The project 'Visibility and Division of Labour' was part of a broader research project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) on “Development Policy: Questions for the Future”. The project entailed analyses of concrete options for improving the implementation of the international aid & development effectiveness agenda.
On the one hand, the project took a close look at “visibility” in development cooperation and its facilitating or impeding potential for the implementation of the principles and commitments of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action and the Busan Partnership Agreement for Effective Development Cooperation. On the other hand, the project analysed both conceptually and empirically international efforts to rationalise aid in order to contain the spreading fragmentation of actors and strategies in development cooperation. The fragmentation of aid causes high transaction costs particularly for partner governments that impede the efficient use of scarce resources in order to fight poverty most effectively. This caused the international community to embark upon a variety of approaches to rationalise aid, most predominantly in and cross-country division of labour and joint programming of the European Commission and its member states.
The project attempted to identify options to design development cooperation strategies that combine the desired properties of visibility, alignment and harmonisation, with the overarching goal to increase the effectiveness of development cooperation.