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From Gossip to Good Global Development
May 11, 2010
This is a joint posting with Sarah Jane Staats and also appeared on Global Post and Huffington Post.
In insider Washington there is a battle going on over who will control U.S. global development strategy. The gossip is that it is a White House-State Department fight compounded by a low-level struggle inside State between the secretary’s staff and the old development guard at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
In reality, the president, the secretary of state and the head of USAID all want the same thing: stronger development tools to fight poverty and promote prosperity to create a better, safer America and world. Key members of Congress stand ready to offer support. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been arguing for stronger development and diplomatic programs to complement U.S. defense efforts.
But after 16 months of a new administration, taxpayers and concerned citizens are still wondering who is in charge of U.S. development strategy and programs, including the $20 billion a year the U.S. spends on development aid. Below the president himself, whom can we hold accountable for an effective strategy and good programs?
The struggles over who is in charge of what and the resulting delay of the release of the White House’s first ever Presidential Study Directive on U.S. Global Development Policy are having unfortunate consequences for our foreign policy goals — from Pakistan to Haiti to our climate policy — as well as our partners in poor countries and our image abroad.
Word is that a draft of the presidential study directive defines a strategy for global development covering not just aid, but trade, migration, climate change and more; and proposes that a senior development official should have a distinct voice at the foreign policy table, preferably with a seat on the National Security Council alongside defense and diplomacy. That is good.
But what about who will be in charge and accountable to Congress, the president and the American people? We hope it will be head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, and that alongside the presidential study directive, the complementary review managed in the State Department will assign to him sufficient autonomy to do the job well.
Why the head of USAID? Why does greater autonomy for USAID matter? While our three main tools of foreign policy — development, diplomacy and defense — should support one another, they have different means for achieving complementary but distinct ends. First, there are trade-offs between more immediate political decisions (often in the realm of defense and diplomacy) and the longer-term horizons and endurance required to reap the benefits of development investments.
Second, there are differences in how broadly dispersed these tools should be. For diplomacy, it makes sense to have some presence in as many countries as possible. For defense, the goal may be to be in as few countries as needed. Development is somewhere in between. Especially given limited development resources, it may make the most sense to focus on fewer places for bigger impact, a direction the White House review of development policy may be headed.
Perhaps most importantly, there must be some degree of separation between development and other foreign policy tools so Congress and the American people can track and measure development results against development objectives — today’s diffuse and unclear authority makes accountability impossible.
In practical terms, elevating development, as Secretary Clinton has pledged to do, means providing the USAID administrator autonomy over policy, program and budget decision-making sufficient to get the biggest bang for our development bucks. Of course this is not an entitlement for the agency. As with other agencies, we should set the bar high for USAID and expect to see — and measure — strong performance and results, with programs and resources scaled up or down accordingly.
Unfortunately, while we wait for clarity on these strategic and organizational decisions, the administration has launched two new development initiatives focused on food security ($3.5 billion over three years) and global health ($63 billion over six years) that have impenetrable joint management across agencies and offices that appear to perpetuate the current tangle. We fear this ad hoc approach will lead to uncertain and ad hoc results.
For almost two decades, the U.S. has not only significantly under-invested in development; we have structured our development programs in ways that weaken, rather than strengthen their impact. It’s time for decisions. We urge Secretary Clinton to put the USAID administrator in charge of these two major new development initiatives. We urge her, whose commitment to development objectives is clear and compelling, to give Rajiv Shah the broader policy and budget authorities that will make USAID, as she promised in her January speech at the Center for Global Development, “the world’s premier development agency.”
Secretary Clinton may be the first secretary of state whose imprint will be felt most deeply in the world’s poorest villages, where poverty, disease, inequality and lack of opportunity devastate families, impede growth and breed instability. We hope she will make getting development right — making it stronger and more accountable — her key legacy as secretary of state.
2 Responses to “From Gossip to Good Global Development”
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May 12th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Thanks Nancy, It’s encouraging to see you and other CGD folks begin to speak truth to power. I supported President Obama from the start, and understand why he chooses not to pick a fight with the Hillary Brigade at this point.
Now that several of your key folks have taken positions in the Administration, let’s encourage everyone else to start doing the type of honest and candid analyis that Ed Scott is paying CGD to do.
Charlie Flickner
May 16th, 2010 at 4:39 am
The best work I have seen on U.S. foreign assistance is USAID’s late, lamented “White Paper.” Those engaged in thinking about aid at the NSC and in the Congress should keep the White Paper on their desks.
I also wonder how much input the thought process has received from professionals like Emmy Simmons, Jim Fox, Jerry Wolgin, or Mike Crosswell.
Speaking for myself, I rarely see the debate use terms and concepts that suggest that it is deeply enough informed by experience in the development process.
On the contrary, the debate seems to assume that the key is some perfect budget (or budget process) operated from Washington. That idea is backward. As long as the implementers of assistance are listening to Washington — whether it’s to the military, to State, or to the White House, or indeed to experts with great number-crunching skills — they won’t be paying attention the targets of opportunity in the field.
Development is not a USG policy. Development is something that champions of change are sometimes able to do in their countries. Those champions can be mightily assisted by USAID’s unique abilities if USAID’s marching orders are to find them (they’re not always at the top), listen to them, and work with them. Working with them means exactly that. It costs money, but financial assistance is only one mode of assistance.
If our goal is to assist development, i.e., if we think that furthers a U.S. interest, then budgets should come from the bottom up. This means that budgets would not fill in a U.S.-centric Civil Affairs program or a Presidential initiative. They would be substantially path-determined, not based on a zero-based, once-and-for-all theory.
Such budgets can, yes, be rolled up globally for coherent reporting — but only ex post. A globally coherent budget that is reported first and then sent to the field for implementation is a decision to ignore the champions of change that we ought to be working with.
I understand that State needs USAID if it hopes to compete with the military in foreign affairs — we all remember Colin Powell.
But we need to plan for success, and a perpetual series of military-led Afghanistan-like engagements is not success, even for (especially not for) the military, nor is it necessary for U.S. interests. I think President Obama understands this and, when the time is right (as Charlie Flickner suggests), will begin acting on it. (P.S. The time would appear to be right in 2011.)
When we do see our way clear to building on military success (already achieved, by the way), we will be able to de-link development assistance from both military goals and from State’s need to cope with competition from the military. Then we can start listening. It’s an art that I wonder if we’ve forgotten.