By Jonathan Scanlon

I enjoyed reading Sherine Jayawickrama’s post on NGO advocacy at the G-20 a couple of weeks ago.  Her comments point to something that Oxfam America calls “smart development,” which is a key part of our current advocacy work on U.S. government development policy.  We believe that effective foreign aid can make a difference, but it’s only one part of the picture.  If the U.S. government has an interest in supporting lasting change then we need to rethink development in a more interdisciplinary way – global development, writ large, is as much about private sector investment, international and local tax policies, trade, remittances and natural resource extraction as it is about aid.
 
Let me give one example.  The U.S. charges Cambodia six times as much in tariffs than it provides in aid.  This is also in a context where China, Japan and the Asian Development Bank are rising as the top donors in Cambodia.  The U.S. accounted for just 6.7 percent of all ODA in Cambodia between 2002 and 2007.  So, if the U.S. government and U.S.-based advocates were to only focus on fixing aid, we’d only be working on a small portion of total aid to Cambodia, never mind the other sources of financial inflows and outflows in Cambodia.  For more, see our short piece on trade and aid.
 
Luckily, mindsets are changing both inside and outside of the U.S. government.  In March of this year, more than 140 businesses, NGOs and former U.S. government officials and military leaders signed an open letter to the President and Congress calling for, among other items, a National Strategy for Global Development.   Such a strategy would integrate U.S. development policy – including policies on trade, aid (both bilateral and multilateral) and other global financial flows, both private and public.
 
A few weeks back, President Obama signed a Presidential Study Directive (PSD) calling for a whole of government review of development policy.  The PSD is now full speed ahead with National Security Advisor Jim Jones and the Chair of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, serving as co-chairs.  Jones, Summers and their staff are involving all agencies with an interest in development, so they are looking at much more than aid alone.
 
Hopefully, we can get more into this during the panel discussion on October 14 with the Kennedy School’s Ambassador Nicholas Burns and Lant Pritchett, and Oxfam’s Paul O’Brien.

Jonathan Scanlon is Lead Organizer for Oxfam America’s Aid Effectiveness initiative.