by them as an acceptance of an obligation to provide development assistance. (As much as the very uncritical acceptance of the ‘aid effectiveness’ dogma which is widely prevalent, other rhetorical terms are also often used to avoid blatant existing contradictions). Development today must be seen within the realm of the HR framework and, in so doing, development assistance must now be seen as a right rather than an instrument of solidarity.

8. Ultimately, human rights work exposes the political dimension of aid and of poverty. This being so, it is claim holders who have to ensure that the technical assistance on offer through foreign aid is truly demand-driven. For this, both donor and partner patterns of behavior must change; but this will only happen if the underlying incentives shift. I had said earlier that country ownership of development programs should not be equated with government ownership. So, for example, if gender equality is not an explicit national priority (and in many cases it is not), the incentive is not there. The rhetorical question here is: Will gender equality then be entirely excluded from donor agendas …as HR in general are?

9. The emphasis in current (and past) foreign aid is (has) simply (been) too much centered on the ‘plumbing’ or ‘mechanisms’ of the aid delivery system and not enough on reducing poverty and inequality as called for by the Right to Development.

10. Under the pretext of making aid more effective, the aid effectiveness paradigm has become a form of collective colonialism by Northern donors when engaging with Southern countries that, through weakness, vulnerability or psychological dependency, allow themselves to be subjected to it.* (Y. Tandon)

*: The explicit recognition of the importance of South-South cooperation is another important issue and is not explored here.

11. There is simply no aid effectiveness without development effectiveness and the gender equality, environment and human rights perspective must be crucially incorporated to even have a chance to achieve this century’s development goals. (J. Cedergren)

12. In closing: The lessons learned from this Reader are quite dramatic. There is a need for more training. The fact is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in multilateral and bilateral agencies, governments, NGOs and other civil society organizations; it is about the real need for training. The move from a traditional basic needs or human development program thinking to an understanding of the human rights-based framework to development and to development programming requires a total mind shift. This cannot be achieved by one or two four-day workshops; it requires at least such workshops several times a year for 2-3 years! No agency or government has come close to that, and it is exactly this lack of serious training that has hindered an accelerated adoption of the HR-based framework.

Claudio Schuftan in Ho Chi Minh City

cshuftan@phmovement.org

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Adapted from How to integrate and strengthen a human rights-based approach in program-based approaches, Urban Jonsson, February 2010.

Human Rights Reader 270

The role of claim holders and duty bearers*

1. With an emphasis on development results that actually ought to be seen as fulfilled human rights, duty-bearers become accountable in a variety of ways: through budgetary allocations, through building capacity on work to realize specific rights, as well as through securing rule-of-law in general and, more specifically, securing judicial-enforcement mechanisms for human rights (HR).

*: It is important to be reminded here: a) that most development texts still use the term ‘stakeholders’ instead of the more appropriate terms ‘claim-holders’ and ‘duty-bearers’, and b) that claim-holders and duty-bearers are roles into which individuals (or groups of individuals) are expected to enter. This means that the same individual may be both a claim-holder and a duty-bearer at the same time, but in relation to different individuals and/or institutions.

2. It is further important to understand that an issue chosen becomes a right only if it has been codified in a HR Covenant or Convention. This then means that all people have that right  –in HR parlance they are bona-fide rights-holders. If a country (state party) has ratified that treaty, individuals move from being just rights-holders to being a claim-holders with valid claims on others, i.e., the correlative duty-bearers. This forms a ‘claim-duty pattern’ in society, in which, most often, the state is the ultimate duty-bearer**.  So, remember: It is claim holders that support the indispensable demand side of human rights!

**: It is said that non-state duty-bearers do not have duties, but rather responsibilities.

Donors as duty bearers?

3. It is interesting to note that donors consistently choose the term and pursue ‘equal opportunities’ rather than ‘equal results’. It can be argued that the second term is more human rights-reflective than the first since, in HR work, it is results that ultimately count.

