The emergence of political order: how can we foster it?
I recently read volume one of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (Profile Books, 2011) in which he explores how different models of governance have emerged and decayed “from prehuman history to the French Revolution”. Volume two is forthcoming, and will bring the story up to the present day. As someone who works in peacebuilding, which is largely about fostering good governance today, I have a keen interest in how different governance regimes have emerged and decayed in history, if they provide us with clues for the present. So does Fukuyama have lessons for us today?
In line with much current thinking – for example from DFID and the OECD-DAC – about statebuilding, he identifies three key elements of well-governed societies. The first of these is that governments are held accountable by at least some of their citizens for providing good government. The second is the emergence of effective states – effective, that is, at promoting and protecting their own interests and providing services to their people – and autonomous institutions. Institutions are defined following Samuel Huntingdon as “stable, valued recurring patterns of behaviour”. The third is the rule of law, i.e. the existence of rules, ethics or norms which even the highest in the land – king, emperor, president, whatever – is required to follow.
Cause and effect
There are many routes through which countries at different times and places have arrived at different mixes and balances of these three factors, and insufficient space here to summarise the various historical pathways he describes. It is worth noting the role religion seems to have played in establishing rule of law: he explains how Hinduism in India, Christianity in Europe, and to some extent Islam in the Middle East, all helped establish rules to which even rulers were beholden. Whereas China, from ancient times to the present, never seems to have established them, meaning that emperors and modern leaders alike are in some respects above the law.
Fukuyama is clear that circumstances matter – so for example the English were well-positioned by circumstantial factors to enjoy the kinds of freedoms and liberal institutions which emerged. But he’s equally clear that societies can copy and have copied the good institutions which emerged elsewhere. He identifies critical hinge moments in history as turning points, such as the standoff between Pope and Holy Roman Emperor – the Investiture Controversy between Henry IV and Gregory VII in the 11th Century, when the Emperor backed down, and thus laid the seeds of an independent judiciary in Christendom. Another hinge moment was Japan’s adoption of “western” governance models in 1868.
The Investiture Controversy was just one of many events whose unintended consequences may have been critical for the emergence of better governance. E.g. the mediaeval Church in Europe pushed to allow the alienation of land, and the inheritance of land by women, because both suited its own financial and economic interests. But in so doing it helped strengthen the rule of law and – eventually – helped promote more equal treatment of women, neither of which it intended.
Changes that do occur are those in the interests of those in positions of power. The English magna carta met the common needs of all who signed it – rather than being forced on the reluctant king as history often portrays.
Even if not a historical determinist, Fukuyama does caution that those who borrow ideas and institutions from elsewhere are perforce laying them on top of their own institutions and norms, and there is no such thing as a blank slate. So courts and parliaments grafted onto patrimonial societies may give the look of liberal institutions, but they will not automatically take root and undermine patrimonialism; in fact the reverse is just as likely. Peter the Great’s attempt to graft foreign political systems and culture onto Russian systems and culture was ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming the patrimonial political economy there.
Obstacles
The obstacles to emerging “order” and good governance are many, and in particular he singles out the normality of violence and patrimonialism (the natural result of kin selection and reciprocal altruism), and the innate conservatism of humans due to our propensity to create and follow norms. Not only do these factors block the emergence of good governance institutions. Crucially, they are also waiting in the wings to undermine progress when opportunity arises – especially when conditions change and institutions fail to evolve, often because of failures of collective action because out-of-date incentives prevent people from working together in their common interests. The Hungarian barons signed a similar agreement with their king, to what the English nobles signed with King John (both were called magna carta), and at around the same time, but a failure of collective action and a resurgence of patrimonialism meant they frittered away the rights they had thus gained, and Hungary failed to evolve and effective and accountable state as England did.
So what are the lessons for today? What can we learn from Fukuyama to help know how to deal with the situation in Mali, for example, where a weak state is vulnerable to capture and where institutions may be in decay because no longer fit for purpose?
