The Effectiveness of Development Aid and What That Means For Donors - Essay Example

? Research Proposal On 'Development Aid and Governance: The Effectiveness of Development Aid and What That Means For Donors, Governments, and other Aid Recipients [Name of Student] [Name of Institution] 2, 379 Words [Date] Outline 1. Problem statement (research background) 2. Research objectives 3. Limitations to and scope of study (demarcation of research) 4. Literature review 5. Importance of the study 6. Research methodology 7. Research techniques 8. Ethical considerations 9. Clarification of terms 10. Time framework 11. Chapter layout 12. Bibliography Background/Problem Statement The effectiveness or lack of aid has been a rather recurring issue/terminology in the glossary of the development aid industry in recent times. Contrastingly, two decades ago, development donors or aid donors would not hesitate to provide funding to governments and organisations for developmental purposes (De Haan, 2009). Among those who benefitted during this past period of improved donor and aid activities were third world and developing countries in regions such as Africa and Asia in which countries such as Zaire under Mobutu and Philippines under Marcos benefitted. With this level of funding, these beneficiary regimes started to mismanage these aids to hitherto unseen corruption levels. These high levels of bad governance and corruption have made donors such as financial institutions and industrial powers to refrain from funding development projects in excessively corrupt governments, countries, and groups (De Haan, 2009). Aid donors have since recognized and established that giving aids to governments with ineffective policies is a practice that is rather wasteful. Instead, more efforts and emphasis have been directed at countries and regions with sound domestic reform policies. Nonetheless, donors’ narrow political objectives still feature in most of the aid decisions in the contemporary society. There is, thus, the need for the official donor aid community to commit to the improvement of aid effectiveness by establishing more proficient and standardized coordination mechanisms. Fortunately, some forums such as the Aid Effectiveness High Level Forum (HLF) in Rome in 2003 and the Paris Declaration in the second HLF in 2005 were moves in the right direction for aid governance. Although these forums focused on donor coordination and harmonisation, the issues of governance, public management, and corruption also featured prominently during the deliberations (Stokke, 2009). In regard to aid management, the supply side featured prominently in relation to public finance management and country procurement systems. It was not only corruption, which was mentioned as a problem, but commitments were also made on transparency and accountability by both donors and recipients. Poor governance, corruption, and bad public management of finance and procurement are thus among the major challenges that the aid industry has encountered for quite some time and mechanisms and strategies to counter their influence are in order (Lancaster, 2006). Research Objectives This research, therefore, sets forth several objectives, including the need to address the rampant corruption and mismanagement that hamper the successful implementation and realization of donor aid projects. The research seeks solution to the derailing progress in realising mutual accountability by both donors and recipients in aid-project implementation. Addressing the issue of commitment by donors and recipients in the aid effectiveness agenda is the other objective of this research. An improvement on the wanting coordination capacity of recipient governments is the other objective of this research. Moreover, this research also seeks to emphasize the central role that commitment on transparency, in conjunction with sound governance and anticorruption, plays in the aid industry. Finally, this research aims at highlighting the effects of the failure by stakeholders to address the developmental aid problems associated with bad governance and corruption on aid management. Demarcation and Scope of the Study Demarcation and scope of the study is that it is a rather specific research, focusing on the importance and implications of governance, corruption and public management on the aid industry. However, the research will focus on both recipients and donors in regard to the above aspects of development aid. The research will be conducted in local communities, but among all stakeholders including government agencies, personnel, project managers, donor groups, and project implementers. In addition, the research will cover on-site or firsthand experiences of donors and recipients regarding donor applications, vetting, procurement procedures and the awarding and the implementation of the targeted projects. The research will further cover stakeholder opinions on mechanisms by which aid governance and management may be improved and corruption prevented. Finally, the study will also take cognizance of the factors influencing aid management and delivery practices inculcated by both donors and recipients and the ways to address them. Literature Review An extensive literature review on the issues of governance, management and corruption with regard to aid reveals that many an author has covered wide ranging aspects of aid and governance. Highlighted in these literatures is the rampant neglect by the concerned authorities in recognizing and tackling the challenges to good governance and anti-corruption practices in aid management. Consequently, there is a silent crisis that the good governance and anticorruption forces in