Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for inviting me to be here today.
I want to talk a little bit about democratic development and how it has evolved in Canada, how our thinking about the promotion of democratic development has evolved. I want to talk a little bit about what it is, why we promote it, and how we do it. And I want to talk a little bit about some of my own experiences as well in this area.
On the question of what democratic development is and where it came from, historically we've actually been very late to the idea of promoting democratic development in developing countries. Many countries in the west and in the Eastern bloc actually supported bad governance for many years in support of Cold War objectives and regimes that were acting in anything but the cause of good governance. I'm thinking of countries like China, Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Liberia, and Indonesia. It's only in the last 25 or 30 years that we've actually begun to think more seriously about how we can promote good governance.
The first foray into the idea of good governance was in the area of human rights. It was probably the Carter administration in the United States that started to talk more openly and more directly about the need to promote human rights through aid programs and informed policy, followed by the Netherlands, and then gradually by other countries, including Canada. So human rights was the beginning of this discussion.
Then in the late 1970s and into the 1980s we talked about economic governance, because we were beginning to see that many countries, especially in Africa, but not exclusively, were running double- and triple-digit inflation. Currencies were worthless, and the economies were in a state of free fall. Structural adjustment became the watchword of the 1980s.
During the 1970s there were approximately 10 structural adjustment programs a year. In 1980 there were 28, and by 1985 there were 129 more. Structural adjustment was a pretty tough cocktail of economic remedies that developing country governments were asked to swallow. Many did. The results, in some cases, were successful. In many cases they were not.
We moved to the idea of more democratic governance. We began to think about that more clearly and more forthrightly during the 1980s. During the 1980s, many of the military governments in Latin America began to fall, partly because of the economic conditions they found themselves in, and you had a return to democratic elections in many Latin American countries. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we could talk much more openly about democracy and how to promote it.
The promotion of good governance, as I said in the paper I submitted to you, is essentially about building effective institutions and rules imbued with predictability, accountability, transparency, and the rule of law. It's about relations between institutions and processes, governmental and otherwise. A UNDP report says it's also about protecting human rights, promoting wider participation in the institutions and rules that affect people's lives, and achieving more equitable economic and social outcomes. Governance for human development must be democratic in substance and in form.
Why do we want to promote democratic governance? Democratic or good governance, depending on how you define it or term it, is a key to poverty alleviation and long-term sustainable development. It's important to conflict prevention and conflict resolution. And it's very important to the better management of human, natural, and environmental resources.
In my paper I talk about some of the difficulties we've had in promoting this. I said that some critics of Canada's approach to governance lament the absence of coherent policies tying all aspects of the agenda together. A patchy project-by-project approach, with no obvious central policy and no central management, they say, is unlikely to yield coherent results. This may be true, but given the overwhelming size of the governance agenda and the limited track record in its promotion by any donor, healthy doses of humility and caution are warranted, along with a good set of brakes in the expectations department.
Given the complexity of the challenge, a case can be made for selective interventions in concert with other donors, aimed at learning what works and what does not. The apparent absence in Canada, however, of a place where the lessons can be rolled up, spelled out, shared, and remembered works against the learning that is so badly needed in this field.
I'd like to talk about three examples of how governance is applied or thought about from my own experience. The first is the Canada Corps that came onto the scene a couple of years ago with a lot of flourish. Through Canada Corps, we were to promote good governance and democracy, primarily by sending young people overseas on short-term assignments.
At the time, I was a lone voice on this. It was kind of odd that nobody said it, but we actually had a Canada Corps called CUSO, the World University Service of Canada, Canada World Youth, and Canadian Crossroads International. We had 12 or 13 volunteer-sending organizations in Canada, and over the last 20 years, all of them have been starved for funds.
When I left CUSO in 1993 as the outgoing executive director, we had a budget of $26 million. Today, in 2007 dollars, CUSO has a budget of $13 million. All of the volunteer-sending organizations have had serious cutbacks. I don't think we necessarily needed a new organization. What we needed was a rejuvenation and rededication of what was already there, unless of course you see sending young people overseas as the cutting edge, in terms of the promotion of good governance and democratic development. The problem with that idea is that those in developing countries who want good governance know what it is. Those who don't are not likely to be persuaded by young Canadians on three-month assignments.
