Partner Countries: Time to Seize the Capacity Development Agenda?

After decades of donor dominated debate on the subject of capacity development, partner countries are increasingly formulating the CD-agenda, according to Jim Hradsky of the OECD, who expects partner countries to take the lead on capacity development at the Busan aid effectiveness conference in November.

At the upcoming Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, some two thousand government, civil society and development representatives from donor and partner countries are preparing to meet for three days of discussion, debate and, hopefully, agreement on how to boost the impact of development aid.

Donors have been weighing up the merits and means of capacity development and its relationship with aid effectiveness for decades, noted Mr Hradsky, but the gathering in Busan that kicks off on the 29 November, promises a shift in the capacity development dynamic.

“We’ve managed to collaborate with our Southern partners so that they have now moved into a leadership position in terms of formulating the key messages for the upcoming Busan conference in Korea at the end of this year,” said Mr Hradsky, the Senior Coordinator for Capacity Development at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“We have an increasing emergence of Southern leadership in the agenda,” Mr Hradsky said. “It’s our conviction that donors speaking to donors will never reform their own systems independently, but that we need this type of Southern perspective which carries the capacity development discussion into the development of the beneficiary.”

Mr Hradsky spoke at a recent capacity development workshop attended by EuropeAid staff from headquarters and delegations and a number of external experts and partner country representatives where he delivered a presentation on the ‘Capacity Development Roadmap to Busan’.

In the presentation, Mr Hradsky illustrated how capacity development has gathered momentum among partner countries since the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action, signed at the Second High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2005. He pointed to the Cairo Consensus on Capacity Development of March 2011, as the culmination of that process and clearest indicator yet of the direction the capacity development discussion could take at Busan.

The Cairo workshop participants of sixty senior practitioners and policymakers, evenly split between representatives from donor and partner nations, agreed on a consensus statement that marked a “shift to an approach which is demand-driven and results focused, owned by the country, and which builds on existing capacity”, as stated in the closing documentation.

An online survey carried out ahead of Busan and involving 163 respondents from over 60 developing countries would appear to support the commitment to capacity development set down in Cairo. Those who completed the survey indicated that capacity development was the second most important topic for discussion at Busan. Only discussion on ‘Alignment to policies and strategies’ was considered marginally more pressing by respondents choosing from a list of 18 topics. And even the discussion on alignment is closely tied to the discussion of country capacity.

“The sum total of what we’ve done over the last five years in capacity development seems now to be bearing some fruit,” said Mr Hradsky. “The reason for optimism is basically because we have Southern champions who are stepping forward now, taking charge of the dossier, promoting change and asking to be heard by the donor community and I have every reason to believe that in Busan, they will.”