No prescriptions – emergence, not creation
Unfortunately, Fukuyama offers no prescriptions. Indeed, he goes as far as to say that since so many different factors have influenced political evolution, and since political evolution has happened differently everywhere, there is no way to isolate the most influential factors in order to know how to play history in the present, and liberalise the political order anywhere. There is no “way to go about it”. In fact the only thing he prescribes is a great deal of humility in anyone working on “institution building”. And he is very clear that many “rule of law projects” such as those promoted by donors and the UN around the world are wrongly-defined, since they often aim to create or transplant the institutions of law, rather than foster the conditions in which rule of law might emerge. Clearly he is sceptical of donors and UN officials whose mandates require them to seek statebuilding levers, and who thus see such levers where none exist. He draws analogies with Darwin’s theories, and I think he’d agree with my own argument that a liberal political order emerges and evolves, rather than being built or created.
But he does give clues. He’s clear that whiggish history and “modernisation” theory are both wrong, i.e. there is no inexorable certainty that economic growth, economic openness, effective states and liberalism always go together. China exhibited many aspects of a modern state over 2000 years ago, but still resists liberal democracy to this day. Rather, the different aspects of development need to be separated out. If I read him right, Fukuyama says the data from history show that effective states have tended to enable economic growth, but there’s less clarity about whether economic growth leads to effective states. Economic growth also seems a relatively good predictor of democratisation, but the reverse is less clear. Economic development seems to foster social development and a dynamic civil society; while an increasingly civil society appears to promote democratisation; which in turn helps to foster liberal rule of law in ever-widening circles. Further, as economic distribution widens, under democratic politics, it tends to legitimise democracy, thus creating a virtuous circle. If I represent those views graphically:
Effective states → Economic development
Economic development → Democratisation
Economic development → Social development and civil society
Civil society → Democratisation
Democratisation → Liberal rule of law
Liberal rule of law → Democratisation
Economic distribution + Democracy → Democracy
While it is tempting to turn these into a single causal line or set of lines, but this would not be consistent with Fukayama’s own finding: he is clear that there is no single origin or theory of political development. These are but rough sketches of possible causality drawn as lessons from the past, not prescriptions for the future, and there is no obvious or common linear sequence which emerges. Fukayama’s is not a teleological view, in fact he even questions whether liberal democracy will survive the rigours and stresses of coming ages – ironic for a man who once wrote that in the end of the Cold War we witnessed “the end of history”. Indeed, Fukuyama seems to have evolved his thinking considerably since his Neoconservative days.
Lessons, then?
In the end, then, Fukuyama’s lessons seem to be simple ones:
- Sustained good governance in the past depended on the emergence of accountable states and the rule of law
- These depended on autonomous institutions; whether they emerged from within society or were borrowed from elsewhere, they have only worked as well as the conditions allowed, and they inevitably interacted with pre-existing institutions and norms, which often undermined them
- Changes occur when they are in the perceived interests of those in positions of power
- Better governance has to some extent been created by purposeful decisions or hinge events, even though it was very often an unintended consequence rather than planned as such
- There are few levers; but dimly visible opportunities, and all is context specific
- The risk of confusing goals (the rule of law, for example) with strategies for how to attain them
- The need for humility in the face of the challenge of institution building, and especially by outsiders and those wanting quick results.
It’s not really such a great aid mystery
The latest edition of The Spectator carries an opinion piece by Jonathan Foreman entitled The Great Aid Mystery http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8808521/the-great-aid-mystery/. In a diatribe laced with rather tired tropes, and whose style undermines the argument he makes, Foreman’s main points when stripped of rhetoric can be summarised quite simply as:
- The domestic politics of foreign aid are complex and at times seem rather contradictory
- The UK’s growing aid budget is suported more by the elite than by the rest of the electorate
- The size of the UK’s aid budget bears little relation to either the scale of the problem, or our proven ability to achieve successful, sustainable development progress; indeed, it is unclear that enough effective mechanisms exist to deliver the rapidly increasing aid budget successfully
- The UK’s aid sector is dominated by white and middle class people
- Some non-white people don’t support all of the claims being made for aid by aid’s proponents
- Some Conservatives see support for aid as a useful way to detoxify their party’s reputation, while some British people and politicians see UK aid as a way to overcome guilt at aspects of our national past, like slavery and empire
- Much UK aid expenditure happens in places where corruption is quite normal, and much aid is thus lost to corruption and theft
- Aid is to a large degree faith-based, i.e. we have faith it does good, but we can’t be sure
- Some aid workers are seeking a bit of adventure through their involvement.
