Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-14-Speech-3-403"
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".
Mr President, developing countries, too, are experiencing structural change or dislocation in the age of globalisation: politically, socially and in terms of the impact of climate change. These are often countries that have either not had any involvement or had insufficient involvement with sustainable development up to now. We note that previous approaches to help give people in these countries better prospects in life have had either no success or insufficient success. Budget support – the subject of this own-initiative report – is one of the recognised instruments of EU development cooperation today. It already accounts for over 20% of European Development Fund resources – and there is an upward trend.
With the right framework, budget support can be an effective instrument of development cooperation. It involves donors and recipients opting for a partnership-based approach to development cooperation. Both parties must truly want this partnership, however, as the donor provides funds for the sole use of the recipient with no preconditions. A requirement is that agreement be reached on the recipient’s development strategies and programmes to be supported: in particular, comprehensive poverty-reduction strategies. Donor and recipient agree that the success of this support will be reviewed on the basis of many performance indicators.
The European Commission has found an approach that has received a great deal of attention and also met with much approval. This approach divides the promised payments up into fixed and variable tranches, with payment of the variable tranches being dependent on the achievement of objectives by the recipient. I envisage this instrument having great value and benefit in principle in instituting general policy dialogue between donor and recipient. The actors who are ultimately negotiating the budget support with the recipient have access to and input in the policies and national budget of the recipient. Partners willing to enter into cooperation can thus develop and review all key policy fields and measures together.
We in Parliament must ask ourselves at this juncture how this benefit will be reflected in our work, for example with regard to the discussion of Commission strategy papers. Will the knowledge we gain or our input into development cooperation also change as a result? Will we be better able to account for the use of our development assistance and have better results to show for it, both now and in the future? Have we developed sufficient expertise to use this instrument?
Last May’s evaluation by the OECD/DAC Evaluation Network on the basis of seven countries advises caution with regard to the assessment of budget support, stating that it is still too soon to carry out any real evaluation of this young instrument. We must also recognise when budget support is inappropriate or should be withdrawn. Donors should resist the temptation to be attracted to budget support because of its potential use in accelerating the disbursement of funds, or so that they can boast at international level about being an effective donor who also upholds the principle of recipient ownership. This must never be reduced to a matter of the disbursement of funds, or of merely paying lip service to the proper use of funds. In terms of effectiveness, too, budget support must always be examined from the point of view of whether it is really a better way of achieving the desired objectives than other instruments.
The instrument of budget support cannot be used if, on the part of the recipient, ‘public expenditure management is [not] sufficiently transparent, accountable and effective’, if no ‘well-defined macroeconomic or sectoral policies established by the country itself and agreed to by its main donors are in place’, or if ‘public procurement is [not] open and transparent’.
Article 61(2) of the Cotonou Agreement, from which I have just quoted, makes this clear. Only if these preconditions are met will direct budgetary assistance be granted as support or for sectoral reforms. Another interesting element is that budget support has to be tied to a process of reform. There is no budget support for the preservation of the status quo.
In my opinion, a process of reform also entails the development of a culture of accountability in these countries and thus also the involvement of parliaments and the supreme audit institutions in the evaluation. This is an important point for us Members of the European Parliament, in particular, in terms of our cooperation with our counterparts in these countries. For this reason, I hope that, thanks to this report and this evaluation, we reach a stage where we can strengthen dialogue in the particular countries where we consider the Commission has been a little incautious, with a view to clarifying whether, at the end of the day, budget support is really the best instrument for those concerned."@en1
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