Dialogue in Pursuit of Development - Are you looking for one of ...

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failures, in particular in providing enough food to feed the population. Vietnam
was extremely dependent on aid from the former Soviet Union,
whose economy was also beginning to look shaky. There was no experience
of managing a market based economy, but Vietnam used UNDP as one of
the very few available donor agencies with access to such knowledge for
introducing crash training and study visits for top officials. This technical cooperation
programme probably had the highest pay-off of any aid project at
the time, since it enabled the politicians and managers to keep the economy
from collapsing when it was changed within a period of 18 months from a
stagnating state-controlled and aid-dependent cripple to a market-oriented
emerging ‘tiger’ economy with foreign aid dropping to only one per cent of
GDP. This was not just a case of skilful management but of a widespread
sense of urgency and of intensive internal dialogue, involving all levels of
decision makers in the party, the bureaucracy and the military (Riedel and
Turley, 1999). One can imagine how that dialogue could have turned, had
the policy reforms failed to deliver the goods.
There is no manual for conducting either the policy dialogue or a programme
review, and both donor and recipient agents are supposed to know
the basic facts from their own experience and to learn the strategy and the
game theory from their senior colleagues. This on-the-job learning does not
always produce good results, which is reflected in the quality of the negotiating
teams as well as in the outcome of their negotiations. I shall never
forget the intimidating experience of my first visit to India as a youngish
leader of a Swedish negotiating team. The seasoned Indian team was vastly
superior in knowledge and negotiating tactics, but fortunately for us, their
sense of fair play kept them from taking advantage of all our blunders. I
have often wondered how it would feel to be a young African government
official, meeting for the first time a team of IMF officials, armed to the
teeth with figures and arguments for decisions which could easily land him
in trouble with his minister and subsequently with his whole domestic support
network. What could be done to strengthen his position in this unequal
power game?
Bargaining games have been developed by IFIs and some bilateral donors
to train their own junior officials together with some of their counterparts
on the recipient side. But these training programmes are more concerned
with technicalities of project agreements than with policy dialogue, and
they would naturally not favour a negotiating path that led the recipient to
exit the negotiations without a contract. A bargaining game that would
strengthen the hand of the recipient would have to draw on the experience
of recipients, from a large number of negotiating cases. Merely listening to
some young negotiators who have just met ‘the IMF man’ makes you believe
that alternative game plans could be developed, discussed and practised
by like-minded governments in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Simply
bringing together people from different countries with different types of