Good Governance, Aid Modalities and Poverty Reduction
From Better Theory to Better Practice
The report deals with the challenges implicit in the commitment of leading donor agencies, including Irish Aid, to deliver aid for development in ways that help poor countries to "own" their development efforts, by using and helping to strengthen their policy-making capacities and management systems. This approach is strongly grounded in experience and theory, but the practice has proven problematic in a number of respects, raising a series of questions for researchers and development agencies alike.
- Part 1 - New aid modalities: towards a more coherent practice.
- Part 2 - Improving governance for development: how to engage?
The implementation of the thinking on new aid modalities has been too cautious and qualified. Even the more progressive donors are tending to adopt half-measures that cannot be expected to yield the desired results. Changes in aid practices must be matched by changes on the recipient country side. Donors have a duty to help in this regard too. But this means engaging in new – better-informed, intellectually more modest and sometimes more pro-active – ways in the improvement of governance systems. In each of these respects, securing changes in incentives and institutions is more important (relative to merely providing funding) than donor agencies and public opinion in Northern countries have been prepared to recognize.