Government funding and the ecumenical sharing of resources - Ecumenical Diakonia: New Challenges, New Responses

Government funding through northern ecumenical agencies to southern ecumenical partners has been a fact for many years. A number of northern agencies secure the major part of the funds they have available from government sources. Others, wary of taking too great a proportion of government funding, have set limits to it. Their fear has been that such funds would in some way alter the nature of the organization or distort its priorities or limit its ability to speak out critically about government action. However, for the vast majority of northern agencies related to the World Council of Churches substantial amounts of the money that they have available to contribute for both emergency and development purposes come from government sources.

New realities

The debate about the effect on the ecumenical sharing of resources of large amounts of the available funding coming from government sources has gained in intensity in the past few years. This is partly because of the attempts within the ecumenical family to clarify a code of conduct for all parties in the sharing of resources, following the ecumenical meetings at Larnaca and El Escorial. The emphasis on mutuality between northern and southern partners, on holistic concepts of development and on consortia rather than bilateral funding relationships can all be seen as conflicting in some way with the demands made by the acceptance of government funding.

At the same time, for many northern agencies the amount of government funding being made available has grown. This is particularly the case in response to the growing size and number of emergency situations around the world, but it is also more generally true. For some, this has coincided with a drop in income or a greater demand to earmark individual contributions from churches and the public. The balance therefore is shifting in a direction which makes unearmarked contributions to generalized programmes and to holistic programmes difficult to maintain at former levels.

At the same time the availability of funds for economic and social development programmes, for responding to emergencies and for rehabilitation needs is far greater than that for mission and evangelism and for the core costs of maintaining the institutional church with its central offices and councils of churches. The amounts of available funds are becoming increasingly unequal as the northern church "aid agencies" grow and "mission" organizations decline.

This begins to pose problems for many of the ecumenical resource sharing forums: continental programmes funding a wide range of individual country programmes, participation in Round Table meetings and agreements to fund total programmes, pooling of resources into a common emergency appeal and accepting a single reporting framework on the total programme. It may be possible to accommodate one or two large ecumenical donors who need to earmark their government funds and attribute them to specific parts of the total programme on which they can specifically report and account. The problem comes when the majority of funds for such a programme come from government sources and require earmarking and separate reporting and accounting. In such circumstances the viability of Round Table arrangements and pooled funding of major programmes decreases. The result is that smaller amounts of money flow from the ecumenical agencies through the ecumenical resource sharing system, subject to what is frequently seen as ecumenical discipline.

While governments have been making more funds available for use through northern agencies and have considered church-related agencies, with their generally low overheads and their access to distribution networks of churches throughout the world, well worth working through, more recently the total aid resources from northern governments have in real terms remained static and in some cases have declined. Added to this are the new demands from Eastern and Central Europe and the diversion of government resources from the south to the east. Consequently, there is a decline in the funds available for some of the traditional programmes which have featured in ecumenical resource-sharing lists for years.

With declining aid resources and the ideology of the 1990s, governments are increasingly looking for "value for money" and more detailed accountability. This often requires higher levels of monitoring and reporting than in the past. If the continued flow of funds is to be ensured, northern agencies must thus ask more questions and place more demands on southern implementing partners to meet these requirements. Frequently southern partners resent this, seeing it as a lack of trust in the relationship. Increasingly, northern agencies are being encouraged to have their own staff monitoring major grants rather than accepting the reports of southern partners. In complex situations, agencies with their own staff permanently based in the area of need are seen by some northern governments as able to provide added value and are therefore at an advantage in obtaining funding for a given situation from government sources.