New Development Consensus - Carnegie Endowment for ...

1 ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, PARTICIPATION, AND INCLUSIONA New Development Consensus ?Thomas Carothers and Saskia BrechenmacherOCTOBER BEIRUT BRUSSELS MOSCOW WASHINGTONACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY, PARTICIPATION, AND INCLUSIONA New Development Consensus ?Thomas Carothers and Saskia Brechenmacher 2014 Carnegie Endowment for international Peace. All rights does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie , its staff, or its part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Carnegie Endowment .

2 Please direct inquiries to: Carnegie Endowment for international Peace Publications Department 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 P: +1 202 483 7600 F: +1 202 483 1840 publication can be downloaded at no cost at 228 The Carnegie Endowment gratefully acknowledges the support from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the UK Department for international Development that helped make the writing and publication of this paper possible. The opinions expressed in the paper are the responsibility of the authors the Authors vSummary 1 Introduction 3 Bridging the Three Rivers of Politics in Development 6An Incomplete Bridge 10 One Agenda or Several?

3 11 The Problem of Superficial Application 12 The Unsettled Intrinsic Case 14 Divisions Over the Instrumental Case 16 The Larger Developmental Debate 18 Uncertain Commitment to international Initiatives 21 The Continuing Donor-Recipient Divide 23 Conclusions 25 Notes 29 Carnegie Endowment for international Peace 34vAbout the AuthorsThomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for international Peace.

4 He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in is a leading authority on international support for democracy, rights, and governance and on comparative democratization as well as an expert on foreign policy. He has worked on democracy-assistance projects for many public and private organizations and carried out extensive field research on international aid efforts around the world. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, the rule of law, civil society building, and think tank Development in transitional and developing is the author of six critically acclaimed books as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers.

5 Carothers has also worked extensively with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), including currently as chair of the OSF Think Tank Fund and previously as chair of the OSF Global Advisory Board. He is an adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and was previously a visiting faculty member at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins Brechenmacher is a first-year MALD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She studied political science and Slavic Studies at Brown University and previously worked as a junior fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for international Peace and as a research analyst at Carnegie Europe.

6 ** The authors are grateful to Aislin Baker, Clarisa Bencomo, Diane de Gramont, Noha El-Mikawy, Lu Ecclestone, Larry Garber, Micol Martini, Shiona Ruhemann, Martin Tisne, and Ken Wollack for helpful comments on drafts of this paper. Oren Samet-Marram provided useful research assistance. 1 SummaryFour key principles accountability, transparency, participation, and inclu-sion have in recent years become nearly universal features of the policy statements and programs of international Development organizations.

7 Yet this apparently widespread new Consensus is deceptive: behind the ringing declara-tions lie fundamental fissures over the value and application of these concepts. Understanding and addressing these divisions is crucial to ensuring that the four principles become fully embedded in international Development Incomplete Bridge Accountability, transparency, participation, and inclusion represent vital embodiments of the opening to politics that occurred in Development work in the 1990s. They bridge three distinct practitioner communities that emerged from this new direction those focusing on governance, on democracy, and on human rights.

8 But Consensus remains elusive. Democracy and human rights practitioners generally embrace an explicitly political understanding of the four concepts and fear technocratic or purely instrumentalist approaches. Governance specialists often follow a narrower approach, applying the core principles primarily to the quest for greater public sector effectiveness. Aid providers frequently present the four concepts as a unified agenda. Yet in actual programming they may only pursue or prioritize selective parts of the set, engendering tensions among the different and Uncertainties Shallow practice.

9 Aid organizations often treat the four principles as pro-grammatic boxes to be ticked rather than fundamental elements of their work. Although these concepts evoke potentially transformative notions of citizen empowerment, they risk being reduced in practice to limited forms of citizen consultation or technocratic reforms that rely on simplistic theo-ries of developmental change. Debates about the place of the principles. Many aid practitioners remain skeptical of treating accountability, transparency, participation, and inclu-sion as intrinsic to their conception of Development .

10 They worry that broad-ening the Development agenda on normative grounds will dilute the core focus on poverty reduction and | Accountability, Transparency, Participation, and Inclusion: A New Development Consensus ? Questions about impact. Evidence for the developmental impact of the four principles is limited and inconclusive to date. Uncertainty about their instrumental value is compounded by the unresolved broader debate over the relationship between governance and economic Development . Resistance on the recipient side.