Therefore he’d like to see:
- A review of the 0.7% target
- A retying of UK aid so more of it is used to buy UK goods and services, thus helping us while we help others
- Better convergence between aid and other aspects of UK foreign policy
- More honesty about aid’s strengths and weaknesses
- Cutting aid from incompetent and/or corrupt recipients and delivery organisations
- Investment in (UK military) logistics capability, so it can be used in delivering emergency aid
- A royal commission into how best to give overseas aid.
Strange that when you strip away the rhetoric, most of what he says makes pretty good sense, even to supporters of overseas development aid like myself. Indeed, apart from one or two of the less useful bullet points in his first list, and the idea of using aid money to build UK military logistics capacity in the second, I think I have made pretty much all the points he makes in the past, either here or elsewhere. And I’m a supporter of (good) aid. But because of all the offensive rhetoric, his cogent points risk getting lost.
Foreman’s article reminds me of three things. The first is that by over-hyping the benefits of aid, and not being completely open about its defects, aid supporters have over the years laid themselves open to just this kind of attack. We really must stop being defensive about aid, and admit its limitations. Margot Asquith’s comment that “it is the height of vanity to suppose you can make an honest man of anyone” is partly apropos here: there is a certain degree of vanity in thinking that the problems of underdevelopment elsewhere can be solved by outsiders. But it is only partly apropos: we may not be able to fix other people’s problems for them, but we can certainly offer to help. We must however stop pretending, as happened at Gleneagles, that poverty reduction is a direct line result of just writing bigger cheques. Because it isn’t, and saying it is ultimately discredits aid when people find out they were sold a pig in a poke.
Second, it is really unhelpful when those who want to criticise aid (as much as those who want to protect and defend it against all comers), feel they can discuss all aid as though it were one and the same thing. UK aid covers a multitude of virtues and sins. It provides food and clean water to victims of disasters, education to young children, technical training and buildings for justice systems, and general budget support to poor country governments, to name but a few. Some of the food gets spoilt, while most gets eaten by those who need it. Some of the water remains polluted, while much becomes clean and safe. Some of the education budget goes to build ghost schools, while some goes to provide life-changing opportunities for boys and girls. Some justice systems remain unjust, despite the training and new buildings; in other cases incremental improvements are seen. And budget support to governments gets co-mingled with other aid and tax receipts, some of which are used to good effect, while much is not. This is the reality of aid in difficult environments, and it is good that a stronger light is now being shone on aid both at home and in the places where it is spent, by citizens there. But we should not draw conclusions – as some readers of Foreman’s article will likely have done – that because things aren’t working perfectly, we should stop the whole enterprise. Journalists should perhaps look at specific aspects of aid on their merits, not treat the whole sector as one. The education system in the UK has been dire for decades, but the response was to try and improve education policy, not stop education completely. Aid is imperfect, and can be improved – and in this respect I agree with Foreman that improvements should come before massive budget increases. 0.7% is certainly an arbitrary target, and in my personal view it can wait.
Third, I would add that we need to stop dealing with aid as if it were the only aspect of UK policy which impacts the lives of people in poorer and less well governed environments. David Cameron put it well in his recent letter to the members of the G8 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-ministers-letter-to-g8-leaders when he said:
“…in our partnership with less developed and emerging economies, I believe we must put a new and practical emphasis on transparency, accountability and open government. Too many developing countries are held back by corruption – and this can be reinforced or even encouraged by poor business practice and a lack of transparency from those that trade with them.
“Our collective efforts on international development over the years give the G8 both the legitimacy and responsibility to move the international agenda forward to focus not just on aid, but also on the underlying drivers of growth and jobs which will lift people out of poverty for good.
