If I were to criticise James Wolfensohn as a World Bank President, then I’d say that if he has a failing, it’s probably that he errs on the side of being a worthless globetrotter far more adept at schmoozing politicians than getting his hands dirty with policy issues, blaming his staff for failures while taking personal credit for successes and that his nine years at the WB have been associated with a general slump in morale that would make Field-Marshall Haig look like Anthony Robbins. Apart from that, he’s pretty much sucked.
So when I saw his name in the story linked above, I thought to myself “I wonder if this might possibly be a plausible-sounding think tank idea which pushes a lot of currently popular political hot-buttons but which is regarded by anyone who knows a bit about the subject area with abject terror?”. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the concept of “Rights-Based Lending”.
“Rights Based Lending” is what used to be called “Politicisation of the Aid Process”, but with the cuddly face of a modern humanitiarian intervention. The idea is superficially plausible; that the World Bank should only lend to countries with a good human rights record (or in its stronger form, only to actual democracies). It’s an idea which has a certain amount of support, usually from dissidents in middle-income countries and it appears to be gaining some traction on the soft left in the developed world.
As the title above implies, it’s an idea which looks sensible but isn’t. “Don’t lend to tyrants” is a good slogan, but that fact is that tyrants are the government of a very large proportion of the poorest people in the world. If anyone is seriously advocating rights-based lending, then they have to look through this list[1] and tell us with hand on heart that they think the world would be a better place without some or all of these projects.
- Tuberculosis control project in China ($104m)
- Rural Water Supply & Sanitation in Uzbekistan
- Nura River Cleanup project in Kazakhstan
- Rural Education project in Peru
- Caracas Slum-upgrading project in Venezuela
- Regional Blood Transfusion Centres Project in Vietnam
- Second Poverty Alleviation Project (mainly microcredit) in Tajikstan
- Multisectoral HIV/AIDS Project in Democratic Republic of Congo
- Earthquake work in Georgia
- Pilot Literacy project in Cote d’Ivoire
- HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis Control project in Djibouti
- National Nutrition Project in Bangladesh
- Urban Natural Hazard Vulnerability Reduction (ie earthquake-proof houses for the poor) in the Wilaya of Algiers Project in Algeria
- Partnership for Polio Eradication in Nigeria
- Emergency Earthquake Recovery Project in Iran
The principle that “human rights are good business” is already observed by the World Bank in many ways; you may notice that Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Somalia, Zimbabwe (except regional biodiversity programs) and Cuba are missing from the list above. This is because they have no currently active World Bank projects, because the World Bank does not lend in countries where it does not believe that it will be able to retain reasonable control over the funds committed. In the countries listed above, for the most part what we are looking at is dedicated World Bank field employees attempting, often under impossible conditions, to make a difference to the lives of extremely poor people. I think that a conservative estimate of the number of lives lost if we were to cancel all the programs above would be in the hundreds of thousands.
The reason that Wolfensohn’s suggestion of a rights-based approach to lending has been opposed by “countries as diverse as the UK and Chile” every time he has mentioned it in the past is that it is a bad idea. In principle, one might be able to design an approach which carried some element of rewards for reforms without making people suffer (although the IMF would be the more obvious vehicle for this, as it makes policy loans to governments rather than project loans). But such an approach would require very careful design of a specific proposal, coupled with the very best possible political will in the world to make it work as a force for human rights rather than an instrument of the foreign policy of the largest World Bank board members. Such a proposal and such political goodwill is entirely lacking at present. Therefore, I’d urge anyone who is looking for a Big Idea to use international institutions as a force for good, to think twice, three times before writing a blank check of political support to the latest bright idea from the poor man’s Henry Kissinger.
Footnotes:
[1] List compiled by making a short list of countries that get a bad write-up from the Human Rights Watch website, then cross-referencing with the World Bank website. For each country, I sorted by “project status” so as to filter only active projects and then chose the one with what I considered to be the most heartstring-tugging name. Some countries on the list (most notably, Venezuela) don’t actually have that bad a writeup, but I’ve included them because everyone (particularly anyone supporting rights-based lending from a “left” perspective) needs to take into account how it will actually be used. I’ve omitted the World Bank’s projects in the West Bank and Gaza for the same reason.
