Tackling rural poverty, together

Jim Harvey

Head of Profession, Livelihoods and Environment Groups, Department for International Development (DFID), London

“More and more, we’re coping with global public goods issues.”

Nater: So donor lobbying is still needed sometimes at the level of developing-country governments. Could the Global Donor Platform focus its advocacy efforts here?

Harvey: We should consider each situation very carefully before doing so. If, for example, you’re part of a donor group in Tanzania already working effectively at a high consultative level with the government, you may not appreciate another donor-funded third party coming in and saying, “Psst, you need to give more attention to agriculture!” That may just open the door to other advocacy groups promoting HIV prevention, universal primary education, property rights or whatever. That’s precisely what we’re trying to get away from, all that fringe lobbying. The Platform has to be careful about creating a donor-funded splinter group whose advocacy might be seen as unhelpful. I’m not against advocacy, but it has to be done in a subtle way — more about presenting good analysis and solid evidence. And there’s plenty that shows that ‘rural’ is still a central poverty issue.

But recipient governments still need advice.
Developing-country governments like to feel that the advice they are getting is impartial, and not coming from the same people who’ve got the money. That’s an important separation to be upheld. Advisors and providers of technical assistance might be paid for by donors, but governments need to have faith that these people are independent and that donors are not pulling the strings.

What, then, is the Platform’s greatest value in your eyes?
I think there are two areas. The first job is to back up in-country harmonisation efforts — to make sure that our headquarters agendas support — and don’t undermine — country-level efforts. But the Platform also has a huge role to play in harmonisation for rural development at the global level, because, more and more, we’re coping with global public goods issues. These cannot be addressed by individual states. They need collective action that goes beyond the borders of individual countries.

Policy on public goods at international level can be just as prone to incoherence and lack of harmonisation as public goods at the country level. There’s clearly a need for this sort of global concertation. For example, France and Sweden in 2003 set up the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. But they’re focusing on security, communicable diseases, trade, finance and information flows. I don’t know of any forum other than the Global Donor Platform in which donors can get rural development right.

Given the different organisational cultures and expectations within the Platform membership that you described earlier, what sort of results do you expect, and when?
I think we should be realistic. The Platform should be just that — a platform — and not be expected to deliver products that others should be delivering. But it should aim at a few, higher-level outcomes around major processes. The recent dialogue around WDR 2008 is a good example. Getting a good number of people into a room to talk about how we jointly and individually can work on it — that’s an achievement. The joint policy products are hard work, but worth it if it means at country level we can increasingly trust each other to look after each other’s programmes.

What has DFID’s experience been with sector-wide approaches, or SWAps, in agriculture and rural development?
Getting locked into a rural SWAp that’s dominated by public sector reform can mean having to deal with some dysfunctional, non-harmonised national institutions, including ministries of agriculture, some of which still don’t know what their job in life is. There are a number of countries I can think of in Central America and Africa where DFID has pretty much said that public-sector side of agriculture is in a mess and going nowhere fast, so we’re working in other areas, such as the business environment and making markets work, that are also of direct importance to small-scale producers. This is a country-by-country decision, of course, and still needs a sectoral approach and donor harmonisation, but it’s sometimes a better place to put effort into. But we’re not walking away from the long-term issues — that’s the reason we’re supporting NEPAD’s CAADP process to get an African-led approach to sorting out the difficult areas.