The new OECD aid boss on Gates, geopolitics, and impartiality

On March 1 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee will get a new chair. Carsten Staur, Denmark’s current ambassador to the OECD, will be the first Dane to lead the body, which defines, measures, and critiques its 31 members’ aid spending. That puts it at the heart of debates such as how to count loans, excess vaccine doses, and the cost of hosting refugees. The chair’s role is to help guide these sometimes years-long discussions to a point where all members can agree. Yet despite the DAC’s significance, its inner workings remain largely hidden. Devex was one of the few media outlets to cover the recent closed-door election race that saw Staur beat candidates from Norway and France. So we began our first interview, by phone last week, by asking about transparency. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. On Dec. 6 your “appointment” as incoming chair was announced without mention of the fact that there had been three candidates, two rounds of voting, and debate among the 31 DAC members. Is this secrecy justified when it concerns public institutions dealing with public money? How do you assess the DAC’s transparency credentials? I would be surprised if that was different in the DAC than it is in other OECD committees. The OECD just elected the chair of the trade committee only a few weeks ago — I do not think that was a public process either. My experience from the last four and a half years when I've been ambassador to the OECD is that a lot of thinking goes on in the organization, a lot of testing of ideas. And most of that thinking is basically confidential. But it is disclosed and it is discussed between member states. The discussions that take place in the various committees are seen as a discussion between countries, in much the same way as the EU has discussion between countries and other organizations have discussions between their member states. So I don't think that the OECD is very different in that. Once discussions come to a close and once decisions have been reached, of course, they are communicated publicly. How will you be different from your predecessor? I think we will need to wait and see. There is also of course a work program for the whole year 2023 and a number of meetings have been pinpointed already. So I will be joining an agenda that is very much vibrant and alive and I will try to take over from Susanna Moorehead on March 1 as best I can. I'm sure there will be some changes in the way I do things. But I don't think that members will see this as a very dramatic change. Your victory in the second round against former Norwegian development minister Nikolai Astrup was quite narrow (16-13, with two members voting for neither candidate). What conclusions do you draw from that? I think the fact that there were three candidates reflects the strong interest from member states in the DAC and in its proceedings, outcomes, and results. So in my view, it's very positive that we had such an interest and we had three very well qualified candidates running for the chair. I think it gave rise to a fairly positive and dynamic discussion among member states. If you look at it, between the two last candidates, Nikolai Astrup and myself, there might be some nuances and differences in our vision statements, but I think, broadly speaking, we basically would subscribe to a lot of the same things. I think we basically come from the same mold of international solidarity framed in the Nordic countries and exercised for decades through our development assistance. In Brussels, the European Commission is launching the Global Gateway investment plan, largely financed by its development budget (93% of which must be eligible to be counted as ODA). Yet the president of the commission calls the Gateway “above all a geopolitical project.” Is using development assistance for geopolitical ends a problem for you? From my perspective, the point of departure will always be the definition of ODA. I said in my interview with DAC members that it is basically an expression of international solidarity. It's concessional funding. But there has never been, in history, ODA that has not had some kind of foreign and security policy objectives. Humanitarian assistance is probably the form of ODA that is least seen as an expression of foreign and security policy objectives. But even there, if you look at how the world responds to humanitarian situations, there is a difference between responses to one emergency rather than the other. So there will always be and has always been these kinds of other policy considerations. But it is still clear that the main objective of ODA will always have to be, as written in its founding documents, to promote economic development and welfare of developing countries. Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General and OECD Chef de Cabinet Steven Cutts has been critical of the DAC, particularly donors’ lack of impartiality in setting rules for themselves, and on how the concessionality of loans is calculated. One of the things Cutts is calling for is an objective and impartial statistical review of ODA, conducted preferably by people elsewhere in the OECD. How do you respond to that call? Those are some of the things that I would like to have the member states’ perspective on before basically setting my own opinion on it. We will always try to have reporting directives that reflect and respect the ultimate basis and foundation of ODA. I would not want to go into that discussion right now. This is one of the things where I think it is fair as a new chair to sound out what the positions of member states are, and to see on what substantive aspects there might be a basis to discuss this issue further. What is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's current interaction with the DAC? I must confess I do not know that, so I cannot answer that question. I have been a member of the board of the Global Fund to fights AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria, twice, 10 years apart, and I have great respect for the work that the Gates Foundation did as one of the major donors to that organization. One of the criticisms in recent times is that the Gates foundation had a huge impact on the world’s COVID response, for example. But they are not in any conventional tents on how we decide what aid is. How do you see yourself working with them? I think it's important to do that. I know from my own country that the Danish government development program has reached out to some Danish foundations in order to see whether we could find a meeting ground, things where we could find things that we could both contribute to and where we could build alliances in order to improve the total outcomes of our assistance. So I think there are a number of ways to do that. But I think we probably need to do some more testing on some modalities before we can see how we can actually do that in practice. How do you want to involve low-income countries in the work of the DAC? I think that one of the meeting grounds will always be the multilateral organizations. The chair of the DAC will participate in a number of international meetings and be able to discuss, both with representatives from DAC member states and recipient countries, the issues at hand. I think that will be at least an entry point for having a discussion with the broad international community, including the private sector and private foundations — anybody who is out there and defines themselves as a stakeholder within the broader ODA agenda. I'm not afraid of not having a discussion with developing countries. And I'm sure we can find a lot of ways where we can have that discussion in a fruitful manner. Denmark will foot the bill for your position. Are you planning to work on the question of how the DAC chair is financed? It's an old problem and it's been discussed at several occasions over time. It's true that the DAC chair is paid for by the country that offers the individual who holds that chair. You could argue that it should be funded by the OECD budget. That would eventually mean that there will be other things that OECD is now financing that will not be funded by that budget. Nothing comes for free here. Then you can also ask the question, is the chair independent if the chair is funded by a country? You can test that in real-time to see whether the chair will behave in an independent way and it’s definitely my ambition to do so. To be very frank, I’m 68. I don’t have another job to go to. The DAC chair is elected for a four-year term (with the possibility to extend for a year in ‘exceptional circumstances’) but is reappointed each year by the members. Cutts, for instance, has argued that you can’t be independent if your constituents get to decide each year whether you keep your job. It's basically I think a reflection also of some broader OECD rules. In most OECD committees the chair is elected for three years, but then automatically reelected every year. We have decided to look at that once I assume the office of chair and to streamline these rules. I would suggest — but of course it will be up to members to discuss this — that the present rule of “exceptional circumstances” be done away with. I hope we can do away with as unclear a concept as exceptional circumstances. I think that the term should be four years, no more, no less.