It is unfortunate that development aid in Nepal is tied to the sophisticated systems, procedures, and expectations in the West. When weak conditions in Nepal cannot match up, they become the added challenge to development itself. The capacity networks overstretch, people look elsewhere, and priorities are misplaced. One such case is donors’ (in this case, any grant-making organizations) anxiety on spending. Even when the common sense of development

has improved considerably, the anxiety has led to

many flawed outcomes. There is much to think about beyond the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action (AAA).

Aid effectiveness in practice is tied to how much is spent in a given time, despite other possible frameworks such as AAA and Millennium Development Goals, because those frameworks do not come into play in daily life the way spending does. Those working in development industry know the pain of underspending. According to this paradigm, performance of development organization is related to performance of person-in-charge and determined by the ability to spend funds quickly. Development workers know well that more actions and outputs can easily be shown as aid effectiveness.

All development projects require results. When an enterprise is rushed, these results cannot flow from social institutions that exist or put in place. Results are often delivered through other means. Long ago, the global development regime agreed on sustainable development that requires building social, political and economic institutions rather than buying results directly from development funds.

If a facility, for example, has to be built, it essentially means identifying traditional ways of governance or establishing mechanisms that would foster and sustain certain behaviours and ways of thinking around that facility. And this requires time and patience.

In Nepal, aid is needed because either these institutions do not exist or they need transforming. Similarly, aid cannot bring desirable outcomes and sustain them unless institutions are in place. It means aid in Nepal should assume weaker conditions to begin with, and, therefore, must prepare to focus on processes. These processes would allow the sustained exchanges that in turn would foster new relationships between people and surroundings. Only the results produced by these institutions can be sustained which should be the desirable objectives of aid.

If not, the hurried development will lead to elite capture (traditional elites and elites within all social groups), which to say the least is an act of endorsing the power structure. The rush to spend big funds often comes in tension with normally what a committed actor would hold dear. The management demands capacity on the part of development partners to deliver.

Since results have to be reported, donors resort to elite-led organizations, because they cannot only grasp the development concepts quickly but also get into the process, deliver results, and defend the enterprise to the donors’ delight. The same cycle of reliance continues at the bottom. I doubt if many development actors would disagree to the idea of strengthening local organizations and that they be made partners. But often they work in such conditions it is difficult to act upon. The safe approach in vogue is some mundane grassroots connections, with the larger funds saved for innovation sustaining the status quo.

Many donors work with the Nepal Government helping its agencies deliver services more efficiently. However, one cannot help but rue at how the donors’ anxiety is at work with the indifference in the government systems. More often than not such conditions reduce projects in scope because they have to work through personal ambitions at government offices. But the bigger problem is donors’ spending worry, which often puts value on association itself, rather than the terms and quality of engagement. Feeding into one another’s interests, they turn these ventures into independent enterprises that have nothing to do with the larger systems.

One may consider this analysis perhaps undermines the bigger picture, that of donors’ commitment to Nepal and the will to fulfill. But living by the commitments requires greater transparency on donors’ part than the self-imposed worry which can only go wrong. They require transparency of processes as much as openness of budget. One should be able to answer simple questions such as: what were the mechanisms a donor used to get into this arrangement? Do these mechanisms represent all that is said about aid effectiveness?

There are others factors at work as well, but that is not a good defence. If development entails obligations and seeks change in all spheres, then I wonder why donors do not change. Why the state effectiveness or governance is the only panacea for all that is wrong with Nepal? Or perhaps I am too naive to question what we all know in silence.

Pokharel is associated with Institute of Asian

Research, University of British Columbia, Canada