4. It is not a surprise then that, in donor meetings, the discussion has been deliberately avoided of the two currently competing trends in the emerging paradigm struggle of international development cooperation, i.e., ‘the aid effectiveness’ and ‘the realization of human rights’ paradigms.

A major reason for donor countries to avoid HR commitments and even, in some cases, HR language (and the Right to Development, in particular), is their rejection of the idea that there is an obligation of donor countries to provide and to increase their aid.***

***: In the Millennium Declaration negotiations, MDG 8 (‘A global Partnership for Development’ that includes the demand for predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial systems; addressing the special needs of the least developed countries including landlocked and small island developing states; and dealing comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries) was not proposed by the donor countries, but by the developing countries who refused to sign the Declaration unless it was included.

5. Additionally symptomatic is the fact that HR and the right to development are not mentioned in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (March 2005), in spite of the fact that MDG 8 is about developing a global policy for donors, with seven targets. Paris did not address any of the targets of MDG 8 either. (R. Bissio)

6. So, after March 2005, we were left with the question that should have been answered in Paris in the first place, namely: What is, and what should be, the place of human rights conditions and indicators in the frameworks governing the flow of donor funds?

7. We have always thought that the human rights framework is a good starting point for a political dialogue between donors and partners to define the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ boundaries of acceptable behavior with respect to HR and related political governance issues****. Such a dialogue has regrettably not happened openly. Strong pronouncements thus need to be made by civil society and by poor countries’ governments to move donors beyond broad political statements, including only generic references to human rights.

****: Indeed, HR do make a contribution to the governance agenda.

The Paris Declaration and HR

8. It should first be made very clear that the Paris Declaration is not a human rights document. One could maybe even say that the Paris Declaration is an anti-human rights document in that it systematically missed any reference to HR at a point in time when most development-oriented documents did make such a reference. (In all honesty, the Paris Declaration implicitly does ‘refer’ to human rights in just a few places). It is by now thus openly admitted that the Paris Declaration does not provide any ready-made and fully-consensual framework for the integration of the HR framework in foreign aid.

9. The issue of mutual accountability, for instance, is the least developed Paris Declaration principles; it would have benefited from a human rights perspective. Civil society’s capacity to hold donors accountable thus needs to be strengthened. Therefore, capacity development in HR (i.e., HR Learning) for civil society is, again and again, a key challenge.

10. Actually, the most prominently missing element in the Paris Declaration is its almost total lack of attention to the governance context. We are clear: Only by integrating HR into the Paris Declaration principles can we  compensate for the low attention it gives to governance; only such an integration will: a) strengthen the link between aid effectiveness and the achievement of desirable development outcomes, and b) compensate for the pitifully narrow and technocratic focus of the Paris Declaration. The remaining challenge, therefore, is to find the practical way to bring the HR perspective to the implementation aspects of the Paris Declaration.

11. On the one hand, the Paris Declaration does offer good potential entry points for HR-inspired approaches by promoting a model of partnership that explicitly addresses accountability gaps and focuses on stronger and more balanced accountability mechanisms. But, on the other hand, it fails to provide institutional mechanisms to address ever-present asymmetries in power. That leaves out the discussion of the serious democracy and legitimacy deficits we see in the present aid architecture, dominated as it is by donor countries of the OECD, the World Bank and regional development banks. The UN lacks any leverage to promote its priorities in the Paris Declaration, because it was not involved in its genesis from the start! (Y. Tandon)

12. More seriously, and through the back door, the Paris Declaration brings-in quite a bit of what developing countries had already turned down. Why? Because it really does not distance itself from the Bretton Woods institutions so that it suffers from the same credibility and legitimacy gap than those institutions.

13. The relationships between the Human Rights Principles of equality/non-discrimination, participation/inclusion, transparency and accountability, and the five Paris Declaration Principles (ownership, alignment, harmonization, mutual accountability and management for results) must be somehow merged in a formal way –beyond the perception that HR are one of many equally important concerns.