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john s 05.18.04 at 11:26 am
dsquared, it pains me to say it, but excellent post. Still, the World Bank never had any projects in apartheid SA. Was that right or wrong? On the basis of your post here, it would appear to have been wrong. Do you agree? If so, would you have argued at the time that it should?
john b 05.18.04 at 11:42 am
Did the RSA government ever approach the World Bank for funding, on a project that would benefit the poor rather than the wealthy minority?
If so, then John S’s point might come into play – but I suspect it never did.
dsquared 05.18.04 at 1:44 pm
As far as I can tell, the WB lent pretty freely to SA between 1951 and 1967, fought tooth and nail against a UN General Assembly instruction not to in 1966 (not sure whether the UNGA can order the WB about and suspect it can’t) and carried out lending in Lesotho to get round the spirit of the ban. So, a mixed record. The IMF continued to lend to SA throughout apartheid. The WB did apparently lend to a quite scandalous program in the 1950s which brought electricity to white South Africans but not to blacks.
I don’t know what I’d have thought at the time – I’m often horribly wrongheaded in the face of obvious injustice – but as of now I think the WB did the right thing. Doug Henwood has a useful rule of thumb on the subject of sanctions; that they should be supported if and only if there is genuine popular support for them in the country concerned. I might be prepared to support “rights based lending” in countries where there was an ANC-equivalent campaigning for it, but not otherwise.
q 05.18.04 at 2:00 pm
_…a worthless globetrotter far more adept at schmoozing politicians than getting his hands dirty with policy issues, blaming his staff for failures while taking personal credit for successes and that his nine years at the WB have been associated with a general slump in morale that would make Field-Marshall Haig look like Anthony Robbins._
The technical term is “Senior Management”.
Timothy Burke 05.18.04 at 2:06 pm
Do you have any idea whether any of the projects you list actually accomplish anything? Because you must know very well that in the world of development, a noble sounding project title is a far cry from actually making any meaningful progress on those noble aims.
Programs that in the past have amounted to virtual in-kind payments to kleptocrats have had similarly productive sounding labels, whether from the WB or USAID or any number of NGOs. Simply rattling off the project titles and linking to valedictory descriptions tells us nothing of what would or would not be lost on the ground were those projects to be defunded. You have no idea whether they’re actually saving lives now. Accounts of development projects in pre-1994 Rwanda or the famine relief in Somalia before the US intervention there have actually argued that projects which looked very much like those on paper actually cost lives rather than saved them, or were at best Potemkin villages. Many studies of development also demonstrate that the kinds of projects the WB tends to fund anywhere benefit local people of some means rather than the poorest populations–something that I don’t have any problem with, as I believe that positively altering the condition of local middle-classes is a useful goad to overall economic growth. But if ever there were an instance where there ought to be a rights-based conditionality, that’s it, because the precondition of that kind of growth is a government that respects the rule of law and the rights of its citizens, or at least constrains its autocratic tendencies in some regions or domains, as China’s now does.
You also lose sight here of the ways in which this proposal is not at all a new idea. If you regard it critically, you more or less are attacking the dominant orthodoxy of the last five-to-ten years in development circles, an orthodoxy which goes far beyond the Bank and the IMF to embrace the majority of NGOs as well. Most development organizations have embraced “good governance” as a basic precondition of the useful expenditure of development money, and a tremendous amount of aid now comes packaged with a set of conditionalities. This is an extension of that concept which one could critique as a bridge too far, but the critique you offer here can’t be contained at “rights-based” ties–you’re more or less attacking the entirety of “good governance” conditionalities. In fact, really of conditionalities at all in any case where there are poor people at stake. Which is a heedless return to endorsing kleptocracy–all a tyrant need do is point to his poor and huddled masses to keep the money flowing into his coffers. Or, in the case of many armies and insurgencies, to keep the aid coming that funds and makes possible their military operations.
To make this concrete, here’s a brain-boggler for you. Food aid is going to be needed to keep people alive in Zimbabwe in the coming year. But the ruling party continues to overtly use food aid as a political weapon, forcing people to swear loyalty to the ruling party in order to receive aid and punishing known members of the opposition by exclusion from distributions. In this case, saving lives is directly linked to repression: one must underwrite oppression in order to feed people. In that case, I myself narrowly endorse the proposition that people who are alive tomorrow may still rebel; people who are dead are dead forever. But it tastes like ashes to say it, and I’m not alone in feeling that–most of the provisioners of aid in this instance feel the same way. Were the need any less demonstrated, or the project in question more complicated and less certain of producing a good result–were it more classically a case of “development” rather than humanitarian assistance, as most of the WB projects you cite are–I’d say there would be no excuse for continuing, and every reason to have a rights-based criteria for participation.
dsquared 05.18.04 at 2:28 pm
Do you have any idea whether any of the projects you list actually accomplish anything? Because you must know very well that in the world of development, a noble sounding project title is a far cry from actually making any meaningful progress on those noble aims.
The specific projects I selected are still active and so don’t have many audit reports available. But I specifically selected as many as possible projects in the field of housing, vaccination, education and microcredit and as few as possible irrigation, pipeline, “economic resstructuring” and hydroelectric schemes in order to concentrate them on areas where the World Bank has a very good track record indeed. I notice that you don’t seriously argue about the order of magnitude of my guesstimate of the lives we would probably be losing if we cancelled the lot. If you’re going to make wild assertions about the diversion of funds from World Bank projects, then you really ought to be relying on sources from 1997 or later, because there have been huge changes in the direct administration of projects since 1996 (I would argue that these happened despite Wolfensohn rather than because of them, but they happened).
Good governance is as different from “rights based lending” as lightning from a lightning bug. Performance-based lending is a) based on objective criteria and b) related to the purpose for which the funds were committed. Rights-based lending can’t be based on objective criteria and is at best tangentially and statistically related to performance.
And on your final paragraph, think about this. Rights-based lending, at its base, is a policy of withholding food, medicine and shelter from people in order to achieve political ends. How very different is that from what Robert Mugabe is doing?
DJW 05.18.04 at 2:38 pm
Timothy Burke,
The WB record isn’t so bad that the null hypothesis ought to be they must do no good–notice that Dsquared avoids listing programs in the WB’s most notorious “problem areas” such as hydroelectric. And, of course, countries with nominally democratic but weak governments are more than capable of having diversion of funds and corruption problems of their own. Not that your concerns aren’t worth raising, but let’s not overstate the case.
The idea of “rights based lending” seems to me to remain a potentially good idea, but you need a more sophisticated test question than “Is the government properly and sufficiently rights friendly?” Instead, I propose “Are there reasons to believe that the impact of the loan might lead to enhanced human rights, in ways more concrete than simply blind faith that economic development alone will move us in that direction?” or something to that effect. Harder and not as pithy, I’ll grant, but I think it’s potentially a big improvement.
DJW 05.18.04 at 2:40 pm
Dsquared made my first point when I wasn’t looking. Sorry to appear to pile on.
P O'Neill 05.18.04 at 2:57 pm
Leaving aside this post’s excellent arguments, there’s another problem: “rights-based lending” will have to get in line behind outcome-based lending, engendered lending, scaled-up lending, pro-poor growth lending, participatory lending, empowered lending, good-governance lending, sustainable lending, and mom-and-apple-pie lending as goals of the World Bank. Staff are already buried under the paperwork associated with all these past initiatives (see DD’s reference to the morale problem), with new ones coming about every fortnight (or with Wolfie’s latest meeting with Bono, which ever is sooner). Rights-based lending might be a half-decent idea if it was the only thing on the table. It’s not.
