Brookings: Experts - Noam Unger

AIDS 2012: Key Lessons from a Decade of Action on Global AIDS, and the Way Forward

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

June 25, 2012
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

On June 25, Brookings hosted Ambassador Eric Goosby, M.D., United States Global AIDS Coordinator, for a discussion of key themes at the XIX International AIDS Conference, which took place July 22-27, 2012 in Washington, DC.

Ambassador Goosby discussed lessons from the first decade of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), focusing on successes that can inform future efforts on AIDS and global health. In his role as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Ambassador Goosby oversees implementation of PEPFAR, as well as U.S. government engagement with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Ambassador Goosby has more than 25 years of experience with HIV/AIDS, ranging from his early years treating patients at San Francisco General Hospital when AIDS first emerged, to engagement at the highest level of policy leadership. From 2001 to 2009, he served as CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation. He also previously served as professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. During the Clinton Administration, he served as Deputy Director of the White House National AIDS Policy Office and Director of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As the first director of the Ryan White Care Act at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Ambassador Goosby helped develop HIV/AIDS delivery systems in the United States.

Brookings Fellow Noam Unger provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. After the program, Ambassador Goosby took audience questions.

You can follow the conversation on this event on Twitter using the hashtag #AIDS2012.

Video

Conflict and Stabilization Operations: A Conversation with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rick Barton

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 17, 2012
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

For years, the U.S. government has been grappling with how to manage conflict prevention and stabilize crises and conflict-torn societies. Ongoing reforms at the U.S. Department of State include the transformation of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization into a new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The mission of the new bureau is to advance U.S. national security by driving integrated, civilian-led efforts to prevent, respond to, and stabilize crises in priority states, creating conditions for long-term peace.

On April 17, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted Ambassador Rick Barton, the newly confirmed assistant secretary of state for Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Assistant Secretary Barton discussed his vision for the new bureau and the priorities on his agenda. Brookings Fellow Noam Unger provided introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.

Audio

Conflict and Stabilization Operations: A Conversation with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rick Barton

Transcript

Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20120417_conflict_stabilization

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Rick Barton

Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations
U.S. Department of State

U.S. Aid and Transparency for Global Development

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

January 19, 2012
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Over the past year the U.S. government has made significant commitments to improve foreign aid transparency through a new informational website and an action plan for the multilateral Open Government Partnership initiative. More recently, the Obama administration has announced its intent to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, an effort to agree upon and employ standards for publishing information on aid spending. And controversial implementation decisions about new U.S. laws on conflict minerals and natural resource extraction present a pivotal moment for transparency and global development policy beyond aid.

On January 19, the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at Brookings and Publish What You Fund hosted a discussion of the 2011 Aid Transparency Index and explored the importance of transparency commitments and how they can be fulfilled. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, delivered keynote remarks, followed by a panel discussion with Karin Christiansen, director of Publish What You Fund; Daniel Kaufmann, Brookings senior fellow; and George Ingram, co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and chair of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. Brookings Fellow Noam Unger provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, speakers took audience questions.

Video

The Ultimate Success of Aid

Audio

U.S. Aid and Transparency for Global Development

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20120119_aid_transparency

Participants

Panelists

Rajiv Shah

Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development

Karin Christiansen

Director
Publish What You Fund

George Ingram

Co-Chair
Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network

Busan, the United States and Transparent Development Results

Homi Kharas and Noam Unger — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:25:00 -0500

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea. The United States is attending with a particularly high power delegation, led by Secretary Clinton, to underscore U.S. leadership abroad on technical and political aspects of development policy. The U.S. government heads into the forum with a handful of priority themes, including country ownership, partnerships with the private business community and philanthropists, and transparency, sustainability and results. The United States seeks to be a leader in these areas and has the rhetoric to match, but much more needs to be done to connect the language of commitment to the reality of U.S. development activities. With the right balance of pressure and political space, the Busan forum may present the opportunity for the United States to step up its game, especially on transparency and results. In each of these areas, the United States can tangibly advance new tools for catalytic cooperation.

With regard to transparency, the United States is approaching a critical milestone. One year ago, the Obama administration unveiled its foreign assistance dashboard website and published the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which touted aid transparency as a key principle of high-impact development. Despite leading in other areas of transparency by pushing the Open Government Partnership into existence, for much of the past year progress on aid transparency seemed to have stalled. The dashboard was limited to a synthesis of previously available State Department and USAID budget and appropriation data in a user-friendly format and there was no progress on the promised expansion of the website to include multiple categories of data across all U.S. government agencies implementing foreign assistance. The 2011 Quality of Official Development Assistance assessment found that the United States ranked 12th out of 31 donors in the category of transparency and learning, which does not exactly correspond to leadership in these areas. This assessment is generally corroborated by Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Index.

But just last week, in anticipation of the forum new data was finally published to the dashboard to reflect information on planning, obligations and expenditures from the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation. This was a long-anticipated step since the MCC was designed to serve as a model of aid transparency and has consistently led in this area, by scoring the best, for example, among U.S. agencies in the Publish What You Fund index. To build on this momentum, the United States should publish a specific schedule for adding data from more agencies and categories to the dashboard in the way it was originally envisioned. That would bring the United States closer to a position of true leadership and make it into the largest provider of data consistent with the standards developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). In fact, there is even speculation that the United States might officially sign up to the IATI, which would be very welcome given that the United States has shaped these standards as an observer and already come close to substantial implementation, even without officially being an IATI signatory.

The United States also stands out in its commitment to a results-based focus in aid delivery, pioneered by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which was set up with an explicit framework for “measurable results”. The MCC approach starts with monitoring processes and outputs at the country level during its country selection and compact design phase, and then continues to track higher-level outcomes and impact as compacts mature. This approach is now being taken up by other development agencies, including the International Development Association (IDA), the concessional arm of the World Bank.

The IDA has proposed a new financing instrument called Program-For-Results (P4R) to indicate its commitment to the idea that development results are the key objectives, not just expanding the size of government spending in partner countries. The instrument is demand-driven and has strong country ownership because it supports programs designed by the countries themselves. Disbursements would be linked to achieving results. This puts a greater premium on transparency and accountability—no results, no aid—and helps transform the dialogue in a constructive way onto metrics of development and cost-effective means of delivery. The IDA is in a good position to push the envelope in this direction because it is ranked as the most transparent aid agency in the world. Of course, there are issues of information, control of resources, and environmental, social and program sustainability, and these would have to be closely monitored within the program. Like any innovation, lessons from the first operation would have to be systematically incorporated into future designs. For example, one important unknown is how best to strengthen the capacity of countries to prepare and monitor their own programs without undermining ownership.

The United States should support P4R and encourage other institutions to embrace the transparency and results agenda. The Busan forum calls for innovative approaches and new partnerships that can be aligned around a common results framework. If the U.S. can raise the profile of this agenda across the globe, it can reinforce its leadership position on development.