14. Finally, the Paris Declaration makes little mention of the donors home-based, domestic accountability to its citizens. Human rights can contribute to strengthened domestic accountability in both donor and partner countries.

15. Bottom line, HR thinking and practice do have the potential to help in filling the rather substantial gaps that exists for the operationalization of the Paris Declaration.

Claudio Schuftan in Ho Chi Minh City

cshuftan@phmovement.org

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Adapted from ‘How to integrate and strengthen a human rights-based approach in program-based approaches’, Urban Jonsson, February 2010.

Postscript: All the above made it extremely difficult to include any type of HR language in the Accra Agenda for Action that reviewed the Paris Declaration in 2008. Even if  HR are mentioned in a few places in the Accra Agenda for Action, this does not, in any way, qualify the Agenda to be a ‘human rights document’ or even a document that has included the ‘human rights perspective’. At best, it gives it rhetorical lip-service –mostly to please some of the critical civil society organizations that attended… Depressing?  You bet! A lutta continua.

We have no other world except this one; it is difficult to imagine improving it without changing it. (CETIM)

1. The need to push duty bearers on their legal obligations is neither new nor only true for national leaders; efforts are being made for this to also become standard practice for donors.

2. Why the latter? Because we firmly believe that, if human rights (HR) are not being taken into account by the several new aid modalities under discussion these days, these modalities should simply be sidelined.*

*: Caveat: At present, economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) do not enjoy robust protective mechanisms under international law. [But this is widely recognized as a travesty of the spirit and the letter of the respective Covenant].

3. The above caveat notwithstanding, where donors are not supporting HR or are undertaking policies or programs that are harmful in this respect, it behooves them to take the measures to redress this situation (or for us to force them to).

4. We can and will hold them to account on many grounds. Among them:

· Donors must recognize that they have binding international HR responsibilities of international assistance and cooperation.

· Donors must proactively engage with the overseas recipients of their aid to encourage them to respect, protect and fulfill HR (…pushing governments on their legal obligations!)

· Donors must make the realization of HR a key objective of their development cooperation. · Donors that have ratified international HR treaties (the latter with the exception mainly of the US) have to align their current aid with the HR-based Framework.

· Donors must also respect, protect and fulfill HR: in international development conferences they participate in; in the executive boards of the WB, the IMF and the WTO they are members-of, as well as in their agreements with NGO and government partners (e.g., in free trade agreements).

· Donors must be responsive to the needs of the different groups they want to support and must be aware of how decisions are made and priorities set, including whether genuine grassroots participatory processes have been adopted.

· Donors must guarantee participation of the affected populations.

· Donors must, as a priority, support the HR of so-far excluded or discriminated groups.

· Donors are not only accountable to their own voters, but also to claim holders in developing countries affected by their development cooperation. (Here is where the power-balance-considerations blocking fair and equitable solutions must kick-in).

· Donors must promote and assure non-discrimination, and must not attach conditions that undermine a developing country’s ability to guarantee HR.

· Donors must disaggregate the data they collect in HR-sensitive ways.

· Donors must provide HR learning opportunities to their staff, to their partners and to their beneficiaries.

5. In all the above, we note that the HR Framework actually transforms the bilateral relation between donor and partner into a triangular relation at the center of which the direct recipients of aid projects play an active role as claim holders while the donor and government partners are bearers of obligations. (O. de Schutter)

6. Coming back to legal obligations, as we have said many times before in this Reader, together with civil society, governments must design a national strategy for the progressive realization of HR and then must take the necessary measures to carry out the strategy.

