DISPOSITIVOS ARTIFICIALES, EQUIPOS INSÓLITOS Y USO DE LOS MISMOS
ORDEN DE JUEGO EN FOURSOMES Y THREESOMES
It follows from the above analysis that the core features of France’s aid programme, its interest-driven, paternalistic and neo-colonial characteristics, were deeply ingrained over the early post-colonial decades and came to mark France’s aid programme to
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Cameroon heavily. This, in turn, begs the question as to what the pressures were that led France to promise to move a more poverty-focused, empowering approach to aid. That will be the subject of this section which will begin by examining international and African regional pressures on France to change, before turning to domestic factors that were pushing in the same direction.The aforementioned pressures are diverse and difficult to measure. This is because it is difficult to tell whether a particular pressure or set of pressures has had a specific, immediate or long-lasting impact. Equally, it is hard to know which factors truly influence policy-makers, not least since the policy-makers themselves may not know. There is also a temporal dimension whereby factors which are salient at one point in time, can be marginal at a later point. To, at least partly, obviate the pitfalls associated with this latter point, the period of the Jospin and Chirac Presidencies has been separated from the Sarkozy / Hollande Presidencies, with the latter being overshadowed by the global financial recession.
It does seem clear, however, that certain pressures were mounting from the time of Jospin’s election, which helps to explain why Jospin finally managed to effect important changes to French cooperation policy and structures, and how it was that these changes were not reversed under Chirac’s second presidential mandate.
International Factors
To begin with we consider pressures from the international political economy and donor community. These increased following the end of the Cold War, taken here to coincide with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The end of East-West rivalry paved the way for the forces of globalisation, the integration of eastern powers into the global market economy and the opening up of African economies to OECD and non-OECD donors. This new environment meant that there was more competition for Africa’s mineral resources, its votes in the UN, and its readiness to act as a repository for cultural influence. This new “free-market” environment was more competitive for the French state and for French business and imposed the need for reforms in France’s clientelistic aid programme if France was to hold on to her African sphere of influence and avoid being viewed as a purely neo-colonial power.
Another major change in the international politico-economic environment was the emergence of a new metanorm, poverty reduction, which, as noted in our introductory chapter, was coming to the fore around the time that Jospin was elected and which would become the overarching objective of all OECD aid programmes as from 2000. The goal of poverty reduction was not of course new, as it had been present from the
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very beginnings of ODA and was concretised by the development nostrum of Basic Human Needs in the mid-1970s when the International Labour Organisation, among others, helped lead the way with alternative thinking on development strategies (UN, 2013). What was new was the fact that this goal had risen to such prominence and taken on such a universal form. While a metanorm of this kind flew in the face of France’s neo-colonial aid practices, it could not be ignored. Nor could it simply be massaged into the French aid programme without major changes to structures/ and or a different type of instrument or a different perspective on existing instruments. Briefly, something had to change, and France’s aid programme would have to become more poverty-focused and empowering.A few observations are required to illustrate the extent to which various multilateral and bilateral agencies across the international donor community were pressing all donors, including France, to espouse poverty reduction as the overriding goal of their ODA programmes. One such agency was the UN, under whose auspices the Millennium Development Goals were signed in 2000.20 The overall aim of the eight MDGs was to halve world poverty by 2015, with specific goals focused on human development issues such as primary education and basic healthcare (maternal and infantile mortality, under-nourishment). Since the UN MDGs framework (2000), Northern political leaders have been making statements about more aid to Africa, more aid to the LDCs, more aid in grant form or on terms, which are more concessional and hence more likely to reduce poverty, promote human development and empower African local populations. Influential economists such as Jeffrey Sachs have also supported such efforts, stressing in his 2005 book, The End of Poverty that aid can work if there is one last push from donor countries.
But the UN was by no means the only force for change. The OECD had been the original inspiration behind the MDGs. In 1995, a meeting of development ministers from the member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) committed themselves to an intensive, year-long process of reviewing past experiences and planning policies for the next century. The May 1996 report, Shaping the 21st
Century, which emerged from these discussions, offered “a new approach to
development” (OECD, 2014, p.16). The new strategy – based on a partnership between donor and recipient – drew upon what had been learned in half-a-century of success and failure in development co-operation. At its core lay a pragmatic approach to a global community of shared interests, and the necessity of solidarity and concerted action to advance those interests in the future (OECD, 1996, p.33). This report, sometimes labelled the “Development Partnerships Strategy”, envisaged a limited
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number of indicators which could be monitored to assess progress towards development goals which had emerged from several UN Summits held during the early 1990s. Since 1996, many donors have tried to incorporate the principles of Shaping the21st Century and development partnerships into their aid policies. The OECD itself has
not, however, rested on its laurels but has, as noted in our introductory chapter, organised a series of High-Level Forums, perhaps the most famous of which was in 2005, with the signing of the Paris Declaration, whereby all major OECD donors recognised the importance of recipient ownership as well as donor harmonisation/ alignment and result-based aid as unifying themes of aid policy.
