This first DCF, which is to meet at the United Nations' New York headquarters on 30 June and 1 July, will focus on the quality of development aid, attempting to instate the ECOSOC in a preeminent position in the debate on the coherence and effectiveness of international aid. The aim is to mark a turning point in the preparations for the meetings on aid effectiveness — Accra, Ghana (September 2008) and Doha (December 2008) — in those respects. Accordingly, a wide-ranging debate is being run on how to get aid through, how recipient countries should manage it, how the various actors interact, and how to make progress in the Accra and Doha high-level meetings.

In conjunction with CIVICUS and Action Aid, the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has convened a multiactor Forum to prepare for the DCF meeting2. It will be held in the FAO's Rome headquarters on 12 and 13 June, and it is intended to enable the actors invited to work together: members of parliament, local authorities, and international civil society. These are a group of actors who do not normally work side by side, and they will be able to identify many points they have in common in readiness for the Washington meeting.
The Paris Declaration: towards effectiveness in aid for development, or towards a new framework for conditionality?

The conference charged with reviewing the Monterrey Consensus will also be influenced by the signing of the Paris Declaration in 2005 and by its subsequent development3. The Paris Declaration is the document representing the outcome of the work done by various countries and international institutions in seeking greater aid efficiency — i.e. getting more performance out of each contribution made.

The Paris Declaration calls for development strategies and action plans from the recipient countries (partners), and for the contributions to be adapted to suit those plans. This would enable the contributions to be devoted directly to the priorities identified by each country. For that reason, the Declaration talks about harmonising strategies, i.e. making the strategies coherent and getting them to follow a specific procedure; it also talks about aligning them, i.e. matching contributions to priorities, and about achieving specific results (results management). The significant leap in it lies in each partner country (the recipients) being required to set up and organise the institutions entrusted with implementing the strategies, the donors then adapting to those structures.

Through all this it is hoped that clear, predictable financing will result for achieving specific, accountable results in development. This process opens new doors for development cooperation, and a new framework for joint work by the donor and the recipient countries.

The Declaration also contains a commitment to stage a review process in 2008, the high point of which will be the meeting to be held in Accra from 2 to 4 September4. That meeting should enable progress in the process of enhancing aid effectiveness to be reviewed, the debate to be opened up to new actors, and the next international actions in this area to be marked out (aid effectiveness).

The work connected with the Declaration is coordinated by the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC-OECD)5.

Despite all the work underpinning this process and the opportunities it offers, it is not without its critics. The Declaration lays down a very strict, narrow working style, and that is leading some organisations to complain that what is in fact being built is a new process for attaching conditions to development aid, as pointed out in the document issued by the United Nations Human Rights Council's Working Group on the Right to Development, drawn up by Roberto Bissio6.

http://www.un.org/ecosoc/newfunct/develop.shtml

http://www.un.org/ecosoc/newfunct/preparations.shtml

http://www.oecd.org/document/18/0,3343,en_2649_3236398_35401554_1_1_1_1,00.htm

http://www.accrahlf.net/

http://www.oecd.org/department/0,3355,en_2649_3236398_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

http://www2.ohcr.org/english/issues/development/docs/A-HRC-8-WG.2-TF-CRP7.doc