7. What we here add is that such strategies cannot be detached from what is happening in the outside world. For instance, the realization of the human right to health and the human right to nutrition can be effective only if there is a decrease in the dependence on (unfair) international trade in goods and services (GATS). (O. de Schutter)

8. So, it is only by aligning our own tactics with those coming from current or would-be claim holders that lasting changes will come… And, let’s celebrate: The groups fighting for such changes are indeed many more and much more active these days. (CETIM)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City cschuftan@phmovement.org _________________________________

 Mostly adapted from J. Bueno de Mezquita and P. Hunt

1. As we have it now, foreign aid is instrumental in decreasing constructive social, economic, and political tensions and internal contradictions that would tend, sooner or later,  redress or resolve the growing imbalances and injustices of the prevailing internal exploitative system in many a recipient country.

2. In the best of cases, donors give their aid in a well-intentioned, but nevertheless vain and futile attempt to mitigate or remedy this ongoing internal economic exploitation.

3. In the worst of cases, as we all know, donors channel their aid through ruling national elites, most often fully aware of how these elites are instrumental in perpetuating this state of affairs: therefore, do the donors become accomplices in the process of exploitation?

4. Local governments channel their own development funds often to urban and more prestigious projects, resting assured that foreign aid will assume a sizable fraction of rural development costs for them.

5. To top things off, foreign aid often attempts to impose Western (Northern) models of development, e.g. cash-crop support or large irrigation schemes, which carry not only the seeds of the further exploitation of those supposedly aided, but also the continuing enrichment of the ruling elites.

6. The difficult to take truth is that, if current type Western (Northern) foreign aid does not cease or is drastically reoriented, it will never achieve its stated aims and objectives – a fact that is already widely recognized, but for which all kinds of excuses are found. If donors do not begin to look at macro-economic parameters, their “good will” will be used facetiously to perpetuate the status quo. (Chances are strong that many of the donor countries would not mind being used in such a way, as long as their public image looks good to the rest of the world, especially to the other members of the club of donors).

7. Most countries face quite a number of problems in managing to absorb all the foreign aid efficiently and clearly lag behind in that task. The bottlenecks that explain this are related among other factors, to shortages of trained manpower, serious limitations in infrastructure, and a slow-paced bureaucracy.

8. Instead of asking ourselves how much foreign aid poor people need, we must ask ourselves whether  Western (Northern) tax dollars are being used to shore up the economic and political power of a few who make the powerlessness of the many inevitable. Do these tax dollars go to regimes who sustain themselves in power by repression against the poor? Statistics cannot help us answer such questions. Only identifying with needless human suffering will.

9. Foreign aid is rightly accused of many things: being based on a false logic: doing more harm than good; maintaining (and protecting) the status- quo in Third World countries; undermining food autonomy; being a political weapon of the rich countries; perpetuating underdevelopment.  There is no indication that policies regarding this aid  –both in donor and recipient countries– are changing drastically despite mounting evidence for the above claims.

10. Short of a call for an overall discontinuation of all aid, foreign aid can play a role in fostering development, but not just any kind of aid. In this context, it is important to determine which kind of aid would be needed, for whom, and under what circumstances.

11. But foreign aid has its own politics. Simply denouncing its deleterious effects is not enough. Some political actions need to be taken.

12. The mere thought that foreign aid can automatically bring mutual benefits is simply a political fiction. Moreover, the assumption that this aid can be neutral is as shaky as the now-discredited notion of a value-free education. Present day aid policy makers, therefore, have to be confronted with the pressing questions regarding the relevance of their own work. Development assistance cannot automatically be considered as well-suited to developing countries. In the international development community, it has actually gotten a rather bad image as a resource that has been poorly used. Mostly, the way it has been used is what has given it its bad reputation.

13. The fact that most formulas for using aid moneys were actually developed to expedite rapid disposal with minimal financial and political costs has conditioned the current drawbacks that have been pointed out. The result is that there are serious deficiencies in the operation and theoretical foundation of Northern foreign aid projects. These projects are often not implemented as planned and ultimate impacts remain unrealized.

14. Aid is extremely vulnerable to political pressures and is an area in which ‘politics-literally-stands-directly-between-the-life-and-death-of-millions’.

