D+C, No.4, Bonn, 1998.
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
If in all honesty, one acknowledges that there are world governments quite indisputably engaged:
– in acts of repression and of exploitation of their people,
– in fostering unnecessary military build-ups,
– in enacting and condoning fiscally irresponsible measures,
– in taking environmentally irresponsible decisions (or allowing a laissez-faire attitude on this);
And they are guilty of (or lenient about) overt corruption and other undesirable traits such as tribalism, nepotism, gender discrimination or ethnic cleansing;
And are not accountable to anybody on these counts and, for this reason, are highly unpopular both at home and abroad;
Then I contend with others (Hewitt de Alcantara 1993; Girvan, 1993) Dubey, 1993; South Centre, 1993) that:
– Withholding international bilateral or multilateral non-emergency assistance is justifiable in quite a few cases -unless certain minimum conditions are met by such recipient governments. (Hewitt de Alcantara, 1993)
– It is conceivable to impose “fair conditionalities” -in a true South-South spirit- as a prerequisite before lending money or giving assistance to the above governments (as opposed to its people!).
– It is further possible to set criteria, define codes and find a consensus among organisations of the South on how to apply a set of guidelines -from a South perspective- to appraise the creditworthiness or aidworthiness of a given regime, not being stopped by issues falsely perceived as interfering with the recipient country’s sovereignty.
– It is thus perfectly thinkable to deny a helping hand to those regimes that do not help their own kin, and instead channel that help through channels bypassing government.
Accepting such a stance poses the challenge to find criteria -acceptable to the South- to sort out the ‘good’, from the ‘not-so-bad’, from the ‘more clearly bad’ governments amongst them. Despite there being serious value judgements involved in this -and despite easy accusations being inappropriately made of this being tantamount to meddling with sovereignty issues- I personally think that setting a minimum package of such criteria is not impossible. It is a way to impose national and international accountability criteria on matters of global concern, but in a South-South context. As said, hiding behind the overused cliche of “this violates our sovereignty” makes us in the South look bad, and weakens us in our bargaining with the North institutions and governments. (I call this “a false sense of sovereignty” as borrowed from the concept of false pride).
Among other, the new agreed upon package of criteria to be used will apply agreed upon international human, economic and political rights, as well as environmental conservation principles and will be used to monitor if and how the same are enforced. But this will be done using a South perspective (to be defined). The countries of the South have to act based on the notion that “we are all interdependent neighbours, and it is unconscionable to believe that we can continue to live indefinitely, side by side, amidst the kind of obscene disparities in wealth and health distribution and in levels of freedom and participation that exist amongst us today”. (James Grant)
There is indeed a desire and a need in the South for increased democracy in our midst. If one is to succeed in making this desire a reality, a South-centered development ethics has to be promoted that expands abilities of the people and enforces accountability on the governments of this diverse group of countries. (Schuftan, 1996)
For the purpose of clarity, one has to first differentiate among several types of conditionality:
– IMF conditionalities: These imposed (or reluctantly agreed upon) conditions most often pertain to stand-by or other loans to support countries’ balances of payments (these are the well known neoliberal, monetarist, mostly macroeconomic conditionalities that are used as a threat of reducing all external resources flows leaving governments of the South extremely limited room to manoeuvre in).
– Other conditionalities: Multilateral and bilateral agencies also sometimes impose conditions for development aid which they may or may not link to recipient countries fulfilling IMF conditionalities. (The World Bank almost always takes the former position).
– Then, there are conditionalities set by private or public financial institutions when countries reschedule their external debt (those are always IMF-linked, are mostly coercive rather than enabling and usually result in an impossibly large number of required stringent commitments).
[Note at this point that modern conditionalities are no longer confined to aid or loan giving; they are increasingly getting linked to giving or denying access to markets. (Dubey, 1993)].
I am sure one can think of other types of or scenarios for conditionalities fitting more restricted contexts, but I am not trying here to set up a classification; such a taxonomy is irrelevant to the central argument of this article.
What is relevant to the argument here is that conditionalities tend to target governments in an all-or-nothing fashion:
No compliance, no money. (Or partial compliance, small money and “let’s see how you do…”).
Not condoning the contents of such stiff unilateral conditionalities, I understand this may often be the last choice left when dealing with matters of the macroeconomic steering of national economies overall.
But in development aid, economic, good governance, human rights, social, environmental, disarmament or other conditionalities do not have to be an all-or-nothing undertaking!