Authors

Image Source: Â© STR New / Reuters

Global Development Under Pressure

Laurence Chandy, Kemal Derviş, Homi Kharas, Ariadne Medler and Noam Unger — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:51:00 -0500

Over the past decade, many developing countries have experienced unprecedented economic growth that has left them more confident about their development trajectories, more assertive in articulating their needs for external assistance, and more capable of funding development from their own resources. Several of these countries are now simultaneously both recipients and providers of international development aid. But the reverse also holds for those developing countries that remain gripped in fragile and conflict situations, where none of the Millennium Development Goals have been achieved. So far, the international community has failed to provide an adequate solution for how these countries can be brought to stability. Meanwhile, the established club of advanced donor countries—a group directly affected by the ongoing financial and economic crisis—is heavily indebted and subject to strong financial and political pressures to cut budgets and development support.

Private philanthropic and civil society organizations have burst onto the development scene on a much greater scale than just a decade ago. Many international nongovernmental organizations have transformed themselves to mobilize resources for their own programs, giving them more independence from governmentfinanced projects. And multinational corporations are increasingly active in development as they do business, and find profit, in emerging markets. Each of these stakeholders must also contend with the pressures imposed by instant, technology-fueled global communications. Ours is an era of fast-moving change and exchange.

In certain respects, the global development community is awake to these shifting currents, which provide a popular topic for discussion and a motive for reforms. Yet both the pace and implications of change have been underestimated, and reforms to existing cooperation structures and activities are not keeping up. Widening gaps between international agendas and reality demonstrate that global development actors are struggling. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and other grand agreements from the past decade have taken years to negotiate, only to then age quickly in the face of rapidly changing contexts and ideas. As an example, it has taken more than a decade to reach—and operationalize—a global consensus to focus development support on low-income, stable countries. However, this framework is of little relevance in today’s world in which 90 percent of the global poor live in middle-income countries or in fragile states.

The Arab Spring serves as another example of the failure of development cooperation to keep pace with the rapidly changing context in those countries. Government-to-government aid programs have proven ill-equipped to support development when recipient governments themselves are perceived as part of the problem of underdevelopment, rather than as part of the solution. Following political change, there is pressure on global development players to act quickly and responsibly—not least to make up for the shortcomings of their earlier engagement. Yet donors struggle to act without recourse to country-led development strategies that enjoy broad domestic consensus. In many of these countries, which have considerable domestic resources of their own, development cooperation does not revolve around aid, but requires the coherent application of non-aid instruments.

Clearly the process of reforms across the architecture of aid and development support must accelerate. If the relevance interval of global agreements has grown shorter, development actors should improve their ability to anticipate change and translate their ideas more quickly into action. Policy discussions on public-private partnerships, for example, still remain focused on the celebration of project-oriented deals after more than twenty years. What we need, however, is a wholesale shift to a new set of instruments that will enable larger-scale strategic programs.

The good news is that there is massive energy from millions of individuals around the world focused on tackling the challenges of development, which can help extract positive changes out of the present crucible of pressures. A key question is how to best harness that energy and coordinate connections and divisions of labor among the various elements of the modern development ecosystem. We convened the 2011 Brookings Blum Roundtable to address such questions and to discuss the state of global development cooperation, opportunities presented by international platforms for policy dialogue, the lessons of the Arab Spring, U.S. development policy reforms and the challenges of effective communications.

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United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Fit for Purpose?

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:30:00 -0400

Event Information

October 18, 2011
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Historic demand for United Nations peacekeeping has seen 120,000 peacekeepers deployed worldwide, managing crises from Lebanon to Darfur. UN political officers are currently assisting the new government in Libya and logisticians are backing up African Union troops in Somalia. But while crises from Haiti to Sudan underline the critical role of these operations, increasing budgetary and political pressures, and questions about the role and impact of peacekeeping, are adding complexity to policy debates about reform.

On October 18, the Managing Global Order project a Brookings and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement hosted a discussion on peacekeeping featuring Anthony Banbury, UN assistant secretary general for field support, Stimson Center Senior Associate William Durch and Brookings Fellow Noam Unger, policy director for the foreign assistance reform project. The panelists discussed ways in which the United Nations is responding to pressures for reform of its peacekeeping operations and how financial and political challenges could reshape the organization. Senior Fellow Bruce Jones, director of the Managing Global Order project, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, participants took audience questions.

Audio

United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Fit for Purpose?

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20111018_un_peacekeeping

Participants

Panelists

Anthony Banbury

Assistant-Secretary General for Field Support
United Nations

William J. Durch

Senior Associate, Future of Peace Operations
Stimson Center

Hillary Clinton to Attend Busan Forum: Demonstrating Development Diplomacy?

Homi Kharas and Noam Unger — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:48:00 -0400

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just announced that she will attend the upcoming High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Although this event will be the fourth such forum – following on Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008) – it will be the first time the U.S. is represented at such a high level.

We view Clinton’s attendance as a positive step, having made the case for it privately in meetings and openly in publications (see our policy paper and this recent brief). But how does her attendance fit into the context of reforms to elevate global development within the U.S. government? And how can her participation lead to a better High-Level Forum? Here are some of our thoughts:

The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), issued at the end of 2010, focused in part on how the State Department can play a role in elevating development within U.S. foreign policy. It explicitly states:

“Elevating development as a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy requires not just rebuilding USAID into the world’s premier development institution, but also transforming the Department of State to support development. Secretary Clinton recognizes that while diplomacy and development are each critical in their own right, when they work together they are the basis on unrivaled civilian power to advance U.S. interests. For too long, however, the Department of State has not always been a willing and capable partner for USAID in supporting the development pillar of our foreign policy.”

The review goes on to note that State should systematically use diplomacy to advance development by negotiating and promoting international policy agreements in the context of multilateral forums in a way that complements USAID rather than treading on that agency’s expertise.

The transformation of the State Department to better support development makes many development assistance advocates and close observers nervous about further absorption and instrumentalization of operational assistance programming into the toolkit of diplomacy. The construct of the three “D’s” – development, diplomacy and defense – as distinct pillars of U.S. national security and foreign policy can quickly morph into a two-dimensional frame that blurs diplomacy and development while setting them apart from military efforts. Given USAID’s recent history of eroded independence, this is a legitimate concern especially with regard to increased roles for the State Department in operational aid programs and aid budget management.

But there are many ways the State Department can support development by drawing on its comparative advantages. For example, in conflict-affected states where an international military presence is required, State can use its expertise and influence with other departments, governments and international organizations to shape coherent stabilization efforts that are conducive to development.