Matthew 05.18.04 at 3:06 pm
Daniel,
Add to this the malleable definitions of “democracy” (often a code-name for market-oriented economy open to Western capital) and human-rights, which can adapted at leisure by the new Henry Kissingers that pull the WB’s strings, and the idea looks even worse.
loren 05.18.04 at 5:51 pm
when I first read the term “rights-based lending” I had this spooky vision of borrowers offering their rights as collateral for loans …
Matt Weiner 05.18.04 at 6:33 pm
d^2 et al.–
What do you think of the principle of using “odious debt” as a weapon against (certain) dictators–that is, that debts incurred by a particularly nasty gov’t will not be binding on successor regimes? This has struck me as an appealing proposal but perhaps it would have a similar effect. Obviously one of the effects is would be to dry up credit but that’s also the point–it would reduce the incentive to take the country over.
dsquared 05.18.04 at 7:15 pm
I must say I like it, but then I tend toward the view that sovereign defaults in general ought to be much, much more common. So I’d say that if a country wants to default on its debt, it should just do so and shouldn’t have to bother about having the debt certified as odious.
Timothy Burke 05.18.04 at 8:56 pm
Good governance conditionalities on aid are frequently not simply about tracking how money gets spent and whether it gets spent transparency: they are and have been used to force wider practices of transparency and accountability in recipient nations which have little or nothing to do with the particular project in question, by the World Bank, the IMF, USAID and even some NGOs.
The critique offered here is sufficiently sweeping that NO conditionality could possibly be acceptable. How can Dsquared justify a conditionality (and there’s a zillion of them, as p o’neill observes) that might prevent the expenditure of money which could potentially save at least a few lives, if we grant (and I don’t) his argument that these projects save lives? At what point does due diligence justify even a single death? If the cost is unacceptable for imposing “rights-based” conditionalities, it’s unacceptable for any condtionality, even those narrowly aimed at ensuring the money is spent effectively–even ineffective expenditure might save a life or two.
What’s the criteria for sorting acceptable death-to-conditionality projects from unacceptable ones?
Brey 05.18.04 at 9:39 pm
Rights based lending as explained here simply proscribes nations from the global economy. While in some cases that could be beneficial, in most I suspect it is not.
A more practical and, in the end, better solution is to monitor the transnational corporations that benefit from the WB funding. Only in rare cases does the borrowing nation actually perform the activites funded. Instead, Western TNCs and their subsidiaries undertake them. Transparency and social justice issues could be addressed in the contracts with those TNCs. It’s much easier to verify TNC activity than it is to verify a despotic kleptocracy.
Of course, scale is a factor. This might not work in China for instance. The Chinese economy is large enough (and the government is powerful enough) that TNCs will have limited success ensuring the WB guidelines. In the Chinese case, rights based lending might be more productive.
Maybe there should be separate cases for economies above and below a certain GDP to delineate between when the TNC model is put in place and when rights based lending goes into effect.
In the end, it’s important not to punish a population for the evils of their leaders. Rights based lending would basically wipe out WB loans to any country including the US if it were considered.
megapotamus 05.18.04 at 10:27 pm
On sovereign defaults; I am perplexed at the enthusiasm for this. Why shouldn’t I stop paying on my debts? There are no debtors prisons anymore. Problem is, barring a bankruptcy well discharged (looks like you advocate just a flat non-payment) I am consigning myself to a life without modern tools of finance of any kind. I guess the WB, since it draws it’s funds from states, has no such quibble? Probably not. I guess this money comes out of the clear blue sky, and not my pocket.
Abiola Lapite 05.19.04 at 12:19 am
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“Rights based lending as explained here simply proscribes nations from the global economy.”
And how exactly does being cut off from subsidized loans achieve such a feat? Are you trying to say that one can’t export or import goods on the open market without a license from the World Bank or something?
