What if all DAC meetings were public?

Does the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee have a transparency problem? Is it an out-of-touch rich donors club? And with war once again at donors’ doorstep in Ukraine, does the concept of official development assistance still make sense? Those were among the questions we put to DAC Chair Susanna Moorehead last week, as she and her team presented preliminary aid figures for 2021. Aid from official donors rose to an all-time high of $179 billion in 2021, up 4.4% from 2020. However, excluding donated COVID-19 vaccines, the increase was just 0.6%. And with the war in Ukraine set to hit fuel, fertilizer, and food prices, on top of existing crises in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen, and elsewhere, Moorehead warned against complacency, arguing that “the worst is yet to come.” What role then for the DAC, where 29 donor countries and the European Union set the rules on what counts as aid? In an in-person interview in her office at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development headquarters in Paris, Moorehead pointed to recent policies on safeguarding, the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, and climate, as key achievements under her tenure, which began in early 2019. However, DAC policy on other key issues remains in flux. No decision has been reached on how to treat the reallocation of Special Drawing Rights from the International Monetary Fund to low-income countries, Moorehead said. Nor have definitive rules been reached on how to count private sector instruments such as loans and guarantees. At the same time, NGOs argue that donors are at risk of diluting the primary purpose of ODA as a means to assist low- and middle-income countries, particularly by counting the cost of hosting refugees at home toward their foreign aid budgets. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Are you concerned, like NGOs, that rising in-donor refugee costs and SDRs could compromise the integrity of ODA? I think like many others, NGOs were relieved that we'd managed to maintain ODA levels. I think they were extremely concerned about what might have happened with vaccine donations in-kind, but in fact, which is our job, what we had done was to come up with sufficient safeguards and transparency to make sure that the prediction you were making of people sort of over-benefiting didn't happen. SDRs is still very much under discussion, so I didn't want to second guess what might happen there. In-donor refugee costs are part of the existing DAC rules. But we're all here because the DAC sets the rules and the rules can change, right? Well, members set the rules. But you set the debate and the rules change in function of your members … I think if you look at the evolution of ODA rules, they reflect the evolution of development cooperation and the complexity of what ODA is being used for. The Millennium Development Goals were relatively straightforward. Not exclusively, but primarily focused on poverty reduction, human development. As soon as you shifted to the Sustainable Development Goals, there were going to inevitably be many, many more things that donors could argue should be ODA eligible. And what happens in the DAC is that it is hammered out amongst a like-minded group of donors who reach compromises. I think with any compromise nobody is 100% happy. But I don't think that ODA integrity is something that existed at one moment in time. I think the DAC has to evolve to reflect the changing reality of development cooperation, partner needs, and the membership. The DAC doesn't sit still. I think people love to parody it and see it as these old men sitting in Paris, but trust me, it's not. --— Susanna Moorehead, chair, OECD's Development Assistance Committee Are you satisfied with where the DAC stands on how to count private sector instruments as ODA? Well, it’s unresolved. How are you going to take that forward? I am working to try and find a compromise, but we haven't done that yet. Where's the wiggle room? Where's the landing zone? I don't know, yet. If I had the answer to that, I would tell you. But there are still a number of different opinions on how that should be treated. So that's precisely why it hasn't been resolved. Is there a point where you say, ‘Well, it's in the too-hard basket. It's going to be a complete time-suck to reopen it for years and years of debate’? This was all done before I arrived but I think the view was that we needed two or three years of data. Because whatever the DAC does, we are evidence-based. So that has been collected. And we will look at that at some point this year and see whether by looking at the data that provides a way through. Why not make DAC meetings public? I think because, like many meetings in multilaterals, members want to be able to talk to each other. There is a lot of outreach, we have this formal dialogue with CSOs [civil society organizations], we have different dialogues on different things with different constituents. But I don't think every single meeting needs to be public. But none of them are at the moment, as far as I can tell. Not the formal DAC meetings, no. But that's because there's a certain purpose to those. But there are lots of other formal DAC engagements that are, and actually, more so than ever now with COVID. We certainly get a lot of input from CSOs, we have a formal CSO dialogue, but just because we don't do everything the CSOs want doesn't mean to say we don't take account of them. And I think that's quite an important nuance. It's an interesting point you make, should all meetings everywhere be public? I mean, that's one way of doing things. And I think it's an important point that people want more information. And what we need to do is continue to make the DAC relevant and understood, but it seems to me we do a lot of that thematically, regionally, with particular groups and CSOs being of note. What about your own future? I'm elected every year. Very accountable. There’s not many people who are elected every year … I was last elected in December. Have you got any change on the horizon? Not at the moment. What's your response to those who say that the DAC is a rich donors club? The DAC represents a coalition of the willing of like-minded donors. And “rich”? It's the countries who have passed the threshold to join the OECD, who also are donors. Not all OECD members are DAC members, though they're always very welcome to join, when they want to and when they become donors. I think so long as it serves its members and its partners, then it's an institution that should be valued. And it has to continue to evolve. How do you see it evolving? The DAC doesn't sit still. I think people love to parody it and see it as these old men sitting in Paris, but trust me, it's not. If I think about what we've done in the three years that I've been here. We — I think — fundamentally changed the way that donors behaved in humanitarian-development-peace, we introduced a new rule about preventing sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment. It's been a massive paradigm shift to align development cooperation with climate change. The in-donor refugee costs rules were before my time, but that was responding to a real-world issue. So we're constantly responding to what's happening in the real world.