Aid transparency: Italy among the least transparent in the UE

The CONCORD 4th edition of the Aidwatch report includes the first transparency ranking of the EU 27 official development cooperation. Increased transparency is considered a vital item for aid effectiveness and it is an international commitment signed in 2008. The European NGOs respectively ranked its official development policies according to a fixed set of transparency criteria. In this first ranking, Italy resulted 6th last EU donors, scoring just a little better than Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovak and Slovenia. This poor performance is due to the dearth of information publicly available and linguistic barrier preventing from access citizens in partner countries.

2008 Italian ODA at 0.22%

OECD/DAC data on ODA released at the end of Mach will need to be corrected on the rise for Italy.
As a matter of fact, following one moth later re-calculation, Italy notified the DAC to have reached 0.22% of GDP from the previusly stated 0.20%. The previously missing 300 million euros came from the lack of conversion from euro to dollar of some multilateral contributions. Though the last Governemnt can be praised for this, this positive result is well below the politically set quantitative target of 0.33%, set by the Prodi's government for 2008.

DAC Reviewers start their field visit in Italy.

On May 11th , the 10 people DAC peer reviewers team, consisting of France, Greece and the DAC secretariat, has started their first field visit. This is part of the DAC Peer review process, expected to produce an official report by the end of November. In April Italy had presented to the DAC a 100 page long report listing the Italian development cooperation progresses since the last peer review in 2004. During this week long visit the DAC reviewers will be on a fact finding mission to gather firsthand information on the Italian development cooperation. They will meet many stakeholders, including members of Parliament and NGOs. The Reviewers are to visit Lebanon in their second filed visit as one of the priority country of the Italian development cooperation to assess it at field level. NGOs will present their own assessment on the lack of progresses and missed opportunities of the past five years. Moving from the official report of the Italian development cooperation, the NGOs counter memorandum acknowledges that while the overall legislative reform of Italian development cooperation framework has not yet produced any results, the Directorate-General for development cooperation (DGCS) has attempted to implement some of the recommendations of the DAC peer review conducted five years ago, especially during last year.

Driven by the pressure of the DAC approaching deadline, the DGCS has quickened the pace and attempted to conclude and finalise processes that started in past years. In September 2008, an internal Task force was set up to overcome Italian cooperation management inertia and implement international policies on aid effectiveness, even without a legislative reform. Despite these efforts, this late undertaking will not enable results to be available in time for the OECD examination, postponing the implementation of the expected changes to a future date. The Italian Memorandum to the DAC in many section often refers to these processes as “on-going” or “underway”. This “underway-ism “ tone indirectly makes clear that no major Peer-review oriented reform was fully implemented over the last 5 years. In the same line, despite the current analysis on aid effectiveness, and on aid quality, in the past there had been no strategic reflection on how to comply with the Paris Declaration commitment till the Accra conference. Three years were wasted while other OCED countries were attempting to implement their aid effectiveness national Plans.

Current policy and planning processes will start being implemented and face institutional resistance in the second half of 2009. Yet, the lack of financial resources and the reduced international screening on Italy after the G8 Summit will mean that two of the main incentives will be lost in the implementation phase, increasing the risk of a renewed stalemate.

The 2004 DAC review acknowledged that its 2000 recommendations were still not implemented. Now, the almost 10 year old recommendations are still valid as there was no protracted effort to implement them.

Italian development cooperation following migration flows

The Italian Parliament is about to approve a bill enabling the government to streamline and speed up bilateral cooperation agreements with countries signing migration repatriation agreements.

This controversial article is part of a broader bill, aiming at boasting Italian economic productivity; particularly it specifically entrusts the government to review its development cooperation administrative procedures in order to speed up development cooperation interventions, including management, in emergencies contexts and with partner countries that signed up to migration control and repatriation agreements. The article clearly details that additional priority is to be given to countries agreeing to jail their citizen that were initially jailed in Italy. This article is an infringement of international human rights and of the main aims of the Italian development cooperation, as stated in the Law. Eventually the article approves a 2 million euro cut of the Italian development cooperation to fund the expenditure stemming form the implementation of the Italian-Israel Treaty.