McLeod Group guest blog by Gloria Novovic, April 11, 2023
As the Canadian government drafts its long-awaited feminist foreign policy, it is wise to examine the implementation of its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), adopted six years ago. However, the Auditor General’s recent report is an administrative distraction from critical discussions on how we define and measure the success of a feminist policy. Oversimplifying the incoherence between feminist long-term ambitions and short-term mechanisms of international assistance, the report recommends only a superficial solution: improved reporting. To deliver on FIAP’s commitments, Canada will need to replace its fairy tale quest to save women and girls with concrete aid reforms that reflect our global context of shared planetary threats.
Background
On March 27, 2023, the Auditor General’s Office found that Global Affairs Canada (GAC) lacked the ability to “show the value of Canada’s international assistance in support of gender equality”. The Ministry and civil society actors rushed to defend FIAP, pointing to the crucial shifts it inspired: unprecedented funding for women’s rights organizations, accelerated gender mainstreaming, and support for programs advancing anti-racism and the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse.
Those are no small feats. Civil society champions, GAC experts, and ministerial staff (including the ministers themselves) have been implementing FIAP despite, and not thanks to, the existing aid mechanisms. We need to recognize the personal commitment and political savviness required advance feminist agendas in change-resistant and risk-averse government and non-governmental institutions. Unfortunately, the Auditor General’s report undermines these efforts by offering an outdated interpretation of Canada’s global mandate.
The report helpfully highlights insufficient allocation of bilateral funding towards projects with gender equality as their primary objective (which I had flagged earlier in a chapter on Canada’s “underfunded feminist ambitions”). However, the rest of the report focuses on the trees (the reporting systems), while failing to sound off the alarms about a rampant forest fire. GAC and the rest of the sector operate on fictional narratives of global development that obfuscate the limitations of global aid and impose barriers to the gender equality agenda that FIAP is expected to advance. Until we give up on this “aid fiction” and redesign how international assistance is understood, disbursed and measured, GAC will be left with the Sisyphean task of proving how close it is to targets that no development agency is set up to achieve.
The tale of results-based management
The Auditor General’s report hints at the team’s painstaking examination of 60 projects, each with its own bespoke results-based framework model, partial data and output-oriented indicators. Yet, it is unclear how the Auditor General’s team concluded that GAC’s struggle to apply results-based management (RBM) principles to FIAP targets could be solved simply by boosting corporate reporting. After years of RBM implementation, shouldn’t the question be why GAC struggles to measure results in this fashion in the first place?
The idea that GAC’s problems can be fixed with improved administration is ludicrous because the issue is political. RBM principles and existing mechanisms of official development assistance (ODA) are at odds. As the literature on RBM suggests, interventions should be designed based on locally identified problems (not donor priorities), course-corrected according to changing circumstances, and funded in accordance with timespans and the ambitions of a desired change. But that is not how ODA funding works. The ambitions under FIAP have changed (they are more long-term and far-reaching to shift legislation, cultural norms, social programs, etc.), but ODA mechanisms have largely stayed the same (short term and top-down). Caught in this web of policy incoherence, GAC faces the choice between defaulting on FIAP commitments or writing RBM fan fiction.
The tale of Canadian (now feminist!) aid
Undoubtedly, GAC’s reporting systems, cross-departmental coordination, and strategic planning can all be improved – but that is true for any government agency. The real challenge is to address the fictional narrative of Canadian aid, which fails the test of RBM principles.
Even according to GAC’s RBM guidance, stand-alone projects are not meant to achieve their ultimate outcomes – those are broader development targets that Canadian funding is merely supporting. In fact, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development positions national governments in the driving seat of their own initiatives. As a donor, Canada should respect local and national ownership instead of deploying resources to prove its own impact (as the Auditor General report implies). GAC should, instead, demonstrate how Canada is enabling gender equality advocates across national and transnational networks to advance their own agendas.
However, GAC is not set up to support local ownership. GAC must provide annual parliamentary reports that non-experts can judge as not only strategically and operationally sound but also politically relevant. The stakes are high: The ODA budget is allocated annually, based on sheer political pressure (or lack of thereof). As a result, GAC has institutional incentives to prioritize projects that yield short-term results (however fleeting or ineffective) over long-term feminist policy objectives. Instead of being concerned about the missing project reports, we should worry about the lack of political mandate to redesign GAC’s institutional incentives in line with the FIAP’s priority of responsibly allocating 15% of bilateral ODA to gender equality-targeted programming.
The current and any future government has a choice between evidence-based, long-term impact and electorally convenient soundbites. So far, as Stephen Brown notes, all parties have prioritized the latter, setting GAC up for an impossible mandate of investing in long-term change while providing on-demand facts and figures anytime a politician needs to show they care about the world. Until we are ready to give up the rosy fairy tale of Canadian aid, any proper application of results-based management, and the pursuit of FIAP’s long-term ambitions, will remain an exercise in fiction writing.
Rewriting the narrative to face rising planetary threats
The saviour narrative of (Canadian) aid is not just oversimplified, it is fake. Rich countries are both failing to contribute their fair share of ODA and exploiting poor countries through illegal and legal (but unjust) global trade and economic mechanisms that deprive them of $3.3 trillion annually (versus $1.3 trillion in global aid). If we understand that Canada is not a global feminist godmother, then the Auditor General’s interpretations of how GAC is to prove the success of FIAP (by, for example, showing how Canada is increasing girls’ school attendance in recipient countries) emerges as not only technically challenging but also ethically questionable.
If FIAP strives to make a difference, then GAC’s success should be measured by its ability to transform the aid industrial complex. For example, GAC should be asked to prove how it is influencing multilateral organizations and legitimizing more long-term investments in national and transnational women’s rights (and other justice-seeking) networks. Giving up on the burden of constantly calculating ODA’s return on investment would free up resources to support, for example, national statistical data collection on progress towards the SDGs, more meaningful engagement of Canadians in global affairs, evidence-based advocacy, and research for integrated trade, diplomacy and aid agendas.
Lastly, abandoning fictional saviour agendas could help us examine what Canada is doing, not only as a donor, but also a trade partner, and as a global economic and political actor, to help address planetary socio-political, economic, and environmental threats. Sure, meeting the FIAP commitment to allocate 15% of bilateral ODA to gender equality-targeted programs is important, as is investing 0.7% of Canada’s gross national income on ODA. However, if we insist on the fiction that achieving these targets alone will solve our planetary threats, then we have to question our complicity in upholding the status quo. Progress towards gender equality, as an emancipatory feminist objective, is entirely reliant upon the broader agenda of global justice. GAC should improve its reporting systems, as the Auditor General demands, but it should do so as part of a deeper interrogation of its corporate mandate that calls for fundamental transformations of how ODA is interpreted, managed and evaluated.
Gloria Novovic is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s School of International Development and Global Studies. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash.