Author: Mr. Heriyono Adi Anggoro, Programme and GTF Support Officer, Global Organization of Parliamentarians against Corruption (GOPAC)
Parliamentarians play a crucial role in ensuring that governments spend funds, including those sourced from international assistance, in accordance with the intended purposes and avoid corruption or misuse of government funds.
When properly exercised, financial scrutiny over development partner funding can increase trust in the country’s governance and reputation. For partner countries, this can be helpful when pushing development partners to meet their 0.7% Official Development Assistance/Gross National income (ODA/GNI) target. At the same time, international development partners feel assured that their contributions are purposeful.
However, members of the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC) have long raised concerns regarding the misuse or misallocation of donor funds. Moreover, many development co-operation projects were perceived to be politically motivated and canceled after changes in government. Hence, in 2013, GOPAC developed Guidelines to Strengthen Oversight Through Parliamentarian-Donor Collaboration which encouraged the institutionalization of parliamentary engagement to loan agreements and projects and the integration of aid received into the government budget.
One key problem is that, in many developing and least developed countries, parliamentary engagement in public finance, including in development co-operation, is mainly related to the general budget approval process. ODA is often sidelined from budget deliberations and parliaments from partner countries rarely exercise a specific review and assessment of aid’s origin, distribution, and impact. In some cases, the executives even choose not to fully disclose aid details. The IPU case study on Rwanda confirms how ODA is only featured at the macro-level, making the scrutiny of development co-operation even harder.
In contrast, a parliament that is well informed on the details, including the ODA received, planned, and spent both on and off budget will be able to make a follow-up inquiry, question, verification, and even impact assessment on the funding.
Political will remains crucial
Legislatures in many partner countries, even with the traditionally known authority that they have, remain struggling to acquire accurate, reliable, and complete data and information on budget details, especially on ODA. The parliament's capacity to analyze the data due to the availability of competent staff is another challenge. Public financial management (PFM) is a complex and delicate issue, and parliamentarians need to rely on the expertise and competency of the parliament's support system.
For instance, years after the publication of the Parliamentary Handbook on SDGs jointly developed by GOPAC, UNDP and the Islamic Development Bank, challenges related to parliamentarians’ awareness of SDGs and their role in overseeing SDG implementation in countries remain. These challenges will continue without adequate resources and staffing.
Against the backdrop of these challenges, a consistent message has been to underline the need to empower the oversight capacity of parliament. Yet, programs and funding from international and domestic resources are not always available.
When support is available, parliament can be empowered. Many parliaments have developed tools and mechanisms to mainstream and oversee SDGs. In Fiji, a guidance note was developed in 2019 as a practical tool to help the standing committees oversee SDG implementation. A parliamentary monitoring tool in Indonesia called SDGs Dashboard and Bangladesh’s MyConstituency Tracker provide disaggregated data on SDGs.
Transparency and legal framework availability strengthen how parliament oversees development co-operation
As a rule-based governance entity, a country’s government should operate within a legal framework, including in making budget information available. Access to information law is crucial for mandatory disclosure of public information, including state budget details. Legislation promoting transparency, accountability, and parliamentary roles in budget formulation, approval, execution, and evaluation is necessary.
Small steps as taken by the Parliament of Sierra Leone in cataloging the international funding agreement between the country and development partners, are essential to promote independent comparative analysis and verification, enabling parliamentarians to conduct further oversight of international development co-operation.
Given the critical role of legislation in strengthening parliament’s roles in public finances, GOPAC developed LEGISTrack to monitor the development of anti-corruption-related legislation, including those related to PFM. By knowing what is happening via the tracker, the public can identify what is required to strengthen the work of parliament in the future.
Examples of such legislative developments can be found in several parliaments. In South Africa, a Responsible Spending Bill was introduced to strengthen the legislature’s role in reviewing fiscal rules through debt level reduction and a mandatory government fiscal submission report to parliament. Members of the US Congress proposed a bill on Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Enhancement Act aiming to further disclose who is actually implementing the assistance on the ground.
In Sri Lanka, a Parliamentary Budget Office Act was just adopted to create an institution to provide support to the parliament through the provision of independent, non-partisan analyses related to the budget, the medium-term economic and fiscal outlook, and the cost implications from a financial, revenue, and expenditure perspective of policy proposals.
These legislative instruments, when adopted, are considered the most concrete form of political will to support changes in overseeing the public purse, including ODA programs.
Unrestricted development assistance data and concrete inclusivity are key
Guided by the four effectiveness principles, the new Global Partnership monitoring exercise is currently being rolled out. It aims to strengthen national governance mechanisms and focusses on how national stakeholders and development partners advance collective accountability on the effectiveness of development co-operation. Beyond partner country governments and development partners, the participation of other stakeholders, including parliament, is a crucial part of this exercise. The exercise provides a platform for parliamentarians to request access to unrestricted development assistance data and details. It then could open the pathway to numerous follow-up parliamentary measures. The question is, how inclusive will the monitoring exercise be?
Partner country governments lead the multi-stakeholder exercise and are required to ensure that they inclusively engage all stakeholders in the monitoring process. The inclusive, multi-party nature of the exercise is one of its key features. Over 40 partner countries have now signed up to undertake the monitoring exercise. It will be important to ensure that diverse stakeholders, including parliamentarians, are engaged in the exercise in a meaningful way to ensure that countries can move towards greater collective accountability on development effectiveness.
What we need to do now is to act beyond words to ensure that collective accountability on development co-operation effectiveness embraces and empowers parliament and parliamentarians. The international community has always emphasized that parliament is critical to shaping development policies and overseeing their implementation. Development partners are also consistently underlining the urgency of parliamentary oversight to establish transparency and accountability. When it comes to development co-operation, however, only few initiatives are aimed at parliamentary development programs, let alone make parliamentary engagement and oversight mandatory in all ODA processes. The Global Partnership’s monitoring exercise – if it inclusively engages parliamentarians - should be able to move the needle on this in the right direction.