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WWF Reacts to USAID’s New Climate Change and Development Strategy

February 17th, 2012
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See below for a guest post from MFAN Partners at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF): Vanessa Dick, Senior Program Officer, Government Relations; Jonathan Cook, Deputy Director, Climate Change Program; and John O. Niles, Director, Tropical Forest Group. The authors respond to USAID’s recent release of a Climate Change and Development Strategy, which “provides a strategic framework for USAID to address the challenges and opportunities associated with climate change and outlines the Agency’s goals, strategic objectives, and guiding principles for climate change programming.”

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We’ve reached a point when it’s politically risky for a U.S. government agency to publicly prepare for the real risks of climate change.  Nonetheless, USAID has remained firm, recently releasing its agency-wide Climate Change and Development Strategy. This strategy identifies promoting low emissions growth and reducing climate change impacts as core development objectives, acknowledging the heavy reliance of USAID’s partners on economic activities that are vulnerable to climate change (ie. agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and tourism) and the critical mitigation opportunities in the developing world.  Without preparing for and integrating climate change throughout its work, USAID risks substantial backslides in development gains – in our view, a much larger political risk.

The newly released Strategy identifies three important strategic objectives:

  • Accelerate transitions to low emission development through investments in clean energy and sustainable landscapes;
  • Increase resilience of people, places, and livelihoods through investments in adaptation; and
  • Strengthen development outcomes by integrating climate change in Agency programming, learning, policy dialogues and operations.

In addition, the Strategy upholds important foreign aid reform principles, including responding to partner country priorities, donor partnering and coordinating, building institutional and governance capacities of partner countries, strengthening civil society, and prioritizing monitoring and evaluation.  As with any strategy, its true value will be measured by its implementation, but having these clear objectives and an outline of available tools is an important starting point.

In the context of sustainable landscapes, also known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Strategy reaffirms recent USAID interest in working on policy reform at multiple scales of governance.  For REDD+ this means increased attention to sub-national jurisdictions such as states and provinces in developing countries.  USAID will also look to invest in stronger technical understanding of forest carbon stocks and measurements of deforestation to encourage new incentives to stem deforestation.  All of this is done with an eye towards leveraging more private investment in REDD+ with partner agencies such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), Export-Import bank, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

The Strategy also recognizes climate change adaptation and community resilience as an important pillar.  It highlights the role of governance at all scales (recognizing decentralization has made sub-national institutions important in many countries).  The Strategy could improve its treatment of adaptation as a proactive step to reducing community vulnerability, highlight linkages between adaptation and mitigation (and their potential tradeoffs), emphasize the importance of ecosystem services in adaptation strategies, and say more about the value of community-led approaches to adaptation.

Finally, the Strategy talks about sector-specific and country-wide approaches to climate change vulnerability assessment. WWF believes vulnerability assessments should take a spatial and multi-sectoral approach that looks for relationships (including tradeoffs) across geographical, sectoral, and other types of boundaries. Otherwise, there is a significant risk of reductive, stove-piped thinking that may lead to inefficient and unsustainable outcomes, or even mal-adaptation.

Mainstreaming climate change is a critical challenge, and there’s lots of good language in the Strategy underlining the cross-cutting nature of climate change and the need for its integration across all USAID programs.  The Strategy emphasizes capacity building and training to support this process.

To keep USAID programming successful it will be important to see concrete progress in this commitment to climate change across all of the Agency’s work.  At the end of the day, USAID’s development goals will hinge on the Agency preparing for climate change.  The Strategy is an important step and WWF’s applauds its release.

Click here to read the full Climate Change and Development Strategy.

 

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Mark Your Calendars — Week of February 20, 2012

February 16th, 2012
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Every Thursday, MFAN will post a list of upcoming events for the following week. For more information about each event and to RSVP, click on the links below. If your organization is hosting an event next week and you don’t see yourself on the list, please email info@modernizeaid.net.

See below for a list of MFAN Partner events:

 

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MFAN Statement: President Obama’s FY13 Budget Reaffirms Importance of Foreign Assistance Reform

February 14th, 2012
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February 14, 2011 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann and George Ingram:

President Obama’s FY13 budget request for international affairs manages to hits three critically important notes against a challenging geopolitical and economic backdrop:

