 My name is Carrie Manning. I'm a professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. And thanks to Danielle and you and you wider for inviting me here to present. I'm going to be talking about foreign aid and democracy in Mozambique as a country that, at this point, represents a dominant party regime. And I want to focus on a couple of things. First, with respect to what donors are doing in Mozambique now, there are two trends that are important that I want to highlight. One has to do with the impact of budget support. And I'll talk about both the intended and the unintended consequences of general budget support. Most aid in Mozambique has shifted toward budget support away from project and sectoral support. And the second trend I want to highlight is the shift from, we tend to talk about democracy aid as supporting democracy and governance, so DNG. What we found in Mozambique is a shift from support of democracy elements toward support of governance. And I'll talk about the reasons and the implications for that and what I see as a difference between democracy support and governance support. So this research was based on field research that I conducted with my co-author, Monica Malbro, last June. And we had meetings with a number of aid donors as Gazebo, as Mamoudou laid out, excuse me. So the bottom line, in case I droned on for too long and don't get to my bottom line in time, is that I think that budget support in Mozambique has tended to give strong support to the incumbent advantage. And I even would argue that even though the aim of general budget support has been to build the state and to strengthen state capacity, I wonder if the effect has not been more to strengthen the particular regime in power rather than the state as such. Second, I think Mozambique echoes what Danielle and Mamoudou said about donors being or at least feeling powerless when it comes to certain aspects of democratic deepening. And I think this realization, the frustrations that donors are feeling with respect to their ability to impact government decisions when it comes to things like electoral administration and other decisions that central elites make is one of the driving forces behind the shift in donors' attention away from those democratic elements and toward supporting governance elements and shifting support also from an almost exclusive emphasis on central government institutions and toward a focus on local government institutions. It's not the only reason. There are good reasons, positive reasons also to support decentralization in local government. But I think one of the things what donors told us at least was one of the reasons behind this shift was their sense that they couldn't really, they had reached the limit of their ability to influence transparency and accountability in some respects at central levels of government. So let me give you a brief overview of Mozambique and some justification for why it can be characterized as a dominant party state. And then I'll get back into some of the details of what's happening with aid there. So as most of you probably know, Mozambique endured 16 years of internal conflict after independence in 1975. And then had an internationally supervised peace process that began in 1992 and culminated in multi-party general elections in 1994. So those were the first multi-party elections in Mozambique. And since then they've had four rounds of general elections, the last were in 2009. They've also had three rounds of municipal elections in 98, 2003 and 2008. And really there have been few major problems in Mozambique. It has been viewed very widely and I think for the most part justifiably as a success story. There's been no return to conflict. There's been very little civil unrest. The main opposition group, Renamo, made the transition to a political party and at least in the first couple of elections made general elections quite competitive. And so we had a fairly robust two-party system emerging at least in the first two or three general elections. I have made the argument that I think that is changing as the ruling party's electoral advantage and its hold over political and economic aspects of national life in Mozambique increase. So over time we have seen these two developments. We've seen this increasing entrenchment of the ruling party for Lima which has ruled Mozambique since independence. So from 75 until 94 there was an unelected ruling party and since 94 it has been the elected ruling party. And at the same time we've seen a really insufficient development of the main opposition party. So Renamo surprised people when it came out in 1994 with such a strong showing in elections and again in 1999. But since then there's been very little internal organizational development of Renamo and this is finally starting to affect its ability to garner votes at general elections and even local elections. That weakness in the opposition party is related to but it's not entirely caused by the increasing dominance of the ruling party. Okay, so for Lima has as I said increasingly entrenched itself in terms of its electoral advantage. In 2009, for Lima's presidential candidate won 75% of the votes in the presidential election and the party had about the same share of seats in the legislature. So that's a tremendous advantage that allows the ruling party to essentially do whatever it wants to pass its legislative program in and also to change the constitution. They only needed two thirds majority to change the constitution. For Lima also won all of the municipal elections in the last election with one exception in Beira, the second largest city. So the ruling party is able to dominate the rule making process and the implementation of these rules as it pertains to elections and as it pertains to most other things. And for Lima has used this dominance to ensure that it doesn't have to trust its fate to the uncertainties of elections. What I mean by that is an example of what I mean can be found in the 2009 elections. So in 2007 and again in 2009, the National Assembly, which was already at that time strongly dominated by for Lima passed new legislation to revise the electoral law that imposed very much higher requirements for candidates to get documentation in order to support their candidacy. And then just before the 2009 elections, there was a new party that emerged, a third party that was a breakaway from Renamo, that I think both Renamo and for Lima saw as a threat. That party was called MDM. That party was prevented in the end from running in all but four of Mozambique's 11 electoral constituencies and this National Elections Commission said it was because documentation was inadequate but they never provided, there was no transparency around that decision. And so that process lost for Lima, a lot of credibility in the eyes of donors. It precipitated the donor strike that Danielle referred to in which the major budget donors, most of them withheld support until the government addressed some transparency issues and that election, the decisions that the government made around those elections really demonstrated its ability to essentially control not just the