The ODA Principles
We suggest nine guiding principles for ODA design and delivery. We hope by doing so that we can encourage debate and consensus across development actors of what values UK ODA should champion.
Our nine ODA principles are separated over
- Ethics: considers the foundational values that should guide ODA delivery and improvement.
- Priorities for action: clarifies the targets of ODA support and the capacities it should support as a means to improve global human welfare.
- Relations: How programmes influence collaboration and power across actors.
- Modalities: considers the operational aspects of how ODA should action and stimulate change.
1 Grounded Ethics
The ODA approach should be grounded in ethics, morality and dignity to support the betterment of human welfare globally. It should be framed with a mindset to be good and fair for society in both what it sets out to achieve and how it does that in practice. These ethics should be considered along multiple dimensions of ethical frameworks, including:
- Universal human rights and capabilities: Advocating for global justice and the strong moral duties affluent societies have to alleviate global poverty and build human capability for a fulfilling life.
- Reparatory justice: Acknowledging and repairing the harms, material injustices, and consequences of past human rights violations and systemic inequality.
These ethics are considered from the perspective of communities and recipients, and inform remedies to the specific needs and contexts of the poor, marginalised and victims. The ODA approach promotes communitarianism through the recognition of community, responsibilities and the strengthening of common good in community.
2 Integrity and transparency
The ODA approach should be transparent, open to critique from diverse actors, and embraces learning from its own successes and failures. It should champion clear rationale, be grounded in independent review and public learning for improved practice. Working with integrity includes staying true to the values reflected across these principles and extends to countering rhetoric, pervasive and pernicious political narratives that seek to undermine these values.
Transparency and openness should be championed throughout the ODA approach, specifying targets, drivers and delivery in advance in public spaces. Plans, monitoring, reporting and sharing of findings should be provided in plain language, translated into local languages and made accessible to the diverse recipients of aid. This principle also includes ODA actors acknowledging their limitations, any trade offs in delivery and subsequent course changes in implementation.
3 Public Good
ODA commitments should prioritise global public goods (health, wellbeing, security, rights, resilience, adaptation, famine prevention, labour rights, dignity, natural environments), which particularly bring benefits to systems and resources for the global vulnerable. Public goods here must prioritise those that benefit global interests, rather than those that primarily serve interests of high-income nationals or support systems that maintain systems of inequality. This includes the public good of natural resources or ecological services that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, in that the use by some actors does not diminish others. For example, it should include environmental public goods such as nourishing clean air, soil health, climate stability, biodiversity, and public access to green spaces.
4 Capabilities
Drawing on Sen’s capabilities approach, ODA activities should build capability (education, health, security, political voice, decent work, mobility) as part of system-building to support thriving, resilient nations with egalitarian returns (institutions, workforce, infrastructure, social protection). ‘Security’ here refers to the capability to create a safe and supportive environment for citizens to live their lives without fear or vulnerability to crime and violence. It is not to be used as part of justification or to partner with military action. ‘Mobility’ refers to the freedom of individuals and opportunity to move, travel, and access locations.
5 Social Mobility
ODA should build social mobility, enabling upward mobility for marginalised groups, not just aggregate economic growth or investor-friendly reforms. ODA should address social constraints that influence mobility, such as childhood development, human capital, gender structures, rural inclusion, labour-market access, labour rights. This principle particularly focuses on ways to improve social mobility of marginalised groups, across gender structures and urban-rural boundaries. It means to not only improve the social mobility of individuals within a social system but also the reduction of structural inequality towards more equitable systems of structural inclusion. ODA should therefore seeks to develop more structural changes to enable social mobility, as well as liberating the movement of individuals within those systems.
6 Power Relations
ODA thinking should be cognisant of power asymmetries and dependency rooted in colonial history and should use this knowledge to inform programmes and address legacies of injustice. Where possible, ODA programmes should draw on relevant studies and maps of colonial relations, extractive processes and post-colonial dependency. Part of this mapping should include considerations of power asymmetries at multiple scales, avoid reproducing these power asymmetries and work towards more equitable power structures. This includes building institutional capacity in donor countries with the intention of preventing ongoing donor dependency.
7 Partnership
ODA partnership should be practiced through a democratised process of co-creation and co-governance where both donor and recipient countries share decision-making roles to guide impact. This includes direct funding for local leadership and the equal inclusion of local groups in project planning, delivery and learning. Knowledge and learning should be led by local understanding of challenges and indicators of progression. Ownership of knowledge and learning from the project should be discussed before the agreement and made to fairly represent the partners involved. Partnerships should be made to embrace lasting connections, with repeated and reciprocal engagements. Local partners should be involved in the design, deployment and assessment of monitoring, learning and evaluation frameworks of project performance.
8 Grant Support
ODA grant-based and concessional loan approaches should be recognised for their unique role in addressing humanitarian responses, across fragile contexts, where markets or services cannot provide. Such assumptions about potential market failure should be made on analysis showing market returns would be insufficient, take too long or require risks that are too high for market capital. Where grants are utilised, they should be made irrespective of the trade and financial returns to the donor country or private actors. The priority should be on improving justice and human welfare in the host ODA context.
9 Complementarity
ODA should keep complementarity in approaches between grant-based and market approaches. While there are concerns that blended finance and impact investing can prioritise capitalist over humanitarian gains, a pragmatic approach is that there are some instances where market-based methods can complement ODA. However, these must not replace grant-based functions for challenges where markets are unlikely to offer solutions. The cause must dictate the mechanism, rather than the mechanism determine which causes are supported. A risk with market-based dominance of ODA delivery is that less bankable situations or contexts are disregarded on account of their poor fit with blended finance and impact investment approaches. While blended finance can be used for ODA provision, this should not crowd out funding for humanitarian issues without clear economic or political benefit.