“A more practical and, in the end, better solution is to monitor the transnational corporations that benefit from the WB funding. Only in rare cases does the borrowing nation actually perform the activites funded. Instead, Western TNCs and their subsidiaries undertake them.”
Whoopee; so now, instead of Julius Berger and Costain making a few bucks from the construction of the new white elephants, Alhaji Umaru dan Buro Ubanka and his nephew Shehu get to take on the construction job for Zungeru Hydrodam at 260 percent of the price of the “greedy” TNCs, only to provide a much shoddier structure, some 4 or 5 years later than the evil multinationals might have. It all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
Something tells me you have no experience of what life is really like in a developing country …
“It’s much easier to verify TNC activity than it is to verify a despotic kleptocracy.”
It’s also much easier for a drunk to search for his keys under the lamp-post than it is for him to go search those places where he’s likely to have lost them.
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David Sucher 05.19.04 at 12:57 am
A bit too ad hominem to be convincing.
Giles 05.19.04 at 1:56 am
There is also the question of whether or not it is more efficient/effective to lend to regimes with the same values as you – both from a commitment perspective and an educational one.
So although there are moral problems about this approach, economically it may make sense.
abiola lapite 05.19.04 at 2:03 am
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Megapotamus: Hypothetically, if a nation were to default on its debts, the result would be a severe negative impact on its credit rating, and increased difficulty in borrowing further down the track. The reality is that defaulting has never had a particularly long-lasting effect on the ability of a nation to borrow money. This is why it looks like a good way out of a bad spot, as long as you have no sympathy for major international moneylenders.
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Matt Weiner 05.19.04 at 2:53 am
megapo–
Let me open by saying that I have no experience of life in a developing country and in general have no idea what I’m talking about. (I mean it–I’m a rank amateur.)
What I was thinking of was something under which debt lent by private banks (and maybe public ones?) incurred by a particularly rank regime would not be binding on its successor. This wouldn’t mean that developing countries could default on anything they wanted to, but it would mean that the next government of N. Korea wouldn’t be on the hook for the debts that Kim Jong Il is running up (if anyone is lending money to him–substitute an example that makes sense if you like).
This sort of default wouldn’t destroy the new regime’s ability to borrow unless all the lenders clubbed together to punish them–it wouldn’t imperil payback of future loans. (Given what Abiola says, there’s no reason to think that the lenders would club together.)
The Weiner Plan would have a blacklist of odious regimes agreed upon by some reputable international institution (yeah, I know, I’m not saying there is one) so banks would know what they were getting into; and I suppose old debts would be grandfathered for the same reason. Maybe targeted development loans would be exempt.
And yeah, I don’t have that much sympathy for international lending institutions–at least not for ones that fund the looting of the world’s worst dictators and take their interest out of the hide of the people after the dictators have fled. At least, I think it’d be OK to give them fair warning that that business plan won’t work any more.
And–there are going to be billions of holes in the theory I’ve outlined. I’m just mulling it over as a matter of abstract principle, sort of.
vivian 05.19.04 at 3:37 am
This idea has come up in the academic literature in the last couple of years. I haven’t read the Wolfensohn piece, but there are two twists that make the idea a lot more respectable.
Pogge’s idea is that the world not hold new democracies liable for loans given to evil/thieving/repressive prior governments. This will (1) free up money the new democracy needs to stabilize, (2) shame existing democracies into better behavior, into forgiving past loans that should never have been made, into treating despots with less respect and legitimacy. It will also (3) reduce the incentive to stage a coup against a fledgling democracy, knowing that the rest of the world will not grant one powers to borrow money or sell off resources or assets.
Kremer and Jayachandran suggest that despots are poor risks for loans, and so they propose a country be certified as a democracy and thius likely to both use more of the money for the stated purpose, and to repay the loan in the future.
