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Nor can capacities be developed overnight – especially in the cases where
the technical assistance cannot be nationally vetted and nationally supervised,
most common in the weakest of countries. Yet, the aid clock keeps
ticking and in the context of contemporary dialogue amongst many development
partners, disbursement remains the key indicator of performance,
so the pressure is on to utilise the funds allocated in any particular fiscal
year, or to come up with loans – in the case of the World Bank and other
development banks. However, clean bills of health cannot be readily given
to systems having to undergo fundamental change, as for instance, when a
finance ministry and its constituent sectoral ministries must make a change
from cash accounting to activity-based budgeting. So issues of trust arise.
When can the monies flow? Lack of trust in such cases may undermine
continued dialogue.
There are wider issues here. If the dialogue remains weak with some government
representatives, it may also be even more limited, or entirely absent,
with respect to the inclusion of a wide group of stakeholders in countries
in which civil society is least developed or poorly organised. Recent
efforts to be more inclusive have led to non-governmental organisations
being invited to be round the table. This is important, but questions remain
about who precisely these organisations represent and, especially, how they
represent conflicting interests of different groups of poor people. Many
have narrow bases, and the more requests for dialogue, the more the same
individuals appear around different tables. So dialogue is fraught where it is
needed most.
Looking more closely at such ‘extended’ dialogue, we see the perspectives
of the different groups of actors. Take as an example an education
ministry and a finance ministry engaging in discussion with a group of likeminded
bilateral agencies and various development banks, such as the case
in Mozambique. The education ministry, typically, is balancing various concerns.
First, it is trying to ensure that the quality of education and access is
enhanced. This aligns it with the development goals of its partners. Yet,
despite the attraction of the aid monies to boost teacher development, educational
materials and for example, girls’ scholarships, the ministry is having
to rely on a teaching force whose pay is beneath the poverty line, so generating
enthusiasm for the proposed education reform programme is tempered
by the realities of most teachers’ working conditions. The finance
ministry, for its part, has to consider the budget demands of the education
ministry against all the other competing demands for expenditure. If it agrees
to the educational reform and the prerequisite capacity development that
comes with it, it is having to watch the whole public sector, so strengthening
financial management in education is a piece of a larger pie. Meanwhile,
the finance ministry is involved in other sectoral negotiations as well as
wider, macroeconomic issues beyond the narrower framework of public
expenditure. For their part, the development agencies have pledged increased