The four high level forums on aid effectiveness (2003-2011) took up the challenge of a previous high-level conference that had been convened by the UN in 2002 at Monterrey, Mexico on the subject of financing for development.
[10] In February 2005, the international community came together at the Paris High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, hosted by the French government and organised by the OECD.
The role of aid in promoting development was attracting increasing public scrutiny in the run-up to the G8 Summit[13] in Gleneagles, Scotland, and the global campaigns such as Make Poverty History.
[15] The Paris Declaration went much further than previous agreements; it represented a broader consensus among the international community about how to make aid more effective.
In particular, although many countries have made significant efforts to strengthen their national systems (for instance by improving how they manage their public funds), in many cases donors are still reluctant to use them.
The Forum was attended by senior ministers from more than 100 countries, as well as representatives of multilateral aid institutions such as the European Commission (EuropeAid), the World Bank, the United Nations (UN), private foundations and civil society organisations.
It was followed by the United Nations High Level Event[18] on the MDGs in New York on 25 September and the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development[19] in Doha, Qatar, 29 November-2 December.
[20] Private funding sources such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation[21] are becoming major players, and civil society groups are increasingly active.
There is broad acknowledgement that new global challenges, such as rising food and fuel prices and climate change, bring added urgency to efforts to make aid as effective as possible.
Drawing on evidence from the latest evaluations, the 2006 and 2008 Surveys on Monitoring the Paris Declaration and on in-depth contributions from developing countries, the AAA identifies three main areas where progress toward reform is still too slow.
The fact that ministers have signed up to these changes in Accra makes the AAA a political document—rather than a technocratic prescription—to move from business as usual to a new way of working together.
Research by the Overseas Development Institute based on in-person interviews with senior politicians and government officials in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Zambia suggested that the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) and Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness's indicators were too narrowly defined and lack depth.
[24] The principles of "predictability" and "transparency" were highlighted as lacking depth and important sub-dimensions not given enough emphasis, for instance on adaptation to local contexts.
The Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness was held in Busan, South Korea from 29 November 2011 to 1 December 2011.
The holding of the forum in Busan allowed South Korea to share its own development experience, which had attracted a considerable amount of research in the country since 2008.
The forum's final declaration expressed many mutual commitments along these lines including the establishment of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation.
[4] But this inclusivity was seen to involve a weakening of the Paris and Accra agreements in the sense that the commitments were to be implemented by diverse actors according to their respective situations, and thus became less absolute and binding.
[30] The official review in 2011/12 found that, of the 13 monitored targets established by the Paris Declaration, only one had been met, though it observed that "considerable progress" had been seen in some of the other areas.