*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Political Conditionality Bad: Delay
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- Political Conditionality Counterproductive
Political Conditionality Bad: DelaySOLVENCY DEFICIT: POLITICAL CONDITIONALITY CAUSES DELAYS Michele Dunne, Carnegie Endowment, 2005, Unchartered Journey: promoting democracy in the middle east, eds. T. Carothers & M. Ottaway, p. 224 The United States must also consider whether to impose conditions related to political reform on its assistance, a difficult proposition considering that the long-standing assistance program is linked to assistance to Israel. Efforts to impose economic conditions on parts of the assistance programs have sometimes delayed delivery of assistance when Egypt failed to meet agreed benchmarks, but Egypt has generally outlasted the United States and gotten the funds in the end. Rather than imposing political conditions on assistance, a better approach would be working to ensure that U.S. democracy assistance funds are spent only on programs that stand a real chance of promoting meaningful reform. Political Conditionality CounterproductiveU.S. HARDLINE APPROACH TO DEMOCRACY PROMOTION COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Marina Ottaway & Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment, 2005, Unchartered Journey: promoting democracy in the middle east, eds. T. Carothers & M. Ottaway, p. 264-5 But there are downsides to this position of strength. First, when the United States implicitly or explicitly relies on the threat of military force to back up its calls for political reform, it becomes very hard or even impossible for Arab reformers to associate themselves in any way with the U.S. agenda. The United States thus ends up losing the chance of close partnership with the people and organizations with which it might most likely be drawn to cooperate. Second, resounding rhetoric and high-profile initiatives cannot be sustained indefinitely. The United States needs to show quickly that pressure produces results. As a consequence, the United States has proven dispiritingly willing to accept timid or even just pro forma cosmetic reforms as genuine steps toward democratization. When Bahrain becomes a poster child of reform, and even Saudi Arabia gets high marks for talking about the possibility of some sort of local election in the indefinite future, it is difficult for Arab countries not to conclude that the United States will be satisfied with little.
Jo Beall, Director Development Studies Institute-London School of Economics, 2005, Funding Local Governance: small grants for democracy and development, p. 85 There were doubts as to the desirability and effectiveness of linking aid and political conditionality. In the first place, it is often the least aid-dependent countries that have the most robust democracies – India, for example. In the second place, aid can undermine some of the fundamental premises of democracy – such as transparency and accountability – by virtue of the conditions it imposes, with policy priorities being agreed with donors in opaque negotiation processes outside of reference t national legislatures. A third objection is that if democracy is foisted upon a country from the outside, it can be argued that this not real democracy. It was in response to such criticisms that some development agencies attempted a response to such criticisms that some development agencies attempted a shift towards DBS, whereby a government that uses its own allocation, procurement and accounting systems. DBS first took the form of Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) which referred to financial aid earmarked for a discrete sector, or sectors, with conditionality relating only to those sectors. CONDITIONALITIES UNDERMINE AID EFFECTIVENESS Bishwambher Pyakuryal, Economics Professor-Tribhuvan University, et al, 2008, Is Foreign Aid Working? An analysis of aid effectiveness and growth, p. 79 Conditionality tied up with foreign aid has been under considerable controversy in developing world. Partly as a result of the principal-agent problem, donors often apply conditions on the aid programs to encourage recipients to act more in accord with the donors’ interests (Radelet, 2006). The practice of enforcing conditionalitie tied to aid has constrained the use of appropriate and less costly technology, materials and services. On account of various policy-related and procedural conditionalities, which are at times not compatible with the prevailing situation and the needs of the country, aid has had not only a limited beneficial impact but has, at times, run counter to the outcomes expected from some projects. CONDITIONALITY UNDERMINES DOMESTIC DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES Carlos Santiso, Johns Hopkins University, 2001, The World Bank and Conditionality, Georgetown Public Policy Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall, [http://www.sti.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Pdfs/swap/swap108.pdf], p. 9 Conditionality has had perverse effects. It undermines the domestic democratic processes by supplanting public policy-making. Collier warns against the abuse of conditionality: “The extension of the practice of conditionality from the occasional circumstances of crisis management to the continuous process of general economic policy-making has implied a transfer of sovereignty which is not only unprecedented but is often dysfunctional” (1999, 319). POLITICAL CONDITIONALITY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – MOBILIZES RESISTANCE IN THE RECIPIENT COUNTRY Peter Uvin, Professor at the World Hunger Program, Brown University, 1993, The European Journal of Development Research, 5:1, 63-84, p. 72 In extreme cases, the exercise of political conditionality can even have the reverse effect of the one intended, by rallying part of the population around the powers that be. This can be said more or less to have happened in the cases of Iraq, Morocco, Indonesia and Kenya - at least with the administrative-intellectual-urban segments of society: in most Third World countries the large majority of the population has far less attachment to abstract principles such as national sovereignty and non-interference than to the end of poverty and exploitation, but its voice is rarely heard.
