RETHINKING THE RELEVANCE OF ODA
Current Rends in the Debate on the Future of official development
assistance; background paper for the United Nations Financing
for Development process by Jens Martens, issued jointly by the Heinrich
Boell Foundation, World
Economy, Environment and Development (WEED) and the Global
Policy Forum. April 2001
From the contents: The level of official resource flows has always
been a bone of contention in the North-South negotiations. The fact that
these discussions have assumed a new quality today is above all due to
changes in the global framework conditions. Competition between the two
systems in the East and the West has ceased, transnational private capital
flows have grown rapidly in the course of world-wide liberalisation and
deregulation, and global problems have intensified. Against this background,
calls are becoming louder for a new development paradigm that is to provide
a new framework of legitimisation for international development financing.
Poverty eradication has become a leitmotif for co-operation between
North and South. Even if this goal is anything but new, the degree to
which it has become a common priority does seem remarkable. Only recently,
Great Britain and Germany passed national action programmes to combat
poverty; the EU and the ACP states assigned the task of poverty eradication
a key role in their new partnership agreement; the World Bank is now making
debt reducing measures for the highly indebted poorest countries conditional
on the compilation of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP), and in
1999, even the IMF renamed its Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility
(ESAF) a Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). At the UNīs Millennium
Summit in September 2000 the Heads of State and Government committed themselves
in their joint declaration to reach a number of International Development
Targets by 2015, including halving the share of people living in absolute
poverty, i.e. on less than one US$ a day.
The broad consensus on the (new) development policy priority is hardly
surprising. Getting rid of poverty is an undisputed goal as long as it
remains nothing more than an empty phrase that can be filled in with a
random choice of political contents. As soon as it comes to defining concrete
measures and approaches to reach this goal, there is no consensus at all.
For what will inevitably be at stake then is the (re-) distribution of
resources, which is hard to accomplished without conflicts in society.
Therefore, the consensus on the goal of poverty alleviation cannot be
separated from the conflict over the distribution of resources required
to this end. This once again brings us back to the issue of financial
flows between the North and the South and the future of ODA.
[ pdf, 19 pages, 162 KB
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