Most donors now routinely relate their country assistance plans to their partners’ national development strategies.  In most cases, however, this does not involved much change to the content of donor programmes.  National development strategies tend to be broad enough to encompass most donor preferences.

The more challenging side of alignment is the move towards programmatic forms of assistance.  Traditionally, aid has been fragmented across too many small projects, which are difficult for partners to coordinate and end up becoming donor driven.  To try to make development assistance more strategic, the Paris Declaration sets a target of 66% of aid flows to be provided in the context of programme-based approaches (PBAs).

The official definition of PBA is contained in the following DAC publication.  However, the definition is notoriously difficult to apply, and there are doubts as to the accuracy of the DAC baseline figure set in 2006.

General budget support is still a relatively new tool in donor practices, and its ultimate impact is still uncertain.  Some donors, such as DFID, are committed to providing two-thirds of their assistance as budget support; others are more sceptical.  The multi-donor evaluation (below) was the first systematic attempt to assess the effects of general budget support.

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