Carlos Santiso, Johns Hopkins University, 2003, Development Finance, Governance and Conditionality: Politics Matter, [http://webserver.rcp.net.pe/convenios/cti/documentos/Governance%20and%20Conditionality.pdf], p. 28 Furthermore, the way in which the reforms were designed and implemented not only were they undermining their political viability and sustainability, but they often were oblivious of the political context and have tended to undermine the democratic process. The policy choices that reforms entailed were intrinsically political. Notwithstanding, “reformers tried to push such political reforms as mere technocratic changes designed to enhance the performance of the economy” (Stiglitz 2000:572). Considering the uncertainty regarding both the contents of reforms and their adequacy to varied contexts, critics of governance conditionality underscore that the choice of policy course must result from the democratic process. Consequently, IFIs ought to reconsider the manner in which they provide policy advise and define conditions to development financing. External policy advice should refrain from supplanting domestic decision-making. Joseph Stiglitz (1998, 1999a, 2000 and 2003) has vocally argued that governance conditionality is fundamentally flawed as a policy process vocally and criticised the manner in which the Fund has misadvised adjusting countries. Its policy prescriptions have often led to standard recipes reflecting the prevailing neo-liberal paradigm of development economics. In particular, the Fund “has consistently discouraged public discussion of alternative strategies” (Stiglitz 2003:115). Credible advice, Stiglitz argues, should refrain for prescribing solutions through conditionality, but rather lay out the risks, consequences and trade-offs of alternative policies. It should clearly identify the options and their respective advantages and disadvantages. It is the responsibility of domestic decision makers to choose amongst the most adequate and feasible paths. The IFIs should restrict their role to ensuring that such decisions are well-informed. Ultimately, as Martin Feldstein (1998:27) argues: “A nation’s desperate need to short-term financial help does not give the IMF the moral right to substitute its technical judgments for the outcomes of the nation’s political process.” As Stiglitz (2003:119) aptly underscores, “macro-issues are far from merely technical matters; they involve trade-offs requiring political judgments” and pragmatic compromises about what is politically feasible. CONDITIONALITY UNDERMINES BASIC SELF GOVERNMENT AND PRINCIPLES OF CONSENT Devesh Kapur & Moises Naim, Government Professor at Harvard & editor of Foreign Policy, 2005, Journal of Democracy, Vol 16, N. 1, January, p. 91 Of greatest concern, perhaps, is the inherent tension between conditions imposed by an outside lender and the cardinal democratic principle of consent. By their very nature, IMF conditions arise not from debate and discussion within a society, but come rather from unelected foreign experts. Locally made decisions lose relevance as conditionality ties the hands of domestic political actors. Does it matter what elected officials are choosing when the fate of the local economy is being decided by technical specialists and managers in an IMF office somewhere? POLITICAL CONDITIONALITIES LIKELY TO INCREASE CONFLICT IN THE SHORT TERM AND UNDERMINE LONG-TERM GOVERNANCE CAPACITY Martin Doornbos, Institute of Social Studies-The Hague, 1995, Aid and Political Conditionality, ed. Olav Stokke, p. 387 External re-emphasis of “universal” conditions and structures for policy management and political organization is bound to have a certain effect in concrete situations, although it is difficult to predict the precise nature of its impact on the complex network of political or organizational processes. It is equally conceivable, for example, that it will accentuate existing social tensions and conflicts, at least in the short run, as that it will assist their resolution. Whether there will be any positive effects in the longer run remains a very open question. As to the specificity of the contexts concerned, questions concerning their characteristics hardly figure in the formulation of conditions for “good governance” – except as an assumption that they carry shortcomings to be overcome. At any rate, it must be expected that the total structure of externally-initiated policy measures will generate its own momentum on processes of political and administrative development, although analysis of its overall impact is likely to remain indeterminate. This question can be approached from two other perspectives. The first of these is based on the fact that in many Third World situations, there is intensive and continuous exploration of new modes of structuring relations between state and society, and of different ways to give them significance. Such processes are usually problematic and difficult but, above all, require space and occasionally some cautious support. It remains more uncertain whether the introduction of external models for “universal” good government as conditionalities is helpful in such situations. CONDITIONALITY FAILS – COERCING POLICY CHANGE BREEDS RESENTMENT AND NONCOMPLIANCE Gordon Crawford, Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Leeds, 2001, Foreign Aid and Political Reform: a comparative analysis of democracy assistance and political conditionality, p. 184 What lessons can be drawn from this experience? The first lesson is that, in the bargaining game intrinsic to conditionality, recipients may (be forced to) agree to specified reforms, yet remain reluctant to implement them. There is likely to be at least as great a resistance to implement donors’ political demands, given that incumbent governments generally do not readily agree to the wider dispersal of power in a society that democratization involves. Second, a recipient government will have learnt, in Mosley et al’s words, “that it can always get away with shortfalls of this magnitude” (i.e. up to 50 percent slippage), and more if it holds a countervailing card (ibid). Third, inconsistency in aid restrictive practice provides comparative evidence to support the arguments of “non-complying” governments that they are being unfairly selected for punishment, as well as generally undermining donor policy. Each of these lessons signals potential negative impacts on the effectiveness of political conditionality.
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