In recent years public budgets have become an increasingly prominent issue in the international development debate. For one thing, more and more countries are developing poverty reduction strategies (PRS) or similar national development agendas that need to be translated into medium-term...

Adaptation to climate change is an inevitable challenge, especially in developing countries. Recent calculations show that costs of adaptation and corresponding needs for financial support are high. The international community therefore has to face urgent questions on how to meet these financial...

Programme-based approaches, including sector and general budget support, are core elements of the Paris Agenda for more effective aid. This agenda emerged from an intense international debate that has since the mid 1990s centred mainly on modalities and instruments best suited to improving the...

Multi-Donor Budget Support (MDBS) has its origins in the critique of traditional aid interventions and is aimed at overcoming related deficiencies of aid by avoiding parallel administrative and decision making structures. It is commonly understood not merely as a financing instrument but also as...

The development cooperation (DC) of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the 1990s can be described and assessed as follows: • The UN is an important pillar of multilateral DC. The organization is endowed with some fundamental presuppositions (universality, a high level of legitimation, good...

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the year 2005 offers a number of important opportunities for political action (G8 summit; debate on the report on the Commission for Africa – CFA; review of the progress made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs). On the one hand, this is a chance...

Sub-Saharan Africa comprises 48 states at various stages of social, economic and political development. Despite the heterogeneity of these countries, the following general developments relating to statehood and governance in the past 15 years can at least be identified: Such pan-African...

How does reforming public financial management (PFM) help to improve governance in developing countries? In both industrialised and developing countriesPFM reforms affect fundamental interests of state andgovernance. Although PFM has steadily grown in importancein development cooperation in...

In the current development debate, so called results based approaches play an important part. There are two aspects to this debate: On the one hand, further improving the effectiveness of development cooperation (aid) is important to the specialists, whereas on the other hand many donors...