” …. The G8 can also support the underlying building blocks of growth, including the rule of law, the absence of conflict and corruption, and the presence of property rights and strong institutions – what I have called the “golden thread” that makes open economies and open societies the best foundation for growth. I hope our work will demonstrate that this is not just about what developing countries do themselves. We in the developed world need to work together with them to prevent money laundering and stamp out bribery and corruption….”
The conversation can no longer be about aid effectiveness, but about promoting effective development progress, and rich countries can offer a great deal more toward this than simply raising their overseas development budgets.
I think Edward Saïd wrote somewhere that the USA can never hope to contribute to sustainable peace in the Middle East until it is willing and able to describe the situation there objectively, comprehensively and accurately. Good advice for President Obama and his new Secretary of State as they embark on four challenging years in the region. And good advice meanwhile for anyone, be they doctor, secretary of state, international NGO staff member or anyone else, who takes on responsibility to help others fix their problems.
George Orwell, in his 1940s essay, Politics and the English Language (downloadable freely through Google), developed six golden rules for writing clearly about politics:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Both Orwell and Saïd offer important advice for peacebuilders, who need to be as clear and complete as possible in their description of the contexts in which they offer to help build peace, so as to avoid misunderstandings and misdiagnoses.
Of course we can’t always describe things publicly as we see them privately. For example, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) might not be in a position to say clearly in public what it thinks of governance in Zimbabwe, because Zimbabwe, as represented by its government, is a member of the UN and thus a master of the UNDP. But all the more reason for the UNDP in Zimbabwe to get its analysis right, and express it as clearly as possible internally.
The point of this preamble is to emphasise that there is a premium on clarity of description in peacebuilding. Nevertheless, most of us who work in the sector regularly find ourselves breaking Orwell’s rules and failing to reach Saïd’s bar. (I know I do.) It is normal for people working in a given technical area to develop a common shorthand for describing the kinds of phenomena they seek to change, and how they seek to do so. It’s an efficient way of working.
But it can also be lazy and dangerous – as demonstrated in James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine about lazy development thinking in southern Africa. With that in mind I list here as examples, five words or phrases in common use which are sometimes evidence of lazy thinking and incomplete analysis, and therefore to ill-fitting or inadequate programming. I have avoided the usual suspects like “empowerment”, which is frequently cited as an example of lazy writing – because often it’s the humbler, less intrusive words and phrases which quietly do most to undermine the argument for peacebuilding.
1. Weakness. Analysts commonly write about “weak governance”, “weak civil society”, etc. This is OK if the weakness is qualified, e.g. governance institutions which are weak because they fail to provide people with an opportunity to influence decisions which affect them, or because they exclude particular sections of society. But taken alone, “weak governance” is a more or less meaningless phrase – and often masks the reality that prevailing governance systems are actually quite strong in some respects, e.g. in repression. Civil society too can only be described as “weak” in regard to some specific function – such as delivering services, providing policy alternatives, etc. The point is, systems, bodies, organisations or people can all be inadequate vis-à-vis a specific standards or objectives, but to call them weak in general terms does nothing to improve the analysis, nor to change things for the better. Indeed, it may become a distraction and an obstacle to change. E.g. International Alert has argued that “weak governance” is an inaccurate and unhelpful description of the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which would be more usefully described in terms of a resilient and effective patrimonial governance system, which skews policies and decisions so they sustain continued instability and violence.
2. Unaccountable. Analysts of governance often refer to leaders, governments, etc. as “unaccountable”. This is unhelpful, because few leaders are truly unaccountable – they are usually beholden to some group or other. By failing to capture this aspect of governance in our analysis, we fail to identify important obstacles and opportunities for change. When we describe leaders as unaccountable, it would be more helpful to explain to whom they are accountable, and for what. Typically, a dictatorial president is accountable to a faction or factions who help keep him in power, and is accountable for protecting the latter’s members while providing them with exclusive economic opportunities.
