Harmonisation refers to cooperation between donors to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their aid delivery.  It includes programme-based approaches, joint projects (pooled funding) and other common arrangements, such as joint country plans or shared offices.

Since the 2003 Rome Declaration, donors have been concerned that the proliferation of donors and the fragmentation of aid across too many activities is straining partner country capacity.  Under the Paris Declaration, they commit to developing common arrangements for planning, funding, monitoring, evaluating and reporting on aid flows, and to reducing the number of duplicative field missions and diagnostic reviews. 

Harmonisation has come to consume a large share of donor time.  Joint activities often come with additional transaction costs for donors, even if they are time-saving for partner governments.  Joint programmes with too many donors quickly encounter diminishing returns.  There are concerns that donors are now spending too much time talking to each other – in effect, doing the same old things in more complicated ways.

The solution would appear to be in a better division of labour among donors.  Donors should be achieving greater complementarity by becoming more selective in their choice of sectors, and by using of silent partnerships and other lead donor arrangements.  Under the Paris Declaration, donors commit to greater delegation of authority to lead donors, while partner countries agree to provide clear views on donors’ comparative advantage. 

However, so far there has been very little progress on complementarity at a practical level.  In African countries, such as Tanzania, formalising the division of labour through Joint Assistance Strategies (JASs) has come to represent the state of the art in harmonisation.  JASs are now preparation in some 15 African countries, but have not yet been tried in the Asia-Pacific region, although there have been some more modest attempts at joint country planning in Bangladesh and Cambodia.