IBIS har sendt sine kommentarer til den såkaldte IDA15 rapport, som er et led i forhandlingerne om den 15. opfyldning af Verdensbankens International Development Association, IDA, som afsluttes i december.
Bla. mener IBIS at rapporten dokumenterer manglende opfyldelse af mål, som Verdensbanken selv har sat.
IBIS opfordrer donorlandene til at skærpe deres krav, og har sendt opfordringen direkte til Udenrigsministeriet, oplyser Lars Koch, Democracy and Policy Advisor, hos IBIS.
Her kommentarerne i deres fulde ordlyd:
European civil society organisations had hoped, at the beginning of this year, that the 15th round of negotiations to replenish the World Bank concessional arm, the International Development Association (IDA), would be a chance for the main IDA donors to hold the Bank into account for their promises of change, and particularly on the commitments to reform their use of conditionality (stillelse af betingelser, red.).
With IDA negotiations entering their final stages, tentative results of the process materialised in the draft IDA 15 report point at a failure of donor governments to do so.
However, the deal is not yet done and there is a last chance to redress the current course of the negotiations before the final agreement is rubberstamped in Berlin on the 13th and 14th of December.
If IDA donors want to make a real difference on the effectiveness of IDA’s aid, they should get firm, specific and timetabled commitments from the Bank on the issues of country-level aid effectiveness and, particularly, on the implementation of the Good Practice Principles on conditionality.
IDA 15 negotiations
Beyond agreement on financial contributions, IDA negotiations constitute a unique opportunity for donor governments to make recommendations on IDA’s policy framework.
Contributing governments have the right and the responsibility to ensure that their taxpayers’ money will be spent effectively to reduce poverty and achieve greater levels of human development.
Unfortunately, the draft report compiled by World Bank staff – free from strong donors’ pressure – has failed to put forward so much needed proposals for reform in a number of areas discussed in the negotiations.
The paper states that ambitions for this current replenishment included “consolidating, strengthening, and fine tuning many significant changes in the policy framework that were put in place during past replenishments”, but the draft report demonstrates very limited progress in the areas discussed.
These areas include the debt sustainability framework (DSF) and the non-concessional borrowing policy (NCBP); the systems used for achieving and measuring results; or even efforts to enforce harmonisation and alignment to country systems.
Particularly on the latter, Eurodad regrets the little attention that this replenishment round has paid to the World Bank’s implementation of the Good Practice Principles for the application of conditionality.
Civil society organisations are also concerned about IDA corporate governance and the way that negotiations have been conducted.
Recipient countries, most affected by IDA’s operations, do not have decision-making power, and their voice is limited to the donors’ good will to open up space for Southerners who anyway only have observer status.
Likewise, the consultation process with civil society organisations during this replenishment round has been extremely weak.
It was up to individual governments to reach out to NGOs at national levels on a voluntary basis. Many governments have signally failed to do so.