A more obvious comparative advantage is the international prominence of the Secretary of State, which should be put to good use in Busan. So while USAID should naturally continue to lead in shaping U.S. positions for Busan— after all it’s a global development conference — Clinton’s participation should enable the U.S. to leverage her unique profile on the global stage. As one of us previously noted in reference to the OECD ministerial meeting in May 2011, “Secretary Clinton must continually use development diplomacy opportunities to empower USAID and its administrator, Rajiv Shah, in the eyes of other U.S. government and international officials. Secretary Clinton is certainly capable of using her star power in this way, but will she?”

With regard to the High-Level Forum itself, Secretary Clinton’s commitment to attend is already serving as a game-changer that could snatch a politically meaningful result from the jaws of an otherwise technocratic aid conference. Six years ago in Paris, at an earlier conference on aid effectiveness, rich countries committed themselves to make changes in the way they delivered aid to improve its impact. They have made some progress on this and the efforts are contributing to better development results, but the pace has been slow. As panelists at a recent Brookings conference argued, this is mostly because the necessary improvements in aid delivery require tough political support. In essence, the reforms would transfer more control over resources to beneficiaries in return for greater accountability on results. Persuading Congress and the public that that is a sensible approach to improving the “bang-for-the-buck” for U.S. taxpayers is essentially a political issue.

Busan will be a political event in other ways as well. There are now many international forums that deal with development in overlapping ways, including the United Nations and the G-20, and many more providers of development cooperation, including China and other emerging economies. Busan must reposition the aid industry to work better in this environment, taking the discussions beyond aid into a more systematic “development effectiveness” agenda. The attendance of Secretary Clinton, and the other foreign ministers who will now be encouraged to attend, can signal that this repositioning is underway. Maybe then new forms of aid partnerships can be built, including with the private sector, so that aid and other instruments of development cooperation can catalyze and accelerate improved living standards in the poorest parts of the world.

Lastly, as one of the world’s strongest voices on greater investment in women and girls, Secretary Clinton’s participation provides a new opportunity to add a focus on gender to the development agenda at Busan.

Authors

Image Source: Â© Zoubeir Souissi / Reuters

Reforming U.S. Foreign Aid: Recommendations from the OECD Development Assistance Committee Peer Review

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:30:00 -0400

Event Information

July 28, 2011
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

In today’s cost-cutting budget environment, efforts to reform U.S. foreign assistance programs to better support development outcomes have become more important than ever. What are the main opportunities and challenges as the U.S. aid architecture seeks to adapt to a changing global environment? How can better aid management and cooperation support these goals? The Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducts periodic peer reviews of member countries to answer these questions. The peer review focuses on helping countries understand areas for improvements in development strategy and structure, as well as identify and share best practices.

On July 28, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and the OECD hosted a discussion on the recently completed peer review of the United States. J. Brian Atwood, chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, provided an overview of the peer review’s findings. Following his remarks, panelists including Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Senior Fellow Homi Kharas, deputy director of Global Economy and Development at Brookings, and Connie Veillette, director of the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program at the Center for Global Development, discussed the review process and its conclusions in the context of ongoing reforms. Fellow Noam Unger, policy director of the Foreign Assistance Reform Project at Brookings, moderated the discussion.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Audio

Reforming U.S. Foreign Aid: Recommendations from the OECD Development Assistance Committee Peer Review

Transcript

Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20110727_foreign_aid_reform

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

J. Brian Atwood

Chair, Development Assistance Committee
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Donald Steinberg

Deputy Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development

Connie Veillete

Director, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program
Center for Global Development

50th Anniversary Ministerial: Spotlight on the D in OECD

Noam Unger — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:12:00 -0400

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will chair the upcoming Ministerial Council Meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and analysts interested in global development policy may want to pay close attention.

This year’s event, structured around the theme “Better Policies for Better Lives,” marks the 50th anniversary of the OECD. According to a preview by Under Secretary of State Robert D. Hormats, Secretary Clinton’s participation will be centered on a discussion of new paradigms for development. As Ambassador Richard A. Boucher (Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD) noted in the same briefing, “development is big on the agenda.”

Armed with President Obama’s policy directive on global development (see commentary) and the findings of her own Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (more commentary), it is no surprise that Secretary Clinton is focusing on development. But what should we look for? A number of items come to mind and they fall into the following four categories:

Emphasis beyond traditional aid: Apparently Secretary Clinton is planning to lay out a detailed vision that is meant to “expand the discussion from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness.” This is an important step since the U.S. and other countries trying to support sustainable development must establish more coherent approaches across a wide array of policy areas that impact development, like trade, agriculture, investment, energy, military security and migration. As I noted in a recent paper with my colleague, Homi Kharas, incoherent policies are characterized by counterproductive efforts and by missed opportunities for synergy. The coordination necessary to surmount the problem requires strong political will.

This broader approach to development is directly in line with President Obama’s policy directive on global development, which calls for a modern organizational architecture that enables greater policy coherence across the U.S. government. Since the announcement of the president’s directive in September 2010, however, much of the momentum on reform has remained focused on aid. The administration has rather quietly referenced the “Partnership for Growth,” which is intended to be a broader, more coordinated approach to supporting development in some countries, but details are lacking. Big changes take time but there has been little if any public elaboration on some of the initiatives announced in the presidential directive that could help with coherence beyond the State Department and USAID. These include the formulation of a presidentially-approved U.S. Global Development Strategy, robust assessments to determine the impact of all relevant policy decisions on development investments and outcomes, or even the creation of a U.S. Global Development Council that could be mandated to advise the president on practical steps to promote policy coherence across agencies. Perhaps the OECD ministerial meeting will mark a turning point by announcing concrete steps that draw upon the full range of U.S. instruments to promote development, including efforts through which aid can be more catalytic.

Secretary Clinton is expected to highlight the issue of promoting domestic financing for development through more effective tax systems in partner countries. The U.S. appetite to push this approach was foreshadowed by President Obama’s recent trip to El Salvador, where he and President Mauricio Funes endorsed plans to pilot a “new DF4D program, which will assist countries to mobilize domestic resources by improving public tax administration.” Secretary Clinton has also publicly hinted at the value of such an approach in the case of Pakistan.

Promotion of accountability and transparency: The emphasis on domestic financing in developing countries ties into efforts to reduce corruption and strengthen accountability. Support for the establishment of fair tax collection systems also presents a good opportunity to link donor aid transparency and the importance of transparent budgeting and spending by governments of developing countries. If members of the U.S. delegation do talk about this connection in the context of mutual accountability, expect them to also reference the new U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard as an example of the Obama administration’s commitment to aid transparency and accountability to both U.S. taxpayers and aid beneficiaries. The dashboard should, of course, be even more impressive as it develops and fulfills its potential.

