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Making the Policy Dialogue more Effective: What the
Development Co-operation Record Suggests
Hendrik van der Heijden 1
Introduction
The record of development experience in the Third World during the
past 30–40 years reveals notable development successes, especially in Asia.
These successes reflected the ‘good’ economic governance and self-help
in these countries, and of donor policies and programmes that supported
this positive governance. In contrast, development performance in African
countries has been much less impressive, reflecting their governments’ far
less than full commitment to economic growth and poverty reduction, as
well as the ineffectiveness of development co-operation in that continent.
Clearly, the policy dialogue between donors and recipient governments
has not been effective in sub-Saharan Africa. Put differently, donor efforts
to induce and sustain policy reform through persuasion and the application
of leverage have not been successful in Africa. In particular, the record tells
us that donor practices to shore up recipient countries’ weak commitment
to economic growth and poverty reduction by the provision of aid were
not successful when there was only a loose connection between the granting
of aid and the conditionalities formulated under the ‘policy dialogue’.
As a result, the development performance of many ‘poor reformers’ remained
poor, and aid thus provided failed to generate development. This
was so because aid began to substitute for essential internal developmental
efforts in the 1990s, rather than to supplement them.
As aid dependency rose, domestic ownership – so important for sustained
development – began to be diluted, reflecting the inverse relationship between
aid dependency and domestic ownership. Not surprisingly, development
policy was increasingly being formulated to ‘please’ donors, to attract
yet more assistance from abroad. Much of this persists today. The table below
shows the comparatively meagre internal developmental effort in sub-
Saharan Africa and its high degree of aid dependency for the 1990s:
1 Hendrik van der Heijden (the Netherlands) is currently a director of the French consultancy firm
Geomar International in charge of work in the macro-economic and financial area. Until recently
he was Economic Adviser to the Government of Solomon Islands and before that, in the 1990s he
worked as External Financing and Economic Policy Adviser in the Ministry of Finance in Zambia.
In the mid-80s he was Head of the Aid Management Division at the DAC/OECD in Paris, after
completion of a twenty-year career in the World Bank, working as a senior economist and occupying
management positions in Latin America and East Asia.