Manual National Union Alliance: A Political Philosophy towards Social Consensus

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Table of contents

Ask governance specialists at one of the multilateral development banks or major bilateral aid agencies whether they are engaged in aiding democracy and they will likely insist that they are not. They will emphasize that they are pursuing greater participation, transparency, accountability, and inclusion for developmental rather than politically normative purposes and are not in the business of trying to shape the political life of other countries. Democracy promotion, in their view, remains a separate terrain, more ideological than governance work, more about changing overall political systems than improving the performance of state institutions and delivering economic growth.

They may note that they often carry out governance programs for decades in undemocratic contexts such as Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, or Vietnam, without any intention of changing the larger political direction of the country. Democracy practitioners, meanwhile, highlight the political dimension of each of the four concepts. Rather than focusing on social accountability mechanisms that target the relationship between citizens and service providers, they attempt to strengthen broader institutions and processes of political accountability, such as regular and competitive elections and effective, independent parliaments.

When they work on participation, their focus is on citizen involvement in local and national political processes rather than development planning and programming. Similarly, they frame issues of inclusion mostly in terms of political empowerment and representation rather than social or economic marginalization.

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In other words, for this group, democratic institutions such as well-functioning political parties, responsive parliaments, and a legal framework that guarantees basic political and civil rights are the central pistons of accountability, participation, and inclusion. As a result, democracy practitioners are skeptical of governance programming that skirts the political dimensions of these concepts.

They worry that their governance counterparts are inescapably inclined toward narrow and technocratic interpretations of these principles that fail to take into account the broader distribution of power in a society although some aid programs billed as pro-democratic fall into the same rut of technocratic efforts to improve the functioning of state institutions, without challenging underlying power inequalities. Divisions also persist between the governance and human rights communities. Most major aid organizations working on governance reform remain wary of casting accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion as rights rather than desirable programming attributes or principles.

Doing so, they believe, would create rigidities in their own programmatic frameworks or in their consultations with recipient governments. Rights entail legal claims and commitments that may hinder tactical decisions about modulating their pursuit of these principles based on other priorities. The human rights community, on the other hand, generally rejects the instrumental view of the four concepts that dominates governance approaches. They fault governance practitioners for interpreting principles such as participation and inclusion in limited or partial ways, or deemphasizing them for the sake of other development priorities.

Some further dismiss the donor focus on governance as just one part of the broader neoliberal agenda promoted by major development organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in alliance with local power holders—an agenda that, in their view, further marginalizes the poor in the service of international economic and financial interests. There is also disagreement over the extent to which the four principles actually constitute a unified agenda. Aid providers typically present them as such, grouping them together in policy documents as an apparently mutually reinforcing set.

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And these principles do share a certain common ground—all of them pertain to the interaction of states and their people, pointing toward a greater role for citizens in the functioning of the state. Moreover, some natural links do exist among them in practice. Accountability programs for example often incorporate transparency as a constituent element while also relying on citizen participation, such as support for local groups that seek to press a particular government institution to be more responsive to public concerns.

Similarly, efforts to foster greater inclusion naturally connect to increased participation by the targeted group. Yet the links among the four principles are only partial. Some accountability work consists of efforts to upgrade the technical capacity of selected government agencies without attempting to improve participation or inclusion. Some transparency programs are narrowly designed to make government data more easily accessible to private sector and other stakeholders and do not attempt to consciously link these transparency mechanisms to accountability or participatory processes.

And accountability programs or participatory development efforts sometimes fail to include marginalized groups and take their needs into account, though efforts in this respect have gradually improved. In short, what is presented to the outside world as a unified agenda instead appears from within the development community to be a set of goals that compete with each other for attention and resources. Different aid organizations or groups within them pursue very different relative emphases on the four principles. For example, enthusiastic proponents of the growing transnational movement for accountability and transparency view these issues as a potentially transformative advance of the governance agenda and one that naturally connects to burgeoning efforts to harness new Internet and communication technologies for development ends.

The four principles are not only frequently pursued at least somewhat independently of each other: they can also at times be in tension. For example, an effort to push a government emerging out of civil war to pursue accountability for past rights violations may limit the inclusion of some groups in the post-conflict political system.

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Accountability programs that seek to reduce state capture may actually try to limit participation in the workings of certain institutions, such as central banks, in order to isolate them from political pressure or improve efficiency. Certain attempts to strengthen public sector accountability by increasing provider competition in service delivery may perpetuate patterns of marginalization, and poorly conceived participatory projects can exacerbate rather than alleviate the exclusion of disadvantaged groups.

These tensions are rarely acknowledged, and remain buried beneath the continual references to the four principles as a shared agenda. Another fissure arising in the application of the four principles centers on the actual depth of donor commitment to transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusion in programming and implementation. Despite their stated devotion to these principles, aid organizations sometimes treat them as boxes to be ticked rather than genuinely significant or even transformative elements to be pursued in substantial, sustained ways.

This problem partly stems from the fact that despite their suggestive and appealing nature, the four concepts are sufficiently broad that agreeing on them in theory does not necessarily translate into agreement about them in practice. References to principles such as participation and accountability in aid programming have become so frequent and widespread that pinning down with any precision what is meant by those terms often proves difficult. At times the terms appear to have the quality of an elixir that aid providers sprinkle—at least rhetorically—on everything they do, in the hopes of giving their activities an appealing extra shine.

