Tackling rural poverty, together

Five to tango?

A senior Platform consultant shares some thoughts on donor-government coordination

Rydder: “Vietnam is moving fast.”

Denmark's Jens Rydder is a veteran of agricultural development in Vietnam and a close contributor to donor-government coordination projects there. As the Platform's in-country lead consultant there, he works with the International Cooperation Department under Dr Le Van Minh at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) in Hanoi. Rydder, together with the Platform's National Consultant Huyen Thanh Dao, has played a key role in researching and drafting the collaborative study „ARD partnerships in Vietnam: Do they contribute to aid effectiveness?“, due for publication in February 2008. He spoke to Timothy Nater about his work.

How's life in Vietnam?

Vietnam is growing fast. I don't know of many other countries moving at this rate, apart from China. In the late 1980s, there was severe poverty in many parts of the country. Now, everything is available. Four years ago, there were one or two high-rises in the capital. Today, there's a veritable skyline.

What's special about Vietnam's donor-government partnerships?

Already in 1997, well before the Paris Declaration in 2005, MARD put together the International Support Group, followed in 2001 by the Forest Sector Support Programme and Partnership. The Ministry has invested a lot of time and effort working to include others in the process. From this emerged some of the partnership programmes in agriculture and rural development that we've examined in the study.

What's the institutional context now for partnerships?

The Vietnamese government is embarked on its own definition of a rural development strategy. There have been efforts to do this before, but never at such a high level. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development is broad and inclusive, covering water, disaster mitigation, rural infrastructure and forestry, as well. It has credibility in the cabinet and leverage on the Ministry of Finance for funding. The Ministry's leadership is keen to pursue harmonisation, alignment and sector-based approaches, and there's now a good body of definition and analysis out there. What's still needed is the 'how-to', the actual modalities.

How are donor-government relations?

Donors are enthusiastic. Vietnam has come to be considered as model for how to enact initiatives such as the PRSC and the ONE UN process. As regards aid effectiveness, the government sees donors as valued guests and sources of aid, and isn't very comfortable about directing donor investments. And the donors have also had a hard time giving up their pet projects. In general, though, I'd say the Vietnamese government is enthusiastic about the new relationship, as well, though still sometimes disappointed with overall execution.

What have you learned from work on the study?

Conducting this study has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride for the study team, an extended learning curve. We started out with the working title „It takes two to tango“, as we felt strongly that both international and national partners have to take ownership of the partnerships as platforms for collective action. Then we realised there was much more to it than that. Vietnam is moving ahead so fast that the conceptual approach that made sense yesterday no longer applies today, let alone tomorrow. We realised that, at least in some sub-sectors, it actually takes five to tango, given the rapidly increasing role being taken by private sector, province and civil society agents in the context of Vietnam's transformation towards a market-oriented middle-income country.

As Vietnam decentralises, as donors are donors consider gradual pull-out, and as the role of the state changes, partnerships in their current form as mechanisms for coordination and dialogue between donors and central-level government probably make less and less sense.

Are the partnerships in their present form able to change and evolve?

That depends hugely on the sub-sectoral context in which each of the different partnerships operates, and on the extent to which they succeed in building linkages upwards and downwards to actors at the national and local levels. Can a tango be transformed into a dance for five without everybody treading on each other's toes? How must the partnerships evolve to stay relevant in this new context? Should they be replaced with something else? These are questions that the study seeks to answer.

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Voices

Donors are publicly discreet about their true feelings, but the Platform offers opportunities for frank talk. Here are soundbites from the debate between more than 50 senior rural development experts from 16 member organisations who gathered at the December 12-13, 2007, Annual General Meeting in Paris: