Exclusive: The three-man race to replace Moorehead as DAC chair

Norway, Denmark, and France have each proposed candidates to chair the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee, replacing the United Kingdom’s Susanna Moorehead after four years at the helm. The secretive 31-member DAC sets the rules on what counts as official development assistance, putting it at the center of hot-button debates over how to measure vaccine donations, refugee costs, and private sector instruments, such as budget guarantees. DAC members, including the European Union, United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, will interview the trio on Friday, Nov. 18. Each candidate sent a vision statement to the other members, obtained by Devex. The three candidates are Nikolai Astrup from Norway, Carsten Staur from Denmark, and Pierre Duquesne from France. Astrup is a 44-year-old Norwegian politician from the Conservative Party, currently in opposition. He was the country’s international development minister from 2018 to 2019. Staur is Denmark’s permanent representative to OECD. The 68-year-old was previously state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in charge of Denmark’s development cooperation, Danida, from 2001 to 2007. He was also permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva and New York, and he has chaired the boards of UNDP, UNFPA, and UNOPS, as well as two stints on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Duquesne was a senior adviser on economic and international affairs to center-left Prime Minister Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2001. He represented France at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and is a former permanent representative to the OECD. Since September 2020, he has been ambassador in charge of coordinating international support to Lebanon. France, Norway, and Denmark did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Norway Astrup argued that “international cooperation is not working as it should” and “greater geopolitical rivalry will be detrimental to development.” “Reversing these trends must be at the core of our mission and mandate in the DAC,” he wrote in the vision statement seen by Devex. “We must build on what the DAC does best: providing updated knowledge and influencing evidence-based policies and practice to promote sustainable development.” He called for “closer and more effective coordination between national development cooperation programmes and multilateral aid organisations, including the World Bank and regional development banks.” He stated his belief in the need to “safeguard the integrity of ODA, whilst recognizing that achieving the SDGs goes far beyond ODA,” as well as the need to examine the funding for global public goods. And he argued that when it comes to DAC, “our consensus-driven agenda is a strength not a weakness. Once the DAC agrees on how to navigate within this framework, we are a powerful force for change.” Denmark Staur began by arguing that “New geopolitical fault lines are redefining the rules of international cooperation. Official Development Assistance from OECD countries is part of the balancing act. Consequently, the role of the DAC will be more important than ever.” He warned that “The effects of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the strong support for Ukraine by DAC-members – and many others – will clearly affect ODA allocations and challenge existing allocation priorities. I see a need for DAC to deal openly with this issue – also in dialogue with development partners in the global South.” And on fragile states, he noted that “We will also have to consider further the role of ODA in relation to root [causes] of irregular migration.” For Staur, “the primary task of the DAC Chair is to develop and continuously revise a work programme that reflects the collective priorities of members, and to help build consensus.” He suggested that an annual retreat might be helpful to foster such collaboration. He also noted that “The emerging economies in Asia and Latin America and Arab countries provide significant development funding, although not on the same concessional terms as DAC-members. A strategic dialogue with these countries is important and should include issues such as the effects of non-concessional aid on debt situations, exploitation of natural resources and climate change, and encourage the application of DAC’s well-defined ODA-standards.” He called ODA the “jewel in the crown” for DAC, noting that other measures, such as Total Official Support for Sustainable Development, lack “the same universal and longstanding political recognition.” And he concluded by proposing that DAC “quietly starts reflecting on what international framework might eventually … replace the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. Such a process might also help shape the discussion on medium-term challenges and opportunities for ODA.” France Duquesne called DAC “a fundamental forum” for analyzing and measuring responses to crises “without taking the place of other development actors, particularly the major donors.” He began his pitch by focusing on climate change, “because there would be no