“Four key principles—accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion—have in recent years become nearly universal features of the policy statements and programs of international development organizations. Yet this apparently widespread new consensus is deceptive: behind the ringing declarations lie fundamental fissures over the value and application of these concepts. Understanding and addressing these divisions is crucial to ensuring that the four principles become fully embedded in international development work,”
So begins a long article elaborating on the theme on Carnegie Endowment for International Peace blog.
It’s written by Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Saskia Brechenmacher, a first-year MALD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
The authors write that aid organizations “often treat the four principles as programmatic boxes to be ticked rather than fundamental elements of their work” and “worry that broadening the development agenda on normative grounds will dilute the core focus on poverty reduction and growth.”
Furthermore, the authors say, “Evidence for the developmental impact of the four principles is limited and inconclusive to date. Uncertainty about their instrumental value is compounded by the unresolved broader debate over the relationship between governance and economic development.”
Many developing country governments rhetorically embrace the four principles bit fail to translate their commitments into substantive political reform, according to the authors.
The article does not discuss transparency in specific, but addresses it in connection with the other three elements.
In discussing the “only partial” linkage of the four principles, the authors state, “Some transparency programs are narrowly designed to make government data more easily accessible to private sector and other stakeholders and do not attempt to consciously link these transparency mechanisms to accountability or participatory processes.”
They contend that the four principles “are not only frequently pursued at least somewhat independently of each other: they can also at times be in tension.”
Later they write:
Similarly, a first wave of efforts to foster transparency in different arenas of state action is quickly giving way to the realization that achieving meaningful developmental impact this way is a considerably more complex and uncertain process than many aid providers had initially realized. Scholars have warned of the frequent conflation of open data technologies and the politics of open government, emphasizing that a government can “provide ‘open data’ on politically neutral topics even as it remains deeply opaque and unaccountable.
They are quoting Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson, “The New Ambiguity of ‘Open Government,’” 58 UCLA Law Review Disc. 178 (2012).
The authors review the debate over the evidence base for the four principles and “the larger, often fierce debate about the overall relationship between governance regimes and economic development.”
Regarding evidence, they conclude:
The impact of donor interventions related to accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion is often long-term, indirect, and difficult to isolate from other factors, and the evidence base to date is still too thin to arrive at firm conclusions. In general, donors so far seem to have been more successful at achieving intermediate outcomes than proving a causal connection between their efforts relating to these issues and broader processes of socioeconomic change. They further struggle to translate evidence of success in one particular context to more widely applicable policy recommendations.
The final paragraph states:
In sum, the apparent consensus around transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusion should be understood as very much a work in progress, not a transformation that has largely already been achieved. Enthusiasts of these principles should avoid the temptation to act as though the agreement around them is stronger than it really is—and they should be willing to face head on the many lasting fissures and look for ways to reduce them. Some, like the debates over the legitimacy of the intrinsic case, reflect differences in the very core idea of what development is and are thus unlikely to be overcome anytime soon. But others, like the continuing divisions between governance, human rights, and democracy practitioners or the problem of superficial application of the four principles, are much more amenable to practical solutions. In other words, whether the consensus genuinely solidifies will depend greatly on how effectively its proponents deepen their understanding of how to put the four concepts into practice, share that understanding clearly across all parts of the assistance community, and bridge the divide between donors and recipients on these issues. The degree of their success will be a major factor determining the shape of international development work over the next generation.
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