One might reply to the Zimbabwe example from above that of the many ways the developed/democratic world has to help feed the people in Zimbabwe, loans to Mugabe are not the most direct, the most moral or necessarily the most likely to succeed. We could just give the food aid (or subsidize neighboring states to give the food aid, w/o expecting repayment). Same for other urgent programs like vaccination -no reason to treat these like potential profit-making ventures or even to expect them to break even. The choice between WB loans for necessities and no provision at all is a false dichotomy. (realistic description of likely policy proposals from current government, but not a full spectrum of political possibility)
dsquared 05.19.04 at 7:30 am
The critique offered here is sufficiently sweeping that NO conditionality could possibly be acceptable. How can Dsquared justify a conditionality (and there’s a zillion of them, as p o’neill observes) that might prevent the expenditure of money which could potentially save at least a few lives, if we grant (and I don’t) his argument that these projects save lives?
Timothy, I can’t understand why you’re so keen on forcing these words into my mouth that you’re prepared to make ridiculous statements like your claim that World Bank projects don’t save lives.
I am in no way committed to your slippery slope fallacy. For example, Glaxo Wellcome’s practice of selling pharmaceuticals for money, almost certainly results in avoidable deaths among people who can’t afford drugs. However, I am in favour of the practice of selling drugs for money because it appears to be the most efficient way to organise the system as a whole.
If, on the other hand, Glaxo were to decide that it would only sell drugs to people who endorsed the Glaxo Wellcome mission statement, fine though that document is (it even contains “respect for diversity”), then I would say that this was an unwarranted use of power which was not related to the purpose for which Glaxo Wellcome was meant to serve. I am able to help myself to a generalised version of this argument, which means I am not committed to your slippery slope unless I suddenly go off my rocker and start believing weird things about the effectiveness of World Bank projects.
Abiola: that huge great ugly PGP key doesn’t need to be repeated more than once per thread, thanks.
dsquared 05.19.04 at 7:36 am
I’d also add that you haven’t addressed at all my point that your wild claims of corruption and redirection of funds from WB projects are a) heavily reliant on the pipeline and hydroelectric industries and b) heavily reliant on things that happened in the 1980s, in a more or less completely different World Bank management structure. Since I’ve also had this argument with Abiola, I’d hazard a guess that you are similarly taking these examples from Easterly’s book?
Abiola Lapite 05.19.04 at 11:20 am
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I just wanted to point out, in case anyone cares, that the
comment attributed to me at May 19, 2004 02:03 AM above was a
fraud, and a rather obvious one at that: the fact that a
different message hashed to the same value (ending with
BYHdOQJtuKs2nGgkguynNRM=
=uc4Q)
should have been enough to give the game away to the observant.
It’s precisely because of idiots like the one who tried to
impersonate me above that I think GPG-signing of comments so
important.
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abiola lapite 05.19.04 at 11:31 am
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Does this mean you plan to keep it up forever? Superb!
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Abiola Lapite 05.19.04 at 2:15 pm
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Whoever you are, you’re an imbecile of the lowest sort – you’re
so stupid you even repeated your mistake after I’d so helpfully
pointed it out to you – and you can be sure I’ll be complaining
to the administrators of this site about you.
There’s something about the anonymity of the internet that
brings out the worst in cowardly dimwits like yourself who have
nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation …
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Timothy Burke 05.19.04 at 3:06 pm
What I’m suggesting, Daniel, is that the slippery slope beckons you because your criticism of rights-based lending applies grease to the slide and jumps with abandon at the top. Your basic criticism is that rights-based lending is bad if it leads to the cessation of worthy projects with save lives. I have yet to see from you how that distinguishes a rights-based conditionality (which, as others have noted, need not be applied with a sledgehammer, as you assume) from other conditionalities. Your argument also assumes no relation between a government which is rights-based and good developmental outcomes, and therefore you don’t have to deal with the possibility that a short cessation of aid might compel a shift to a mode of governance which would save lives overall, or at least you don’t think this is a possibility you need consider. Again, I ask: if you don’t see a slippery slope here, what is the basis of the distinction between this conditionality and others?
