Economists prove importance of transparency in social protection?

"We find that the mistargeting of a cash transfer program in Indonesia is significantly associated with increases in crime and declines in social capital within communities. Hence poorly administered transfer programs have a potentially large negative downside that extends beyond the pure financial costs that have been the focus of the literature to date."

A new paper by Lisa Cameron and Manisha Shah  (ungated). A similar point made by my colleagues Ian and Nils a few years ago based on some qualitative fieldwork.

Cameron and Shah conclude that:

"This study underscores the importance of targeting programs in a way that is acceptable to the a ffected communities. Program acceptance can be enhanced by improving targeting accuracy and by transparent communication of this mechanism and the program's aims to the general population."

Aid Effectiveness #Fail

So in 2005 all the big donor countries set themselves a bunch of targets for making their aid more effective. The results are in.

"The results of the 2011 Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration are sobering. At the global level, only 1 out of the 13 targets established for 2010 has been met. Nonetheless, it is important to note that considerable progress has been made towards many of the remaining 12 targets."

As Owen Barder says,

"If developing countries had hit as few targets as the donors have met on the Paris Declaration we would have cut off their aid."

And to paraphrase Owen, this is all sadly a bit predictable. The targets are inconsistent with the incentives facing donor agencies. We need new ways of working, including much more transparency and better data (for more - see here). 

Kudos to the World Bank

The clear winner of Publish What You Fund’s new aid transparency ranking. The US clearly needs some work (vindication for AidWatch?).

Transparent Impacts?

New post up on the IPA blog.

A change.org campaign for oil transparency

Dear rovingbandit.com,

In 2008, Chevron paid more than $40 billion to the governments of countries around the world - most of it entirely in secret.

Chevron drills for oil in places where millions of families struggle on less than $1 a day. That $40 billion could have supported schools, health care and food programs - so where did it go?

Chevron knows exactly how much it paid to each country. But they won't say. And without any information on these secret payments, poor communities can't demand their fair share - to send their children to school, create jobs and escape poverty and hunger.

Tell Chevron to open the books on its secret payments so that the world can follow the money and help put it toward real development.

In less than a week, Chevron will hold its annual shareholder meeting. This is our moment to demand that Chevron finally come clean. Greater transparency and accountability will stabilize countries and help Chevron in the long run.

Chevron won't even provide a basic accounting of how much money goes to each country - so there's no transparency, no accountability, and no way for poor people to call for their fair share.

That means people whose lands are yielding up billions of dollars in oil revenues still face chronic hunger and poverty. It means some officials remain free to enrich themselves with no public oversight. This makes it hard for citizens and watchdog groups to follow the money and keep officials honest.

Our partner, Oxfam America, has met with Chevron multiple times, but they keep refusing to disclose. So they have filed a shareholder proposal for Chevron's May 26th annual meeting, by which shareholders can exercise their rights and ask Chevron to open the books on its secret payments - and in partnership with Oxfam America we're also making it easy for people like you to put direct pressure on Chevron.

Other oil and mining companies disclose this information, and Chevron should join them - especially since more transparency will actually help Chevron in the long run by stabilizing countries. If the company agrees to change its policies, it could be a watershed moment across the oil, gas, and mining industries.

Tell Chevron to stop the back-room deals that open the door to corruption and keep people in poverty.

Chevron advertises itself as a protector of the planet. So why isn't it agreeing to let the public see what it pays to foreign governments?

With your help, we can pressure Chevron to make a real change in its policies - and help millions of poor people in the process. Please share this alert with your friends and family.

Thank you,

- The Change.org team in partnership with Oxfam America

This is going to be huge

The UK Conservative Party has promised to

Publish every item of local and government and quango expenditure over £25,000, plus every project that receives EU funds

a Tory spokesman confirmed to me earlier today: "We will publish Coins [the Treasury’s Combined Online Information System] straight away if we get into government."

I’m almost tempted to vote Conservative. Only kidding. I’m probably not going to vote in any case. But this is absolutely revolutionary. This is going to change everything. It will make the MP expenses scandal seem like nothing.

How much of DFID spending will be on this thing?

Social Networks for Development

I’ve been chatting to Sam Lampert and a colleague about Beyond Planning and what the ultimate social network for development would look like.

I think the big idea is already out there. It is Ushahidi, which aggregates and maps information submitted online or by SMS during elections and crises. But why stop at crises? Why not just have a system which is always on and which can allow citizen reporting on public services?

How about a massive global wikipedia for aid spending, government spending, and politics, with Facebook Connect so contributor’s reputations are at stake, and maps, and links to MP profiles, and voting buttons on public projects, and voting buttons on public projects linked to SMS, which are advertised on the radio (“how is your local school doing? text your marks out of 10 along with your district name to 1234”), and detailed user reviews of projects, and league tables, and links to public data on project spending. Aid and Government projects all in the same place. Aid transparency, government transparency, political transparency, all in the same place.

Geeks of the world - any takers?

Complexity

Ranil at AidThoughts has a pop at shrill advocates of cash transfers, migration, and aid transparency.

Being a shrill advocate of cash transfers, migration and aid transparency myself, I feel duty-bound to respond.

What is bugging him is simplistic arguments, but he couches his argument in terms of the complexity of development.

The trouble is, it is precisely complexity which makes market and network-based solutions so attractive - in a world where no single person or organisation can know everything, markets can harness the power of lots of decentralised sources of information.

Market-based solutions like giving aid as cash transfers direct to poor people and allowing greater international movement of people, or network-based solutions like aid transparency to allow for crowd-sourcing scrutiny to both rich and poor country citizens, are attractive relative to the central planning of state provision of public goods precisely because of complexity.

This is not to say that any of these issues are magic bullets. They will not solve the development puzzle. But I would argue that they are $100 bills lying on the sidewalk that aren’t being picked up. There is often a good reason that they aren’t being picked up, such as a guy with a gun standing there telling you not to (border guards); or someone who’s job depends on you being unable to pick it up (aid workers), but that doesn’t stop it being a good idea. That doesn’t stop it being a heinous waste, heinous because waste and inefficiency is so tragic when so many people have so little. And yet we let the dollar bills lie. That is why I am shrill.

And finally, Ha-Joon Chang? Really?

Actionable Ideas for Shared Prosperity

Nancy Birdsall and Owen Barder both have fantastic lists of new development ideas, the most radical (and awesome) of which is I think Owen's "global minimum income guarantee backed by cash payments to the world's poorest people."

Go and read and revel in the development-policy-beyond-aid awesomeness.

Owen also points to the campaign for Aid Transparency website, which although being a great cause, really need to work on their marketing a bit.

There is lots of information about consultation papers and TORs and Technical Advisory Groups (TAG) and Steering Committees and Secretariats and Official Statements and OECD-DAC and the OECD DAC's Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and what all of this means for the DAC's Working Party on Statistics (WP-STAT) and HOLD ON A SECOND ISN'T THIS EXACTLY THE KIND OF SUBTERFUGE THAT TRANSPARENCY IS DESIGNED TO OVERCOME!!!

OK OK I know project governance is important, but as Owen argued in Beyond Planning, the Paris/Accra agenda is failing because donors have little incentive to do what they say. So how about doing some simple naming and shaming huh?

So here is Bill Easterly and Tobias Pfutze's (2008) transparency ranking of aid agencies by their public reporting on their operating costs, and on their reporting to the OECD.



GEF (Global Environment Facility), at least in your transparency practices in 2008, you sucked. So did you UNFPA. No gold stickers for you. Bad agency, bad!