Genuine negotiations should be a true two-way dialogue, and defending the legitimate interests of the people of the South should not be considered as confrontational by the negotiators from the North. (South Letter, 1994, p.1)
It is conceivable that, when imposed conditionalities are not met by host governments, the option exists for donor or credit institutions to bypass the government without withholding aid to the people of those countries altogether.
Some sort of “national clearing houses” for NGO funding can be set up at national level with (pooled) donor funding; foreign aid can then be channelled through such a route, sending a clear message to non-complying governments.
The way the South has been unilaterally fighting North-imposed current conditionalities has so far been erratic and certainly uncoordinated. The South has been posing resistance to the concept as a whole and has complained about the lack of a real South-North dialogue in applying conditionalities, and this is genuine.
But this is a defensive strategy, most often fought by each negotiating country in isolation, in the absence of a strong common front or backing.
Defensive negotiation strategies have worked poorly with the North as a whole, especially when applying them in the absence of collective South-South support.
The South, therefore, needs to set up a common-front-offensive; and in aid negotiations, this also means the South has to demand the same flexibility from the international financial institutions and bilateral donors than the one they use when dealing with difficult economic policies in the North itself.
The time is thus ripe for the South to launch a counter-concept of conditionality that will lend it credibility and bargaining power when negotiating with donor/lending institutions.
In essence, the South needs to be seen effectively combating and tackling -rather than condoning in the name of a non-existing Third World unity and solidarity- the most flagrant government excesses and weaknesses in its own midst. On this issue, the South needs a more convincing platform that reflects the realities of what is acceptable to its member countries in the present day and age. (South Letter, 1994, p.11)
When introducing counter-conditionalities as a South proposition, “we have to reject all kinds of moral scepticism, moral relativism, and value neutrality coming from anywhere; we need a non-ethnocentric ethical consensus, a cross-cultural moral minimum”. (Amartya Sen)
Ethics cannot be used only when politically convenient. There is a new global consciousness even in the political life of the world: our ethical universe is thus now planetary. The radically changing circumstances we are experiencing in the world call for a reconsideration of our ethical parameters in development. This moral underpinning of development applies both to countries in the North and in the South. The South has its own duty to intervene to safeguard the elementary rights of its individuals, of its societies and to protect its environment -setting its own standards. Responsible South leaders and politicians can no longer wash their ethical hands. The task is not one of simply adding ethics to international politics in the South; ethics is present in the first place. (Booth, 1996; Schuftan, 1982)
The process of setting counter-conditions has to be used by the South to gradually encode (codify) concrete state obligations in human, economic, political, environmental and other basic rights often invoked by Northern conditionalities with varying degrees of sincerity.
A counter-concept will help the South to negotiate from a position of strength, taking the offensive in the fight for its own version of what in its eyes are ‘fair’ conditionalities (that to begin with, do not take at face value the orthodox monetary/neoliberal model of the economy that underlies Fund/Bank programmes). (Girvan, 1993, p.2) A new conditionality will thus consolidate the position of the developing countries as a whole and will strengthen their negotiating position vis a vis the developed countries. (South Letter, 1994, p.15)
We are talking here of a sort of pro-active counter-conditionality package to be used as a counter-offer or an alternative ‘responsible response’ to be used in more balanced negotiations with donors/lenders. What has to be attempted is to make these donors/lenders adopt the South’s concerns as their own as a basis for an equal-footed partnership (“if we win, they win…”); and this, I contend, requires new openings as the counter-conditionality package herebelow proposed offers.