  • Funding: It maintains and in some places provides new funding for development and diplomacy programs that are taking on increased importance in post-conflict areas and other hotspots (e.g. the post-Arab Spring Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), while also providing the resources necessary to protect the last decade’s unprecedented gains against poverty and disease in developing countries.
  • Reform: It focuses on the importance of making U.S. foreign assistance more effective and accountable by: Calling for continued support of reform-oriented Presidential initiatives (i.e. Feed the Future, Global Health Initiative); Highlighting programs like the Partnership for Growth, a unique and potentially powerful new effort to drive broad-based economic growth through better coordination of U.S. agencies in recipient countries; and, Ensuring the continuation of reform and innovation initiatives underway that will strengthen the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including USAID FORWARD, with its focus on procurement reform, and Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), which provides incubation support for promising new approaches to development around the world. These reforms are maintained, in part, by providing funding for the agency’s critical operating expense (OE) account. The Administration also rightly calls for the establishment of a “Working Capital Fund,” which would be used to cover the costs of implementing cross-agency reforms.
  • Prioritization: It reflects a strategic shifting of resources away from places (e.g. Europe, Asia) where assistance is no longer as critical, while also making very difficult choices to reduce money in accounts where increasing efficiencies and burden sharing with partners and recipient countries can bolster the impact of every dollar spent. We look forward to hearing more about how the Administration will maintain the effectiveness of these programs even with declining resources.

While no budget is perfect, we believe the President’s FY13 international affairs request is balanced and constructive. Most importantly, it seems to us to be a reaffirmation of the Administration’s focus on reforming U.S. foreign assistance. We remain committed to working with both the Administration and Congress to see that these reforms have lasting impact.

 

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Mark Your Calendars — Week of February 13, 2012

February 9th, 2012
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Every Thursday, MFAN will post a list of upcoming events for the following week. For more information about each event and to RSVP, click on the links below. If your organization is hosting an event next week and you don’t see yourself on the list, please email info@modernizeaid.net.

See below for a list of MFAN Partner events next week:

Posted in Community, MFAN News | No Comments »

What should we expect from the President’s 2013 assistance budget?

February 9th, 2012
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See below for a guest post from MFAN Principals John Norris, executive director of the Center for American Progress’ Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding initiative,  and Connie Veillette, director of the Center for Global Development’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance initiative.

It would be a mistake to think that the budget crisis has passed for America’s foreign assistance programs and institutions. Although the 2012 international affairs budget dodged the proverbial bullet, and the president’s 2013 budget request will likely be reasonably robust, this is all something of a mirage. The administration appears eager to keep its powder dry in advance of what will eventually be a high stakes showdown over sequestration at the end of the year, after considerable election-year dust has settled. The administration does not want to put significant assistance cuts or USAID Mission closures on the table now and give up that advantage later.

It is a reasonable negotiating strategy, although it may prove to be a poor management decision. Looking at our relative fiscal health as a country, it seems almost inescapable that eventually there will be steep cuts in our foreign affairs spending as part of some grand bargain (however begrudging) that includes both spending cuts and revenue increases. We will likely see few signs of this in the President’s budget request, which will  read very much as a status quo request where we see shifts in emphasis, but no dramatic headlines. For those of us who care about effective assistance programs and the health of the U.S. economy, this amounts to whistling past the graveyard and hoping for the best.

For those who care about selectivity and focus in our aid programs, the budget will likely be something of a disappointment. Officials at USAID have argued, including in this blog post, that they are being more selective and catalytic in their approach to assistance. These are important but insufficient steps. USAID continues to be spread too thinly across too many countries and over-represented in places like Latin America and Eastern Europe that should be on a faster track for graduation. USAID can only take a share of the blame for the slowness in adapting to new realities. Both Congress and the State Department have been slow to assent to USAID pulling up stakes in Latin America, and no ambassador ever likes to lose a USAID Mission under his or her general command.

These arguments may have been fairly esoteric during periods when the U.S. assistance budget was flush in the post-9/11 period. But if the administration is not more aggressive about putting money into fewer places where development is more likely to succeed in the immediate term, it could be left to deal with some wrenching and very disruptive changes when a top-line budget agreement is finally brokered.

As Connie noted in this recent post, U.S. economic assistance, including the major health, development, and humanitarian response accounts, goes to 102 countries.  One country – Afghanistan – accounts for about 10% of the total.  The top 15 recipients account for 40% of the total, leaving about $12 billion to be distributed to 88 countries. Very small sums are allocated for countries like Belize ($20,000) and Micronesia ($490,000), which begs the question of whether it costs more to administer the funds than the value of aid provided. Ambassadors argue that such aid buys political influence, but one is only left to wonder what exactly we as a country get from Micronesia on the political front that would not lead to the conclusion that this money is better spent on development programs that have a chance of securing real and lasting development progress in a higher priority country.

From all indications, we will see a real push in the budget to provide more support for the Arab Springcountries. How exactly this effort will be affected by the Egyptian government’s hidebound determination to shoot itself in the foot and prosecute American democracy activists remains to be seen. But if we are to glean any lessons from the disastrous assistance programs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over the last decade, it is that money should follow reform, not the other way around.

This is the year in which, more than any in recent memory, the wisdom behind our assistance will be judged most harshly.  The President’s budget should reflect an understanding that Congress will be scrutinizing aid partners, goals, and effectiveness, and that anything that doesn’t pass muster could drag the best of these programs down.

 

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