National Union Alliance: A Political Philosophy Towards Social Consensus

Participation, for example, is generally used to refer to input by citizens into governmental processes, including, for example, in the planning, design, implementation, or review of policies that affect them. Yet such input varies widely in type, duration, and intensity—it can be formal or informal, sporadic or continuous, limited or far-reaching, local or national, and so forth. Yet the term is also used to describe broader consultations and public input into decisionmaking processes that remain firmly in the hands of governments or other stakeholders.

A similar degree of variation holds for the other three concepts as well. As a result of this variation in definitions, very different things can be carried out in the name of apparently common principles.


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Seemingly transformative concepts and approaches in reality often translate into superficial or limited applications. In the realm of participation, all major aid providers have during the last two decades committed—at least rhetorically—to facilitating greater citizen participation in development work and have built participatory elements into many of their programs.

More often than not, they directly linked these efforts to powerful claims that participation would help advance capacity-building, local ownership, and citizen empowerment. But as numerous critics have detailed in extensive review studies, such elements often fall short of their transformative aspirations, resulting instead in superficial forms of public consultation that do not give poor people substantive input into development decisions or change the balance of power between citizens and states.

Although there is evidence that in some countries, civil society involvement in these processes helped shape a more multidimensional understanding of poverty and its causes, it generally fell short of achieving genuine inclusion. Efforts to bolster the inclusion of marginalized groups also often suffer from the problem of superficial application. However, the domain of gender inclusion is nevertheless littered with examples of aid providers who have professed their commitment to gender awareness in their program design without in fact attempting to address the systemic and structural exclusion of women from development processes.

They argue that reforms can face obstacles of collective action, political resistance, and long implementation chains, and are most likely to succeed in situations marked by competitive service delivery that poses fewer of these hurdles. Beyond divisions among various practitioner communities and difficulties in implementation persists a broader debate about the appropriate role of the four principles in development work.

The intrinsic case for making accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion major pillars of development aid seems straightforward to enthusiasts of these principles: the four concepts describe a relationship between governments and their citizens that honors and reinforces basic human dignity. As such, they are good things in and of themselves that should be understood as intrinsic elements of development. In other words, a society is more developed when its people are treated in accordance with these values and less developed when they are not.

But within most aid organizations, skepticism over the intrinsic case persists. The debate is not over whether participation, accountability, transparency, and inclusion are good things. Instead, the question is whether the primarily socioeconomic conception of development—on which the field of development aid has rested since its origins in the s—should be expanded to include these principles as objectives.

Many developmentalists worry that moving away from the core socioeconomic conception risks diluting the focus on poverty reduction and economic growth. They fear that opening the door to what they see as politically normative claims on the development agenda will lead to even greater disagreements both within aid organizations and between donors and recipients over basic purposes.

They are not necessarily against incorporating concepts such as participation and accountability if they can be shown to yield better developmental outcomes—but they are uncomfortable with the normative argument as a stand-alone rationale. This division also exists within some of the various practitioner subcommunities that have emerged around the four concepts: for example, between those that view open data and access to information as an intrinsic human right and those that see it primarily as a tool for economic development, greater public sector efficiency, and anticorruption efforts.

It is impossible to assess with any precision the degree to which the intrinsic case is accepted within the many aid organizations putting forward these four concepts as important priorities. Official policy statements affirming donor commitment to inclusive, participatory, accountable, and transparent governance often do not explicitly state whether this commitment is primarily normative or based on an assumed instrumental case, and only provide vague or incomplete theories of change relating to these issues.

However, it is clear that many mainstream developmentalists remain strongly attached to a traditional socioeconomic conception of development and are reluctant to embrace normative principles for their own sake. Few donors clearly state the normative argument in their policy statements. Rights-based approaches to development take participation, accountability, and inclusion as inalienable rights that should be integral to both development processes and outcomes and thus represent an embodiment of the normative case.

But they have gained only partial ground over the past twenty years, and even the minority of major aid organizations that embrace a human-rights-based approach are still struggling to incorporate it substantially into development practice and make a difference in programming beyond appealing statements of intent.


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One at least partial exception is the UNDP, which since the early s has advanced a rights-based conception of development in its Human Development Reports and pushed for a convergence between human rights and development agencies in the UN system. UNDP has invested in efforts to develop clear indicators for this approach to aid programming and assist donors in assessing human rights standards and principles in project design, implementation, and monitoring.

Not only is the intrinsic case for the four concepts unsettled, so too is the instrumental one—the argument that building the four principles into development assistance will help produce better socioeconomic outcomes in aid-receiving countries. A limited and generally inconclusive evidence base to date exacerbates this problem. Despite the rapid increase of aid programming relating to accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion in the course of the past fifteen years, relatively little time and funding have been invested in examining the long-term socioeconomic and political impact of these initiatives.

Only in the past several years have a substantial number of researchers and aid organizations attempted to address this shortcoming by systematically investing in evidence collection. This emerging body of work—which is still in its incipient phase—consists both of evaluations of specific programs or projects and larger reviews that attempt to extract, code, and synthesize the findings from existing studies and cases.


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