This counter-offer will:
– use the South’s collective influence to promote its members’ interests giving them added individual moral force; (South Centre, 1993, p.17)
– consider all current options and techniques in external aid negotiations to apply them as is fit to the situation in which the South finds itself today; (South Letter, 1994, p.13)
– be based on the notion that development aid conditionalities are not an all-or-nothing proposition, giving non-governmental outlets access to the aid instead when negotiations with the government break down; (Hewitt de Alcantara,1993)
– focus less on macroeconomic policy reform and more on increasing the efficiency, transparency and accountability in government; it will, therefore, upgrade public bureaucracy, as well as decentralise and promote citizens organisations; (Hewitt de Alcantara, 1993)
– hold as central the concept of ‘customised conditionality’ which calls for policy packages that are customised to the actual circumstances of recipient countries; (Girvan, 1993, p.2)
– bargain for reverse (or reciprocal) conditionalities which, on the one hand, have to do with the decentralisation of international financial institutions with substantial devolution of authority and initiative to their regional and country offices (in an effort to increase their cultural, social and political sensitivity) (Girvan, 1993, pp. 5+6), but on the other hand, also have to do with the following (in no particular order and not exhaustively):
– insisting on (longer) programme aid as opposed to (shorter) project aid;
– calling for more recipient-driven aid as opposed to donor-centered packages;
– fixing debt servicing to percentages of export earnings;
– a grater shared control of loans/grants by donor and recipient with an added role for NGOs in the partnership (the same as NGOs do watching over UN bodies and over global conferences);
– policy measures that address the factors leading to the need for credits/loans of each country in the first place; (Girvan, 1993, p.2) and
– setting up realistic frameworks which provide economic space for the poor to move out of poverty and that provide incentives for environmentally responsible economic behaviour. (Girvan, 1993, p.4)
In the scenario here proposed, the first challenge will be to come up with such a counter-conditionality package to change the traditional patron-client attitude of the developed countries in negotiating with the countries of the South thus pushing the North to be more forthcoming. (South Centre, 1993, p. 14 + 15)
The Geneva-based South Centre could broker the process between likely participants called upon to draft such a package (Group of 77, Non Aligned Movement, Commonwealth Secretariat, others).
The document will have to set stepped criteria that will give an indication of progress towards fulfilment of each counter-conditionality.
How is such a set of counter-conditionalities supposed to be applied in a customised country-by-country way?
Existing national bodies in the development business, governmental as well as non-governmental, will be called upon to apply the criteria of this South counter-conditionality package in each specific country context.
Governments negotiating for grants/loans will use commitments they are willing to make as regards these counter-conditionalities as bargaining chips when negotiating with donors/lenders. What needs to be avoided is the by now frequent sterile confrontation of rhetoric to replace it by efforts to reconcile conflicting interests through balanced negotiations. (South Letter, 1994, p. 10)
A national NGOs coalition can vouch for or counter government claims that it has already fulfilled certain counter-conditionalities; they can do this, point by point if necessary, using the very same criteria set out in the package.
The donors/lenders will bargain from their own vantage points, now not putting forward a blanket objection, but based on a counter-proposal that is bound to have more, if only a few, points of convergence and minimum consensus.
A dialogue between donors/lenders and NGO coalitions will also further the cause of governments subsequently fulfilling counter-conditionalities.
NGO coalitions can open channels of communication between donor/lender and governments in case an impasse is reached between them. NGOs can also use their position in this as a mobilising factor to engage the national public opinion.
The interjection of the NGOs interpretation of the same counter-conditionalities package will call, when needed, for government/NGO formal interactions before scheduled negotiations with donors/lenders. This has the potential for fostering a needed national dialogue to assure government compliance with counter-conditionalities. If needed, international organisations (such as the South Centre, the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organisation of African Unity, the Organisation of American States, or others) can broker these meetings.
At least yearly, reviews of compliance with agreed upon commitments will be needed. Again here, NGOs will play a leading role.
If the ideas herein have merit, the system can be tried out in 2-3 countries to ascertain its viability and to adjust further details. Funding for such a testing can even come from one of the Bretton Woods institutions -if they can be convinced to give it a try. The South Centre can also play a role in making such a test run possible.
References:
Booth, K., (1996), reviewing the book “Ethics and International Politics” by Luigi Bonante, Book Review, The Political Quarterly, 67:2, April-June, pp. 175-176.
Dubey, M., (1993), The evolution of conditionalities. Paper prepared for the South Centre, Geneva.
Hewitt de Alcantara, C., (1993), Real Markets: Social and political issues of food policy reform. Frank Cass/EADI/UNRISD, London.
Girvan, N., (1993), Customised conditionalities: A note. Paper prepared for the South Centre, Geneva.
Schuftan, C., (1982), Ethics, ideology and nutrition. Food Policy, 7:2, May, pp. 159-164.
Schuftan, C., (1996), Towards operationalising a sustainable development beyond ethical pronouncements: The role of civil society and networking. Submitted for publication.
South Centre, (1993), Drafting “An agenda for Development”. Draft, November 26.
South Letter, (1994), No. 20, Summer.
[Dr Schuftan is a pediatrician from Chile currently working as an independent consultant in Saigon. He lived and worked in Kenya for 7 years in the late 80s and early 90s].