Framing USAID’s role: In talking about development policy on the international stage, Secretary Clinton has to navigate the tension between using her platform to promote more coherent initiatives and making it appear like the State Department operates all the relevant moving parts of the U.S. government. Secretary Clinton should shine a light on other agencies of the U.S. government, and this is especially true for the U.S. Agency for International Development. President Obama’s policy directive includes an explicit “commitment to rebuilding USAID as the U.S. government’s lead development agency,” and Secretary Clinton must continually use development diplomacy opportunities to empower USAID and its administrator, Rajiv Shah, in the eyes of other U.S. government and international officials. Secretary Clinton is certainly capable of using her star power in this way, but will she?

Agenda setting for international development cooperation: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the OECD, Secretary Clinton and the U.S. delegation are likely to mount a forceful defense of multilateral partnership. This is not to say multilateralism will be under attack at the ministerial meeting – quite the opposite! But with regard to development assistance, most official development donors have swung toward bilateralism in recent years, decreasing the share of aid that they channel through core funding for multilateral agencies. The U.S. presents an extreme example: cutting its share of development assistance channeled through multilateral organizations by more than half over the past decade. While a dramatic reversal of this budgetary trend is unrealistic in Washington’s current political climate, the Obama administration has taken steps to embrace multilateral efforts to promote more effective development. This has been evident in the G20, in the serious rather than dismissive treatment of the Millennium Development Goals and the principles of the Paris Declaration, and in the renewed enthusiasm of the U.S. to play a leadership role in the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD.

It will be interesting to see how Secretary Clinton and the U.S. delegation use the opportunity of the OECD ministerial meetings to lay the groundwork for future leadership on international development cooperation. Might the U.S. signal openness for a more merit-based approach to selecting the leaders of the IMF and the World Bank that could pave the way for others beyond Europe and the U.S., respectively, to fill these roles? During the week of the G8 summit in Deauville and one year before the U.S. hosts the G8 again, will Secretary Clinton note that the U.S. is looking more toward the G20 than the G8 as an appropriate forum in which to exert leadership on development effectiveness? Will Secretary Clinton up the ante of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness by announcing that she will also attend that meeting in Busan, Korea later this year?

Authors

Noam Unger

Image Source: © Jim Young / Reuters

A Serious Approach to Development: Toward Success at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea

Homi Kharas and Noam Unger — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:51:00 -0400

With little more than a half year left to prepare before a key international conference on aid effectiveness in Busan, Korea, policymakers must consider the answers to two key questions: what could success at this meeting look like? And what can be done in the preparation phase to maximize the chances of success?

The fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness will build on agreements from past years, but this time the discussions are taking place in a markedly different context. In the face of heightened pressures on international aid, the meetings in Busan at the end of the year present an opportunity to finally take development cooperation seriously. The U.S. government in particular could play a critical and catalytic role.

Context
The 2011 High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan is different from the preceding forums in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). It must directly contend with a particularly complex mixture of factors. Some are new and some have simply grown too big to ignore, but all are actively mounting pressure on an essential yet weak system of international development support in need of reform:

First, budget difficulties in the traditional donor countries that provide major development support likely mark the end of an era of growing official aid budgets. Surveys by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD/DAC) suggest that aid growth will slow to just two percent a year from 2011 to 2013. Consequently there is a search to leverage aid with other resources and strategies for development. With tighter aid budgets, there is greater attention than ever before on improving the dysfunctional international aid architecture to make it more efficient, effective and accountable.
Second, newly prominent actors in development—from official partners like China to international NGOs to private corporations—have become large in financial terms, changing the nature of the aid landscape. While this phenomenon has been unfolding for years, the degree to which it is treated seriously in Busan will determine the relevance of the High Level Forum.

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The U.S. Global Development Council: What Should It Look Like?

John Norris and Noam Unger — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:31:00 -0400

When President Barack Obama launched a new U.S. global development policy last year to world leaders assembled at the United Nations, he said, “Put simply, the United States is changing the way we do business.” He also stated that supporting development cannot be the work of governments alone, noting that “foundations, the private sector and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] are making historic commitments that have redefined what’s possible.” This is well supported by the fact that the vast majority of resource flows from the United States to developing countries now come directly from private individuals, organizations and companies rather than from the U.S. government.

Having recognized this dramatic shift, and in an effort to nurture greater policy coherence across the broad range of U.S. government agencies and instruments now engaged in promoting global development in various ways, in September 2010 the White House issued a presidential policy directive on global development announcing that it was creating the U.S. Global Development Council. The directive stipulated that this council would be “comprised of leading members of the philanthropic sector, private sector, academia, and civil society, to provide high-level input relevant to the work of United States Government agencies.” However, no further details about the council were provided when the directive was released, nor have there been any subsequent statements from the administration clarifying how the council will function and when it might be up and running. This paper therefore spells out some of the key considerations that should be addressed as the council moves from concept to reality.

Advisory boards and councils designed to guide the government in its work are legion in Washington. They range from the high profile and influential, such as the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee and the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, to the obscure, such as the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries and the Flue Cured Tobacco Advisory Council. Advisory boards and councils can effectively steer the work of government in constructive ways, or they can serve as a delaying tactic to feign political concern in the absence of meaningful action. We offer these ideas and recommendations to spur a policy dialogue to enable the U.S. Global Development Council to emerge as an influential and steadily effective entity rather than one that fades into irrelevance and inaction.

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John Norris
Noam Unger

Image Source: © ERIC THAYER / Reuters

Aiding Development: Assistance Reform for the 21st Century

Kemal Derviş, Homi Kharas and Noam Unger — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:58:00 -0500

Global development assistance efforts are experiencing a critical moment of change. This moment is not a week or month but a several-year period in which political scales are tipping, rationales and underlying assumptions are being reexamined, and new systems and approaches are emerging.

Collectively, the public and private institutions involved are working around the world to alleviate poverty and human suffering, support equitable economic growth, foster better governance, promote global public health, prevent conflict, and strengthen the resilience of communities vulnerable to external shocks. These development actors operate at the threshold of a significant inflection point as they seek to answer big questions, including:

With many of the poorest developing countries not on track to meet most of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), what can be done to dramatically improve poverty reduction efforts focused on education, gender equality, nutrition, maternal mortality, and other key health concerns?
How should development strategies incorporate climate resilience and lowcarbon growth, and how should aid donors proceed with related financial support?
How can aid be improved to help jumpstart a process of self-sustaining economic growth?
How can external organizations support the achievement of stability in fragile states?

The solutions to these problems require major shifts in the international dialogue on development and aid, followed by key architectural and operational changes across a wide range of actors. Large donors like the United States must lead by modeling and implementing fundamental reforms.

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The QDDR: Following Through on Civilian Power?

Noam Unger — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:23:00 -0500

On Wednesday, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development unveiled the much-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review entitled “Leading Through Civilian Power.” The specific conclusions of the review are certainly of interest to many policymakers and policy watchers in Washington and around the world, but it is important to first recognize that the QDDR represents a critical effort to enhance strategic thinking and planning at both State and USAID. With an eye toward sharpened capabilities, one of the biggest tests of the review’s success will be whether it actually fosters an alignment of strategies and plans with appropriate resources.

