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Policy coherence in development co-operation

In the 1990s, a widely shared conviction emerged among aid donors that their policies should be more coherent than in the past. The drive towards increased policy coherence came as a response to a state of policy incoherence. The shifting grounds of policy coherence in development co-operation are outlined. The policies of some selected donor countries - Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland - are scrutinised and analysed, with particular reference to the 1990s. Spotlights are also directed towards the European Union, with particular reference to the internal coherence of its development co-operation policy and the common foreign and security policy, and the coherence of EU policies and the bilateral policies of its member states. Some perspectives are highlighted in separate contributions: one analyses the coherence and incoherence of aid and trade policies, another the challenge of policy coherence in the new global order. Governance and coherence in development co-operation are also given particular focus as are coherent approaches to so-called complex emergencies, taking Belgium's policies towards the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa as the point of departure. The volume starts off with a state-of-the-art contribution by its editors.

Aid impact and poverty reduction

Aiding recovery? : the crisis of aid in chronic political emergencies

m More and more governments in Africa and elsewhere, buckle under the strain of economic crisis, structural adjustment, declining legitimacy, and civil war.International aid has traditionally assumed the existence of stable, sovereign states, capable of making policy. In a number of developing countries, this is no longer the case. The big donor agencies have usually responded by suspending development aid and substituting some kind of emergency or relief assistance. Joanna Macrae shows from her on the ground investigations that relief and development aid are very distinct processes and cannot be merged in practice. Where the public authorities are weak, aid becomes highly fragmented, often inadequate in scale, and certainly not capable of leading to locally sustainable programmes. The international aid system, she concludes, faces real dilemmas and remains ill-equipped to respond to the peculiar challenges of quasi-statehood that characterize chronic political emergencies and their aftermath.