Building partnership between the government and other stakeholders in a country helps to mobilize resources for development and complement the limited capacity of the government itself. In most circumstances, the central government needs to develop a close working relationship with subnational governments and with civil society organizations, including private sector associations and CSOs involved in social service delivery. For external partners, engaging in an effective partnership for development usually depends on respect for the principle of country ownership: partnership led by the government and by country stakeholders helps ensure that assistance is demand-driven. Engaging effectively in partnership involves three complementary processes: alignment, harmonization, and coordination. Alignment means providing assistance that is consistent with the priorities in the national development strategy. Harmonization means adopting simpler and common processes and systems that reduce the transactions costs involved in development assistance and make use of already existing country institutional structures, processes, and systems. Coordination means assigning tasks among development partners to take advantage of their comparative advantages and to avoid unnecessary redundancies. Lessons of experience: The effectiveness of development efforts has been seriously limited by fragmentation and compartmentalization within countries and among external partners. Transaction costs have been high because of a multitude of divergent requirements that development assistance agencies impose along with their support. Even when a government has been able to articulate a long-term, holistic vision for national development and design an appropriate strategy, implementation of the required programs and policies has often been frustrated by inability to adequately mobilize support from other country stakeholders (for example, the private sector and civil society organizations (CSOs) and to coordinate the help offered by external partners. Poor coordination has been especially problematic in low-income countries with many active external partners. The need for coordination of development assistance has been long recognized. However, to date mechanisms of coordination have not been successful in overcoming the obstacles created by the desire among development assistance agencies to maintain their distinct identities and interests, and their divergent procedures and requirements. Coordination efforts led solely by external partners have failed to increase growth of government capacity to manage assistance from external partners. Periodic efforts to intensify coordination in the past have typically collapsed due to “coordination fatigue.” Development effectiveness is also seriously diminished by failure to tap into local knowledge required for designing and implementing development programs. External partners too often have relied excessively on their staff based at headquarters, rather than in the client countries, and on international experts who may not have adequate understanding of the countries in which they are working. Failure to establish working partnerships with nationals usually underlies the lack of local knowledge. For an overview on progress in implementation of the CDF principles, see CDF Progress Report 2005, Enabling Country Capacity to Achieve Results; OR click here for detailed CDF implementation progress by country. |
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