BetterAid’s response to second draft HLF4 outcome document

With less than 50 days left to the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, the BetterAid reaffirms their position in the response to the 2nd BOD and at the meeting of the OECD DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness in Paris.

In their response to the 2nd draft of the Busan Outcome Document BetterAid welcomes the new draft and language that continues to focus on:

• Poverty reduction through the lenses of human rights, gender equality, decent work and disability.

• Needs-based and demand-driven cooperation, country leadership, south-south cooperation and democratic ownership.

• An enabling environment for CSOs as development actors in their own right.

• Improvements on transparency, among others, through the inclusion of time-bound commitments with reference to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard.

• Greater policy coherence for development.

• Untying aid and strengthening predictability by 2015.

• Favouring the broadest possible partnership and the re-affirmation to implement in full the actions agreed under the Paris Declaration (PD) and Accra Agenda for Action (AAA).

Yet much more needs to be done to make the final BOD a strong and significant agreement for effective development. We are concerned with the current expression of the idea of development effectiveness in the BOD text, which, upon further scrutiny, is vague and lacks a comprehensive rights-based approach to development. Similarly, we are concerned by the overly state-centric approach in the BOD draft, for example, in the section on fragility and conflict. Furthermore, growing inequality, being one of the major challenges for the current development model, is not addressed adequately.

As civil society we are convinced, which we believe other members of the Working Party share, of the fundamental importance and added value of the multi-stakeholder approach to development which should be used to model the proposed Global Partnership for Development Effectiveness. As such, in revising the outcome document, BA calls on the WP-EFF and
Co-Chairs to address the following concerns:

• Time-bound targets for PD/AAA and BOD implementation

• Development effectiveness framed by human rights and democratic ownership

• Moving beyond PD and AAA through minimum standards for an enabling environment for CSOs

• Moving away from state-centric approaches in political contexts of state

• Tackling growing inequality

• Enabling a truly inclusive global aid architecture by adopting inclusive multi-stakeholder processes and structures.

Read the full response here: BetterAid Response to Busan Outcome document