From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM AIDIn these bouts of North–South arm wrestling, developing-countrygovernments are often in a stronger position than they realise, sincedonor staff are under huge pressure to disburse money. ‘Weapons ofthe weak’, such as passive resistance or agreeing to one thing and doinganother, can often pay better dividends than a stand-up fight. As oneRwandan official wryly observed, ‘When dealing with donors, youhave to deal with them as you would milking a cow. Treat them nicelyand more milk flows than you would have expected; treat them badlyand they kick over the bucket.’ 167Empowering aid recipients would be an attempt to make aid morelike a competitive market and less like a monopoly (in that sense theParis Declaration is, if anything, making aid more monopolistic, albeitwith benign intent). Creating such a marketplace would go with thetrend towards an ever greater proliferation of aid providers – newdonors, vertical funds, philanthropreneurs, Western governments,and multilateral and regional institutions. However, at the momentaid is a market where the consumers (developing-country governments)find it very hard to exert choice precisely because they have no power.One idea might be to allocate the overall global aid budget torecipient countries, which could then decide which aid agencies touse. A successful voucher system would depend on a healthy level ofcompetition so that the ‘consumer’would have clout. Harvard economistDani Rodrik half-jokingly proposed breaking up the World Bank’spolicy advice arm into separate competing bodies, based in differentdeveloping countries. 168 They would then be forced to provide theadvice that developing countries actually want and are prepared tospend their aid revenues on, turning the current relationship on itshead by ‘putting the first last’. 169Alternatively, aid could be reconceived as transfer payments, likethose made by central governments to provincial ones, to be spentwithin agreed guidelines but in the way that the recipient governmentchooses (GBS comes close to this vision). Either of these optionswould bring the aid system more into line with the overall purpose ofredistributing global wealth from rich to poor regions, countries,and people.Even stopping short of such seismic shifts, the global aid systemcould be run much more accountably. For all their faults, the WTO377