On 30th March 2022, The Alliance published a new draft discussion paper outlining our broad position on how the Scottish Government (SG) should design and implement its contribution to global solidarity going forward, including but not limited to, the direct financial support it provides to partner countries through its International Development Fund (IDF) and Humanitarian Emergency Fund (HEF).
Read the report here.
The paper makes the case for a new ‘Global Solidarity Strategy’ that coordinates and aligns external affairs, climate justice and international development programming. We think this is vital for a more joined up approach to Scotland’s contribution to global sustainable development, and a new strategy of this kind would sit alongside, not below the new planned global affairs framework. Crucially, it would support coordination between distinct policy portfolios, support better policy coherence, lay out mechanisms to ensure transparency and provide clear parameters on funding criteria.
This new strategy would build on work undertaken and progress already made through the international development review in 2021 but would also reflect more recent changes mentioned above. A full consultation should be carried out to inform this new strategy.
Our report also puts forward a number of practical recommendations on how to improve and develop its financial contributions to global development to enhance Scotland’s role as a global citizen, particularly on:
- Ensuring additional resources to support continuity and coordination between all the new elements of SG’s international development and wider external affairs programming
- Ensuring systematic learnings across the portfolios of international activities, including the Climate Justice Fund (CJF), to improve co-ordination and coherence
- Ensuring transparency in how and why all grants are made to ensure trust and support from all stakeholders
- Continuing to support civil society directly and championing a strong, vibrant civil society here and elsewhere as the most effective vehicle for global solidarity
- Developing suitable mechanisms to support funding local organisations directly in partner countries
- Focussing more SG resources into influencing the national and global context on international issues such as vaccine equity, climate justice and gender equality
- Pioneering new approaches and solutions and by doing so leveraging support from other national, sub-national and private actors in global development
Positioning the draft discussion paper to stimulate input and idea creation, the Alliance now seeks the views of all its members, and crucially the views of their partners across the world, to inform the development of this discussion paper into a clear set of recommendations for the Scottish Government.
After each section, we outline consultation questions for stakeholders to consider. These questions are designed to support more focused feedback, and all questions can be found in this online form on our website.
The questions are not designed to limit the scope of feedback – you can also provide direct feedback on any issue this paper raises by emailing us at admin@intdevalliance.scot . We are seeking views until 1st of June 2022, after which we will finalise this paper and present it to the Scottish Government.
Share your thoughts using this simple online form!
We expect to publish our final recommendations and share these with the Scottish Government in June 2022.