The development white paper : second report report, together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence and appendices / International Development Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. International Development Committee
Date:
[1997]
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Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The development white paper : second report report, together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence and appendices / International Development Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    11 November 1997] [Mr Rowe Cont] whether they be mothers and children or whether they be women in general or whatever, rather than taking a departmentally divided view. One of the difficulties I have with the White Paper is how confident are you that Whitehall’s strongly departmentalised view with people saying “it is not for me, it is for my” is actually going to be able to deliver that. As you know, the Agriculture Department has its own agenda and its own criteria for measuring success. The Health Department will have the same and I just wondered to what extent we can hope for consistency, given for instance we have already encountered the fact that the view of the Foreign Office and the view of your own Department, two very closely allied departments, is actually quite sharply different on some elements of Montserrat. If on a tiny pin prick of that kind you have quite sharply differentiating views, how are you going to ensure that the Whitehall machine does not continue an irrelevant fragmentation when it gets the delivery of aid? (Rt Hon Clare Short) The logic of your question, Mr Rowe, is that my Department should take over all the other departments in Whitehall. Quite an interesting proposition that I would not resist, but it might not happen in the short term! There will be of course tension between what departments see as their first priority. Development is slightly longer term. The business of government is often very short term so that although these reforms are in the interests of the British people and there is no question about that and getting reform in the efficiency of the international system, more trade, more stability, more sensible agricultural arrangements or whatever is in the interests of British consumers. We have the Common Agricultural Policy to deal with in the meantime kind of thing, although of course we are entering into a period when we are going to get reform in that area. So I do not underestimate the difficulty of this. We have for the first time a commitment in Whitehall to a department that brings to the table on questions of agriculture or trade or debt or whatever it is the interests of developing countries and not just the immediate short term interest of our own country. It is our task to at least bring that into the considerations of our policy on any immediate question that is raised in the World Trade Organisation or in the OECD or whatever. That is an advance and we have all departments signed up to the White Paper in a very real way and that has been a process of advance. But you are absolutely right, some of the tension and pull between short term interests, between immediate departmental interests and bigger world picture interests, will remain and we will have to continue to work on those questions together. Chairman: We were interested, Secretary of State, in the Panel 14 on page 39 with which I am sure you are very familiar and Barbara Follett is going to ask our questions. Ms Follett 42. Yes, Panel 14 sets out the criteria for government to government partnerships in the bilateral aid programme. What the Committee would like to know is how demanding will Her Majesty’s [Continued Government be in ascertaining and assessing whether governments meet these criteria and whether the multilateral institutions should also set stringent criteria like these in Panel 14? (Rt Hon Clare Short) These criteria are not meant to be stringent; they are meant to be a description of what a commitment to the poverty eradication targets to which everyone has signed up might mean. But we know that in the real world and in the poorest countries getting perfect administrative systems that deliver across the board is not easy when they are struggling with all sorts of difficulties, very tiny government with its very big debt burdens and all the kind of political conflicts that you get in any political system. So we are not saying we want perfection or we will not work with you, because indeed there might not be very many places one could work. I mean, which government in the world would claim to be perfect; none, I hope, including this. That is the not the nature of government. What we are looking for I suppose above all is the goodwill, the will to do it, the genuine aspiration to really make progress. Now the ideal is the one I described earlier and Tanzania is just moving to this, realising it is wasting a lot of resources dealing separately with lots of different donors and developing its own programme that then it can take to all the donors and it can own and might a more efficient way of working and other countries are working in that way. That is the ideal, but we are not saying you have to have that in order to make progress. You might in another country have a very good department or some very good ministers in some sectors, so you might have a very good Education Ministry that really wants to make progress and you can really work there, but you have real problems in some other sector; that would still be a partnership. They will go in gradations from the ideal with a very heavy government commitment through less than ideal but some ministers and departments that one can work with and hope to get the big enhancement of government provision. In reality, in the real world, that is what we find. In some of the very big countries like India we work in some States because to take on the whole of India and the levels of poverty there our potential effectiveness would be less. So we are not looking to be in a posture of hectoring, we are looking to be in a posture of genuine partnership, of saying: “You and we have signed up to these poverty eradication targets; can we work together on them? How is your country going to get more of its children into primary education? This is the experience we have in other places, can we help you with teacher training, book production, administrative systems? Do you need some help with your Finance Department to get the taxes raised that will fund the system?” So it is a series of gradations that will go right down, I suppose, to governments that do not have the will. We would all have different lists, but one tries to work with them because there you will find some of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world and one will try and work with local NGOs or maybe units of local government to do what one can. But we will get the big advances where we have governments who want to make them and I do think to get optimism into development to show that success
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