point in developing entire regions if they were to become uninhabitable by the middle of the century.” Recognizing that “the achievements of the last century on untying aid and more recently on aid effectiveness must be firmly defended,” Duquesne went on to argue however that “DAC cannot live solely on the preservation of its historical contributions.” “It must be able to renew itself,” he wrote, adding that DAC must offer a vision of “a solidarity-based investment policy” that meets the expectations of low- and middle-income countries today. On localization, he said DAC “definitely has a role” in ensuring that local actors and civil society can better influence decisions. Achieving this, he said, will require framing “definitions and common guidelines.” On public-private financing, he wrote: “Attracting private investors also requires the ability to speak in a language they are familiar with, and current DAC standards on insurance, guarantees, and equity investments need to be modernized. Other considerations, such as the labelling of development bonds, like green bonds, also deserve to be explored further.” He also sees a role for DAC in looking “at the social and environmental responsibility of development funders so that they can rely on common definitions and impose minimum standards on the companies that respond to their bids. The DAC, because it is not only the guardian of ODA but also its legislator, could also define more precisely the notion of impact finance and indirectly fight against the development of social washing.” Evoking “new dimensions of development,” he also touched on the need for DAC to consider other areas such as space, blockchain, sport, and art. On the successor to the Sustainable Development Goals after 2030, he sees a role for DAC to consider questions such as whether “they be more defined in relation with the beneficiary countries?” As for the DAC itself, he warned that further enlargement — beyond the current additions of Lithuania and soon Estonia — will be necessary “to prevent unsustainable divergences between DAC and other OECD members.” And he concluded on the need to discuss more about whether the current consensus model in the DAC — which saw Hungary thwart agreement on a common rule for counting excess vaccine donations — should be changed to a consensus minus one approach to decision-making. “It is not a question of pre- empting the outcome of a discussion,” Duquesne wrote, “but it is also important not to refrain from reflecting on our collective way of moving forward together.” A ‘new age’ … of transparency? As for who gets the job, “the election of the DAC Chair is by consensus — as are all decisions in the OECD. The deliberations are confidential,” an OECD spokesperson for DAC wrote to Devex Thursday. “We hope to communicate on the appointment of the next DAC Chair in early December.” Moorehead took over in 2019 and a DAC chair’s mandate is limited to four years with a maximum of five years in exceptional circumstances. Sources told Devex that Moorehead had wanted to continue for a fifth year on the grounds that the lack until recently of a director of the OECD’s development cooperation directorate did amount to exceptional circumstances, though this was thwarted by the two Nordic candidacies. The French submission of Duquesne’s candidacy came at the last minute. Moorehead declined to comment. Anna Byhovskaya, OECD policy lead at Oxfam International, told Devex by email Thursday that “the new chair has to continue to bring the DAC into a new age”. Byhovskaya wrote that meant “opening up much more to civil society & the Global south (with more information sharing & access to official meetings), by addressing aid diversion and aid inflation trends in a serious way, have a concrete discussion around climate finance, and start looking at economic and societal inequalities alongside poverty alleviation as the main goal behind ODA that should be central to funding and programming.” The secrecy surrounding the election process is not likely to do any favors for DAC, which is already under fire from critics for inflating aid figures on loans, vaccines, and refugee costs. A recent closed-door civil society dialogue also left both sides frustrated, with NGOs telling Devex that they learned little new from donors reading prepared remarks. Perhaps DAC’s most candid and prolific critic is Steve Cutts, a former United Nations assistant secretary-general and former chef de cabinet at OECD. He told Devex by email Thursday that transparency at DAC is “totally inadequate,” with key documents on aid eligibility often classified or unclear on individual members’ positions. “This makes it impossible for the taxpaying public or civil society organisations to know their own country’s positions,” Cutts wrote. In the past, he added, “DAC meeting records clearly identified the people at the meeting, and their home departments, and, when policy issues were raised, said exactly which countries were arguing for what.” “The idea that donors should set all the rules behind closed doors may have been OK in the 1960s when developing countries had rudimentary statistical capacities,” Cutts wrote, “but this seems quite indefensible today.”