Tackling rural poverty, together

Stephen Wallace

Chair, Advisory Group on Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness
Vice-President, Afghanistan Task Force
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Ottawa

Wallace: CSOs have started to seize the initiative on multi-stakeholder discussions for greater aid effectiveness

A graduate of the University of Ottawa, Stephen Wallace has focused much of his 30-year career on development and international affairs. Early work with non-governmental organisations, including long-term postings in Nigeria and Lesotho, led to his appointment with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in 1984. In recent years, his work with CIDA has included special responsibility for the conflict areas of Bosnia and Kosovo and leading development policy for Africa and the Middle East. He was appointed CIDA Vice-President of Policy in 2005, and assumed responsibility for an expanded CIDA Afghanistan Task Force in March 2007. Since late 2007, he has chaired the Advisory Group on Civil Society (established by the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, an international partnership hosted by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD) as part of the preparatory process for the Accra High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, set for September 2008. He discussed this latest assignment with Timothy Nater.

Nater: What's new about civil society organisations in development?

Wallace: CIDA has worked overseas in partnership with Canadian civil society organisations – or CSOs – since the 1960s. But there's a growing realisation internationally of just how important CSOs are to development. We're witnessing a flourishing of CSOs of extraordinary scope and breadth across many countries now. In Kenya, Mali, Mozambique and Tanzania, for example, we’ve seen growth of CSOs as never before. In India there are at least one million, in the Philippines, 200,000. CIDA's conservative estimate is that CSOs mobilise $40 billion-plus a year for development from contributors in industrial countries.

For a long time, donors held a relatively narrow perspective on the link between CSOs and development activity. In the 1980s, for instance, the emphasis tended to be on their role as service delivery agents in areas where the state was weak. What is becoming much more widely appreciated now is the role that CSOs play as agents of change, as donors in their own right, and as partners in development. There's a growing recognition everywhere, including within the OECD Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, that CSOs are not external to the aid architecture, but can play an integral part in ensuring effective aid and making a difference in fighting poverty.

Haven't governments and donors been slow to recognise this trend?

Notions of the role of the state are changing, and moves to include non-state actors in the development process are accelerating. Also, understanding the contribution that CSOs can make to development is leading to much greater awareness of their overall potential. Western countries and donors have come to recognise that aid isn't just about providing money, but about trying to enable genuine, locally-anchored processes of change, in which CSOs can play a very strong role. CSOs often help to reinforce shared values of human rights, outreach to marginalised populations, democratisation and gender equality, and when we consider aid effectiveness from this perspective, it is not a theoretical concept. It's about saving lives and building livelihoods. The growing reality of CSO activity on the ground is galvanising the attention of countries themselves, the international community, and donors.

Given the huge numbers and variety of CSOs, isn't achieving representation a problem for the Advisory Group?

Yes, the issue of representation is a deep challenge. But we're seeing CSO’s respond in extraordinary ways to the need for concerted dialogue and action. There is something fundamental underway in this regard. The original aim of our consultation process with CSOs was to help realise their unfulfilled potential, believing they could help strengthen the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and contribute to the overall aid effectiveness agenda worldwide. But over the course of the last year, as the Advisory Group on Civil Society and Aid Effectiveness got involved in consultations in 30-plus countries, we saw that the CSOs themselves wanted to take a lead role in organising processes of dialogue and representation.

And rather than just work at central levels in discussing the Paris Declaration and the build-up to the Accra High-Level Forum, we found CSOs in more and more countries also wanting to work at a decentralised level in their own countries, with grass-roots organisations on the domestic scene.

This trend has mushroomed. There are an increasing number of national consultations run by CSOs themselves, involving local governments and donors in a multi-stakeholder structure, including at a sub-national level. The mobilisation of civil society has started very much at local rather than international level, and is building up from there. We didn't set out to do this — it's happening on its own, largely due to the energy and enthusiasm of the civil society movement itself.