Post 2015: Global Action for an Inclusive and Sustainable Future

CHApTER THREE
Improving aid
effectiveness has
been another
important part of
the international
effort to achieve
the MDGs. The
EU as a whole has
actively engaged
in this effort.
50
been aligned with the mDGs. It concluded that
development programmes, including those
financed by the European commission and other
donors, had contributed overall to achieving
progress towards the mDGs.
rather than trying to suggest a direct causal link,
the commission’s brochure ‘Eu contribution to
the millennium Development Goals’, published
before the 2010 mDG Summit, relied on anecdotal
evidence to highlight Eu support for the mDGs.
citing global progress on each of the mDGs, it gave
examples of where the commission was providing
oDa, such as for building schools in Egypt and for
the afghan government’s efforts to train midwives
(com, 2010a). In other words it is more realistic to
look at the overall contribution of European oDa
to achieving progress in meeting the mDGs rather
than seeking to attribute any part of such progress
to the Eu contribution.
Improving aid effectiveness has been another
important part of the international effort to achieve
the mDGs. the Eu as a whole has actively engaged
in this effort and since the 2005 paris Declaration
has taken steps to improve the effectiveness of its
overall (multilateral and bilateral) aid by setting
its own (tougher) targets and establishing internal
agreements such as the 2007 Code of Conduct
on Division of Labour. the potential importance
of such efforts is illustrated in a study published
by the commission (carlsson et al., 2009), which
argued that the lack of coordination among
European donors was costing between €3 billion
and €6 billion a year due to the volatility of aid
flows, the proliferation of donors and implementing
organisations and the fragmentation of programmes
into tens of thousands of sometimes competing
projects. 25 Efforts to coordinate through joint
programming among Eu donors have been piloted
EuropEan rEport on DEvElopmEnt 2013
in Haiti and South Sudan and country strategies are
planned for Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, laos and
rwanda in the next Eu budget, the ‘multiannual
Financial Framework: 2014–2020’. there have
also been efforts to improve results through better
monitoring and evaluation and through more
effective management of aid policy, actions and
programmes. the commission has been more
ambitious than most individual member States in
using budget support to improve public financial
management in aid-recipient countries and to
reduce transaction costs (Faust et al., 2012) 26 . the
commission sees its comparative advantage
as helping partner countries to establish the
framework conditions for making progress towards
the mDGs by strengthening political institutions,
public financial management, transparency and
accountability (com, 2011). 27
3.3 The EU’s role in advancing
the MDGs: improving Policy
Coherence for Development
3.3.1 Global ambitions and concrete
challenges
In the spirit of paragraph 5 of the millennium
Declaration, which calls on un member states to
‘ensure that globalization becomes a positive force
for all the world’s people’, mDG8 describes the
ambition to give shape to a ‘global partnership for
development’. this captures the realisation that
achieving the mDGs could not rely only on oDa.
the first ErD research paper commissioned by the
European commission and several member States
in 2008, confirmed the central importance of mDG8
for the success of the mDGs and stressed that ‘policy
coherence was key to the achievement of the mDGs’
and ‘policy coherence at the global level was more
important than ever’ (bourguignon et al., 2008).
25 this was confirmed by a follow-up study (bigsten et al., 2011).
26 a preference for budget support comes out in both the nepal and rwanda case studies with rwanda in particular seeing the Eu’s willingness
to use budget support as helping to increase aid predictability and ownership.
27 many of these efforts are covered in more detail in chapter 7 on Development Finance.