ABSTRACT
The use of the term ‘partnership’ to prescribe the appropriate relationship between international aid donors and recipients has spread remarkably in the past few years and achieved a central place in the policy documents of all major multilateral and bilateral donors, as well as in the Millennium Development Goals themselves (German and Randel, 2000). The notion of a partnership for development dates back at least to the Pearson Commission, set up in 1968 by the World Bank in the context of concern about the limited impact of ‘twenty years of development assistance’ (Pearson, 1969: vii), and its report was entitled Partners in Development. The objective of development assistance1 at that time was defined in a limited and straightforward way as ‘self-sustaining economic growth’ (ibid.: 130). Partnership was represented as a new kind of development relationship that would avoid ‘friction, waste of energy, and mutual irritation’, while maintaining ‘clear and accepted channels’ for ‘advice, consultation and persuasion’ (ibid.: 127). The precise objective of development made it possible to satisfy the ‘natural’ interest of aid providers in the use of their resources, while avoiding donor monitoring of the whole of social policy in developing countries, by defining two indicators of progress: ‘adequate and sustained increases in the ratio of domestic savings to national income and in the ratio of exports to imports’ (ibid.: 132), simultaneously taking appropriate account of factors outside the country’s control. Since partnership implies mutuality, relations between donors and recipients were to be ‘based on an informal understanding expressing the reciprocal rights and obligations’ (ibid.: 127). From the beginning, partnership relationships were to be supported by improved donor coordination, and the ‘donor community’ would accept its responsibility to
guarantee predictable and long-term performance-related aid flows. But also from the start, doubts were expressed in the South about the credibility of the proposals:
Unfortunately, the concept of a genuine partnership in development somehow lacks credibility. There has never been any real sense of equality between donors and recipients even when they attend the same consortium meetings and sit around the same table in many other forums. . . . The donors have parliaments and public opinion which reign so supreme that a mere reference to them should silence all criticism, whereas the recipients should obviously be able to manipulate at will their parliaments and public opinion in the interest of appropriate development policies. A mere equality of opportunity in engaging in dialogue cannot establish parity in decision-making. Nor can the platonic world of knowledge as a sufficient basis for right conduct be easily summoned into existence.
