Improving Aid Effectiveness: A Review of Recent Initiative for Civil Society Organisations

This review was commissioned in the context on international concern to seek ways of improving the development practice of NGOs and the contribution of CSOs. We will look at why at the present time there should be the increased interest in areas of ‘aid effectiveness’. Specifically we will review some of the proposals and problems inherent in the international process around the ‘Open Forum for Aid Effectiveness’ – placing this initiative into a wider political context as well as measuring it against previous and other existing similar initiatives. We will explore whether some of the intention to produce new good practice guidelines and principles is likely to have any influence on the ongoing debates about aid effectiveness in the inter-governmental process of the Paris Declaration. This paper seeks to answer four key questions:

• What are the different types of initiatives?
• What are they trying to achieve?
• Are they the right responses to the issues they set out to resolve around aid effectiveness?
• What alternatives might there be to achieve the same goal?