the aid industry face. Although the 1980s recorded a big number of authors as focusing on the issues of aid management and governance, studies during the early 1990s revealed that authors largely ignored and lowly prioritized these issues. Fortunately, since mid-1990s, a lot of ground has been covered as far as the literary exposure and reporting of governance, anticorruption, and transparency in the aid industry is concerned. In fact, this wide coverage of aid governance and management has been prompted and promoted by the focus that multilateral and bilateral official donors and agencies have directed at governance and corruption in the aid industry. In addition, the influence of donor-funded projects that support and promote good governance on aid management, initiated all over the world cannot be overemphasized (Lancaster, 2006). However, recent trends in which multilateral and bilateral agencies have laid little or no emphasis on aid management and governance have affected the literary coverage of the subject to a slight extent. The Supply Side of Donor Aid Recently, a lot of emphasis has been put on the supply side of aid, ignoring the governance and the anticorruption needs of the development side, which is in dire need of sound anticorruption, governance, and management measures. Many literatures have also covered the failure by the governance and anticorruption movement in the aid industry to transit from the awareness campaigns to the action-oriented phase. Similarly, the aid governance movement has not shifted from the narrow supply side focus to a focus that would support the more relevant demand side, which is prone to a myriad of challenges (Tarp, 2000). In addition, a focus that embraces a multi-stakeholder approach that encompasses even the political dimensions of corruption and aid governance, which are rather crucial to aid effectiveness, should be emphasized in literatures. Instead, recent literatures have been focused on the supply side, more so the capacity of donors to give financial and technical assistance. Further, literatures are focused on how donors and recipients should establish institutions, which are tailored to fit and address the requirements of donors, including ineffectual anticorruption commissions. The New World Reality Most literatures on donor aid have also failed to address the most recent and realistic challenges and aspects of development aid. Thus, the low priority given to aid governance and anticorruption is not the only indicator of the lagging behind of the aid industry as a whole: aid literatures have also failed to cover the path-breaking information technologies that have offered immense promise and avenues for improvements in aid governance and management (Heyse, 2007). Also ignored by many literatures are the various types of aid that have continued to emerge in recent times including sovereign funds, private donor aid, trade aid, and new official donor countries such as China (Heyse, 2007). Furthermore, the emerging innovative market – and private-driven solutions to development challenges in developing countries have been largely ignored by literatures. The impact and the role of the global financial crisis on the aid industry and aid management have also not been well covered in literatures. In fact, the need for changes in aid governance has become more apparent with the global economic crisis. On the basis of the impacts of the financial crisis, it is quite imperative that the governance of the aid industry should be altered to promote a forward motion (Heyse, 2007). One area covered by many aid literatures highlights the reality that world economics and finance have fundamentally changed and the role of governance and anticorruption practices in the aid industry has equally changed. In fact, with the current global financial crisis and the accompanying revelations of underlying corruption and bad governance, literatures have identified the compromise in donor flow to developing and underdeveloped countries. In summary, the multi-dimensional nature of the shift in the role and responsibility of governance in the aid industry has been explored in many a literature but not to the expansive and extensive level expected. Research Techniques and Methodology The research technique to be used involves four major steps: topic formation, hypothesis building, conceptual definition and operational definition. In the formation of topic stage, a question will be formulated within the field of the research after which a theory phrased as a question will be established. To help define the scope of the study will be the conceptual and operational definitions. The steps that would follow the above are data gathering, data analysis, testing, and conclusion, all of which will be quite crucial and integral in the research. Importantly, the research methodologies to be used in this research will allow for the logical realization of scientifically valid results. Moreover, the nature of the data required for this research has been among the factors upon which the research methodologies have been chosen. The variables, coverage and sample size are the aspects of the data required that greatly influenced the choice of the methodologies used. Therefore, the methods are expected to deliver data of the desired qualities such as comparability and reliability. Although the research intends to apply secondary sources such as texts, numbers, images, and audio, it will exploit the process of primary data collection as the empirical material for data analysis. The research will also exploit the dichotomy quantitative-qualitative approach favored in social researches, taking advantage of the