Although the QDDR focuses on diplomacy and development, its readers should understand that the development issues covered constitute essential components of President Obama’s broader development policy across all the relevant instruments and agencies of the U.S. government, including but not limited to State and USAID. As Obama noted earlier this fall during his landmark development policy speech at the United Nations, “aid alone is not development,” and in addition to diplomacy, other policies like trade and investment are essential pieces of the puzzle.

Within the community focused on U.S. initiatives in diplomacy, foreign assistance, development, peace building and state building, there is a great deal of consensus on the need for strengthened civilian international affairs capacity. This consensus pre-dates the current review and the Obama administration, and it will be interesting to carefully examine the full QDDR, while reflecting on the recommendations from major study reports of the past decade. Many of these recommendations were parsed out in Surveying the Civilian Reform Landscape, a 2008 report I co-authored with Craig Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, a fair number of the most popular recommendations—whether on strategic planning, human resources and training, or engagement with the private sector—have a foothold in the QDDR.

From the QDDR executive summary, it is clear that the recommendations include many common-sense improvements necessary to execute effective diplomacy in the face of 21st century challenges. For example, the State Department will reorganize to focus on energy in close collaboration with economic and environmental affairs. It will also establish a coordinator for cyber issues, ensure better communications technology, continue to strengthen engagement with emerging powers, make its personnel systems more flexible to meet critical needs and take other steps to modernize.

One of the issues at the crux of the QDDR is how to deal with complex crises and conflicts. The focus is an important one, but a key recommendation for “a lead-agency approach with a clear division of leadership and responsibility” between State and USAID will not, in practice, have the clarity needed. State is assigned the lead for political and security crises and USAID has responsibility for leading responses to “humanitarian crises, resulting from large-scale natural or industrial disasters, famines, disease outbreaks and other natural phenomena.” However, famines are inherently political and the lines between these areas are murky enough that it may be bureaucratically difficult for USAID to truly lead on crises beyond the most tightly circumscribed delivery of disaster relief operations. Since USAID is the more operational agency, this leadership challenge may result in missed opportunities as State seeks to become more operational and more developmentally minded.

The most pressing issue with regard to U.S. peace building and state building efforts in fragile, conflict-affected regions is that of coordination across all relevant departments and agencies and this issue was largely beyond the scope of the QDDR. The Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at State has never been able to fulfill its whole-of-government coordination function, and its metamorphosis into a new Bureau for Crisis and Stabilization Operations will not help on this particular issue. What is needed is a much more robust coordination capacity at the White House.

On broader development issues beyond conflict and fragile states, the QDDR hits many of the right points. When USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah first took up his position a year ago, there were concerns that he was arriving too late to shape the review. The QDDR’s numerous delays and many of its conclusions related to development have shown that this concern was misplaced. The QDDR emphasizes systematic change over service delivery while placing high value on transparency, innovation, monitoring and evaluation, multi-year planning in close coordination with developing countries and rebuilding the core capacity of USAID. It has also determined that USAID should lead on the presidential initiatives related to food security and global health. This is a sound conclusion in accordance with President Obama’s policy of making USAID the government’s lead development agency and consciously begins to transition beyond the bureaucratically fragmented approach that has weakened U.S. global development efforts.

The QDDR’s decision to focus development support on specific sectors should lead many policy analysts to ask hard questions about how State and USAID define seemingly broad areas of concentration such as “sustainable economic growth.” Although greater focus is an important step toward more effective policies, everyone should also be asking what we will no longer be doing in order to achieve that goal.

Additionally, there is the question of geographic focus. How can we more deliberately concentrate our development efforts in particular countries? Where? And how might scaling back on bilateral assistance to certain countries relate to scaling up U.S. engagement with multilateral development institutions?

Other critically important questions relate to the interpretation of USAID mission directors as “primary development advisors” to U.S. ambassadors. How is this different from the past? Considering Obama’s stated intent for USAID to be the lead development agency, does this designation change USAID’s relationship with many other agencies of the U.S. government actively engaged in development support programs at the field level?

There is seemingly much to like about the QDDR, such as its well-placed focus on the role of women and girls in peace-building and development, but the review raises many questions. Ultimately, to make this type of review quadrennial in fact, rather than just in name, and to leave behind a legacy of institutional reform, the administration would do well to work closely with Congress. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has boldly chosen to try to fundamentally change the culture of the State Department—a large project to say the least. With the full 200+ page QDDR now available, expect to witness a lively debate on whether this is possible and whether progress is being made.

Noam Unger, a Global Economy and Development Fellow and the Policy Director of the Brookings Institution's Foreign Assistance Reform Project, has worked on humanitarian affairs, reconstruction, conflict transformation, and interagency coordination at both the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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Noam Unger

Image Source: © Akhtar Soomro / Reuters

Opening Up: Aid Information, Transparency and U.S. Foreign Assistance Reform

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

December 9, 2010
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

The Obama administration is seeking to reform U.S. foreign assistance to better support development outcomes. Transparent development programs and accessible, timely aid data can provide accountability to members of Congress, who hold the purse strings, and to American taxpayers, who foot the bill. Transparency can also help the United States set priorities, assess effectiveness and coordinate with other development partners – and help the citizens of developing countries strengthen their own institutions. What is the U.S. government doing to pursue transparency and what are the challenges? How does the U.S. compare to other donors and how can U.S. efforts align with and even shape emerging international standards for aid transparency?

On December 9, International Anti-Corruption Day, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and Publish What You Fund will host a discussion to address these questions. Karin Christiansen, director of Publish What You Fund, will present findings from a pioneering transparency assessment across 30 leading aid agencies. Ruth Levine of USAID’s Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning will address U.S. government efforts to improve development assistance transparency. Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan, Liberian finance minister, and Daniel Kaufmann, Brooking senior fellow, will serve as discussants. Brookings Fellow Noam Unger will provide introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Audio

Opening Up: Aid Information, Transparency and U.S. Foreign Assistance Reform

Transcript

Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

20101209_foreign_assistance

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Karin Christiansen

Director, Publish What You Fund

Ruth Levine

Deputy Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning, U.S. Agency for International Development

Nancy Birdsall

President, Center for Global Development

Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan

Minister of Finance, Republic of Liberia

Rwanda: A New Vision for Economic Development

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 7, 2010
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Rwanda has emerged from its war-torn past as one of the fastest growing countries in Africa. The country now boasts one of the best business climates in the region, an average growth rate of about 7 percent in the last decade, and by far the most gender balanced government in Africa. While Rwanda has many obstacles to overcome before it can reach ‘middle income country’ status, it presents a new and intriguing model for reconstituting post-conflict countries.

On October 7, the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) at Brookings hosted Rwandan Minister of Finance and Economic Planning John Rwangombwa to discuss his country’s progress, challenges and strategies for economic development. Dr. Mwangi Kimenyi, the director of the Africa Growth Initiative moderated the discussion.

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Participants

Panelists

John Rwangombwa

Minister of Finance and Economic Planning
The Republic of Rwanda

Set to Lead Again? New U.S. Engagement on Global Development

Homi Kharas and Noam Unger — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:56:00 -0400

The Obama administration’s foreign policy began with a mission to refashion America’s international image and influence. Last week, alongside a speech to the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals and nearly two years after he was elected, President Obama unveiled a critical component of that effort: his administration’s global development policy. The policy announcement marks a significant and welcome step in advancing a strategy Obama first put forward during his presidential campaign.

While the policy aims to support sustainable development outcomes worldwide, much of the announcement inwardly focused on necessary reform of U.S. governmental systems. It is critically important to modernize the U.S. approach to development and the capacity to successfully support that approach. Additionally, the policy emphasizes support for economic growth by strengthening multilateral capabilities, leveraging non-governmental development actors, coordinating more closely with development partners, and working in better alignment with developing nations’ priorities. With such aims at the core of a new operational model of development support, and with the president’s policy launch timed to coincide with the United Nations review of the MDGs, it seems the U.S. could be setting itself up to once again be the international leader on development issues.

Renewing Multilateral Development Cooperation

U.S. leadership in international development has taken a hit in recent years—largely due to the unilateral (or at best, bilateral) approach that marked the George W. Bush administration’s efforts. Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the Bush administration worked with Congress to invest heavily in focused, innovative, and results-oriented development programs designed and implemented by the U.S. alone. United States multilateral cooperation sank precipitously as a consequence. Since 2000—even as U.S. development assistance increased nearly 10 percent per year in real terms—the share of foreign assistance channeled through multilateral organizations dropped by more than half (down to 11 percent today compared to an average of 30 percent for other rich countries). Also during this period, the U.S. ceased to be the largest donor to several multilateral development funds. The U.K. surpassed the U.S. in contributions to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s concessional fund for the poorest countries; and in contributions to the African Development Fund, the U.S. now ranks behind the U.K., France and Germany. Beyond lower relative funding to multilateral agencies, the U.S. also implemented its development programs in relative isolation. According to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, only 12 percent of U.S. aid missions are effectively coordinated with other donors.

To the extent that the U.S. engaged in broad international dialogue on development cooperation during the Bush administration, it seemed to do so grudgingly. Through Ambassador John Bolton, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations at the time, the Bush administration even sought to excise all references to the MDGs in a 2005 U.N. summit document. At the 2008 High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, the U.S. could not even agree to be a signatory to the International Aid Transparency Initiative even though transparency is central to U.S. domestic values.

In contrast, the Obama administration’s new policy positions the U.S. to embrace international efforts to promote more effective development, allowing for the opportunity to shape that open dialogue in a way that reflects American values, such as market-driven approaches to growth. Serious, rather than dismissive, treatment of the Millennium Development Goals, for example, gives the U.S. a chance to promote good governance, better measurement of outcomes, sustainability through the development of country systems and other key themes. In his speech at the MDG summit, Obama made a point of noting that broad-based economic growth “turned South Korea from a recipient of aid to a donor of aid.” It so happens that South Korea will host two upcoming meetings that will further test the U.S.’s willingness and ability to influence international development strategies: the upcoming G-20 Summit in November that will debate development issues for the first time, and the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.

Also in his speech, the president emphasized scaling up development efforts in places where countries themselves have made good governance and economic development a priority. Without abandoning crisis response and humanitarian relief efforts, Obama has committed to steer the U.S. system to become more selective and deliberately focused, “where we have the best partners and where we can have the greatest impact.” This high-impact approach also has implications for multilateral development cooperation. While the new policy acknowledges the need to “make hard choices about how to allocate attention and resources across countries, regions and sectors,” such decisions invite political costs as certain programs and country missions are closed down in favor of others. However, the policy explicitly includes a commitment to renew U.S. leadership within multilateral development organizations, and widespread multilateral engagement can provide a balance to more narrowly selective and focused bilateral efforts. With greater leadership at the multilateral development banks, the United Nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and other multilateral organizations, the U.S. can still influence resources deployed across many countries worldwide while also sharpening its focus on development results.

A Lead Development Agency

A key element of development leadership under Obama’s new policy will be the elevation and strengthening of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The MCC and PEPFAR initiatives of the Bush administration were intentionally established apart from USAID, because the latter was viewed as weak and, in some ways, too broken to fix. That approach to USAID shifted late in Bush’s second term when the administration sought to reform the agency by integrating it into the U.S. State Department. Under Obama’s leadership, USAID’s status has been unclear.

The president’s policy, however, seeks to “reestablish the United States as the global leader on international development” by “rebuilding USAID as the U.S. government’s lead development agency.” This is significant because the White House included 16 different agencies across the bureaucracy to review the U.S. approach to development, which fed into the creation of the new policy. Additionally, in his speech on the MDGs, President Obama emphasized that development policies and strategies are about more than foreign assistance. To be the leader for development, USAID, must be able to guide more than just aid. To do so requires clout, capacity and creativity. If implemented well, the new policy could provide for all three:

Clout: Rajiv Shah, the leader of USAID, now has an explicit role on the National Security Council. He must promote a strong development viewpoint; and USAID mission directors in embassies and developing country capitals worldwide must be empowered.
Capacity: Given many years of bureaucratic fragmentation of development-related responsibilities and operations across the government combined with severe losses of in-house technical expertise, USAID needs to rebuild. Already, Shah is taking steps in this direction by pushing policy, budget, planning and evaluation capabilities. The president’s approach points toward new “development impact” assessments of policy changes affecting developing countries (such as shifts in trade policy). As it is rebuilt to be the U.S. government’s lead development agency, USAID should augment its capacity to spearhead such assessments.
Creativity: Tension lies in the combination of renewed multilateral development cooperation and the President’s commitment to making USAID the U.S. government’s lead development agency. An elevated lead development agency should have a more prominent role in affairs concerning multilateral development organizations. This has implications for U.S. policy toward the multilateral development banks, which is led by the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as policy toward the U.N. humanitarian and development agencies, generally guided by the U.S. State Department. Subject to statutory reforms, which may or may not emerge from current Congressional interest in the modernization of development legislation, existing laws establish some of the current divisions of responsibility among agencies. Even so, USAID could take on a bigger role with regard to multilateral development issues not assigned to a different agency by law. In other cases, creative arrangements could emerge unless and until the law changes. For example, working in conjunction with the Treasury Department, USAID could establish closer collaboration with multilateral development banks.

A Bit of Evolution, a Bit of Revolution

In certain ways, the new strategy represents a significant shift in how the U.S. manages its development operations, while in other ways it demonstrates consistency and continuity. Obama is building on the good aspects of his predecessor’s aid programs by: retaining the MCC and its approach to good performers, transparency and measurement; advancing PEPFAR as a dominant component of a results-oriented global health program that is focusing increasingly on sustainable health systems; and ramping up resources and human capital at USAID and the State Department even in a very trying budget environment. Rather than creating new aid institutions to execute new initiatives, the Obama administration is wary of fragmentation and focused instead on strengthening core systems. The strategy also suggests that elements of selectivity, public-private partnership, and an analytically-based results orientation will apply to development aid efforts more broadly. Development’s place in the U.S. national security strategy is similarly more evolution than revolution, as this trend developed in the last administration.

What is more revolutionary, is the clear recognition that U.S. development policy must be about more than aid. Organizationally, alongside its long-term commitment to build up USAID to be the nation’s lead development agency and the world’s premier development agency, the White House has recognized the need to oversee a coherent global development strategy that factors in the broader array of development policy instruments in areas such as trade, investment, migration and agriculture. The administration’s strategy indicates a commitment to a more comprehensive and coherent approach to supporting development outcomes. To the extent that President Obama succeeds in truly elevating USAID in a manner that lasts beyond his tenure, this might also represent a revolution. If the administration’s shift in tone on multilateral cooperation translates into real resources for engagement through such institutions, and through cooperation on the ground, then this too could be a revolution. The degree to which these revolutions succeed through policy implementation will determine whether the U.S. can lead on global development.

Authors

Development Assistance Reform for the 21st Century

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:00:00 -0400

Event Information

August 4-6, 2010

From high-profile stabilization contexts like Afghanistan to global public health campaigns to a renewed focus on sustainable food security and the looming impacts of climate change, development effectiveness is a central and hotly debated issue. As traditional donors make progress in the international aid effectiveness dialogue, they must increasingly take into account the changing global development landscape and the slew of new actors, including emerging donors, multinational corporations, mega philanthropists, high-profile advocates, and a vocal and energized global public.

The seventh annual Brookings Blum Roundtable, led by Kemal Derviş and co-chaired by Richard C. Blum and Strobe Talbott, convened over 40 exceptional international thought leaders, entrepreneurs and practitioners to explore the relationship between efforts to promote aid effectiveness and the anticipated shape of the global development agenda over the next decade. The roundtable discussions provided an opportunity to look beyond questions of increased resources for anti-poverty services to the effectiveness of different approaches and to systemic issues associated with the delivery of development outcomes. The high-level group of participants explored opportunities for new commitment in engaging the private sector and multilateral actors, as well as the increasingly important role of climate assistance and operations in instable arenas. Over separate meal conversations, Dr. Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, and Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), reflected on the current and future roles of their organizations, and how they could each act on the suggestions put forward at the roundtable.

Learn more about the 2010 roundtable » (PDF)
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Read the roundtable report »

Catalyzing Development: A New Vision for Aid

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

July 29-30, 2010

Saul and Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

The global aid system is at a crossroads. 2010 is the target year for implementation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, a commitment by the international aid community to reform the way it delivers aid to developing countries. Despite progress in some areas, and renewed pledges made in Accra two years ago, most of the targets set under the Declaration will not be met. At next year’s Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4), to be held in Busan, Korea, the international aid community must find a way of breathing new life into the effectiveness agenda or else risk losing credibility, as well as wasting countless more aid dollars.

On July 29 and 30, Brookings co-hosted a private workshop entitled Catalyzing Development: A New Vision for Aid to consider the future of the aid effectiveness agenda. This event is part of a joint project being conducted with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), to explore how the opportunity presented by HLF4 can be seized.

The workshop agenda was organized around three themes and 10 topics, which capture changes in the environment in which today’s aid industry operates. Today, there are new challenges for aid to solve (climate change, capacity building, fragile states) which remain poorly understood; new players in the aid industry (international NGOs, private businesses, non-DAC donors, coordinating networks) who are too important to leave out; and new approaches being used (South-South cooperation, transparency, scaling up) which need to be further encouraged. These changes mean that while the ideals enshrined in the Paris Declaration remain important, they do not cover the full scope of today’s aid system.

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View the second edition assessment brief (November 2011) »

Event Materials

Global Development in the U.S. National Security Strategy

Noam Unger — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:16:00 -0400

President Obama’s national security strategy sets the stage for his administration to put a premium on global development cooperation. But, will the administration follow through?

The unveiling of the full strategy makes clear that U.S. global development policies will factor into each of the strategy’s four major pillars: security, prosperity, values and international order. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at Brookings yesterday about the strategy and despite talking about development at times during her remarks, the degree to which development is infused in the strategy was not particularly underscored. Given her track record of speaking passionately and extensively on development, I was surprised that she did not explicitly emphasize its importance.

The point in the national security strategy on being strong at home in order to lead globally is understandably a separate but important pillar for U.S. security and global leadership. Nevertheless, aspects from all the other key points in the strategy connect to America’s ability to promote global development and effectively assist people around the world. In the security section, development features primarily through the lens of stabilization, reconstruction and conflict prevention. In the prosperity section, the focus is on global public goods and investments in sustainable and long-term development. The values section references a slew of development principles and actions – as Clinton noted in her speech that “democracy, human rights and development are mutually reinforcing.” Lastly, the section on international order highlights the administration’s intent to renew U.S. multilateral development cooperation.

In recent months, the administration has publicly said favorable things on a broad range of development topics, such as the linking of climate change adaptation and development aid, of health threats and health systems, of sustainable results and a reasonable time horizon for investment, of programming decisions and evidence-based research, of capacity building and local ownership of development projects. Obama and his team have also demonstrated a high level of commitment to development issues on the international stage. However, the problem is not in the administration’s rhetoric.

The problem is that the U.S. needs to fundamentally reform its internal systems for managing and implementing its global development policies. This includes foreign assistance, but it also includes areas such as trade, agriculture, international finance and migration. As USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah has expressed, development is a discipline, but it is presently a discipline that is marred by U.S. policy incoherence largely because it is organizationally fragmented and structurally weak in lacking its own distinct clout in policy deliberations. The U.S. needs to put itself in a better position to support the broad range of development imperatives, including post-conflict reconstruction, the alleviation of poverty and human suffering, and the promotion of good governance and equitable economic growth. Only by doing this can the U.S. government effectively promote its values and security interests.

