1. Introducción
3.5.2. Mi Reserva
These changes to development aid in the last two decades have altered the workings of the aid regime. While some features have persisted such as the role of the DAC and the UN agencies, overall the regime has “tightened” following the introduction of structural adjustment – there are now greater expectations and pressures on donors to behave in prescribed ways. The rise in importance of the IFIs has meant that bilateral donors have lost their privileged and protected relationship with recipient states (this is particularly true of France’s relations with francophone Africa). In order to influence decisions bilateral donors now have to think about influencing multilateral donors as well as recipient states. This has also meant that there is potentially greater scrutiny of what bilateral donors do.
Changes in what aid is used for (from projects to institutional engineering and
193 In personal interviews.
policy buying) have demanded greater donor interaction and coordination. Using aid to buy policy will not work if recipients can exploit differences between donors. The sheer technical capacity needed for continued institutional reform work has increasingly led donors to divide up work between them, with lead donors concerned with finance reform (the IFIs), the health sector (often the World Bank), education (often France in francophone Africa) and so forth.
One important aspect of these changes is that parts of the institutional reform agenda have been turned back onto the donors themselves. This is particularly true of non-governmental pressure groups at the margins of the regime attempting to influence the IFIs. Although the critics lack the direct “leverage” that donors have over recipients, much of the substance connects with doubts that officials have about the institutions in which they work. The donor regime has responded to this by constantly trying to ensure that development aid is seen as being oriented towards the needs of the poor.
This use by pressure groups of the good governance concept to direct attention to the very institutions of aid disbursement is well captured by Ngaire Woods:
“each [of the IFIs] has come to accept the notion of “good governance” within countries in which they work and the need for local participation and widespread political support in order for economic reforms to be sustainable. The challenge the institutions have been slower to absorb is what these principles mean for their own operations”.195
The IFIs especially have been criticised for not following their own prescriptions on openness to civil society, both in terms of consultation and dissemination of information. They have been criticised for being the sort of unwieldy bureaucratic institutions that they argue against in their policy prescriptions and for not adequately and impartially representing the concerns of the different groups affected by their decisions (often called “stake-holders”). It is argued that the institutional forms and policy-making procedures of the IFIs prevent them from fulfilling their principal role, which is the alleviation of poverty in aid receiving countries.196 The IFIs are aware of a
195 ‘The challenge of Good Governance for the IMF and the World Bank Themselves’ in World
development, 28 (5) 2000. See also Stevens, Mike and Gnanaselvam, Shiro, ‘World Bank and Governance’, IDS Bulletin, 26 (2) 1995; and Woods, Ngaire, ‘Good Governance and International Organisations’, Global Governance, 5, 1999.
196 While this is certainly the stated aim of the World Bank, the IMF was set up to ensure stability in the
world’s financial system. However, in the last two decades it has increasingly expanded into areas of development aid whose end points are presented as the alleviation of poverty in recipient countries. For
need constantly to adapt their functioning and role to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of their publics, both critics and shareholding governments. They have made some moves to open their workings to more public scrutiny.
In the French case the criticisms of the system are similar to those made of other donors, and for similar reasons, although the particular post-colonial nature of French aid means that the context is somewhat different. This study has previously identified a long-standing but unfulfilled reform agenda, from the Jeanneney report of 1964 though the Cot reforms of 1981. It has also concluded that the coopération system entered a crisis in the late 1980s. This crisis intensified pressures for reform and encouraged reformers to be bolder in their calls for change. Before looking at specific attempts at reform in the late 1990s, it is worth recapitulating the features of the reform agenda and the composition of the reform lobby in France.
The reform agenda has pointed to the following faults with French development aid:
• The institutional structures of French aid administration reflect a post-colonial
objective of maintaining ties with former colonies, rather than development objectives. There is as a result a lack of clear direction and purpose.197
• This institutional structure of French aid administration is overly complex, with too
many different parts of the administration involved. As a consequence, decisions are dominated by insider negotiations and are obscure to those not in the very inner circles of power (the lack of transparency).
• There is a lack of public and democratic debate on development aid and a lack of
democratic control over aid spending. The views of NGOs and pressure groups (both in France and in recipient countries) are not taken into account. NGOs are under-valued and under-used in project implementation.
• As a result of the above three points, there is a proliferation of cases of corruption
involving French development aid.
In addition there are a number of more specific points:
• French aid remains tied to the purchase of French goods.
example, the IMF now negotiates PRGS (Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy) programmes with recipient countries.
197 This summary of the reform agenda is taken from critical texts such as those cited in footnote 93;
OECD/DAC, Peer Review of Donor contribution, France, DAC, Paris, 1997; Marchés Tropicaux, 14 décembre 2001, ‘35 ans de réformes avortées’ and personal interviews.
