In the span of fifty years development cooperation has become a highly specialised sector spending over 100 billion € a year. Notwithstanding its impressive track record, the traditional development cooperation sector is facing an unprecedented crisis. This crisis has much to do with the inability of the sector to deal with new challenges such as global environmental degradation, rising insecurity and severe distortions in the international market that minimize or even annihilate development cooperation efforts. Paradoxically the sector itself, policy-makers and the population at large are looking at the development cooperation sector to solve these problems as well while – at the same time – traditional development cooperation is being criticized for being too-little-too-late, ineffective, inefficient, incoherent, uncoordinated, non-transparent, unaccountable and even illegitimate.

Much of this crisis is related to the unbearable lightness of public and political support for traditional development cooperation. But why do we continuously refer to the ‘traditional development cooperation sector’? Because a new and promising type of cooperation is emerging. This new and modern mode of development cooperation is seriously challenging the traditional actors of develop¬ment cooperation.


1. The traditional development cooperation community: challenge 1

The development cooperation community is composed of what we have called three ‘pillars’. The first pillar refers to the donor-agencies responsible for official development aid (e.g. USAID in the US, DfID in the UK, DGIS in the Netherlands). The gamut of specialised multilateral agencies such as UNDP, the World bank or EuropAid form the second pillar. ‘Civilateral’ development agencies such as non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) and certain foundations are the third pillar.

The thousands of agencies that belong to these pillars and this development cooperation commu¬nity were created because of the development problems. They are domain-specific and specialised. They share common credo’s (‘we can change the world if all donors invest 0.7% of GDP in ODA’), common values (‘solidarity’), common ideas (‘not-for-profit’), common discourses (‘pro-poor growth’), common vocabularies (‘ownership’, ‘empowerment’, ‘participation’, ‘target group mix’, …) and common practices (‘participatory appraisals’, ‘project cycle management’, ‘budget support’, ..). For a decade or so they have been working on a common agenda epitomised in the MDGs and the Paris Declaration.

This traditional development cooperation community is hermetically closed and self-referential. For outsiders it is hard to join the club and the members of the club itself have little feeling with the vibes of the communities outside. Still, public opinion barometers such as the Eurobarometer show that the population at large in western countries largely supports the development cooperation specialists: ‘poverty has to be tackled, development cooperation is needed, NGOs do a good job, …’. But this support is extremely and increasingly volatile both in terms of opinion and financial support. This support is also increasingly conditional. There is a growing call for accountability and proof of effectiveness. Remarkably the dictum ‘unknown makes unloved’ does not apply this time. Research shows that the public has little or no knowledge of who is who in the development cooperation sector and does know little or nothing about the recent trends and strategies of the sector. But support for ‘the small water and sanitation projects; for the health clinic and the school; for the European or American aid worker’ is high.

Simultaneously a new pillar is emerging. We called this ‘the fourth pillar of development cooperation’. In the US over 20 government agencies, ministries and departments are involved in some kind of development cooperation. In Belgium all ministries do have a budget for development cooperation activities. All donors are confronted with a ‘pluralisation’ or ‘fragmentation’ of their official development aid (ODA). At the level of the U.N. efforts are being made to ‘Deliver as One’ in order to get control over the unbridled expansion of development cooperation efforts of tens of existing agencies and the proliferation of new agencies, funds and alliances. The NGOs then are confronted with new ‘civilateral’ initiatives of individuals (‘self-made aid workers’), but more impor¬tantly of other civil society organisations and movements such as schools, trade unions, farmers’ organisations, human rights organisations, environmental NGOs, foundations, health care institu¬tions, migrant communities, sports clubs, businesses, and so on.

Characteristically these fourth pillar organisations are not domain-specific. They were not created because of the problems in the third world or the North-South divide. They are children of the age of globalisation. They are not part of the development aid community (very few long for it), they do not take over its credo and values in a wholesale manner, do not understand its discourses and highbrow vocabulary. Their logic of intervention does not stem from the development community either. They know how to act as school masters, as trade unionists, as sports people or as entre¬preneurs. They do it back home. They feel they are good at it. So why couldn’t they do it else¬where, together with their colleagues from Botswana, Belize or Bangladesh?

2. The traditional development cooperation arena: challenge 2

The development cooperation sector is not only a community of fellow travellers. It is also an arena or even a set of arena. There are arena in the donor countries, in the recipient countries, in the pro¬jects and programmes, in the villages, …This means that there are plenty of latent contradictions and conflicts within the sector. This also means that there are interest groups and strategic groups fighting fierce wars for power, positions and penny. We see those who want to promote redistribu¬tion (globally and nationally) and those who favour growth (globally and nationally); those who urge for more attention for humanitarian catastrophes and those who call for preventive and structural solutions; those who see the State as the most legitimate player and those who prefer the dyna¬mism and innovative capacity of the private sector; those who want everything to go to the bottom poor and those who see more benefit in investing in change agents who rarely belong to the poorer segments of society; those who defend technical assistance and those who are believers of the budget support approach; those who favour short-term projects and those who advocate long-term commitments and programmes; those who plead for ownership of recipient countries and commu¬nities and those who belief that some donorship and conditionalities are indispensable.

