"Our bargain with taxpayers is this. In return for contributing your money to help the world's poorest people, it is our duty to spend every penny of aid effectively. My top priority will be to secure maximum value for money in aid through greater transparency, rigorous independent evaluation and an unremitting focus on results."
'Thus spake Zarathrusta,' or at least Andrew Mitchell, the UK Secretary of State for International Development in 2010 whose grand proclamation set the foreign aid world in a spin.
No one disagrees with the goal of spending aid effectively, but what does the mantra of 'value for money' actually mean in practice? How is it measured, and who decides whether any piece of expenditure represents 'good value,' especially if the goal is the transformation of society?
Governments tend to use value for money to justify rather than inform their policy decisions, especially in times of austerity - while pumping scarce resources into a burgeoning industry of consultants.
As a 'pracademic' who plays a role in this industry and dabbles in critical accounting and economics, the value-for-money debate seems to offer both opportunities and risks. It promises a more critical look at how to allocate resources in support of social change, and it provides one way of debating competing interests in systems that are inherently unequal. But it also threatens to reduce the ability of groups to pursue transformational work that is more difficult to quantify in economic terms.
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