How India can emerge as the global leader in bringing sustainable development

By: Diya Dutta& Tomojit Basu

The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africamet in Xiamen, China, between September 3rd and 5th at the Ninth BRICS Summit, with the group looking to further its policy influence on developing an alternative international cooperation discourse led by the global South.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims to reimagine the international development cooperation/assistance architecture with a focus on sustainability, equality, and eradication of poverty. In this context, the BRICS nations, who are significant aid providers today, assume a central role, more so as actors having endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Countries of the global South share knowledge, skills, expertise, and resources to meet their development ambitions through concerted efforts.

Development cooperation, or more specifically South South Cooperation (SSC), is a key foreign policy tool in this regard. South-South Cooperation is an important element of the diverse range of international cooperation.It has developed as an expression of solidarity among developing countries,who are themselves receivers of foreign aid. It refers to a broad framework of collaboration among these countries in the political, economic, social, cultural, environmental and technical domains, by and large, based on their shared experiences. Involving two or more countries for collaboration in meeting their particular development needs can take place on a bilateral, regional, intra-regional or inter-regional basis.

Countries of the global South share knowledge, skills, expertise, and resources to meet their development ambitions through concerted efforts. Countries like India, China and Brazil have been giving development assistance for over fivedecades and are not new to the concept. Such partnerships and resource flows are marked by non-conditionality and inclusivity and are demand-driven in nature.

Given that aid budgets, particularly grants, are sourced from taxpayers’ money, the need for Southern donors to be held accountable and transparent in the processes of development cooperation is a cardinal issue which needs to be addressed.

As it stands, reporting mechanisms for resource provision and utilisation, assessments of social and environmental impacts, contraction and sub-contraction norms, and a robust monitoring and evaluation framework, among other subjects, are either weak, non-existent, or incoherent among various actors.

India’s generous development cooperation programme has expanded by more than 300 per cent over the last decade.

India and SSC challenges to assessment

A number of factors have aided India’s transformation from a net aid-recipient country to its emergence as a major development assistance facilitator over the last 25 years.

Largely riding on the positive effects of economic liberalisation which saw the country grow at a near-7 per cent average between 1991 and 2016, India’s generous development cooperation programme has expanded by more than 300 per cent over the last decade. As of the last fiscal, India contributes more to development cooperation efforts than 12 out of 30 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC), a group comprising, primarily, of wealthy ‘Northern’ donors.

With a foreign aid programme amounting to more than USD 1 billion each year between 2013 and 2017, and coupled with its extensive international peacekeeping and humanitarian commitments, India is a major SSC actor and has facilitated the promotion of infrastructure and industrial development, capacity building and socio-cultural welfare, in its immediate neighbourhood but even beyond, most notably in African nations. Its soft power projection through technical assistance and knowledge sharing programmes, educational support and healthcare training, has helped strengthen its footing geopolitically.

But how is one to gauge the effectiveness of resources flowing to India’s Southern partners? How does one situate efficiency when projects are delayed or see cost overruns? Ostensibly meant to facilitate development, just how much has Indian aid been pro-poor in nature?

There is a need to democratise the aid assistance programme and make efforts to facilitate greater public understanding of India’s aid commitments.

The methodological challenges to answer these questions are manifold which, in turn, makes analysing donor accountability a challenge. While successive High-Level Forums on aid effectiveness – held in Rome (2002), Paris (2005), Accra (2008), and Busan (2011) – saw DAC and non-DAC donors agree on principles, such as developing country ownership, SSC concepts continue to compete with traditional North-South development assistance models.

Take, for example, the issue of measuring SSC/aid flows. SSC premised on mutual benefit, takes into accountaid promoting commercial interests, a departure from the OECD’s practice of separating donors’ poverty reduction activities from its commercial undertakings. A great deal of SSC is also ‘in kind’ or involves a transfer of technical expertise shaped by emerging donors’ own development experience, which is difficult to quantify monetarily.

Challenges such as these make global norms setting in the development assistance architecture difficult at a juncture when global efforts for inclusive development require closer coordination. While competing interpretations of development cooperation must be welcomed, evolving a common reporting mechanism among Southern providers would help in the better examination of aid effectiveness and help separate best practices from good ones.

Time for a white paper on India’s Foreign Aid objectives

There is a need to democratise the aid assistance programme and make efforts to facilitate greater public understanding of India’s aid commitments. The process of setting in motion a green or white paper on aid to spelling out India’s foreign aid objectives and strategy would be a good starting point for the public to better comprehend SSC. Improving the access to disaggregated data on projects, feasibility reports and impact assessments or audits would make the development cooperation process vastly more accountable.

The Indian Government would also benefit from decades of experience and expertise among CSOs across various fields of international development including poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, social protection and community development.

Public participation would also be welcome at a time when India’s overseas commitments are likely to keep expanding. The inclusion of civil society organisations (CSOs) in a multi-stakeholder setting to feed into policy formulation – a principle outlined by the Busan Partnership Agreement (2012) – would make systems more transparent and accountable. The Indian Government would also benefit from decades of experience and expertise among CSOs across various fields of international development, including poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, social protection and community development.

Ultimately, civil society actors act as conduits of information between the administration and the public. If the Indian taxpayer is to help steer efficient development outcomes among geopolitical partners, it would be useful to know just how those resources are utilised and how processes could be ameliorated.