The implication of all this grumbling and muddling is that the traditional development cooperation community has never been able to define what good development cooperation is. Public opinion is deluged with contradictory messages coming from all these different strategic groups. In the absence of a coherent discourse the public makes its own cocktail. For the general public good development cooperation is believed to be “quick wins realised by capable westerners who help with water, health and education, effectively controlling whatever is done with ‘our money’ particularly by corrupt governments and avoiding all unnecessary overhead costs”. It goes without saying that development cooperation specialists are frustrated with this naïve, old-fashioned public opinion which is so much ‘in contradiction with what we are doing and should do’.

Even the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is not very helpful in our search for a definition of good development cooperation because it is primarily inspired by bad practice and only tries to weed them out. And, still, continuous public support depends on a clear understanding of what good development cooperation is.

In the mean time, the new actors coming on the field (fourth pillar, but also new ‘donors’ such as China and India) can not be bothered. They do not believe in development cooperation master plans or logical frameworks. The plan is replaced by the man. The man has the freedom and the plight to take action, to take risks, to be entrepreneurial. See the contrast with the traditional development cooperation sector who considered non-specialists (the public at large) as having only obli¬gations to give, to remain at home and to leave the real job to the specialists. The confrontation between the development specialists and the new actors might bring fire into the arena!


3. The traditional development cooperation market: challenge 3

The development cooperation sector is not only a community and an arena. It is also a market. It is not only inspired by value rationality (the main rationality of a community) or power rationality (the main rationality of an arena). It is also profoundly affected by a calculative rationality (the main rationality of a market). The players on the market deal with each other as sellers and clients, com¬petitors and money-seekers.

But it is of course a special market. The players see themselves as not-for-profit institutions but have a very strong focus on everything money. Financial management is a multi-actor process involving governmental agencies, non-governmental organisations, recipient governments and beneficiary organisations. Each has its own financial interests and operating modes. Ownership (in legal terms) of means acquired with development aid money is very nebulous. Who owns the bridge or road, the health clinic and its medical equipment, the school and the computer in Kaya, Burkina Faso?

The development cooperation market is fuelled by financial resources stemming from governmental and private sources. The traditional development cooperation specialists do know that there is no causal relation between 0.7% of rich countries’ GDP and the resolution of the poverty problems in the third world. Still this norm has become a mantra for the sector. It could be looked at in a diffe¬rent way also. The fact that few countries reach that level of development commitment and that even 1% is only a meagre share of national wealth and government budgets does confirm that poli¬tical and public support for the sector is weak.

Development agencies also look at private sources to finance their operations. For this the most advanced techniques of merchandising and marketing are utilised, often at the expense of the sectors’ conviction that developing countries should be considered and pictured as owners of their destiny and hopes and not as victims of fate. But the market of philanthropy and generosity is not endlessly elastic and competition is fierce. The market is very demanding also and volumes of private gifts have not quadrupled since the 1960s where private wealth of westerners has.

Here again we see that the traditional development cooperation sector is being challenged. New actors tap into the same market. While they might have much less general credibility when it comes to development cooperation, they have very strong local credibility. Local media adore their proxi¬mity, their visibility, their action-orientation, their simple language. Friends and colleagues strongly believe that their fourth pillar initiative produces the best results because of low or no overhead and because they know the person(s) behind the initiative.

But again, innovation might come from these challengers. They are experimenting with new finan¬cial products replacing or complementing the recurrent small gift. Some allow you to become a member (and thus to pay member-dues), to buy (cooperative) shares, to make a loan, to lease ground, to give bank guarantees or other financial derivates. Few traditional development coopera¬tion actors allow their supporters to choose between different formula of financial participation and stick to the easy (but boring and anonymous) financial donations.


4. Challenges become opportunities

The traditional development sector is thus facing serious challenges as a community, an arena and a market. But these challenges can become opportunities and can inspire an agenda for change and transformation. In this way the shallowness and lightness of public support for development cooperation could be remedied and make place for a more embedded and rooted form of devel¬opment cooperation.

Elements for such an agenda could be:

- take the fermentations in society serious: the culture of participation in the age of globalisation is different than the one of the age of cold war;
- make yourself understandable: get rid of the verbalism of the sector and be concrete;
- define what good development cooperation is: and show humility in this;
- interact with new actors: do not deal with them in a paternalistic way;
- interact differently with your supporters: don’t treat them as an uneducated audience or mute donors; let them take action;
- link your supporters in a structural way to your organisation: make them members, sharehold¬ers, decision-makers;
- make your supporters the partners of your African, Asian or Latin-American partners: profe¬ssionals can be useful as co-pilots or in the back-seat;
- and last but not least: repeat again and again that ‘it is about the money, but not all about the money’.