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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
From conditions to selectivity
>> Foreign Aid in the National Interest >> Chapter 1 Jump to Chapter 1 Sections:
>> Global trends in democracy >> A strategy for assisting democratic governance >> From conditions to selectivity >> "Tough Love" for development >> Background paper >> References
The United States must work more closely with other bilateral donors to coordinate pressure on bad, recalcitrant governments. Reductions in U.S. aid will do little to change the behavior of political leaders if their governments continue to receive funding from other donors that far exceeds the U.S. aid. Leaders will be most likely to change if they perceive a coherent message from international donors.
Where committed reformers can be identified within the state, donors should work with them. The United States should identify and try to strengthen the hand of reform-oriented ministers, agency heads, and provincial governors. Assistance can be provided to reformers to help identify key winners and losers, develop coalition building and mobilization strategies, and design publicity campaigns. Often, nodes of reformers or even majorities favoring reform can be found in branches of the state outside the executive, such as the legislature, the judicial system, and other agencies of horizontal accountability that may be deprived of resources and authority. Even when reformers lack the power today to effect far-reaching change, training and technical assistance may enable them to expand public constituencies for reform. Such assistance may also represent an investment in the future, when a political shift gives reformers real power.
State capacity must be enhanced, but it makes no sense to strengthen the capacity of state structures that lack the political will to govern responsibly. Building effective state structures must be a major goal of assistance for democracy and governance, but not until state leaders are serious about governance. Large investments in the infrastructure and technical capacity of judiciaries and legislatures will be largely wasted if there is no political will to use the enhanced capabilities for more honest, responsive, and accountable governance.
Donors should encourage the global private sector to accelerate efforts to incorporate judgments about the quality and transparency of governance into investment decisions. To continue pressing this agenda, donors should institutionalize support for Transparency International and other global anti-corruption efforts. An important priority is to improve comparative measures of the quality of governance and then widely publicize them, to encourage the private sector to invest in countries that are governing well and adopting promising reforms. Credible (independent) and publicly disseminated measures of governance are particularly important for smaller, more peripheral developing countries, on which reliable information is slower to reach investors. The United States might also introduce incentives (such as through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the negotiation of free trade agreements) to encourage investment in better-governed countries.
International donors must strengthen the global rule of law, particularly the capacity to track down and close off corrupt flows of money in the international banking system. The United States must work to institutionalize rigorous global standards and procedures for rapidly identifying and recovering corruptly acquired assets. It must also work vigorously to ensure that member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) enforce the new OECD convention against bribery. The anti-money laundering tools used to combat terrorism and drug trafficking can also be applied to fight international crime and corruption. "Tough Love" for development
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Last Updated on: October 07, 2009 |
