18. Should China Join the GPEDC? Prospects for China and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation

Due to their continued reluctance—or even suspicious attitudes, which started right at the beginning of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) process—four of the five BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) were absent from the second forum, as only Russia attended. This has had a big impact on the “global nature” of the partnership (Klingebiel and Li 2016).

After the First High-Level Meeting of the GPEDC—held in Mexico City on 15–16 April 2014 and attended by more than 1500 representatives from 130 countries—the second finally took place more than two years later in Nairobi, from 28 November to 1 December 2016. The GPEDC was launched at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which was held in Busan, South Korea, in 2011, and proved to be a turning point for international development cooperation. It recognised the increasingly important role of South-South cooperation (SSC) and the existence and relevance of diverse actors and practices of development cooperation (Assunção and Esteves 2014). The first forum, in Mexico City, was aimed to kick off the agenda to transition from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, whereas the second one came at a critical juncture. This was a moment to review the evidence and lessons learnt from the decade-long attempts to implement the aid- and development-effectiveness agendas, and to look ahead to the role of effectiveness in the new era of sustainable development, anchored in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Blampied 2016). The core value of the GPEDC is to be more open in terms of its agenda and more inclusive in terms of its membership.

Although the Mexico City and Nairobi fora offered a diversified range of participants (developed countries, developing countries, international development organisations, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions, and think tanks), and the focus was changed from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, the role of the GPEDC has been questioned by some countries and scholars (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016). Some suggest that, although various stakeholders involved in global development actively participated in the fora, the agenda was still under the control of developed countries (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016), which continued to try to bring in more countries to support their development approach, which had already been proven a failure (Li 2017). In addition, the absence of China and India in the two events—and the absence of Brazil and South Africa in the Nairobi forum—raised doubts as to the legitimacy of the fora. This signifies that the good intentions of starting an era in which traditional and emerging aid donors can hold talks on a level playing field in development cooperation have failed, and that the transformation of existing international development and cooperation architecture is still under way (Fues and Klingebiel 2014). Kharas (2014) argued during the Busan forum that the Busan meeting symbolised the paradigm shift from “aid effectiveness” to “development effectiveness”, and that the increased diversity of participants could cause the further fragmentation of the cooperation plan or put at risk the internal consistency of the process. Besides, Day (2014) is concerned that launching such a negotiation outside the United Nations (UN) Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) will duly affect the legitimacy of the UN. Some have also questioned the effectiveness of the agenda and believe that it will fail to achieve salient results in the immediate future (Glennie 2014).

Contrary to these opinions, many have responded positively with regard to the shift in focus from aid to development towards more openness and inclusiveness. They consider it to be a perfect opportunity to develop a framework that is inclusive, sustainable, and comprised of diverse stakeholders (Atwood 2011, 2012). Chinese scholars are sceptical of the overall initiative, but they agree that the GPEDC provides a new space for China and other like-minded actors to influence global development through learning and sharing (Li et al. 2014). In fact, the GPEDC is one of the important outcomes of the changing global context. The agenda has been seen as a milestone in global development governance (Atwood 2012). It came during a critical era in which the role of new players in global development began to increase while the traditional players began to readjust their strategies. The GPEDC is certainly a new opportunity for all stakeholders to build a more inclusive global development platform, but a pertinent question is: Why did emerging powers decline to take part in it? This chapter aims to assess the reasons why emerging countries have been sceptical about the GPEDC by presenting China’s case in particular. The chapter further analyses if the GPEDC is a useful platform for global development and whether all stakeholders can work together under this new structure. Finally, the chapter illustrates how—and under what conditions and circumstances—this can happen.

Some accused China and others of rejecting the opportunities offered by the GPEDC (Li 2017). Some even questioned those countries’ commitments to global development, without acknowledging the fact that the emerging countries have been consistently sceptical of the legitimacy of the GPEDC: They do not consider the GPEDC to be a UN forum, as Bena summarised during the Nairobi forum (Bena 2017). The emerging countries have been very careful not to get trapped in the problems that the “Western” partners have, and therefore have avoided being brought into the system. The GPEDC is not just the outcome of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Although the openness of the GPEDC is being brought into question less, it is still seen as an attempt by the partnership to remain relevant and merely an extension of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) under a new label (Klingebiel and Li 2016). Therefore, to understand the perspective of the emerging countries on the GPEDC, it is relevant and useful to briefly review the history of the DAC first.