I agree that the WB reformed itself considerably during the 1990s, but that’s precisely one of the sources of my confusion about your argument here, because a substantial part of that reform became a strong insistence on good governance–not merely project-based, but in general–in recipient nations. Whether states have generally transparent procedures, accountable bureaucracies, and so on already determines at least some of the funding decisions the WB makes.
That being said, you are far too certain that WB money–or any expenditure on development–results in saved lives, good outcomes and so on. This is not a charge about corruption a la Easterly–that’s the easy part of it–as much as it is a general skepticism about the degree to which development aid on the ground has a reasonable relationship to tangible outcomes. Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts, though it’s a book about which I have many misgivings, is a pretty good sketching of why it is so hard to make clear claims about the relationship between most development funding and concretized outcomes like “saving lives”.
dsquared 05.19.04 at 3:58 pm
Your basic criticism is that rights-based lending is bad if it leads to the cessation of worthy projects with save lives. I have yet to see from you how that distinguishes a rights-based conditionality (which, as others have noted, need not be applied with a sledgehammer, as you assume) from other conditionalities.
I am in favour of “cessation of worthy projects which save lives” in all and only all those cases where it is carried out in the context of a realistic plan aimed at saving more lives elsewhere or at another time. I consider governance-based lending to be a successful version of such a plan and rights-based lending not to be (for example, rights-based lending would AFAICS more or less cut Vietnam off from the flow of lending forever or until there was a revolution, despite a very good track record of governance and effectiveness of WB programs there).
Your argument also assumes no relation between a government which is rights-based and good developmental outcomes
No, it assumes that there isn’t enough of a relationship over and above the relationship already captured by existing governance-related lending to justify the costs of implementing this highly uncertain approach. Note that a complete cessation of aid to the DRK has not resulted in a change of government for rather longer than teh “short” period you hoped for. I also think you’d agree that it is a fairly well-established empirical result in political science that when a tyranny is put under the stress of an economic collapse, liberal democracy is not usually the first result.
So my view is that governance-based lending captures all or nearly all the benefits which rights-based lending promises, does not arbitrarily exclude totalitarian regimes which are also developmental, and is more difficult to use as a weapon of foreign policy.
Timothy Burke 05.19.04 at 4:04 pm
Ok, fair enough–but I think your last response suggests just why I don’t think the categorical language of your initial posting is justified, or offers sufficient reason to not have a rights-based approach to developmental aid. Here instead what you’re saying is that good governance conditionalities may already implicitly contain some “rights-based” components, or favors those benefits in some manner. So you’re not nearly as against the concept as your initial posting suggests, merely against this form of it as being unnecessarily crude. Which makes for a very different starting place in which you can’t conjure up all the people that a rights-based conditionality is going to kill as opposed to all the people that the lack of one is going to save. You’re really arguing about the details of a proposed shift in policy, not the general substance of it.
I would also suggest that the class of “totalitarian regimes which are developmental” is a perishingly small one, and generally requires modifications at either end of that category (e.g., not-so-totalitarian or not-so-developmental) in order to find any state that can meaningfully occupy the category.
dsquared 05.19.04 at 4:46 pm
So you’re not nearly as against the concept as your initial posting suggests, merely against this form of it as being unnecessarily crude. Which makes for a very different starting place in which you can’t conjure up all the people that a rights-based conditionality is going to kill as opposed to all the people that the lack of one is going to save. You’re really arguing about the details of a proposed shift in policy, not the general substance of it.
Yeh, maybe, but it’s an important detail. All of the examples I gave were real ones and ones which a “maximalist” concept of rights would certainly throw out. The impetus for Wolfensohn’s comments was the Shirin Ebadi speech, and would certainly put Iran (along with Vietnam and Cuba, none of which are small countries) in the category of definitely totalitarian and definitely developmental.
Also, it’s much easier to define a good governance record than an acceptable rights record, and thus rights-based lending is intrinsically much more political. That’s a huge potential disadvantage; as I imply in the original post, policisation of the aid process has a really bad track record.
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