3. Youth, women – and other collective nouns for large groups of people. Programme analysis frequently includes broad statements about women (50% of the population, after all), or youth (frequently an even larger percentage). It is rare that all women or all young people are affected by the same factors in the same way, and even rarer for peacebuilding strategies or programmes to have an impact on all women or all young people. It is far more useful, for programming purposes, to say which women, or which young people are affected by the phenomena in question, and therefore which specific policy change might help to improve their situation. The words “youth” and “women” are probably the worst examples of this problem, but there’s a long list of other collective nouns which are similarly conducive to lazy thinking: young men, girls, the elite, the media, businesspeople, the private sector, civil society, and so on.
4. Community. Again, unless clearly defined, the word “community” often becomes quite meaningless. E.g. in the UK it became common in the face of Al Qaeda threats, to talk about the “working with the Muslim community” – when it’s hard to imagine there is a single community uniting all 1.5 million Muslims in the country. Labelling people as a community where there is none, can lead others to draw the wrong conclusions. Programme strategies often use the word as though “community” is an unalloyed good: as in community-level governance, community-owned solutions, and community projects. But as we all know, “community” often masks a great deal of inequality, with particular individuals and groups being excluded from decision-making, opportunity and rights, and it is important that peacebuilders understand the factors which perpetuate these problems, rather than ignore them and assume that community level solutions will always be good ones.
5. Conflict. A very basic word in peacebuilding which we often misuse. It’s fairly normal for peacebuilders to understand “conflict” in its broad sense, i.e. as a description of the unresolved differences between people and within society. That’s a useful definition, which allows us to identify the systems, skills and culture for conflict resolution and management as the bench at which we work. But even when the work parameters have been so defined, it’s still common for peacebuilding strategies to be defined and described in terms of “addressing the underlying causes of conflict”, rather than in more appropriate terms such as “addressing the reasons why conflicts become violent”.
No doubt there are countless other words and phrases whose misuse contributes to murky analysis and less-than-surgical programming. But I hope these five examples suffice to make the point. I doubt that a business marketing strategy defined at the level of generality all-too-common in peacebuilding, would convince investors to part with their capital. If so, then we should not get away with it in peacebuilding.
I am not claiming that one has to be able to describe everything with perfect accuracy and pinpoint precision, before embarking on peacebuilding in a particular context. But I do agree with Saïd that it’s important to describe things as accurately, objectively and comprehensively as possible if one is offering to help resolve complex problems. And I’d also suggest that Orwell’s six golden rules are useful guides to help us do so.
The swing of the democratic pendulum is slow and long
(A version of this post appeared earlier on International Alert’s website).
There’s been a lot of fairly superficial reporting of late about “anti-democratic” governments in Italy, Greece and elsewhere. By this, they often mean that Germany, Brussels and the IMF are calling the shots; and that “technocratic” governments have been imposed, etc.
First, there’s nothing necessarily undemocratic about having to go through some difficult times as a result of decisions to which electorates contributed by their voting and other behaviour. One of the main features of democracy is that it corrects in slow time. Corrections in Italy and Greece have included a certain degree of imposition from outside the country – from those to whom the citizens of Italy and Greece are in hock, i.e. to whom they have voluntarily mortgaged their assets.
In the UK, voters went along with a central planning, statist approach from 1940 until Thatcher came along. We then underwent a quarter century of Thatcherite correction, an era which probably came to an end finally in 2007. The pendulum often swings slow and far in democracies. So perhaps the Greek and Italian democratic cultures are being formed by the experience of the corrections they are undergoing now, by the slow and frustrating swing of the pendulum far out of reach. Perhaps in the future, Greek voters will opt for a less hollow state, and for a stronger sense of citizenship and a greater awareness of the Tragedy of the Commons. Perhaps it will become unfashionable to avoid paying taxes, so as to avoid the sense of disempowerment they are going through now.
But there is a democratic deficit within the EU: one that’s more deeply inlaid, and widespread. It’s commonly said, and I agree, that Europeans have become alienated from politics, especially young people. It’s partly because of venal and cynical politicians, sure. But political parties are likely to have less appeal in an era when which social class and which branch of the Church you belong to are far less divisive issues than they once were; when more and more people are educated to a healthy level of scepticism; and when the easy and rapid availability of data allowing us to judge the implications of policies means “think-tank driven” policy often trumps ideology. But we haven’t yet figured out how to replace political parties with some other vehicle for democratic participation. Crowd-sourcing doesn’t do it. Nor do social media quite fit the bill.
