The principle of ownership means that donors should no longer try to dictate development policy through conditionality.  Under the Paris Declaration, they commit to drawing their conditions, where possible, from a partner’s own national development strategy, and imposing additional conditions only where clearly justified.  In addition, donors should as far as possible use the partner country’s own performance assessment framework to assess progress against the national development plan. 

Donor practice on conditionality is not covered by the Paris Declaration monitoring process, and there are at present no overall assessments of donor performance.  However, individual donor practices are addressed in the DAC Peer Reviews.  In preparation for Accra, a report is being prepared drawing together lessons from the 14 DAC Peer Reviews completed since adoption of the Paris Declaration. 

Conditionality is also one of the themes for the OECD’s Global Forum on Development, a body which encourages dialogue between DAC and non-OECD governments and civil society.  The following is a report of a seminar in September 2007 attended by 30 developing country experts, containing a useful summary of current thinking on conditionality. 

A number of donors have introduced new conditionality policies to reflect the Paris Declaration, including the World Bank.

Other commentators contest this interpretation of the World Bank’s practice.  Some of the civil society articles cited above suggest that the Bank and the IMF still impose structural adjustment measures through their lending activities.  Others suggest that the Bank has other ways of dictating country policy.

The European Union is acknowledged as leading on performance-based conditionality. 

For an Asian example of best practice in benchmarking rather than policy conditionality, see:

Further information

Work underway for Accra

• The DAC GOVNET is preparing various contributions and case studies on governance assessments and political economy analysis.