Prioritizing Opportunities in Development Policy
How Development and Security Cooperation Can Better Serve German Interests and Expectations
A reform of German development cooperation is urgently needed. The domestic crisis of confidence is just one reason for this, but an important one. Public opinion, however, is less one-sided than political actors often assume: for most people, different interests and values are equally legitimate, and the overwhelming desire is for greater effectiveness and burden-sharing.
A cross-section of the most robust research findings on the impact of development cooperation reveals both positives and negatives: for some of the goals of German development policy, research offers solid evidence of impact — but for others, it does not, or only to a limited extent, or only under demanding conditions for success that are often not met in practice.
Development policy should therefore make it an even greater priority than before to achieve practical successes in individual countries and sectors with regard to popular and realistic goals. In many cases, the necessary framework conditions for such tangible successes can be identified. Development and conflict research can reliably identify these conditions for success in many, though not all, subfields. Such goals can be driven by self-interest, but also by a sense of responsibility. Opinion polls show that it is not only self-interest that motivates the public’s willingness to spend German tax dollars abroad, but also humanity, morality, and responsibility.
At the same time, the recipient side should not be romanticized: the standard reference to technocratically determined “needs” or unquestioned “partner interests” (“local ownership”) falls short when enormous and growing “needs” are met with insufficient and dwindling resources, and when, for many partners, the ruling authorities’ commitment to the common good appears meager.
Hence the proposal to strengthen a focus on opportunities for success as a guiding principle. It is based on proven insights and could — if given greater weight than before — place a more honest, realistic, and rigorous emphasis on achieving goals. To target opportunities recognizes that the success of any form of support depends on local conditions that it cannot create on its own. Investments must therefore be made more selectively than before, namely only where and when the framework conditions for success in line with the respective objectives are in place. If the conditions for success are lacking, there is a risk of waste or even unintended contributions to corruption or the exacerbation of conflict risks.
What these conditions are varies considerably depending on the objective — a further challenge posed by the vague concept of “development cooperation,” which is divided among many ministries for budgetary reasons and whose individual instruments operate according to very different political logics that only partially relate to economic and social development.
What they all have in common, however, is that the traditional emphasis on needs-based approaches is no longer sustainable: needs far exceed the willingness of wealthy societies to invest; they are scarcely verifiable objectively and are subject to significant perverse incentives for the unilateral enrichment of ruling elites; and in the past, needs-based approaches have led to successes in terms of the respective goals only in isolated cases.
In addition to humanitarian emergency aid (which is not the subject of this paper), the paper outlines for the other fields of development cooperation how the four priorities of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (BMZ) reform plan could be further developed with a view to a stronger focus on opportunities.
This study was generously supported by More in Common UK.