Alienated citizens are not what you need in a time of difficult choices. And this has been made worse by the structural dynamics of power within the EU.
National governments have handed over a portion of their power to Brussels. They in their turn have sucked up power from local councils, to compensate. This leaves local councils bereft – where can they suck up power from? Result: local politics have become unattractive and dull, and so young people in particular have no interest in engaging. And if politics don’t work, then where are conflicts anticipated, managed and resolved? Has the EU, famously said to be a glorious peacebuilding project, actually undermined the democratic mechanisms which are so essential to peace?
I don’t say that political power is a zero sum commodity, but it’s not infinitely elastic, either. More of it needs to be accessible to young people, which I think means more local decision-making about things that really matter – not just about how to implement directives from the capital, from Brussels and from other international rule setters.
The EU or The Cold War as Nobel Peace Prize winner?
Today the European Union receives the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve suggested before, that this represents encouragement to do better in resolving the current conflicts dividing the EU. Such as those between north and south, between the generations, between citizen and state, and between state and sub-national entities/identities.
The EU grew out of a peacebuilding initiative which established the commodity communities of steel and coal. But has it really played such an important role in stopping the French and Germans going back to war as intended? Arguably it provided reassurance to France and others, that German reunification would not lead to a German military resurgence. Though ironically, it was Mitterand’s insistence on the Euro as the price of German reunification, which got us into the current mess.
I suspect that the EU institutions are nicely designed, intentionally or not, to prevent war. This is because they seem designed to prevent precipitate decisions and actions. The predominant image of the EU is of endless rounds of not-quite-entirely-fruitless meetings, which seldom reach agreement, yet are never quite frustrating enough to cause people to stop talking. Thus Churchill’s “jaw, jaw” rather than “war, war”.
I also maintain the UK’s and the Republic of Ireland’s respective membership of the EU was a more critical enabling factor for peace in N Ireland than is often credited. Getting rich perhaps became more important for Irish on both sides of the border, than righting historical wrongs. Financial transfers helped. And the current resurgence of separatism in Spain was perhaps earlier delayed by EU transfers and other support, post-Franco.
I can’t help wondering though, if the Cold War should not be receiving the laurels today instead of the EU. Surely superpower deterrence and the availability of places outside Europe where proxy wars could be fought, is what gave Europe time to get over the 1st and 2nd world wars, and grow up a little?
The end of Aid Effectiveness?
I took part in a round table discussion in a post-conflict country recently, looking at aid effectiveness there.
Among the salient details on the table, and which will be familiar from elsewhere:
- The political economy is a tangled web of patronage, linking government, parliamentarians, bureaucrats and some businesspeople, dominating and closing out political and economic space from others – ultimately likely to be a chronic obstacle to development, even if good for short term stability.
- The amount of “traditional” OECD and IFI concessional aid is reducing, when compared with the comparatively vast sums being invested by “emerging” players like China.
- Some of the aid from traditional donors is anyway in the form of instruments like loans and export credit guarantees. Is this really “aid” at all?
- The level of investment and support coming from “emerging” sources is impossible to quantify accurately, because not in the public domain. But it seems fairly clear that little of it is “aid” in the traditional sense of ODA. It’s certainly tied to the national strategic or commercial interests of the donors or lenders.
In our discussion, people were using the phrase “aid effectiveness”, but we ran into two problems. First, as alluded to above, were we really discussing “aid”, or something different, wider? Second, how to define “effective”? It became clear from the interventions of different people around the table that effectiveness was in the eye of the beholder, and that different beholders had quite different, sometimes contradictory definitions.
