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DEVELOPMENT: Obama Lays Out Vision, Details Still Blurry

Aprille Muscara

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2010 (IPS) - Following U.S. President Barack Obama’s introduction of his long-awaited Global Development Policy at the United Nations on Wednesday, exactly one year after he told member states that he would return with a plan to make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) a reality, questions remain over how it will be executed.

“Essentially, my sense is this: the president’s Global Development Policy represents a big and long-fought win,” Noam Unger, a policy director at the Brookings Institution who focuses on foreign assistance and development, told IPS. “Now, it needs to be implemented.”

The president’s speech characterised development as not only a moral issue, but also as essential to Washington’s strategic and economic imperatives. “Put simply, the United States is changing the way we do business,” Obama said.

Civil society and lawmakers have continuously called for an overhaul of the country’s foreign assistance structure, which – with its nearly 30 agencies – has been criticised for being uncoordinated, inefficient and outdated.

Part of the reason for this, they argued, was the lack of a clear strategy for the way the country supports development abroad. Obama’s Global Development Policy, the U.S.’s first of its kind, has thus been largely welcomed.

But Wednesday’s speech outlined only generally this new plan’s pillars: to expand the notion of development beyond cash assistance, to end aid dependency, to promote broad- based economic growth and to ensure mutual accountability.

As a result, anticipation is mounting for the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, expected out next month, which will address the nitty-gritty details of this new strategy.

“Let’s move beyond the old, narrow debate over how much money we’re spending and let’s instead focus on results – whether we’re actually making improvements in people’s lives,” Obama said. “Let’s reject the cynicism that says certain countries are condemned to perpetual poverty.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs – who has argued that poor countries are almost always stuck in a “poverty trap” unless substantial amounts of foreign aid, coupled with a tailored and complex development approach, are provided – gave IPS a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the president’s speech, which he pointed out lacked specific details of the plan and contained no new funding commitments.

“It was a little bit of a letdown and there was puzzlement in the room,” Sachs told IPS, “Most people in the hall were a little bit scratching their heads in the end asking what was new, because there was kind of a build-up beforehand.”

However, Sachs, who is U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special advisor for the MDGs, acknowledged that the policy was still in its early stages.

“I think the intentions are good: to make sure that development has its proper place in U.S. foreign policy,” Sachs told IPS. Still, “I didn’t hear a lot of path-breaking innovation.”

Although the long-called for Global Development Strategy has been largely praised – Save the Children called it a “winning formula” in a statement, while Oxfam America president Raymond Offenheiser called it a “real breakthrough” in a press conference – Sachs’s bewilderment has also been widely echoed.

“We need Obama to explain how he will turn his words into action over numerous agencies and departments,” Offenheiser said. “The tri-legged stool of defence, diplomacy and development – DDD – still has a bit of a wobble in it. Exactly how Obama plans to balance it… remains an open question,” he added, predicting, “It will be a political battle.”

Key to the policy is selectivity: targeting sectors that have been shown to produce favourable outcomes – Obama mentioned health, education and women’s empowerment – as well as places that show promise. According the president’s speech, these include countries that expand trade or promote democratic institutions, but also those that are transitioning from war to peace.

In a conference call before Obama’s speech, Mike Froman, his deputy national security advisor for international economic affairs, said that one of the policy’s aims is to help countries on the verge of graduating from developing to developed.

“What they might do,” Offenheiser told IPS “is focus on drivers for development, what are called development poles, to serve as models for the region.”

Countries that are “kinetic sites of conflict” like Iraq and Afghanistan will also be targeted, leaving a gap, or intermediate space, in the middle, he told IPS.

So what happens to all the countries in between?

“The president hit the nail on the head: We cannot do everything, everywhere and do it well,” Unger told IPS, arguing that concentrating on areas where results are most likely to be achieved is a more effective and efficient way of distributing aid.

Who will be administering this assistance is another key question given the multitude of mandates and entities that have a hand in development, and the historic back-and-forth between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department over who gets to play captain.

In his speech, Obama gave both bodies honourable mentions.

“Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton is leading a review to strengthen and better coordinate our diplomacy and development efforts,” he said, adding, “We’re rebuilding the United States Agency for International Development as the world’s premier development agency.”

Despite, or perhaps given, Obama’s remarks on USAID, Unger told IPS that “[the agency] needs the clout to speak out on development issues beyond aid. So the strengthening of USAID over the next few years will be an interesting process.”

The Modernising Foreign Assistance Network has been particularly vocal in pushing for a global development strategy. In a statement, its co-chairs David Beckmann and George Ingram referred to Obama’s speech as a “major victory”.

But they also warned, “As with most ambitious policy pronouncements like this, the devil will be in the details of implementation.”