There was a mix of motives that blended the security and protection of US and European global/regional power interests with the “recognition” of a “moral imperative” to assist poor countries (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 13) during the Cold War. Historically, after the economic rehabilitation of Western Europe (with support from the Marshall Plan) and Japan, they joined the United States in providing development assistance. From the perspective of the United States, it was necessary to build a collective mechanism to coordinate the development aid provided by different countries (Adam 2018), international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. Due to this concern, the United States and its allies co-established the Development Assistance Group, which was set up in January 1960 and had 11 members, including the United States.¹ This marked the founding of the “Western”-led development cooperation system. It is viewed as the first expansion of the “Western”-led development cooperation system, into which the United States brought its allies to follow the interests of the United States (Li 2017).² In October 1961, the Development Assistance Group was integrated into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with a different name—the Development Assistance Committee. To support the work of the DAC, the OECD established a department that consisted of the development financing branch and the technical assistance branch. The development financing office was renamed the Development Assistance Directorate in 1969, and then renamed again as the Development Cooperation Directorate in 1975, which, since then, has been serving as the permanent office and secretariat of the DAC.

The institutionalisation of the DAC marked the formal establishment of the international development cooperation system led by “Western” countries (Li 2017). The primary functions of the DAC are focussed on the following considerations. First, although different aid providers share the same goal, their activities can hardly be termed effective if aid is provided inconsistently or not coordinated among the different countries. Second, among group members that share the same goal, it is difficult for them to honour their promises to provide aid accordingly, without peer pressure. Finally, it is also a challenge to ensure the quality of the assistance programme without a universal standard. Therefore, the DAC adopted a series of standards in 1961 that all members should follow and required that “developed countries should spare 1 per cent of their GNP [gross national product] for development aid”. The ratio was then modified to 0.7 per cent, based on the recommendation of the Pearson Report, issued in 1969. In 1993, GNP was replaced by gross national income, but the ratio stayed the same. In addition, the DAC conducted the first evaluation—called a “peer review” today—of its member countries in 1962. Meanwhile, the DAC, aiming to advance the peer review mechanism in a more effective way, established a statistical gathering and reporting system that can be used to compare different donors. However, the establishment of such a mechanism was not only a technical measure to ensure programme quality but, more importantly, a strategic effort to reinforce the political interests of the United States and its allies in the Cold War context (Li 2017).

Furthermore, the United States endeavoured to link the DAC’s agenda with the First Development Decade of the UN with the aim of making the development assistance system global and, hence, more legitimate. In the same way, the adoption of the resolution by the UN in October 1970 that “developed countries should spare 0.7 per cent of their GNP as global development resources” further consolidated developed countries’ economic power and gave them a more dominant role in international development policy. At the same time, with the support of the United States, the OECD established the Development Centre. Many developed countries hurriedly established think tanks on development issues to provide knowledge bases to make development assistance more technical and depoliticised in order to reduce potential political conflicts (Li 2017). Concepts such as “basic need strategy”, “gender and development”, “participatory development”, “sustainable development”, and “poverty reduction”, among others, which have all been widely used since the 1970s, all fall into the category of “development knowledge”. In the name of “shared values”, similar concepts emerged, one after another, by claiming to be neutral—and even sympathetic—towards developing countries, and they won the hearts of a large number of loyal supporters. However, the metaphors about such knowledge could actually be argued as embodying the West’s hegemony to a certain degree (Li 2017), and the bureaucratisation of development aid could be seen as covering up the political face and intentions of development aid (Mosse 2011). On the other hand, the development of the GPEDC is also closely related to a growing debate within the DAC member countries on the effect of the development aid provided by DAC members. To respond to the question, all development ministers of the DAC put forward the issue of how to measure aid effectiveness during the ministerial-level meeting in 1995, which later emerged as the “aid-effectiveness agenda”. “Halving the global population under extreme poverty” was enacted after the meeting as the central element due to the report “Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation”, which was adopted later as a priority of the Millennium Development Goals by the UN.

Later on, at the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, issues concerning the effectiveness of development aid started to draw attention, and the DAC quickly included aid effectiveness into its major work. In February 2003, the DAC held the First High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Rome, Italy. At the forum, DAC members found that the reports they required from recipient countries were an additional burden to them and distracted them from focussing on studying their own development strategies. Therefore, the declaration adopted at the forum raised the concept of “harmonious aid” and established the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness. Meanwhile, the DAC also realised that, in order to improve aid effectiveness, their own efforts would not be enough. As a result, they called for the participation of bilateral institutions, multilateral institutions, governments of developing countries, emerging countries, social organisations, and the private sector (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2018). This was the first time that the DAC extended its policy discussion range to the outside. The working group was eventually formed by 80 representatives from the above-mentioned institutions. This was different from the first expansion of the system, in which only the United States and its allies were members. This expansion is viewed as the second expansion of the US-led DAC to include a wide range of stakeholders, signifying that the DAC’s influence in the decision-making of aid policies has started to decline (Li 2017).

