Transcript
CAROL LANCASTER: Just to sort of nail one or two of Ann's points, we have a problem, as we see it, of great fragmentation. Every single major agency of the U.S. Government, domestic agencies as well as foreign affairs agencies, has an aid program of their own. You're probably all aware of that, but that is something that has occurred in the last ten years or so. You can see signs of this in other governments, but it does, it seems to us, present a special problem here, and it's especially evident in the United States.
Not only do we have a fragmentation in programs where they're situated, we have a fragmentation, if you like, between policy decisions and implementation. And we talk about this a little bit in the book, the problems that occur when you separate policy from implementation. You can see these problems in other governments. I hesitate to mention the Japanese Government, of which there are a number of representatives here, or the French Government, but it does complicate the effectiveness of aid delivery and the effectiveness of what you're trying to do. Some of it is inevitable, and some of it, it seems to us, is probably—it probably is needed to be dealt with or looked at fairly closely.
If you grant us the problem, then what are the solutions? The first thing we did was we said, well, what is the world we're going to be facing? What are the key factors we need to take into account as we begin to think about how we might restructure the U.S. Government to manage its aid program, and especially its aid for development program in the 21st century? And a couple of points came to mind.
Number one is something that I would have never dreamed would happen in my lifetime, as somebody in the development field for many years here, and that is the prominence that development has gained in the United States and, indeed, worldwide in the last couple of years. Ann mentioned the Bush administration's national security strategy. That puts development right up there with defense and democracy. The administration has also provided an enormous boost in resources for this purpose, and that is also very important.
It has become an issue that people are talking about. They're talking about the ethics of why the rich should help the poor. This is something I have to confess I heard very little of when I was in various administrations over the last couple of decades. That's out on the table. The practical elements, the practical reasons for taking development seriously, no doubt encouraged by the experience of 9/11 and other terrorist groups, is right there out there on the table. We have to be concerned about the practical issues of development.
And so I think that this is an issue whose time has come, and I might also say that extraordinarily, it seems to me, there is a degree of political support for providing development assistance in the United States an elsewhere that I certainly haven't seen for many, many years. So it's a very important issue for us there. It's time to think about how to organize it to make it effective and make it coherent.
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