It is quite possible that the 2010 national security strategy will help open the door for the systemic elevation and reform of U.S. global development policies and operations. If Obama chooses to seriously head in that direction, the path is already somewhat illuminated:

At a strategic level, the development policy review ordered by the president last summer is rumored to be finished and its conclusions captured in a document. A draft of the document was leaked and then published earlier this month. Let’s hope the final version retains an approach to development that includes a deliberate policy, a more effective and partnership-oriented operation, and a new architecture that truly elevates development and coalesces development resources around a more focused set of objectives. The leaked draft called for a routine U.S. Global Development Strategy. As others and I have noted in the past, such a strategy could substantively expand on the national security strategy. It could do so in much the same way as the national military strategy. Having just completed consultative government-wide reviews of national security and development, the White House should aim to deliver the first U.S. Global Development Strategy in time for Obama’s much-anticipated speech on development at September’s United Nations summit.

At the operational level, many more changes are already underway, including a broader global health initiative, a forward-looking global hunger and food security initiative, the re-establishment and revitalization of USAID’s policy planning bureau and further reforms to improve the agency’s procurement, human resources and transparency.

Since day one, this administration has needed to redefine America’s global development cooperation. While its efforts in 2009 were detrimentally sluggish, the new national security strategy could breathe new life into the effort.

Authors

Noam Unger

Social Entrepreneurship in the Middle East: Charting the Next Steps for U.S. Engagement

Ehaab Abdou, Noam Unger and Samantha Constant — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:16:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This is the third in a three-part series of commentary connected to the release of a joint report by the Middle East Youth Initiative and Silatech on the state of social entrepreneurship and social investment in the Middle East, part of the Taqeem project. This commentary focuses on the United States’ role in promoting social entrepreneurship and innovation through knowledge sharing and new development assistance tools.

Almost a year ago, when President Obama gave a historic speech at one of the most prominent public education institutions in the Middle East, Cairo University, he promised a new thrust of engagement between the United States and Muslim-majority countries. The recent Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship took this effort another step further by bringing together key changemakers leading the way in business and social development.

The summit was a showcase of public diplomacy. Amid the line-up of speeches and panel discussions, a bevy of partnership initiatives were announced, but perhaps the most significant outcome for delegates in attendance was the motivational recognition by policymakers that entrepreneurs are integral players in development. The United States’ relations with the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries around the world have long been shaped through the lenses of Arab-Israeli conflict, religious extremism, military aid, oil, and nuclear proliferation; hence the Obama administration’s intentional focus on youth, social entrepreneurship, and economic growth may be viewed as a welcomed new tack.

This targeted attention to development and partnership with innovators in Muslim-majority countries dovetails with broader efforts to forge more coherent U.S. policies to promote global development. To be more effective, one thing the U.S. must do is reform the way it manages and implements its foreign assistance. The U.S. administration has taken up this call, with everyone from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and President Obama himself explicitly urging new approaches and a fundamental modernization of the U.S. bureaucratic aid infrastructure. Strategic reviews within the executive branch have been propelled by a strong external community of interest, including a crescendo of attention from key foreign affairs leaders in Congress.

This churning discourse within U.S. policy circles provides a significant window of opportunity to make further progress in the direction the Obama administration is taking. New approaches to development and focused efforts that leverage U.S. comparative advantages through partnerships with innovators in key countries and regions around the world are needed to more effectively reduce poverty and suffering, spur opportunity, and foster greater government accountability to citizens.

One emerging and increasingly recognizable approach is social entrepreneurship. Across the Middle East, social and business entrepreneurs have proven to operate effectively in the most complex circumstances, yet their numbers are small and their impact still in need of scale. To date, there is little incentive or opportunity to start one’s own business due to the high consequences of failure and limitations to accessing credit, technical assistance, and policy support. In many countries of the region, the laws and regulations that govern business and civil society – while recently seen as more open – are still somewhat restrictive to the growth of either sector. As a result, communities lose potential gains in innovation, income generation, and broader economic opportunities.

There are three main areas where governments – domestic or foreign – can affect the development of social entrepreneurship: i) creating, supporting, or enforcing the appropriate regulatory framework for the functioning of social enterprises; ii) rewarding successful social entrepreneurs and social enterprises through recognition, procurement and partnership, and iii) developing and sustaining the broader ecosystem for social entrepreneurship.

The U.S. is well-positioned to support efforts in the Middle East to scale up entrepreneurship that yields economic growth and social gains. While technology transfer, networking, and other convening platforms are important milestones in the broader U.S. reengagement effort, there also needs to be an integrated institutional approach for long-term impact. Such an approach would ensure that official development assistance tools and regulatory frameworks governing all sectors related to entrepreneurship encourage or produce complimentary results on the ground.

Two key areas for U.S. engagement toward a more comprehensive institutional approach include:

Transfer of Knowledge

Through technical assistance, the U.S. can transfer knowledge and expertise in legal and regulatory issues to legislators in the Middle East. It can collaborate with regional governments to support dialogues that would bring together policymakers, social entrepreneurs, the corporate sector, social investment funds, and international donors. These discussions can address key priorities such as the introduction of hybrid legal models to encourage social enterprises and an exploration of potential legal models to support the establishment of social investment funds.

These policy dialogues should result in an action plan on how to introduce legal structures that are more conducive for social enterprises and social investment. The U.S. is strategically positioned to be a model of good practice as it is one of the very few countries with a hybrid model to encourage social enterprise development. For example, the low-profit, limited liability company legal form (L3C) is an entity which allows for-profit initiatives that are addressing social problems to accept selected philanthropic funds.

Access to Capital

Through official development assistance (ODA), the U.S. government should aim to i) support incubators and seed funds targeting youth-led social enterprise start-ups, ii) invest or channel aid through financing mechanisms that are specifically designed to replicate programs and activities which have proven successful in reaching base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) markets, as well as encourage other donor countries and organizations to do the same, and iii) elevate the importance of better evaluation measures and clear benchmarks for success.

More generally, U.S. foreign assistance to the Middle East could be more explicitly oriented to reducing poverty and creating economic opportunity. The Obama administration has requested an increase of total bilateral assistance to Yemen of almost 60 percent for fiscal year FY11 as compared to its current assistance package. Yet almost 50 percent of the requested aid is planned for military and security support with a 17 percent decrease in funding for economic growth. In Egypt, where total bilateral assistance amounted to 1.6 billion dollars in FY09, 1.3 billion went toward military aid while only 230 million went to areas ranging from education, social protection, trade and investment, and economic opportunities.[1]

To effect real change, the U.S. will need to both reach social entrepreneurs on the ground as well as stimulate broad-based economic growth through long-range foreign assistance and development policy instruments. In her closing remarks at the Summit, Secretary Clinton announced the Partners for a New Beginning to engage the U.S. private sector in helping advance the development agenda with Muslim-majority countries. This public-private partnership may develop into a successful example of how government can build on the entrepreneurial strength of the private sector to strengthen policy, spur innovation, and deliver better services to communities.

[1] Department of State, “Congressional Budget Justification: Foreign Operations, Fiscal Year 2011.” http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/137937.pdf.

Authors

Ehaab Abdou
Noam Unger
Samantha Constant