The neoliberal legacy of the Paris Declaration: Different responses, practices and outcomes of implementation in Tanzania 1

Abstract

The Paris Declaration (PD) is a seminal international agreement which binds donors and recipients to standardised and simplified practices in aid delivery. However, it also carries in its design certain neoliberal characteristics such as quantitative monitoring and evaluation, targets and forms of co-opted participation. It serves to delegitimize generic public accountability for aid which would otherwise flow through parliaments. The compliance with the PD and the degree to which donors have adopted it has differed between the four countries cases discussed in this paper: Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK), South Korea and China in Tanzania. Likewise, the degree of donor harmonisation with their recipient partner (Tanzania) is uneven. Further, it seems that Western donors tend to emphasise neoliberal approaches, for instance new public management (NPM), in recipient countries in order to achieve the PD, whilst emerging donors seem to be indifferent to either neoliberal standard or NPM-style reform. At the same time, while the implementation progresses and required changes by the PD in public management systems in Tanzania are relatively greater than in other African recipients, the achievement of the PD indicators has not been linked to actual development and poverty reduction in Tanzania. In sum, the PD can be viewed as a neoliberal mechanism which has changed the organisational culture of public management in recipient countries, bringing to the fore NPM practices which seek to quantify performance. However, the quality of aid actually received by its recipient populations has arguably not improved. Thus, the central achievement of the PD is an alignment of cultural practice across governments so that southern governments work similarly to their northern ‘partners’, rather than an improvement in aid effectiveness per se.

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