Another set of pressures on France came from the World Bank and IMF. In 1999, the World Bank introduced Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers or PSRPs which constituted processes through which to steer recipients’ spending priorities and guide lending to some of the world’s poorest countries (Levinsohn, 2003, p.8). These were the following up on a number of World Bank reports on poverty reduction in the early 1990s. According to the IMF, it was expected that the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers would be authored by countries which had successfully used the IMF’s poverty reduction and growth facility (PRGF), a facility which was itself a precondition for countries securing access to debt reduction under the 1996/ 1999 Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative (IMF, 2016). These new internationally inspired and monitored poverty reduction processes made it harder for laggard donors to slip behind in their needs-oriented agendas and raise questions about implementation of policy; they had the potential to reveal any discrepancy that could exist between official aid rhetoric and implementation, or aid activities on the ground. They militate in favour of an empowerment–based policy, even if the procedures for checking up on donors remain limited and voluntary.
Yet another factor pushing for change in French “cooperation” policy was the EU, which has played a more proactive role in promoting poverty-reducing aid to Africa in the 2000s. This is clear from the EU-Africa strategies of 2005 and 2007, which underscore the importance of a more fraternal development and security partnership and a more needs-based aid programme, as a way to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (European Commission, 2008). These changes together with the 2005 European Consensus also point to the need to work together in ways that are much more recipient need-focused than the Washington Consensus (which linked aid to neoliberal reform). This consensus “defines the framework of common principles within which the EU and its Member States will each implement their development policies in a spirit of complementarities” (European Commission, 2007).
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The European Union has also been active in shaping French aid policy towards Africa/ Cameroon in other ways. The EU and ACP signed the Cotonou Accord in 2000, thereby replacing the Lomé Convention (1975). Cotonou, to which France has been at times first or second contributor, has a much more empowering focus than any of its predecessors, linking aid to civil society capacity building, anti-corruption measures, good governance, human rights and democracy. Soon after the signature of Cotonou, the European Commission and the European Union, as norm entrepreneurs, launched a set of recommendations designed to set an agenda for member states like France to move away from an interest-based approach towards a target-based strategy. Equally, the European initiative at the 2002 Barcelona summit led to European-wide (except for central and Eastern Europe) commitments to aim for a 0.7% increase in targeted aid by 2015. Around the same time, the EU was, moreover, an actor pushing France to adopt a less neo-colonial, more recipient centred approach to military “cooperation”. Thus, the nascent European Security and Defence policy underwent some major developments at the 1996 NATO ministerial meeting in Berlin, which eventually led to the EU-Africa Strategy in 2005.It was not just the EU but also fellow donors that pushed France towards significant reform. The Nordic donors have been particularly vociferous, through the group of like- minded donors and more recently the Nordic Plus group in the EU, in pushing for poverty reduction and greater recipient state accountability. 21According to the OECD, “Sweden has a tradition of leadership in development co-operation” (OECD, 2005, p.11), which has set “an example for the DAC”, (OECD, 2005, p.10), and which has maintained “the momentum of development co-operation leadership”, not least as the first donor to provide one per cent of GNP in aid (OECD, 2003, p.11).22 Arguably the most important fellow donor in this respect was the UK as a result of its emergence as a pioneer in development circles following the creation of DFID. The fact that the UK and France signed the 1998 St Malo Agreement, promising to collaborate more closely on Africa also ensured that the UK’s influence over France would arguably make it more significant than that of other EU donors, including Germany, whose involvement in Africa had always been secondary to France’s as well as almost completely lacking a security dimension (Chafer and Cumming, 2011).
The UK foreign policy apparatus as a whole has clearly had an impact on France’s development and military assistance programme. Britain’s creation of the DFID in 1997, Tony Blair’s prioritisation of Africa, particularly as from his second term as Prime Minister, and the government’s introduction of public service contracts designed to ensure that aid was indeed poverty-all helped to give the UK a reputation for
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professionalism and innovative practice in relation to poverty reduction. The fact that the DFID and AFD signed an overarching partnership in 2009-10 also confirmed the UK’s status as one of the donors that had the greatest influence over the French cooperation programme.This influence was not confined to the poverty orientation of ODA but also included pressure to move away from neo-colonial politico-cultural forms of aid as well as from harder military style assistance towards security sector reform, conflict prevention, capacity and state-building approaches (Bagayoko-Penone, 2016). UK impact could also be discerned in a less direct way, not least in the Cameroonian case through the DFID decision, in 2004, to move away from bilateral (grant) aid provision to Cameroon and towards pooled donor arrangements on issues such as forestry preservation and climate change. In so doing, the DFID signalled that it was adopting a selective approach which other donors might wish to follow, not least since Cameroon was so corrupt and not considered to be poor enough. The DFID, in effect, gave up its potentially very influential position vis-à-vis Anglophone Cameroon and moved towards a policy where it was only sending low-level officials out to deal with Cameroon (Interview 16; 7 May 2011). Further, there has been no DFID representative in Yaoundé since 2004; this is significant because it demonstrates that a reduced presence of donor country´s officials is the response that the DFID offers to a state that is unaccountable and corrupt, whereas France’s aid strategy towards the same country has been to maintain the number of French aid officials, ostensibly at least to reform the Cameroonian state through a process of engagement.
