Bunge-Lenye-Meno-A-Parliament-with-Teeth-for-Tanzania-LAXNNAJ547

Introduction
“GBS has been presented as a slightly simplistic
theoretical nirvana, I think pushed by DFID. That
wasn’t right. It must go hand in hand with PFMR,
the rule of law, and a private sector.”
– Ian Shapiro, Head of Governance, DFID Tanzania 5
The political implications of the new varieties of aid were assessed at a
seminal conference of donor agencies in Paris in 2005. The notion that
aid should be de-politicised – a cause advanced by Professor Sachs –
has been revised. Paris 2005, as the meeting is now known, urged more
responsiveness to local conditions, aid programmes “aligned to the
policies” of recipient governments, and a concerted strategy to identify
and support cooperative local officials. These are explicitly political
skills and far closer to the traditional role of senior diplomats than of aid
officials. 6 Similar objectives are outlined in DFID’s ‘Drivers of Change’
initiative, which argues for astute political operators capable of finding
local champions to advance donor priorities.
In Africa, this agenda looks certain to become contentious again as
politicians accuse donors of interference in domestic politics. Yet donor
agencies also face pressure from industrialised nations, where support
for more aid for Africa has been galvanised by popular campaigns –
from the first Live Aid concert during the Ethiopian famine of 1985 to
the ‘One’ campaign endorsed by every presidential candidate during
the US elections of 2008. Such movements are testimony to a new kind
of popular protest, a product of the consumer society and the internet
age. The Jubilee Campaign to “Drop the Debt” of developing countries
in 2000, was a catalyst for billions of dollars in debt relief written off
by the World Bank and IMF.
5. Interviewed by Mark Ashurst, Dar es Salaam, July 2008
6. Arnon, J., Aid, Politics and Development: A Donor Perspective. In Development Policy Review, 2007,
25 (5), pp 653-656 (Blackwell).
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