ODI | tag

Monday, 01 March 2010 16:38

Sector-based Approaches in Agriculture

This study provides an overview of sector‐based approaches (SWAps) in agriculture. It reviews past experience, identifies opportunities and challenges arising in the current setting and discusses future options for developing the approach.

Published in PBAs & SWAPs

Wednesday, 17 February 2010 11:54

Greater Aid Transparency: Crucial for Aid Effectiveness

This paper sets out and explores the link between donor aid and recipient country budgets, and the role greater transparency about aid can play in improving budget transparency, the quality of budgetary decisions, and accountability systems. The paper goes on to explore how current initiatives to improve aid transparency can best support better budgets and accountability in aid dependent countries. These efforts provide an important opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of both the recipient governments’ own spending and the aid they receive from donors.It concludes that publishing better information on aid requires compatibility with recipients’ budgeting and planning systems. The research findings suggest that recipient budgets bear many similarities, but this is not reflected in current formats for reporting aid. Finally, it concludes that the poorest countries will lose out if donors do not publish aid information that is easy to link with recipient government budget systems.

Published in Aid transparency

Monday, 15 February 2010 13:11

Aid effectiveness and human rights: strengthening the implementation of the Paris Declaration

This report by ODI explores the synergies that might exist between the human rights and aid effectiveness agendas and possible implications for the implementation of the Paris Declaration.

Published in Addressing cross-cutting issues

Wednesday, 04 November 2009 17:33

Forum on the Future of Aid

The Forum on the Future of Aid is hosted by the Overseas Development Institute, and was established to encourage online dialogue and discussion on research and opinions about how the international aid system currently works, and whether and how it could be reformed. The site presents research and opinions from the South and North on reform of the global aid architecture. It offers unbiased information and analysis to all the main actors on the international development scene. Wherever possible, it seeks to ‘level the playing field’, by equipping non-specialists to better predict how changes initiated elsewhere may have an impact on them, and by providing them a timely channel to identify and articulate their interests and concerns.

Published in Broadening the policy dialogue

Tuesday, 13 October 2009 10:53

Linking policies and budgets

This ODI Briefing Paper discusses the potential of MTEFs to link the competing imperatives of macroeconomic stabilisation with medium-term spending priorities, in order to budget resources more strategically. It discusses the importance of an integrated budget cycle, close attention to fiscal stability and early engagement with the political decision-making process. It notes that successful MTEFs begins with a strategic phase which determines sectoral budget ceilings, followed by the preparation of detailed budget estimates within these ceilings.

Published in Budgets & MTEFs

Monday, 12 October 2009 17:53

Second-generation PRSPs

This review by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) concluded that the PRSP has begun to escape from its origins in HIPC and IFI conditionality, and become genuinely country owned. It found that second-generation strategies were more comprehensive and multi-sectoral, and have triggered a genuine shift in expenditure towards poverty reduction in health, education and transport. They had opened up the policy process and enabled civil society to engage in policy debates “on an unprecedented scale.” However, it also noted the tendency of PRSP units to act as “enclaves” within government, and for ownership to be limited to core central ministries. The lack of budget links had resulted in poor costing and prioritisation, while weaknesses in public-financial management systems made the strategies difficult to implement. While donors were making genuine efforts to align with PRSPs, it found that this was often a pro forma process of reformulating existing policies in PRSP language. It found that too much assistance was still provided off the budget, and was fragmented across too many sectors, programmes and projects.

Published in Development plans

Thursday, 17 September 2009 11:27

ODI Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure

The Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure (CAPE) at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) aims to improve the quality of international development assistance and the effectiveness of public resource management in developing countries. It provides research and advice on PFM reform, and its site contains an extensive list of useful publications.

Published in Using country systems

Thursday, 17 September 2009 10:31

Promoting Mutual Accountability in Aid Relationships: Synthesis Note

This ODI paper describes a number of mechanisms for mutual accountability at the international level, including the EU's Cotonou Agreement, the DAC Peer Review process, the WB and IMF Global Monitoring Reports and the Africa Partnership Forum. It finds they are generally quite weak, with loose targets, unclear monitoring mechanisms, limited recipient voice and lack of enforceability. It calls for more dissemination of information on aid flows and performance, more independent monitoring of donor behaviour, stronger fora for high-level dialogue and measures to promote a common voice among Southern countries. At the country level, the paper argues that mutual accountability requires four conditions: confidence, credibility, coherence and capacity.

Published in Strenghtening accountability

Thursday, 17 September 2009 09:36

Thinking politically about ownership

This think piece from the UK's Overseas Development Institute suggests that ownership refers to the kind of political leadership, development vision and willingness to transform state structures associated with successful development in East and South-East Asia. It points out that for most developing countries, this requires more fundamental and more difficult political changes than donors acknowledge, particularly in political systems based on patronage. In difficult political environments, national development strategies are not effective drivers of policy, and may be a distraction from the more basic task of building effective states.

Published in Ownership

Sunday, 13 September 2009 14:13

Parliamentary Strengthening and the Paris principles: Cambodia case study

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.

Published in Broadening the policy dialogue