rulemaking process but how those were implemented, even where you had a National Elections Commission that was supposed to be representatives of civil society and opposition parties, the government and the ruling party. The government was essentially able to hand pick who those representatives were for civil society as well as for its party and the government. By the way, the donor strike did not last very long. The government donors were insistent that the government addressed transparency issues not just relating to the election but also to relating to the increasing blurring of the line between party and state. And over the last two elections, with President Gabuza has had an agenda of returning, reinserting the party back into the life of the state through a variety of mechanisms and donors asked for more clarity on those issues and didn't really get it. So, both horizontal accountability and vertical accountability mechanisms are weak. You have, as I said, executive dominance over the legislature and you have single party, single party dominates essentially all institutions of government at all levels. Media independence is there, there's a thriving independent media sector in Maputu and in the major cities but outside of the major cities with the broadcast media there's not so much. Also, as you see in a lot of other African countries there's a big divide between urban areas and rural areas in terms of the strength of civil society. So, if you go to Maputu or Bayra you see very strong civil society organizations but when you travel out a bit it gets a lot thinner and that's a challenge for donors who wanna work with civil society organizations as well. Okay, donors in Mozambique, donors have long played a pivotal role in Mozambique. So, they were very important in the war to peace transition. They were very important in the transition to multi-party politics. One of the innovative things that they did that was fairly controversial at the time was giving about $17 million to Renamo in the form of a trust fund to make the transition from rebel group to political party. But they did a lot more than that. They also built confidence on the government side, helped ease economic conditionality for the government in exchange for the transition process. And so, we're extremely involved. One of the reasons they were able to be so involved and to have the confidence of both sides is because bilateral donors had been in Mozambique for quite a long time. You had this sort of Nordic countries were there from independence onward, the US IMF World Bank, Western institutions began going there in the early 1980s with the drought and the humanitarian emergency that that created. So, during that humanitarian emergency, a lot of these donors began to build institutions that allowed them to coordinate their aid with one another. And that has continued through the support for Mozambique's transition and after the transition. So, I think Mozambique has historically a pretty high degree of donor cooperation and coordination that kind of dates back to this collaboration on relief, even though there's a very large number of donors there. And so it's a good thing actually that there is this history of coordination and cooperation. Okay, the current focus of donors as I said is general budget support. It's, I think, governance over democracy and within the rubric of budget support there are a fairly large number or probably over a dozen working groups that are designed to bring donors and the government working in a certain area together to facilitate the sharing of information and reduce duplication and sort of promote strategic thinking. So, let me say a little bit about budget support. Budget donors in Mozambique include most of the European bilateral donors, the African Development Bank, the World Bank, the European Commission does not officially include the United States. In 2009, the United States and the UN became associate members of the Budget Donors Group, which is known as the G19. And they attend meetings and donor coordination groups but don't commit ahead of time to the common G19 policy, typical for the United States not to want to sort of commit to any kind of, pre-commit to any kind of group decisions. And for these budget donors, the overwhelming majority of the aid that they provide to Mozambique comes in the form of budget support. And this is sort of striking because particularly with the Nordic countries they have a very long history of project support. I mean, we all know that the shift in general terms has been, for all kinds of aid, has been away from project support and toward budget support and generally that's viewed, I think rightly as a very good thing. But it's a striking transition for a lot of these donors who had followed a very different sort of pattern in Mozambique for years and years. So most of them now shifted to budget support. Together, the G19 budget donors, so there are 19 of them, hence the name, pledged a total of $471 million just in 2009. In between 2004 and 2008, they spent $1.7 billion in Mozambique. So I think the number of donors in the amounts of budget aid make this one of the biggest budget support programs in Africa. Now, how does this have, what are the implications of this for democracy? Budget aid is structured around the poverty reduction strategy paper which every country, most every country that receives significant aid has. And that paper, it's called PARPA in Mozambique, it sets out the parameters for government priorities during a five-year period. So now they're on their third, just started on the third PARPA in Mozambique. And it has an explicit monitoring and assessment framework built in that's supposed to guide budget support. Donors, like I said, participate in donor coordination groups that are meant to facilitate dialogue with donors, between donors and government, and between civil society groups that are working in that particular area. In practice, usually it's donors and government representatives who participate in these with a few exceptions. So the thing about PARPA is because it's an attempt to sort of focus government priorities and funding for those priorities over a five-year period, logically a lot gets excluded. So in Mozambique's case, the strategies that support, budget support monitoring assessment have all revolved around three pillars. And those are poverty, governance, and human capital. Things that don't fall under one of these three pillars don't get a lot of attention. And one of the things that doesn't fall under these pillars, two of the things are the National Assembly and civil society. In Mozambique's framework, governance focuses even more specifically on public sector reform and what is known as justice, legality, and public order. And public sector reform includes support for local government. So there's been a sort of ongoing, about decade-long, decentral, gradual rollout of decentralization in Mozambique. And so support for local government is naturally part of public sector reform. And in this context of the PARPA, justice, support for justice, legality, and public order primarily means a fight against