Research Proposal on 'Development Aid and Governance' Essay

Research Proposal on 'Development Aid and Governance' - Essay Example Bibliography Background/Problem Statement The effectiveness or lack of aid has been a rather recurring issue/terminology in the glossary of the development aid industry in recent times. Contrastingly, two decades ago, development donors or aid donors would not hesitate to provide funding to governments and organisations for developmental purposes (De Haan, 2009). Among those who benefitted during this past period of improved donor and aid activities were third world and developing countries in regions such as Africa and Asia in which countries such as Zaire under Mobutu and Philippines under Marcos benefitted. With this level of funding, these beneficiary regimes started to mismanage these aids to hitherto unseen corruption levels. These high levels of bad governance and corruption have made donors such as financial institutions and industrial powers to refrain from funding development projects in excessively corrupt governments, countries, and groups (De Haan, 2009). Aid donors have since recognized and established that giving aids to governments with ineffective policies is a practice that is rather wasteful. Instead, more efforts and emphasis have been directed at countries and regions with sound domestic reform policies. Nonetheless, donors’ narrow political objectives still feature in most of the aid decisions in the contemporary society. There is, thus, the need for the official donor aid community to commit to the improvement of aid effectiveness by establishing more proficient and standardized coordination mechanisms. Fortunately, some forums such as the Aid Effectiveness High Level Forum (HLF) in Rome in 2003 and the Paris Declaration in the second HLF in 2005 were moves in the right direction for aid governance. Although these forums focused on donor coordination and harmonisation, the issues of governance, public management, and corruption also featured prominently during the deliberations (Stokke, 2009). In regard to aid management, the suppl y side featured prominently in relation to public finance management and country procurement systems. It was not only corruption, which was mentioned as a problem, but commitments were also made on transparency and accountability by both donors and recipients. Poor governance, corruption, and bad public management of finance and procurement are thus among the major challenges that the aid industry has encountered for quite some time and mechanisms and strategies to counter their influence are in order (Lancaster, 2006). Research Objectives This research, therefore, sets forth several objectives, including the need to address the rampant corruption and mismanagement that hamper the successful implementation and realization of donor aid projects. The research seeks solution to the derailing progress in realising mutual accountability by both donors and recipients in aid-project implementation. Addressing the issue of commitment by donors and recipients in the aid effectiveness agenda is the other objective of this research. An improvement on the wanting coordination capacity of recipient governments is the other objective of this research. Moreover, this research also seeks to emphasize the central role that commitment on transparency, in conjunction with sound governance and anticorruption, plays in the aid industry. Finally, this research aims at highlighting the effects of the failure by stakeholders to address the developmental aid problems associated with bad governance and corruption on aid management.