International pressures on France did not of course all simply emanate from the North. They also arose out of Southern powers and the large emerging developing countries including China, India, Brazil and others which became much more prominent on the African scene and which have identified possibilities rather than problems in Africa (Nygaard and Selbervik 2006, p.23). The entry of these competitors throughout the 2000s and beyond, drove reforms of French aid policy, as will be suggested in chapter 7. While the impact of these latter pressures is hard to gauge (the emerging powers often do not respect OECD aid norms and can actually open the door to a less empowering approach by Northern donors anxious not to lose out), there are some grounds for assuming that one impact of this renewed interest of G20 and other powers has been to promote “a process of normalisation” of French ODA practices (Fondation Paul Ango Ela, 2008, p.9) while also helping to ensure that French aid volumes have been maintained to Cameroon. This has been the case, albeit largely thanks to the substantial contribution made by the C2D bilateral debt to grant conversion facility on
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top of “normal” ODA flows. These C2D monies have maintained France’s position as the largest donor by far to Cameroon. Furthermore, as Cumming shows in his article “France’s approach to bilateral reduction” (forthcoming), France has helped to direct around half of C2D assistance towards key areas of human development such as primary education, basic healthcare and agriculture.As a consequence of these multiple international pressures, we can deduce that in the post-Jospin era, normative pressures from the EU, UN and leading donors made it harder for any leading donor to be “against” poverty reduction targets or to be seen to pursue old style neo-colonial goals like aid tying and influence. These initiatives all had, to a certain extent, a common thread. Specifically, they catered to a shift towards an empowerment-based aid policy with reference to African countries. Consequently, as one of the most important northern aid donors, France had to deal with demands for aid development efficiency and effectiveness, while managing African regional and domestic pressures.
African/Regional Factors
To begin with African regional factors and events, the most significant of these was probably the Rwandan débacle. France’s implication in the developments leading up to the 1994 genocide, its unconditional support for the genocidal regime of Juvénal Habyarimana, its readiness to exfiltrate Rwandan elites guilty of inciting genocide, and its failure to do enough to save Tutsis and moderate Hutus, all led to France’s shaming on the international scene and unprecedented levels of criticism in domestic forum, whether from Parliament (the Quilès report), the press (e.g. Stephen Smith), academia (e.g. Gerard Prunier), pressure groups (e.g. Agir Ici and Survie or NGOs (e.g. Coordination Sud). Both the Jospin premiership and the second Chirac presidency were affected by the aftershocks created by the Rwandan genocide. France’s implication in this debacle, as a major source of international opprobrium (Boutwell and Klare 1999; Drake 2011), forced a shift away from France’s former explicit collusion with African autocrats and its automatic policy of intervening in support of Francophile regimes (Péan 2005; Verschave 1994).
Another seismic regional event pushing for a more recipient-focused approach to French aid came through the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 as President of South Africa, which marked the end of the Apartheid. Arguably the election of a president who was a black Freedom fighter indicated a growth of African empowerment worldwide. Against this backdrop, too, another important development has been the rise of a new generation of African leaders including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Ethiopia’s Meles
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Zenawi and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, all of whom were pushing for a new relationship to former colonial powers, thereby opening the door to a real recalibration of French aid policy towards Africa, and more specifically, towards Cameroon. In traditionally Anglophone, and even in parts of Francophone Africa, notably in countries like Rwanda, this new generation of African leaders began turning away from France´s monopolistic system. These African leaders were embodied in the “African renaissance”, explained thus by former President John Agyekum Kufuor:There is a new breed of leaders in Africa who even after their time at the helm of affairs of their countries are determined to be of relevance to their society and humanity
There is a new breed of leaders who do not want to be remembered by history for their notoriety, disregard for human rights and good governance but rather want to be part of the forward match towards the establishment of a better life for their people by using the expertise garnered over the years for the good of their people there is a new breed of leaders in Africa who want to establish the identity of the continent as an equal partner on the world stage and must be treated as such (2008).
The African Renaissance is embraced within Thabo Mbeki's call for an African Renaissance and his „I am an African” speech, given on May 8th 1996 to the Constitutional Assembly of South Africa (Bongmba, 2004, p.300), all of which created a context propitious to a shift towards an empowerment agenda. There was also some substance given to the idea of African empowerment by the creation of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation in 1996, which aimed at “training and developing African cadres who would dedicate themselves to the implementation of the African agenda in all its manifestations” (Bongmba, 2004, p.300). More important still was the establishment of the African peer review mechanism (APRM), as a part of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which took effect in 2001 and through which Africans were supposed to watch out for abuses in neighbouring countries. The APRM allowed for increased assessment performance and progress in African countries, such as Cameroon, in four main fields: 1) democratic and political governance; 2) economic governance and 3) socio-economic governance (APRM, 2014).
The goal of the NEPAD itself, is to create “a blueprint for Africa’s development”, according to former president John Agyekum Kufuor (2008). This organism had come