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Parliaments and Aid Effectiveness
How can the contribution of aid to a country's development be maximised? How can aid's impact on reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals be strengthened? Until recently, this debate has largely taken place between developing country governments, development agencies and civil society organisations. Less attention has been given to the role that parliaments, political parties, and parliamentarians might play in promoting more effective and accountable aid.
At the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in September 2009, new commitments were made by developing country governments and donor agencies to remedy this. Specifically, the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) highlighted:
Parliaments and parliamentarians have a crucial role to play in ensuring that governments are accountable for the decisions they make on how resources are used and the results they achieve. This section of the web portal aims to provide practical guidance and examples of how parliaments in many countries have already begun to promote more effective and accountable aid. The guidane note described below was updated in March 2010 to take account of extensive feedback by MPs and development practitioners who peer reviewed earlier drafts. Click the link below to find out more, or click here to directly download the latest draft.
Parliaments and Development Effectiveness a Practical Guidance Note This guidance note has been commissioned by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in partnership with the Capacity Development for Development Effectiveness Facility at the request of parliamentarians, policy makers and practitioners from the Asia-Pacific region. Please do write to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to give us your feedback, that will help improve the guidance note and the list of resources.
Further Reading on Parliaments: Ownership in the Paris Declaration Evaluation Author(s): Wood; Kabell; Sagasti; Muwunga; OECD-DAC Year: 2008 The Paris Declaration Phase 1 evaluation concluded that most countries have experienced a strengthening of national ownership of development policy as a result of the Paris Declaration, but that in many cases it remains narrowly focused in central government. While public consultations on national development strategies are now widespread, many countries are still struggling to achieve a sufficient engagement of broader society. National governments often lack capacity to play an effective coordinating for multiple inputs into sectoral strategies and decentralised programmes. The evaluation noted some tension between a narrow or technical understanding of ownership, based on ad hoc consultations, and a more political understanding based on strengthening democracy.
UNDP Resources on Parliaments and Participation UNDP has an excellent webpage on parliaments and democratic governance, providing a series of guidance notes, handbooks and toolkits. The resources include handbooks on strengthening parliamentary involvement in PRSPs and on parliament, the budget and gender.
Parliaments and the PRSP process Author(s): World Bank Institute; K. Scott Hubli; Alicia P. Madaville Year: 2004 Acknowledging that parliamentary involvement in early PRSPs was weak, this World Bank Institute paper provides practical guidance for those involved in developing policy processes on how to integrate parliaments. Using a checklist approach, it maps out opportunities for parliamentary involvement in different stages of a PRSP, including poverty diagnosis, policy formulation, implementation and monitoring and evaluation. However, it notes that the specific role for parliament in any country must be determined by reference to its particular characteristics and capacities. Missing links in the politics of development: learning from the PRSP experiment Author(s): David Booth; ODI Year: 2005 ODI's David Booth is a leading commentator on the politics of development. He points out the dilemma for donors: effective participation is a function of healthy, democratic political processes, which by their nature cannot be 'engineered' by external actors. He concludes that the theory that more participatory policy processes will be more effective has proved to be "naive". His studies of the political economy of LICs suggest that real decisions on resource allocation are taken behind the scenes by small groups of politicians, and that formal policy processes are largely "window dressing". However, there is greater potential in MICs, where there is informed public opinion, a degree of effective parliamentary scrutiny and an active media. What role have parliamentarians been playing in PRSP implementation and policy? Author(s): Rasheed Draman; Parliamentary Centre Year: 2007 This study, funded by the World Bank Institute and carried out by the Parliamentary Centre in Canada, looked at the role of parliaments in PRSPs in seven African countries. It found that, in many countries, development policy is still seen as exclusively a task of the executive, with parliament marginal to the process. Parliamentary Strengthening and the Paris principles: Cambodia case study Author(s): Anthony Tsekpo; Alan Hudson; ODI; Parliamentary Centre Year: 2009 This is one of four country studies on the effectiveness of parliamentary strengthening, commissioned by DFID and CIDA and carried out by ODI and the Parliamentary Centre. It finds that, in Cambodia as in many other developing countries, the executive dominates a resource-starved legislature and a single party dominates the political landscape, making a challenging environment for strengthening parliamentary effectiveness. Despite some strengthening of parliamentary commissions in recent years, parliament remains largely ineffective, with most parliamentarians lacking the skills, knowledge or incentives to play an independent oversight role over the executive. It finds that the Paris Declaration principles have had relatively little influence on donor assistance to the parliament to date, and would have the potential to improve performance. Parliamentary Network on the World Bank The Parliamentary Network on the World Bank was founded in May 2000 as an informal network of individual parliamentarians, to strengthen accountability and transparency in international financial institutions in general and the World Bank in particular. It represents more than 800 parliamentarians from 110 countries. It mobilises parliamentarians to engage in debates on the global governance of international development institutions, and provides a platform for dialogue between parliamentarians and the World Bank. Many of its actions are taken in partnership with the World Bank, including the Annual Conference and Field Visit Program. The Network has local and regional chapters in India, Japan, East Africa, West Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Network members represent themselves and their constituents, and not their countries, parliaments or governments. The Network has published a Parliamentarians’ Guide to the World Bank. The Parliamentary Centre is a Canadian not-for-profit, non-partisan organization devoted to improving the effectiveness of representative assemblies around the world. Founded in 1968 to strengthen the capacity of Canada's Parliament, the Centre is now a global leader in parliamentary development wiht projects that support parliaments in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The Centre hosts the African Parliamentary Poverty Reduction Network, created to pool experience and best practice of parliamentary participation in PRSPs.
The Parliamentary Development web platform, AGORA, has three main objectives: to act as a hub of information and expertise on parliamentary management and parliamentary development programmes; to promote the global streamlining of parliamentary development activities and advocate for parliamentary development worldwide; and to consolidate knowledge and expertise by creating an active online community for those working in parliaments and in the field of parliamentary development.
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