Ownership and Donorship: Analytical issues and a Tanzanian Case Study

During the 1990s development funders officially incorporated into their rhetoric the ideal of passing control of the design, implementation, and monitoring of projects and programmes to recipient 'stakeholders', a goal summarised in the term 'national ownership'. Ownership has joined a list of funder-agency concerns that in recent years has included governance, institutions, poverty reduction, sustainable development, participation, and decentralisation. Whether or not economic performance improves with greater ownership, the move to encourage recipient country ownership represents a change in the aid relationship. Numerous and detailed policy conditionalities characterised the Washington Consensus programmes of the 1990s. The rhetoric of ownership appeared to signal a retreat from that approach to the relationship between funding agencies and recipient governments ('development partnerships'). This article explores the implications of a commitment to recipient ownership. The conditionalities associated with loans and grants are central to the discussion, particularly in the context of the Millennium Development Goals. Most attention has focused on the sevent poverty reduction goals. Less has been directed to goal eight, which calls for new parnerships for development. The article discusses these issues in the context of recent developments in aid delivery in Tanzania. The difinition of 'ownership' is central to an analytical discussion. The meaning varies across donors, lenders and governments, in part reflecting the history of agencies and intergovernmental relations, as well as ideology. For example, the interpretation by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) orf ownership, which was profoundly affected by the politics of international aid in Sweden from the 1970s onwards, differs considerably from that of the World Bank. Similarly, the Ethiopian government's more literal interpretation and the more funder-accommodating approach of the Tanzanian government are influenced by the different histories of these countries. The lack of an agreed definition arises partly because recipient control of development assistance means different things in different concrete circumstances. In addition, vagueness may serve the interest of parties less willing to reform the more obvious manifestations of 'donorship' (a funder-driven process). Thus, one must be cautious in attributing too much meaning to the emerging consensus among development funders that ownership is central to aid policy.