The talk about Canada Corps has gradually subsided, and it's been folded into something called the Office for Democratic Governance at CIDA. It's too new to say what this actually is—it just started—but at least the title is more appropriate to the challenges.
Secondly, I wanted to mention the Pakistan environment program I was involved in for five years. CIDA ran this project for more than 10 years, and by 2002-03 it had become the leader among donors on environmental issues in Pakistan. Canada had promoted the development of Pakistan's national environment policy and brought together government, the private sector, and Pakistani civil society to talk about these issues and to promote change.
This area was and remains extremely important in Pakistan, but in the early part of this decade, governance rose to the fore in CIDA's agenda. CIDA decided it needed to have projects in governance. Today CIDA is supporting a project on the devolution of governance: decentralization in two districts of Punjab and Pakistan. That may be a very good project—I don't know anything about it—but it was done at the expense of everything we knew about the environment.
Our work on environment was about the governance of a very badly underresourced sector in Pakistan. We were the leaders. We were not a large donor in Pakistan, but we were the largest in that area. We had a voice, leverage, and the ear of government. Now we can't actually remember what it was we did in Pakistan on the environment.
The third area is diamonds. For the last seven or eight years I've been working on the issue of conflict or blood diamonds, which are the diamonds stolen by rebel armies in Africa and used to pay for weapons to prosecute wars. Over the last 15 years, the diamond-fuelled wars in Angola, the Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leon have directly or indirectly taken the lives of four million people. That's not an exaggeration; it's a fact that's backed up by a lot of study--four million people.
When the issue of conflict diamonds came to the fore in 1999 and 2000, the Government of Canada became very much involved and took this very seriously. We had what I would call a joined-up approach.
The Department of Foreign Affairs led on the negotiations for the Kimberley process, which is a certification scheme to control the movement of rough diamonds. The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs was involved because they are in charge of diamonds in the Northwest Territories. Natural Resources Canada was involved.
We received support from IDRC, very generous support, and from CIDA in our work both on campaigning and in the creation of the architecture for the Kimberley process certification scheme.
About two years ago we began to talk about the development issues behind all of this. The Kimberley process is up and running and working fairly well. It's not perfect, but it's working fairly well. But the Kimberley process is a regulatory process. It's not about development.
In Africa there are more than a million, probably 1.3 million, artisanal diamond diggers. These are people who dig with a shovel and the sweat of their brows to dig diamonds out of the earth. They earn on average about a dollar a day. It puts them into the category of absolute poverty. These people were the source of the conflict diamonds. They are vulnerable to economic predators. They are still vulnerable to military predators.
What's needed on top of the Kimberley process in addition, now that we have the regulation in hand, is a development process. My organization, Partnership Africa Canada, and some others, along with the diamond industry and the governments of the countries affected, have created something called the diamond development initiative to work on the development challenges here.
The minute development came into the equation, our funding from CIDA ceased. We had received very generous funding, but from one year to the next, it simply dropped off the agenda and we had nothing.
It is very odd that we get support from the governments of Britain and Ireland, from a number of other sources, and from the industry itself, which is very worried about this issue, and not from our own development agency.
This is a governance issue as well, the governance of a very important natural resource for Africa. Seventy per cent of the world's gem diamonds are produced in Africa. Diamonds have never been regulated in any way at all in the past. Here is a challenge and an opportunity.
We need to be a lot clearer about what we mean by democratic development and good governance. We need to understand why we're doing it, and we need to learn and apply what we've learned.
I finish my paper, which I submitted to you, in this way.
I agree, however, with the admonitions found in all thoughtful critiques on governance programming: good governance does not drop from the sky; it is not a gift; it cannot be imposed. Good governance is unlikely to flow from a collection of disparate, time-bound projects offered by a dozen ill-coordinated donors. It cannot be transferred holus-bolus like pizza from a delivery truck. It must be earned and learned, not just by those for whom it is intended but by those who would help them. Effective application of the full governance agenda as we now understand it is still pretty much undocumented, untested, and uncoordinated. And it is far too young for dogmatism and certainty. It is old enough, however, that mistakes should not be repeated, and it is important enough that lessons, both positive and negative, should be documented, learned, remembered, and applied. Aid agencies have a problem with this sequence, in almost everything they do. But for democratic governments that want to promote their values elsewhere, doing this well is a test of their own understanding of and commitment to principles of democratic good governance.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
