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A monitoring and accountability framework for development cooperation post-2015

Monitoring and accountability must be an integral part of the post-2015 development agenda, not an afterthought. To be effective, a global framework must be rooted in an inclusive, bottom-up approach, engaging and empowering all stakeholders.

An inter-governmentally agreed renewed global partnership for development post-2015 will be instrumental to mobilize all necessary resources to support the post-2015 development agenda – financing and other means of implementation. This will be a major focus of the upcoming Third International Conference on Financing for Development (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 13-16 July 2015) and negotiations of the post-2015 development agenda.

A global monitoring and accountability framework, specifically focusing on development cooperation commitments, will be an integral part of the broader framework to monitor and review the post-2015 development agenda as a whole.

Such a framework, narrowly focusing on the diverse dimensions of development cooperation should be multi-layered, flexible and open to engage domestic counterparts – governments, parliaments, civil society. It needs to be transparent and allow for interactive action and bring together a variety of sources of information.  

Such a development cooperation framework should be simple in design and have the following among its key features:

  • Be intrinsically linked to the global partnership for development, and help ensure a global enabling environment
  • Provide adequate policy space and flexibility for all actors to become engaged so as to share knowledge and progress on the quantity and quality of their development cooperation, taking into account their different capacities and responsibilities. This requires a participatory, people-centred and bottom-up approach to facilitate broad engagement, putting in place multi-directional feedback loops for constant review and evaluation
  • Ensure high-level political buy-in and technical soundness, and the ability to track information flows – bottom-up, top-down and horizontally.
  • Build on the evidence base from existing accountability mechanisms at sub-national, national, regional and global level and meaningfully interlink them to support good quality decisions and effective results
  • Be supported by well capacitated Secretariats to facilitate independent monitoring and dynamic accountability mechanisms
  • Fully engage and empower recipient countries and help translate global development cooperation commitments to national and local contexts, where they can make a difference for the lives of citizens
  • Move beyond monitoring and surveillance by using stronger modalities of horizontal accountability, such as peer reviews and mutual accountability
  • Avoid duplicating efforts and overburdening development cooperation actors on the ground
  • Support capacity building for all stakeholders, including rights holders and their representatives in parliament and civil society ,to engage in robust consultative processes
  • Engage the private sector
  • Incentivize monitoring, review and accountability processes in a way that they induce mutual learning and necessary policy and institutional changes.
  • Promote greater policy coordination and policy coherence for development for better results.

The Development Cooperation Forum can be the home for such a framework and review the development cooperation dimensions of a renewed global partnership for development and successor arrangements to MDG8. It will also continue to review national mutual accountability and transparency in development cooperation.

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FROM GLOBAL COMMITMENT TO NATIONAL IMPLEMENTATION