an initiative by SEEK Development
Partner Perspective
0 min read
Written by
Rachael Calleja
Published on
October 1, 2019
By Rachael Calleja, ODI
How do donors use development spending to pursue their long-term national interest? While the Donor Tracker provides information on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors’ strategic priorities, the Principled Aid Index (PA Index), created by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), quantifies how development spending aims to serve both the recipient state and donors’ own national interests. The PA Index complements Donor Tracker analyses and helps clarify the motives behind donors’ development strategies as well as their impact in creating a more prosperous and sustainable world.
In recent years, the populist turn in politics around the world has granted greater imperative to servicing the national interest through official development assistance (ODA) spending. Foreign assistance that earns a domestic return through ‘mutual gains’ or ‘win-wins’ is now a common goal for political leaders seeking to justify expenditures on non-citizens overseas to an increasingly skeptical public.
Yet the more donors seek to achieve narrow short-term interests through their development assistance, the greater the risk of detracting attention, resources, and efforts away from the primary objective of global sustainable development. Donors need reminding that a safer, more sustainable and more prosperous world serves the national interest as much as it benefits recipient countries. If assistance is allocated with long-term development goals as the primary consideration, nation states – individually and collectively – are winners, with long-term mutual interests truly served.
ODI’s PA Index benchmarks 29 donors on whether the type of national interest they pursue is ‘principled’, ‘unprincipled’ or somewhere in between. A principled national interest advances a donor's interest by engaging with development challenges to create a safer and more prosperous world. An unprincipled approach prioritizes short-term political or commercial interests of donors over long-term development outcomes. In other words, unprincipled donors care more about what development assistance can do for them than what their assistance can do for the world.
Through this benchmarking methodology, the PA Index provides insights into trends among OECD DAC donors. These insights can support the formation of alliances among donors based on shared values and foster wider discussions on the role of national interests and agendas in relation to foreign assistance.
Whether donors are considered principled or unprincipled in their development activities depends on the degree to which spending advances three principles:
The PA Index is a composite measure that uses 12 equally weighted indicators to proxy the principles of need, cooperation, and public spiritedness with four indicators per principle. The indicators capture different facets of donor allocations to empirically assess the degree to which donors promote a principled national interest. The full list of indicators and data sources used to compose the Index are available in our working paper and policy brief.
The Index aggregates indicators across each principle to derive a total score out of a maximum 10 points for each dimension. The scores on each principle are then summed to a total score out of a possible 30 points. In all cases, higher scores represent more principled performance.
On the PA Index website, users can explore the PA Index data across years (2013 through 2017 as of publication). The website allows users to compare donors’ rankings, across both principles and overall. It also presents country profiles on policies related to the national interest and trends in country performance.
Our analysis showed four main findings:
Like many areas of development policy, the case for principled development assistance relies on a long-term understanding of national interest. Unfortunately, this is inherently at odds with the short-termism of electoral cycles and the public pressures on foreign assistance budgets seen in many countries. Measuring donor principledness allows for an independent, evidence-based assessment of the nature of donors’ motivations as revealed by their development spending.
The views and opinions expressed in this Partner Perspective are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Donor Tracker. Through Partner Perspective pieces, we hope to bring Donor Tracker users a range of viewpoints on critical issues in global development.
Rachael Calleja
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