David Mepham makes a strong case that institutions of the international community, including the G8 and European Union, need to show greater commitment to Africas development and prosperity. The way to do this is by overcoming the accountability deficits that hamper the continent:
a lack of domestic accountability, with inadequate structures for holding Africas governments accountable to Africas people; and a lack of external accountability, an absence of mechanisms for holding rich countries to account for the impact of their policies on Africa. The debate in the rich world, says Mepham, has neglected the second deficit. The result is policy incoherence that measurably damages Africas people in four areas: aid and conditionality, trade, arms transfers, and corruption and conflict financing.
In openDemocracys Think-tanks, politics, ideas debate, writers from Italy, Brazil, Britain and the Netherlands examine the power of think-tanks to seed new ideas, influence political agendas, and challenge orthodoxies. For a taste, see:
Geoff Mulgan, Global comparisons in policy-making: the view from the centre (June 2003)
Tom Bentley, Governance as learning: the challenge of democracy (June 2003)
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David Mephams argument is persuasive within its own limits. But these very limits also make it interesting, for the essence of his case is offering policy advice about Africa to the governments of rich countries (in particular Mephams own, the United Kingdom) from the perspective of a leading London think-tank. The question it leaves open, and which I would like to address in this response, is to what extent Africans themselves (and by extension citizens of all poor or developing countries) have the capacity to put their own ideas on the international political agenda. Where are their think-tanks and civil-society institutions, what are their preferences and choices?
A triple deficit
The aftermath of the great Asian tsunami of December 2004 is only the most vivid recent illustration of one of the most notable features of international media discussion, namely that leading figures in the development world from donor states to bleeding-heart liberals wishing for improvement in poor countries are given far more space to express their views than voices from these countries themselves.
This general trend of exclusion impacts sharply on the many people in poor countries who are in principle available and willing to participate in a global policy dialogue. They are disempowered, their voices unheard or at best marginalised. Quite possibly, they are even crowded out by the very people who want to help them.
But the exclusion also has deep institutional roots. Domestic policy idea-generation through think-tanks and professional associations has played a critical role in the economic development of the United States and Europe. Such institutions create a network of idea-exchange, competitive funding and peer review, which comes to underpin innovative research work. Moreover, they deepen communication between idea-generators and policymakers, helping in the process to educate both civil society and the political classes. The conclusion of these efforts is an appropriate reform strategy that is domestically owned.
In low-income countries, by contrast, think-tanks and professional associations remain largely undeveloped, and research foundations barely exist. In their place are aid-giving institutions administered from faraway capital cities that pay little heed to local circumstances. Any public policy debate that does take place is confined to relatively closed groups comprising mainly people from these aid institutions, their partners and consultants. The only other marginal participant tends to be the government marginal because it routinely has neither the capacity nor the political time to concern itself with the longer-term implications of public policy.
In some poor countries, donors and governments have attempted to collaborate to develop think-tanks. The inefficiencies and corruption that shackle their bureaucracies and political systems too often thwart these efforts. Despite substantial funding, all that is achieved is another government department and no domestic capacity for policy research and investigation.
The lack of organised capacity for strategic research and debate means that low-income countries remain dependent on expatriate advice for their reform ideas. This has three deleterious effects:
- a knowledge deficit: the expatriate expert who has limited familiarity with the society he or she is working in, and limited time to acquire it, often creates plans and designs that are inappropriate to its needs. Without organised forums such as research universities, professional associations and think-tanks, the fragmented ideas that do circulate in occasional newspapers and periodicals are likely to be inaccessible to the expatriate.
- an ownership deficit: the ideas which do develop in poor countries neither born of domestic experience, nor argued through domestic debate are seldom owned by the domestic population. All too often, this means a lack of enthusiasm, poor implementation and ultimate failure in any reform process itself.
- an opportunity deficit: the reliance on expatriate advice crowds out domestic thinking and policy-development capacity the latter is like a child that has little room for growth in the presence of an oppressive parent.
The talent drain
There is no reason in principle why this situation should persist. The experience of institution-building in the west from successful universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Chicago, to think-tanks such as Brookings, Carnegie, and Rand offers many lessons that could be applied to the developing world. I found it very surprising to learn that, in only a few years, the combination of a generous grant from a non-interfering philanthropist (John D Rockefeller) and a talented visionary (William Rainey Harper) created a major force in the academic world, the University of Chicago. Indeed that universitys often-controversial contributions to public policy include its reputed influence on economic reforms in Chile as well as the United States.
Such innovative institutions have prospered by nurturing and retaining core groupings of talent even when, as in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, the talent is imported. The lessons for poor countries are clear. Expatriates may provide training or knowledge where these are needed, but ownership of the thinking process requires dedicated and talented people who are very largely free of bureaucratic impediments or commercial demands and are able to create domestic learning and research centres that can influence policy development. Additionally, competition among these institutions facilitates open policy debates and peer-review processes that help guide their work and aid objective evaluation.
The current approach to developing such institutions in low-income countries is too dependent on the assumption of the superior knowledge of the donor-government nexus. This leaves no room for the leadership of dynamic individuals that can take charge of an institution and innovate. Any such leadership will be hidebound by externally-imposed plans, bureaucratic regulations and strict reporting requirements.
At the same time, current mechanisms encourage talented professionals to migrate to western institutions. Both donor and government incentive schemes regard domestic talent as inferior to foreign, and award the former lower salaries and prestige. Indeed, the United Nations two-tier organisational structures and salary scales in poor countries clearly privilege expatriate knowledge. No surprise that in response to this discrimination, competent professionals in poor countries move abroad or into other activities, or seek to join locally-based international agency staff. As a result, domestic institutions are stripped of talent.
The institutional barriers to social and economic progress in low-income countries thus go far beyond the questions of accountability that David Mepham rightly draws attention to. The absence in these countries of thinking networks that can help create relevant, appropriate and achievable reform models is also a crucial impediment.