Donors really like to talk about ‘country ownership’ - but in Myanmar this is harder than it sounds.

Donors really like to talk about ‘country ownership’ - but in Myanmar this is harder than it sounds.
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From: Tamas

The Second Myanmar Development Cooperation Forum has ended with many of the expected feel-good diplo-speak statements about cooperation between the Myanmar government and donors to ‘accelerate development’.

Yet underneath the neatly scripted statements (which sound like a computer has drafted them), the whole Nay Pyi Taw Accord process does have an i...mportant function in emphasising Myanmar’s ownership of the aid agenda. 

Internationally, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 - and the other high level donor meetings since then – rightly put the idea of ‘ownership’ more strongly on the donor radar. And who would disagree? Of course countries themselves – rather than foreign governments –should be in the driver’s seat of their own development.



But, saying you want ‘country ownership’ is not as easy as it sounds.

In Thomas Carothers’ recent book ‘Development Aid Confronts Politics’ he brings up the point that ‘ownership’ can be interpreted in different ways - is it ‘government’ ownership, or is there somehow an idea of ‘society-wide’ ownership?

Of course, ‘society wide ownership’ is impossible - how can you get a country of people to unanimously buy into an agenda for aid? There will always be some people left on the margins. But the idea is important in that it sees ‘government’ and ‘society’ as not necessarily having the same perspective - and in fact, at times their agendas may be competing. So if you want to talk about real ‘country ownership’, you have to reach out wider than just elites in the government.

Overall, Carothers reckons that Western donors – the likes of DFID, Australian Aid, USAID and the EC - tend to overemphasise the first option of ‘government’ ownership, to the detriment of the more challenging and perhaps ‘political’ idea of ‘society’ ownership.

But in Myanmar that wasn’t always the case.

In my first few years in Myanmar in the mid-2000s, it seemed that the opposite was true. Myanmar was a little understood pariah state, and donors tended to look to ownership (or legitimacy) of the aid agenda more directly through local communities or activist groups or local NGOs. And one criticism of donors during that time could have been that they didn’t grapple enough with what ‘government’ ownership meant.

Things have changed now.

Since the Myanmar ‘turnaround’ a new generation of donor managers are now redefining the aid approach. And it seems as though it has flipped around - with the Myanmar government now on centre stage. At one level, that is a good thing. The Thein Sein government should be a primary point of call for owning new plans based around the Nay Pyi Taw Accord.

Yet one growing criticism is that the idea of ‘society’ ownership has dropped too much off the agenda. Understanding the web of civil society organisations, ethnic groups, opposition parties and local community groups in Myanmar – and all their diverse and potentially conflicting ideas – may simply be too hard for a donor system now intent on disbursing money and scaling up.

This is interesting, because it goes to the core of how Myanmar’s transition is viewed. From the outside the ‘turnaround’ may have felt like a quantum shift in Myanmar politics.

But for many Myanmar people in the aid sector, the changes in government since 2010 are seen in a much more nuanced way. This means that the current leap in donor emphasis – from ‘society’ ownership to ‘government’ ownership – is seen by many to be a little too stark.

Of course, the task of nicely building both ‘government’ ownership and ‘society’ ownership into some kind of grand consensus is impossible- as they are far too many criss-crossing tensions.

But the alternative – of tacking on a few civil society consultation meetings onto a ‘government’ ownership approach – is lazy, and may ultimately be self-defeating.

I don’t envy donor managers. Whichever way they tread on these questions there is a potential minefield.

And for these ones, a bunch of Norwegian demining experts may not be enough.