key differences between the two methodologies while exploiting the potential for their being complementary. Qualitative research designs will be extensively used since they have been found to be quite effective in gathering developmental knowledge for governance and management studies. The advantage that the research will exploit by using qualitative research designs is the ability of the design to answer a wide range of questions touching on governance, anticorruption and management of development aid and related actual and potential challenges. Similarly, qualitative research designs will describe, explain and further explore the phenomenon of the relationship between governance and development aid by taking the question forms of what, why, when, and how among others. The qualitative design to be used will be based on non-probability and purposive sampling but not on probabilistic or random approaches. In this method, all sampling decisions will be made for the clear reason for which information will be obtained or to address the questions asked. That the approach will be purposive implies that the selection of participants, settings, events, incidents, and data gathering activities will be determined by the required answers. In other words, only the relevant stakeholders in the industry will be approached to give their responses. Thus, either stratified sampling or maximum variation sampling or both approaches could be used. As is usually the case, a small sample size is to be used in the qualitative techniques. The data collection techniques to be used in the qualitative design include interviews and since the researcher has some knowledge on the questions being asked on the subject of study, semi-structured questions will be used in interviewing the participants. Unlike quantitative data, the qualitative data analysis to follow will not require statistical analysis but analysis of codes, themes or/and data patterns. Ethical Considerations in the Research There are several ethical considerations that the research will ensure are observed, more so given the fact that data will be obtained from primary sources in the real world. The first among these ethical considerations is the need to seek and obtain permission from the targeted participants and others who might be involved directly or indirectly with the participants. To avoid causing any physical, mental or emotional harm to the participants, the research will carefully word any sensitive or difficult questions to be asked during the interviews. The other vital ethical issue is objectivity versus subjectivity, which requires the researcher to ensure personal biases and opinions do not interfere with the research. Additionally, all the sides of the study will have to be accorded fair consideration. Importantly, the research will be conducted with the assumption that all the respondents’ identity will remain anonymous although most studies are never done under the condition of anonymity. The study will not exploit the easy-to-access participants such as local communities or clients either: instead, the study subjects will be chosen according to the questions to be addressed. The research will also have to be approved by the relevant ethics review committees of the institutions concerned to ensure that no legal and ethical requirements are violated. Finally, the reporting of the results will have to be done accurately and within the context of the study. Clarification of Terms Below are some of the terms most likely to be encountered during the research whose clarification would be important for the sake of the researcher and the reader. Aid- Refers to a voluntary transfer of resources from one country, person, or organization to another for the benefit of the recipient for social, political, cultural, military or humanitarian assistance, as a reward or for other uses. Corruption- Refers to acts and omissions characterized by depravity, moral perversion, perversion of integrity, bribery and dishonest proceedings. Development- Refers to an act or process of growth, progress, or significant events and consequences in various economic, social, cultural and political fields. Donor- Refers to an organization or a person who gives a resource voluntarily to another person or organization to represent philanthropy or for reward purposes. Good governance- Refers to governance characterized by participation, accountability, transparency, responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency, equitability, inclusiveness, consensus and the rule of law. Governance- Refers to the processes related to decision-making and non-/implementation in several context and environments such as local governance, national governance, corporate governance and international governance. Chapter Layout I. Introduction II. Literature review III. Methodology IV. Results and Analysis V. Discussion VI. Recommendations VII. Conclusion VIII. References Appendices References De Haan, A. (2009) How the Aid Industry Works: an Introduction to International Development. Kumarian Press. Heyse, L. (2007) Choosing the Lesser Evil: Understanding Decision Making in Humanitarian Aid NGOs (Non-state Actors in International Law, Politics and Governance Series). Ashgate Publishing Company. Lancaster, C. (2006) Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. University of Chicago Press. Stokke, O. (2009) The UN and Development: From Aid to Cooperation (United Nations Intellectual History Project Series). Indiana University Press. Tarp, F. (2000) Foreign Aid and Development: Lessons Learnt and Directions for the Future, First Edition (Routledge Studies in Development Economics). Routledge. Read More