Aid Effectiveness in Development Policy

The pressure of legitimizing development policy as far as its effectiveness has risen tremendously in the last few years. Reasons for this are, for example, the following:

• a number of developing countries are increasingly dissatisfied and are doubting whether development policies are effective
• the dissatisfactory or not enough demonstrated effectiveness of projects and programmes in development cooperation
• international sample analyses, conclude that development policy is either ineffective or only within certain conditions effective
• the demanding expectations in development policy due to the international formulated high standards for achieving goals (e.g. Millennium Development Goals) and process levels (e.g. Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness).

The debate on aid effectiveness is very complex. A useful overview for an interested general public (and not for special aspects dealt with by experts) is not available in the German speaking world. Above this stands the keyword “effectiveness” with very many problems in development cooperation (e.g. coordination, harmonization, project creation, and effectiveness analysis) which are being worked on or should be supported conceptually.

The German Development Institut / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is preparing a collection of papers on this subject where a number of staff members and external experts are involved. The collection offers an introduction, which gives an overview about the debate, then it touches on five main areas and for each area a conclusion is drawn for German development policy. These five main areas are:

• effective targets for development policy (Chapter 2),
• results and methodical approaches for collecting data on effectiveness (Chapter 4),
• implementing higher standards of effectiveness (Chapter 6),
• influence of other politicians on effectiveness of development policy – the problem of policy coherence (Chapter 1), and
• effectiveness of development policy of the EU, UN and World Bank and giving Germany an approach to start shaping this field (Chapter 3).