• Budget support has an overwhelming place in the French aid spending budget, which
leaves little room for direct focus on poverty alleviation.
• There is very little consideration given to evaluating French aid spending.
• Recipient governments do not participate in the elaboration or implementation of
French funded programmes (lack of ownership), which are implemented almost exclusively by highly paid French officials.
In the early and mid-1990s therefore there was a clearly identifiable reform agenda. It was articulated in private by other donors, and in public by civil society and the DAC. This generated a strong perception, including among French decision makers, that French aid was out of line not only with some of the evolving norms of the global aid regime, but also with some of the better practices of other donors. This strengthened the case of the domestic French reformers.
Several official reports of this period, although often defensive of the French record on aid to Africa, pointed to this malaise.198 They again highlighted the detrimental effects of the confusing bureaucratic architecture of French aid policy and the inappropriate geographical and functional distinction that the Cooperation Ministry represented (for example in Fuchs pp. 31–5). These reports point to the fact that French aid policy is a closed shop, with a lack of openness to input from outside, especially from the non-governmental sector. They also pointed to a more general lack of transparency and Fuchs specifically recommended that future aid relations should be based on “contracts” with the recipient state that would make clear the responsibilities of each side. Finally, these reports (especially those by Fuchs and Marchand) argued that French aid policy suffered from a deteriorating international image and that better public transparency was needed in order to allow better coordination with other aid donors.
Advocates of reform within France were in fact fairly heterogeneous. Broadly speaking there were two camps. On the one hand there were the “technocrats”, largely made up of officials, who had little attachment to Africa and were concerned to limit the damage that coopération was inflicting on France’s finances or diplomatic standing. The historical origin of this school clearly lies in the position of those who were against colonisation of Africa on the grounds that the benefits for France were minimal and the costs potentially too high (Clémencau and later Cartier). On the other hand calls for reform came from the development camp, many of whose supporters had direct
198 Fuchs, Jean-Paul, Pour une Politique de développement efficace, maîtrisée et transparente , Rapport au
experience of aid work in Africa. They believed that development aid in Africa was a noble and worthwhile pursuit for France, and that the crisis and scandals of coopération should not obscure this, or serve as a pretext to reduce development aid spending. Advocates of reform therefore came from diverse backgrounds and had different ideas of how they would wish to see French aid in the future. It was only by virtue of the crisis of coopération and the glaring problems that this exposed, that they found common ground on the need for reform.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the main features of French development aid in the first three decades of its existence. It was orientated towards the construction of viable states and economies in the former colonies of sub-Saharan Africa. This was intended to be beneficial both to French commercial and political interests, and to provide the capital and expertise these countries lacked, in line with broader coopération policy. French aid can therefore be termed “political post-colonial”.
In the 1960s and 1970s French aid fitted fairly comfortably with the norms and expectations of other donors and of the wider aid donor “regime”, which also focused on state led economic development. Reform of French aid, particularly changes in its institutional and ministerial structure, was occasionally called for. But significant change was successfully resisted by those who had an interest in the system. In this period many, both insiders and outsiders, regarded French aid as having many laudable attributes, including a good understanding of problems in sub-Saharan Africa and a large cadre of competent aid workers. Larger coastal countries in francophone Africa in particular benefited from the French presence.
In the 1980s, the economic crisis of African states changed the nature of development aid (from all donors, not only France), which became orientated more to financial stability than to development per se. Aid was increasingly used to encourage changes in policy on the part of otherwise recalcitrant states (“policy buying”). This period also saw the rise in importance of the IFIs. At the end of the 1980s, further changes saw the introduction of other elements concerned with institution building and further thought was given to how aid could best be used (concentrating on reformist governments, restructuring economic sectors and so forth).
The French reaction to this changing agenda has been mixed. In general, French decision makers have been wary of what they sometimes perceive as the “market
fundamentalism” of the IFIs, although they have welcomed the more recent renewed interest in institution building. However, the French reaction to the changing development aid agenda at the global level has occurred at the same time as the basis of French aid (in short “coopération”) has suffered a severe crisis due to the financial collapse of African states, corruption scandals and diplomatic disasters such as Rwanda. One of the consequences of this crisis was that the consistent but often muted calls for reform of the system became more vocal or more persistent, both on the part of outsiders (French and African civil society and other donors) and insiders or semi- insiders (the authors of parliamentary reports, French decision makers themselves). These calls for reform were largely negative, as they had always been, in the sense that they called for given elements of the system to be changed but offered little detailed vision of what may take its place.