Author: Hannah Ryder

Happy New Year to all my DFID friends and blog readers!

Traditionally, the new year is a time for making new resolutions. Go on that new diet, start that exercise regime, enrol in that evening class you’ve been eyeing for a few months now. We’ve all been here before and January always starts with the best of intentions.

My main New Year’s resolution is to get my finances in order – economists are notoriously bad at looking after their own money and I’m no exception! Apparently, trying to lose weight is the most popular New Year’s resolution amongst Americans. Similar surveys may find the same in other countries.

But New Year is not just a time for individuals to put their best foot forward. It’s also a time for countries and organisations to shape up. While weight loss might be popular for individuals, for countries and organisations working in development, one of the most popular 2013 resolutions is likely to be to increase transparency.

Is your organisation ready to open up and become more transparent in 2013? Picture: Yemi Adamolekun speaking about ‘Enough is Enough Nigeria’ at Open Up! Russell Watkins/DFID

The sad thing is that quite often, January best intentions end up fizzling out by May. There’s a risk that, just like many of our individual resolutions, pledges on transparency could slip.

There are a few great articles with tips for keeping New Year’s resolutions alive. Like this one from the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team with 5 tips, or this from the Huffington Post with 10 tips. I won’t go through all of them, but I did see some really useful parallels for countries or organisations interested in transparency.

Take Tips 3-6 from the HuffPo article. These were especially relevant for countries or organisations taking first steps towards transparency. They were about visualising goals, formalising and declaring them – ideally in public – and breaking them down into quantitative sub-goals and a plan, then tracking progress against that plan. Economist Dean Karlan calls this creating a “commitment contract”, and cites several examples about how it can be used in development. It’s exactly what the common transparency standard has been created to help organisations do. Countries or organisations from all over the world – be that UK, Brazil or Ghana – can focus on achieving the standard, create their own specific timetable for how they will get there, and publish it so that they can track their own progress and everyone can hold them to their own goals.

There were also tips relevant to countries and organisations already doing pretty well on transparency, such as DFID. Doing well is dangerous, as it’s easy to become complacent. If one individual in DFID or another organisation is not transparent it may not matter too much, yet many individuals being opaque can add up to significant failure. How to avoid this? It’s hard to coerce staff or punish them for not keeping up. So the best alternative is to keep reminding staff of their goals, focus on the great things that will happen when these goals are achieved, find ways to actively lock-in gains, and celebrate success. These are all crucial to avoid sliding back. 

We will need to do this in DFID. For example, in 2012, we were at the top of the Publish What You Fund Aid Transparency Index. This year, another organisation might get there. Whatever happens, the competition will provide a good incentive to DFID to keep progressing. Hence, we are planning to do more work to code aid data geographically so that people can see and show data that’s relevant to a location anywhere in the world, and publish the data based on developing countries’ budget definitions rather than what’s relevant in the UK. Success in these will mean people in developing countries can better understand and illustrate through tools like infographics what UK aid is doing and have greater say over it. Success under the Aid Transparency Challenge which we launched at the end of 2012 will mean people can add up and understand how much UK aid, different non-governmental organisations or other organisations are administering. The Center for Global Development think-tank called this work a “game-changer”.

New Year’s resolutions are never easy to maintain, and I doubt that 2013 will be any easier. But the good news is that whether we’re new starters or we’ve already been making progress, there are some simple tips we can use to maintain our best intentions. Let’s use them all, for transparency’s sake!

The world is definitely changing.

The song “Gangnam Style“, made in Korea and sung in Korean, has gone to number 1 in the UK, number 2 in the US, and has broken the record for being the “most viewed” video on you tube, with over one billion views. It is also being parodied all over the world. There’s my personal favourite –  a Ghanaian version, as well as a Nigerian-British version and a Saudi Arabian version. It’s been used by Amnesty International and Anish Kapoor, an Indian-born British sculptor, to publicise the need for freedom of speech globally, following a ban of a separate Gangnam parody by the controversial Chinese Writer Ai Weiwei.

The origins of Gangham Style are themselves interesting. This article describes how the song has some relatively subversive messages about debt and inequality in Korea’s society, which may well resonate in many other countries around the world.

However rebellious or relevant the message, the fact is that Korea is having a dramatic influence on the music industry. The world is changing. It’ no longer just European or US artists dominating the world’s music charts. Others are coming in too.

There’s a similar phenomenon taking place in development. Korea’s influence is being felt. Take climate change and green growth which I used to work on, and was the subject of negotiations earlier this month in Doha, Qatar. Korea was and is a major player in this arena. The country continues to spend 2% of GDP per year -that’s over $20bn – on specific green growth measures. It has been the first country to set up a Global Green Growth Institute to help other countries follow its path. And one of the positive outcomes at Doha was that countries agreed that Korea should set up the new Green Climate Fund in the futuristic, eco-smart city of Songdo during the second half of 2013.

Promoting the Green Climate Fund, Gangnam Style

Korea has also influenced the area I now work on. Just over a year ago, Korea hosted a major conference in Busan, initially billed as focused on “aid effectiveness”. As I’ve set out in a previous blog, aid effectiveness conferences had been held prior to this in Rome, Paris and Accra, but none of them had managed to gain the trust and involvement of countries such as China and India. Korea did. Partly as a result of actively bringing in these partners into the discussion, the Busan conference actively changed its focus on aid effectiveness to a focus on development effectiveness, which was a much wider and broader concept that countries such as China, Brazil and even countries like Colombia and Nigeria better recognised. Korea, and the wide range of countries it helped bring in, made a permanent impact.

Earlier this month, Justine Greening, DFID’s Secretary of State, alongside ministers from Nigeria and Indonesia co-chaired a meeting to follow up that agreement in Busan. It was the first Steering Committee of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. Korea was present, representing countries outside the EU that “provide” development cooperation, such as Australia or the Gulf States. As is clear to see in the videos of the meeting, Korea played a constructive role. Korea helped in deciding when the Steering Committee would next meet (in March and June/July next year) and agree plans for a bigger ministerial meeting in October 2013. Korea also helped address the vexing question of what change and success for development that the Partnership, now that it is formed, might deliver. In doing so, the Committee agreed to look at four to five initial topics, which they will be writing papers on in the coming weeks and will be shared and discussed with the international community. In my next few blog posts, I’ll try to explain these topics, and what they might mean in terms of our real lives.

For now though, it’s clear that Korea has and will continue to make an impact. That’s a signal that the world is changing, and work on development is, rightly, changing along with it too. My hope is that we will build on Korea’s achievements and look back on the Ministerial next year as ground-breaking too. Let’s bring on the Gangnam Style!