Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog

 

Posts Tagged: Busan

 

U.S. Signs IATI, but the Proof Is in the Publishing

December 7, 2011

Posted by in Aid Effectiveness, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: , ,

Will McKitterick

With the development community back from Busan, it’s time to break down what went right and wrong at last week’s meetings. The consensus seems to be that the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in Busan was a mixed bag – some promises, few commitments, little progress (see here for a good breakdown of the meetings from Nancy Birdsall). Donors were able to dodge most measureable, time-bound commitments and left the public with few benchmarks against which to hold them accountable.

Disappointments aside, some achievements did emerge from the grandstanding, particularly with regards to transparency where the U.S. took a major step towards making its aid investments more transparent, measureable, and accessible. During her keynote address at the opening session, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. will join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).  IATI is a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at committing donors to publish up-to-date foreign assistance data in a standard format that is accessible and comparable, in line with the Accra Agenda for Action commitments on transparency.

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Busan Alert: The United States Is Still a Unilateralist

November 28, 2011

Posted by in Aid Effectiveness, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: ,

Nancy Birdsall

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Mitt Romney (or is it Newt Gingrich) keeps accusing President Obama of apologizing for the United States – probably because Obama sees the world not only through unilateralist eyes. He is too much the multilateralist for their tastes.

Maybe so. But in at least one area the Obama Administration has so far eschewed multilateralism: foreign aid.

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