corruption through the support of national monitoring mechanisms like the audit court. So these are the priorities in governance. And donor working groups are formed around these priorities. So what are the implications of this? One of them is that, I mean, one of the novelties or one of the positive innovations of general budget support is that there is joint monitoring and assessment built in between donors and government. So it's not just donors monitoring the government's activities, but it's sort of annual assessment by the government of what donors have done and whether they've met their commitments. However, the process has not been conducive to horizontal accountability within the state. So it almost promotes more accountability between donors and government than between government and any domestic constituency. And for example, in the PARPA, in the entire PARPA 2 document, there's not a single mention of the National Assembly and its role in this process. So there's a paragraph on media, there's a paragraph about civil society, there's a paragraph about business organizations and workers organizations and local consultative councils and donors. But there's literally no mention of the National Assembly and there are two sentences that say the opposition should work to voice its support or constructive criticism of the PARPA, but there's no mention of formal channels through which they might do that, which I think is an odd exclusion. As I said, issue areas that aren't explicitly included in the PARPA have tended to be marginalized. And again, I mean, donors have to make choices about what they're going to support and with coordination comes a sort of common goals. Naturally, certain areas will be marginalized. And these, as I pointed out, have tended to be in Mozambique civil society and the National Assembly. Efforts are being made by DFID and other donors in the area of civil society development. So several donors support a common fund that gives support directly to civil society organizations. But generally, this is limited to the strongest, there is a sort of handful of very strong CSOs that are doing very important work. But most CSOs are not able to absorb the kind of support that donors would be able to give. And finally, budget support makes the government look good when really it is donors who are providing the goods. Now, I mean, to a certain extent, it's always been the case in Mozambique that donors are providing a lot of what is ostensibly provided by the government. So even now, about 49% of the budget is supported by donors that that share has been larger in the past. But in the past, when you had project support, you had more visible markers of this support. So things were given out, trucks had emblems on the side, and people used to talk about, like in 1994 when I first did field work in Mozambique, I asked people in rural areas, what are the problems that you have here? And they would say things like, well, the problem is the World Food Organization hasn't been here recently to make a delivery or World Vision hasn't brought us food. They talked about things in terms of what NGOs were doing rather than what they are not doing rather than what the government was doing. So even normal state tasks, people sort of attributed those to NGOs. Now, those activities are carried out by the state but still funded in large and important ways by donors. So I'm not saying we should go back to project support, I am saying that there's a sort of subtle dynamic by which the degree to which the government is actually, the state is actually providing services that we all expect states to provide has not necessarily changed. It's still funded by donors, but people don't see it anymore. It looks now like the state is actually providing these goods. And that's why I said, I think that, especially in an electoral regime, budget support may be strengthening the government of the day rather necessarily than strengthening the state. Okay, and finally on the shift of toward support of governance aspects rather than democracy. As I said, I think this is fueled in part by disenchantment on the part of donors with decreasing transparency and traction in the political sphere, particularly at the national level. And so donors are shifting their focus to the local sphere and to governance over democracy. And what I mean by governance over democracy is donors still support elections, they still support the National Assembly but in very small amounts now with respect to the National Assembly, the amounts are bigger with elections but again, support for elections is episodic rather than sort of the electoral process being seen as something that is continual. And again, the big money and most of the attention is on the PARPA, the five-year plan and those elements don't fall under the five-year plan, support for civil society and support for the National Assembly. And I don't wanna overstate the shift to local level. There's still support for governance at a central level. So at the central level, the G-19 have made a commitment to improving transparency and accountability when it comes to the management of public funds. They fund the audit court, they work with central level officials to provide training on public sector management, public investment and they have an integrated program. They're working with the government to develop an integrated program for budgeting and monitoring a budgeting from the central level all the way down to the district level. But what's interesting is that as donors, even though there are these, there's still support at the central level, donors are now dividing up provinces and picking districts to support. And so even though we have on the one hand, budget support sort of seems to be driving everything. On the other hand, there's this interesting return almost to the days of project support when donors would sort of divvy up the country and say, okay, these are our five districts that we're supporting in this province or these two provinces. Which again, sort of requires donors to rethink coordination. Are they giving the same information and the same training to all of these district level officials, for example. Okay, and finally something that I think is a bright spot and a encouraging spot on the horizon in Mozambique is that with this emphasis on local support to local government institutions, donors are starting to integrate democracy aid and development aid. And they're doing this by focusing on essential service delivery as an entry point for governance work. Which I think is very promising because one of the things that democracy donors have struggled with is how to make democracy relevant to people's everyday lives in between elections. And so at the local level, you now have governments that are responsible for providing water, sanitation, healthcare, and so forth. And donors are focusing on building community decision making ability on service delivery. So I think this is an area where state building and support for a civil society can mesh and also where democracy and governance can intersect. So let me stop there since I'm out of time. And thank you.