Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals ...

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
Furthermore, only in relatively few cases do these papers state why
German DC is supporting certain measures instead of others that
might just as well contribute to reaching the goals set, i.e. why the instruments
selected are assumed to be superior to others. This can give
rise to the impression that instead of being derived from the goals of
German DC, the measures receiving support have been defined a posteriori,
as a means of creating a strategic framework broad enough to
cover a number of individual DC projects. Rodenberg (2001, III)
comes out in favor of formulating PSPs without any unduly unspecific
statements of the following kind: “… provides a contribution to
the country’s economic development and thus contributes to reducing
poverty.”
– Meaningfulness of and need for a German engagement: Numerous
PSPs on MENA countries fail to explain why a given partner country
is especially reliant on external support for the measures being conducted
by German DC, i.e. where, precisely, they see a bottleneck in
partner capacities that can be bridged with the aid of German DC.
And seldom do these papers state precisely whether and to what extent
Germany, as a bilateral donor, has comparative advantages over
other donors and what these advantages consist of. Many papers get
no further than the assertion that there are such advantages.
– Goals not congruent with the MDG agenda: In most countries of the
MENA region German DC also pursued goals that, while they may
not run counter to the MDGs, are nevertheless not congruent with
them. For instance, one aim pursued by German DC together with the
Maghreb countries is to improve the latter’s international competitiveness
and in this way to ‘get them in shape’ for the Euro-
Mediterranean free-trade area. There can hardly be any objections to
additional goals or reference systems. 11 Most PSPs plausibly state
why they may be regarded as reasonable goals and how the measures
supported may contribute to achieving these goals. However, German
11 Alternative reference systems of German DC with the MENA countries would include
e.g. (i) the goal system of the EU’s Mediterranean policy and policy of good-neighborly
relations, set out in the Barcelona Declaration, the Common Strategy, and the agreements
on a Euro-Mediterranean free-trade area; (ii) the Arab Human Development Reports;
and (iii) the Broader Middle East Initiative (BMENA). These systems differ markedly
in the terms of the weight they assign to individual goals and their degree of concretization
and the obligations they entail, but not in terms of their rough orientation.
What this means is that they are, in the end, congruent; see Erdle / Trautner (2005); Posselt
/ Buchmüller (2005a).
German Development Institute 143