15. Some seem to believe that without foreign aid, the present development crises would be even worse. If this view were correct, there would be no reason to alter present development strategies and one should simply spend a great deal more money on them. The basic problem, however, is that these present strategies do not adequately address the issue of Human Rights violations, the issue of redistribution of assets and income, the issue of income generation for the poor and of adequate expenditures for public services for the poor.

16. Therefore, for alternative development strategies to become a cornerstone of genuine development (such as the Human Rights-based approach), policy cannot be usefully discussed outside a broader geo-political and socio-economic framework.  Much more far-reaching steps must be taken to avoid the catastrophic failures of the past.

17. Moreover, the sad reality is that aid given with one hand as a soft loan is actually being taken away with the other. The debt trap in which many a developing country is caught makes it necessary to service the debt in hard currency, this directly undermining the whole idea of foreign aid.

18. Another valid criticism voiced about aid is that it gets too involved in looking at improving the system’s management, ignoring the need for the system’s drastic reform. Donor agencies somehow avoid raising the issues of structural changes, because of the conflict of interests this inherently raises for them. For many, aid is actually still coupled with a strong belief in the (discredited) trickle-down process despite the evidence that the actual value of the net transfers from most foreign-funded development projects is often less than 30% of the budgeted funds; a big proportion of it, donors spend at home in procuring goods and in expensive consultants (the latter often far removed from the realities in the South).

19. Further, there has also been a trend away from aid to the lower-income countries. The concentration of US aid on only a few countries, for example, shows that its objectives are strategic rather than humanitarian. But the US is not alone in this.

20. On another political note, donors actually agree that aid can discourage local production, increase dependency, alter people’s habits, encourage corruption, and does not reach the more needy. Nevertheless, they contend that none of these problems need happen under ‘proper’ safeguards. They genuinely seem to believe that aid, when used for ‘strict’ developmental purposes, can be made to have none of the above drawbacks. How this is going to come about is seldom elaborated upon.

21. In addition, the same aid often causes severe budgetary and logistic problems to the recipient countries since donors often pay for only some (or none) of the local recurrent costs.

22. According to Susan George, the following postulates are generally true for most countries receiving foreign aid:

- A strategy that benefits the least well-off groups will not be acceptable to the dominant groups unless their own interests are also substantially served.

- A strategy that benefits only poor classes will be ignored, sabotaged, or otherwise suppressed by the powerful, insofar as possible.

-       A strategy that serves the interests of elites, while doing positive harm to the poor, will still be put into practice and, if necessary, maintained by violence so long as no change occurs in the balance of social and political forces.

23. So, to be more effective, foreign aid should:

-generate a multiplier effect on the amount of resources allocated for other disparity-reduction programs in the recipient country;

-primarily meet the transitional needs and costs of such disparity-reduction policy adjustments, acting mainly as a catalyst; aid is good only when used as a vehicle of transition;

-in some way, help increase the bargaining power of the poor and the politically marginalized. For this to occur, peasants, workers and women must be helped to form or strengthen their own representative associations.

24. If a recipient government cannot agree to these basic conditions  –which will necessarily alter the internal balance of power–  a simple syllogism would indicate that it would be better for the donor to withhold aid.

25. But perhaps aid needs to be rethought and restructured, not necessarily withdrawn. Centering it around the human rights-based framework is an option rapidly gaining ground. That will require fostering the political and economic changes necessary in the recipient country to make it possible for aid to really make a difference. The risk is for the latter effort to become another area for the donors being (rightly or wrongly) accused of neo-colonial interference.

26. The real commitment to the eradication of Human Rights violations, such as hunger, malnutrition, ill-health plus all the other, implies a massive assault on the roots of underdevelopment and poverty  Foreign aid thus only adds false hopes to the prospects of poverty alleviation. At best, aid treats the symptoms of poverty, not its causes.

Anybody moved to react?

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan@phmovement.org