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Some international conferences are immediate failures, but none are immediate successes. It will take weeks, months and ultimately years before the impact of the last few days at the Busan forum on aid effectiveness will be known, and it is impossible to find two people with the same opinion at the moment. Here is my preliminary view.
If you think what matters are time-bound measurable commitments, then Busan is something of a failure. At Paris, most of the technical work on principles and indicators was already done, with a limited amount of target-setting left for after the conference. Here in Busan, there are next to no specific commitments, merely promises to come up with some. No wonder the large donors have big smiles on their faces – they have no targets to which citizens can hold them accountable. The one specific commitment is on transparency, with 75% of official development assistance (ODA) now falling under the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
While some are hopeful that the next six months will bring forth a meaningful global monitoring framework for the promises made at Busan, my instinct is that this will be a hard task, although one worth engaging in.
If you care about evidence-based policymaking, this conference has been mixed. While there was not enough explicit referencing, sifting and collation of the plethora of evidence available on what has worked and what hasn't over the five years since the Paris declaration, it has, nevertheless, filtered into the outcome document, with less important Paris commitments being dropped and the vital ones being reaffirmed.
And that is worth dwelling on. There was a time a few months ago when even core Paris commitments, such as ownership and putting aid money through systems, were thought to be in jeopardy given donor preference for "results" over process. That has not happened. Busan has thoroughly underlined the importance of ownership, and has stronger language on systems-approaches than ever before, insisting that the "default" option should be to use country systems, with any deviance explained to beneficiary countries. The new deal for fragile states will also be seen as one of the successes of Busan.
If you are interested in progressive language more generally, this document is satisfactory. It moves the debate well along from an obsession with aid to a much broader understanding of the co-operation, financial and otherwise, required for development to take place. Sure, they are just words, but sometimes that is useful. There is a section on illicit capital flight, language on creating the "enabling environment" for civil society to thrive and a general tonal shift towards a new global reality in which the west plays a supportive rather than a dominating role. South-south cooperation, with its strong emphasis on horizontal relationships, is the key new area of theory in this document and that is good news. It does not herald a paradigm shift, but describes one that is taking place.
Driving change
But despite the human resources spent on including time-bound commitments and perfecting language in international documents, we should not exaggerate their importance in driving change. Statements of intent are important, but not very important. As my boss at the Overseas Development Institute, Alison Evans, has put it (in the language of an economist) they marginally increase the cost of an alternative course of action, but seldom compete with more profound political and economic incentives. That is certainly one of the lessons of the last five years of Paris, in which donors have improved a bit, but substantially failed to meet their commitments.
That is why some people prefer to look at process issues more than wording, and if we look at political engagement rather than specific targets, Busan emerges as an important step forward. After last minute negotiations (in which Brazil played a key role) and the insertion of a paragraph distancing non-DAC (the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) donors from concrete commitments, China, India and Brazil all endorsed the idea of working together more closely in what is being described, even by usually critical civil society representatives, as a "new global partnership". This matters to African countries that want to apply principles to all international partners, without diminishing the distinctiveness of Chinese support for their development.
It is not a leap, it is a pigeon-step, but it is a step nonetheless - the latest in a long line that demonstrate the willingness of progressives to work more closely together to respond to global challenges such as poverty. The inclusion of civil society in negotiations was also an important procedural innovation, in contrast to the reduced political space it is experiencing in many countries. At one panel I was on, the idea emerged that civil society should be a formal part of many more UN processes.
The OECD, which, along with South Korea, deserves great credit for brokering the Busan agreement, realised that it had to decrease for a global partnership to increase, and it demonstrated leadership when it mattered. I am hopeful that despite the lack of measurable commitments, the building blocks are in place for an improved and much more inclusive model of international co-operation for development.
If Paris was a triumph of technocratic organisation, Busan has been an expression of shifting geopolitical realities, with the role of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) proving more critical than ever before. But ultimately the same question applies to both talkfests: what difference will all this hullaballoo mean for the world's poorest and most vulnerable people? That will depend more on the actions of the international community than words on a page.
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