|
On Wednesday 3rd September the DAC Network on Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation (CPDC) invited Mary B. Anderson to the OECD to lead a discussion on the "Policy-Practice Gap".
Her presentation highlighted how international donors have managed to bridge the policy-practice gap in aid delivery over recent years. Anderson's findings are based on two research projects, the "Do-no-harm Project" and the "Listening Project", which are conducted by her organisation, Collaborative for Development Action (CDA).
According to these findings, there is still a significant gap between aid practice and policy, which is due to three main reasons. First, there is a tension between normative goals and procedures of aid delivery. That-is-to-say international efforts to install efficient aid procedures can undermine normative development goals such as ownership. Second, there sometimes is a contradiction between general concepts of development cooperation and local needs. Third, changing donor priorities on a policy level make consistent work in the field difficult. As a solution to those problems, Anderson suggested, for example, sending more highly qualified international experts to a given country in order to create a “human link” between international donors and local recipients.
Mary B. Anderson, characterised as the “most influential theorist in the world of humanitarianism” by the New York Times Magazine in 2001, is a international expert in the field of development cooperation. She is known for her pragmatism and her grounded approach to solving the problems of international aid agencies. With her best-known academic work “Do no harm: how aid can contribute to peace – or war”, she laid the foundation of a new paradigm in the international aid debate. Mary B. Anderson holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder and received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For more information please contact Rory Keane.
|