After the Rome forum (2003), the Working Group on Aid Effectiveness held the Second High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, in Paris in 2005, and issued the Paris Declaration after the forum concluded. The declaration proposed 56 specific measures on issues, including ownership, aid alignment, aid harmonisation, management of results, and mutual accountability. From the author’s observation, the most positive contribution to the forum was that the working group started to realise the asymmetric relation between aid and development and tried to fully mobilise recipient countries’ initiatives in aid utilisation. Later, in September 2008, the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness was held in Accra, Ghana, where the Accra Agenda for Action was adopted. The attending parties reached a consensus on how recipient countries should make better use of aid, particularly on how they should rely on their own systems and resources. In November 2011, the working group held the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. More participating parties attended this forum than any of the previous fora. As a more marketable platform, this forum shifted its attention from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness, which posed unprecedented challenges to the influence and dominant position of the West in the field of international development. To cope with the challenges, the dominant parties, including the DAC, made big concessions in areas including forum documents, issues, and participation mechanisms. Meanwhile, they also hoped to hold their bottom lines by relying on the traditional buy-in approach. Therefore, the GPEDC is viewed as the one partnership agreement that symbolised the third expansion of the DAC-dominated development cooperation system (Ulfgard and Lopez 2016); in essence, it is an exercise of the hidden “buy-in” approach (Li 2017).

Making the GPEDC more legitimate in terms of the participation of emerging powers requires efforts from both sides. In this regard, the first step is to reduce the suspicions about the intentions of the DAC on behalf of the emerging powers. The priority of creating mutual understanding should be conducted with further formal and close communication through a series of conferences and workshops. The OECD-DAC was seen by the emerging powers to have an inherent bias favouring OECD-DAC members and as being bent on applying its aid principles and modalities worldwide, as Abdel-Malek highlights (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 180). Thus, they see the GPEDC as another form of the DAC’s expansion of this historical process. The emerging powers think that the GPEDC is the strategic way to buy-in the emerging powers in order to share the heavy burden that the DAC has accumulated over the decades. Therefore, the emerging powers have been reluctant to join, or have even rejected the offer. The emerging powers need to recognise that the DAC has recognised the changing context, even since the middle of the 1990s, as reflected in the DAC’s 1996 “21st Century Report”. From the DAC’s viewpoint—and according to the concessions made in the documents in Busan, Mexico City, and Nairobi—the principles for the emerging powers through “differentiated commitment” have been confirmed; SSC is only regarded as being complementary rather than being equally important, as with North-South cooperation. Those principles have helped remove the major obstacles preventing the emerging powers from taking part. Therefore, emerging powers—China in particular, because it has a larger capacity and extensive experience in SSC—should take the GPEDC as an opportunity to form a joint force to play a role in global development.

China has reiterated that it was and has been the creator, benefactor, as well as supporter of global governance. In the 1920s, China was the first country that appealed to the international community for financial and technical support. From 1929 to 1941, the League of Nations provided technical support to China (Ali and Zeb 2016). The GPEDC is certainly a part of the global governance structure, thus China should be a part of it; otherwise, China would not be able to be involved in policy-making conducted by the GPEDC. Secondly, despite the political arguments, the GPEDC originates from the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. The agenda and main context presented in both fora still reflect aid-focussed issues and still largely reinforce the traditional donor–recipient model (Li 2017).

The relatively narrow OECD-DAC aid-effectiveness agenda is viewed as being inadequate to address the issues resulting from broad development cooperation (Abdel-Malek 2015, p. 180). Because of the limitations of the mandate and capacity of the DAC, it is also difficult—and unrealistic—to expect development ministries of the DAC members to move completely beyond an aid agenda.

The emerging powers also need to understand that aid is a business that involves many stakeholders. Changing the nature of aid-development cooperation would require changing the capacities of both institutional and individual structures as well as the whole portfolio structure within the DAC system. The difficulty is that, unless the agenda and context are focussed on development, the active participation of emerging powers is unlikely to happen.

The emerging powers, in particular China, believe that promoting development for developing countries requires different discussions that should relate to how development cooperation can promote trade, investment, agriculture, and industrialisation so that economic growth can be accelerated. Under this scenario, both sides would need to find consensus on how to move ahead.

The third issue varies slightly from the second issue. The original purpose of the World Food Programme was to strengthen the collective action and commitment of DAC members. Therefore, a series of requirements and indicators for data collection and reporting were enacted for monitoring and evaluation purposes. The GPEDC agreed that emerging powers would not need to follow these requirements. However, this privilege would demoralise the emerging powers if they were not able to present the data publicly.

