When Aid Bureaucracy and Development Clash: A Former USAID Administrator Speaks Out

Posted on 09 July 2010

By Sherine Jayawickrama

A newly-published essay by Andrew Natsios – who served as USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2006 – lays bare the tension between the compliance side of aid bureaucracies and the programmatic side of those same agencies.  He argues that the balance has now tipped so strongly toward compliance that the integrity of programs is under threat.  He also asserts that the compliance side of aid has taken over management and decision-making at USAID.

It is interesting to see Natsios, who presided over this “counter-bureaucracy” for five years, rip into the compliance culture that he oversaw. He does so with a clarity and insight that should not be ignored as development and foreign assistance policies are being redefined by the Obama Administration and on Capitol Hill.  Ironically, Natsios’ account of these tensions and imbalances may also reveal why these policy processes seem to be so bogged down and delayed.

Natsios provides a historical perspective of how the compliance culture came to be dominant within the U.S. foreign assistance bureaucracy – he calls it “a painful story of good intentions gone bad.”  He is unsparing in his critique of what this has resulted in, and declares that it is well past the point where compliance has become counter-productive. 

Natsios argues that the demands of this compliance culture “are now so intrusive that they have distorted, misdirected and disfigured USAID’s development practice to such a degree that it is compromising U.S. national security objectives and challenging established principles of good development practice.”

The argument that Natsios makes – that increasing pressure to measure outcomes or impacts can lead to a tendency to invest in interventions that can be easily measured – is not a new one, but his “view from the inside” gives even more credence to this perspective. 

Natsios starts from the principle that development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are often the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are often the least measurable.  He posits that health programs have become the most favored sector in U.S. foreign assistance because health outcomes are more easily measured, and that democracy and governance programs have been underfunded because their results are hard to measure (especially within short timeframes).

I suspect that Natsios paints this picture so starkly in order to get his central arguments across: that measurability does not equal development significance, that good development must be the unequivocal goal of U.S. foreign assistance and that foreign aid systems and processes must not unintentionally undermine that goal.

Does Natsios go too far?  Although you might conclude that Natsios is targeting measurement as the villain here, I think the point is more nuanced. It is not whether measurement is good or bad.  It matters what measurement is for (e.g. is it for learning and continuously improving development practice, or is it for satisfying compliance requirements?) and how it is conducted (e.g. is it engaging community perspectives and creating spaces for reflection on what’s working and what’s not, or is it focused on the kind of bean-counting and report writing that takes staff time away from good implementation?).

Furthermore, how has the dominance of the compliance culture at USAID and other U.S. agencies affected NGOs that receive significant funding from these agencies?  To what extent has the compliance culture also become dominant within NGOs? 

Sherine Jayawickrama manages the Humanitarian & Development NGOs domain of practice – and the Humanitarian & Development NGOs blog – at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.