Fourthly, even if they were to actively join the GPEDC, the emerging powers would feel that their development narratives could not be fully recognised because of their weak knowledge base, compared to the strong voices of DAC-based research institutes. Despite the changes made by the GPEDC agenda, conventional political and technical language still dominates the entire agenda.

Finally, the strength of emerging powers is also gradually being presented through those Global South-linked funding institutions such as the India–Brazil–South Africa Forum, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the New Development Bank (NDB). Active support and participation from OECD member states in these institutions could show a more sincere commitment towards more equal cooperation. However, from the case of the refusal of the United States and Japan to join the AIIB, it shows that the gap between traditional actors in international development assistance and the new players is still stubborn and cannot be filled automatically. However, this also presents another opportunity for DAC members to explore whether DAC-led development cooperation can be joined with those new development financing modalities. Concretely, the GPEDC should approach the NDB and the AIIB and invite them to take part in the forum to explore ways of how they could work together.

Based on the above analysis, one can see that there are various obstacles hindering the emerging powers from actively participating. However, the commitment made by all parties towards global development, in particular the SDGs, and the strong claims of the GPEDC to contribute to the SDGs (and also the agreement of a “common goal but differentiated responsibility” between the DAC members and the emerging powers envisaged in the GPDEC process) by making the GPEDC more inclusive and effective in supporting the SDGs should be the concrete step that encourages the participation of the emerging powers.

The chapter offers China as the case example in order to provide the following recommendations for the GPEDC to move ahead. Although the emerging powers have behaved similarly towards the GPEDC, they are not coordinated in their foreign policy, and there is no common policy towards the GPEDC among them. The GPEDC should not categorise “the emerging powers” as being one and the same, but it should discuss the issues separately with each in order to understand their different viewpoints on the GPEDC.

Firstly, China has demonstrated a strong commitment to global development. It has claimed to be the creator, benefactor, and developer of global governance (Jiang 2017). China’s SSC programmes have been increasingly more aligned with the model advocated, practised, and led by the DAC in terms of modalities. Taking part in the GPEDC should be the focus of China, rather than being brought in passively. China should take the GPEDC as an opportunity to exercise its “soft power”. China’s development experiences have been highly regarded by the GPEDC, and China can certainly make significant contributions to the paradigm shift of the GPEDC from aid to development. However, the importance of the GPEDC to China’s own interests has not been recognised by the Chinese side for two reasons. Firstly, the message of the GPEDC has not been presented properly within the Chinese foreign policy and think tank community; thus, the GPEDC still lacks policy attention in China. Second, due to the fragmentation of the development cooperation policy process in China, the designated institution-to-institution approach routinely applied by development ministries to China does not sufficiently ensure the acknowledgement of the GPEDC by a wide range of institutions relating to decision-making in China. Therefore, it is important to strengthen the linkage via think tank research and policy advocacy to advertise the GPEDC in existing policy dialogue via separate DAC members with China, such as Sino-German and Sino-UK dialogues.

Secondly, the GPEDC should propose a concrete field that China might be interested in. For instance, for the next high-level forum, the topic on how development cooperation could better contribute to China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) could be suggested as one of the topics. China sees this programme as being a concrete measure to implement its global development commitment, and it has also asked for its own development cooperation programme to align with the BRI. The newly established China International Development Cooperation Agency, which was formally launched on 18 April 2018, also stated that it will support national foreign affairs strategy and BRI.

Thirdly, the GPEDC should realise that its legitimacy largely depends on the active participation of the emerging powers, thus the GPEDC should set up a working group to begin talks with the emerging powers to ensure their participation via process approaches rather than just event-based ones; the emerging powers’—even China’s—capacities and human resources are limited, and they are not ready to provide an immediate response.

Lastly, the GPEDC also needs to realise that many topics listed in the working programme are not the primary interest of the emerging powers. For instance, the GPEDC continues to focus on the “aid management” agenda, and a strong linkage between development cooperation and development is still missing. The GPEDC needs further concessions to dispel the impression that it is another form of the DAC. Moreover, importantly, the GPEDC needs to highlight clearly how it can link with the UN DCF and other platforms such as the G20 Development Working Group.

The rapid development of emerging countries is not only changing the global political and economic landscape, but also reshaping the architecture of global development governance through initiatives such as the BRICS’ NDB and AIIB. The emerging powers influence the global development agenda mainly via what they called the SSC approach, which emphasises trade and investment in development, whereas the GPEDC largely focusses on an aid-based development cooperation system, and its agenda is still largely to provide aid.

However, due to the fact that the GPEDC has moved towards a development-effectiveness agenda and the emerging powers have influenced global development via a developmental approach; there appears to be an opportunity to persuade different forces to contribute to the SDGs. To do this, both sides need to overcome difficulties via understanding the realities and demands of each side and take concrete steps towards a truly genuine partnership.