Simplifying this massively, for the traditional donor agencies, effectiveness was about logframe success: improved livelihoods, better health or education outcomes, higher GDP, peace consolidation, human rights, etc. For other parts of the same governments, as well as for some of the emerging players, it was about maintaining a geostrategic partnership in line with broader interests including their own domestic economies or their foreign policies. For the government, it was about getting resources and support for its own programme – through which inter alia it expects to consolidate its hold on political and economic power. For some beneficiaries, depending on their particular circumstances, it was about welfare or improved livelihood, health etc. outcomes. For others, it was about reinforcing their higher status in the community, and so on.
So it became clear that anyone using the term aid effectiveness would need to clarify what he or she meant by it a priori, to permit useful discussions with others.
But perhaps aid effectiveness is just a minor issue, anyway. In its place, ought we to be considering the intersection between two dynamics slightly differently defined? The first of these is planning and execution of “development” in the context. This surely will – and should – always be a contested notion. After all, defining what progress means has been at the heart of ideological debates for centuries. Let’s call this factor development effectiveness.
The second factor is the influence and involvement of outside agents on and in the development process, i.e. their impact on development and thus their development effectiveness. By this I mean the policies and actions of, for example, bilateral allies and donors, multilaterals, INGOs, international investors and businesses. These all, taken together, add up to a whole lot more than just “aid”.
So the task of those monitoring aid – locally, nationally, internationally – ought perhaps to be transformed into the monitoring of the effectiveness of all these different outside influences. Given that development is inescapably a contested notion, these monitors would have to judge effectiveness with reference to their own ideas (or ideology) of progress. To put this in peacebuilding terms, they would perhaps be monitoring the Conflict-Sensitivity of Outside Influences. (CSOI doesn’t really trip off the tongue though, does it?)
History and the post-2015 debate
Development is human progress. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast published a powerful conceptual framework in 2009 to explain human progress already achieved, in their book Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge University Press, 2009). The book continues to be a source of great inspiration to me, and is highly relevant to the current debate on development guidance post-2015.
In an International Alert report in 2010, we summarised the book’s central argument, and I include this again here as a stimulant to useful thinking by those involved in the post-2015 debate. It reminds me above all that development is history looking forwards, hence we need to learn lessons from – though not attempt to repeat – history (or development as seen from the future…).
Their analysis is based on five key interlocking premises.
• Economic and political progress are intimately intertwined, and cannot be considered separately if they are to be understood.
• Violence is endemic to human society. Ruling elites have a strong incentive to retain control of violence, so they can control access to resources, ensuring sufficient peace and stability to allow them and their allies to benefit from such access, and using violence to disrupt access by others.
• Access to economic and political opportunities becomes increasingly open as societies develop. In early stages of development, opportunities are restricted to and bargained and fought over by the elite(s), but then become more open to others. Only when access became more open has sustainable progress occurred.
• Understanding organisations, institutions (i.e. the rules of the game), beliefs, values and culture is critical to understanding how society is organised and evolves.
• One of the critical changes taking place as societies develop is from the personal exercise of economic and political opportunity and power (e.g. “big man” politics, landownership linked to the capacity for organised violence) to the impersonal (e.g. shareholder-owned corporations, freehold land, and offices of state).
North and his colleagues identify a process of transition from what they term a limited access order to an open access order. In a limited access order, political and economic opportunities are limited to the elites. The characteristics of limited access polities are vulnerability to shocks, arbitrary legal processes, personal insecurity, small governments accountable only to the elite, and patronage-based systems of governance. Open access is characterised by greater personal security, larger and more decentralised government, participatory citizen-based governance, the rule of law, and a more resilient political economy.
While considerable evolution and back-and-forth variation is possible within these broad parameters, a fairly rapid step-change towards open access has occurred in history when three so-called “doorstep conditions” have been met:
• The establishment of rule of law for the elites;
• The existence of “perpetually lived” (i.e. institutionalised) forms of public and private elite organisations, including the state itself; and
• Consolidated control by the state of the military and other forces of security.
Once these conditions are established for the elite, circumstances can lead them to be extended to include other members of society, and a broadening of access to political and economic opportunities can occur quite quickly. This step-change is reckoned to have happened for example in the UK and the US around the end of the eighteenth century. North and his co-authors claim that most societies – and certainly all those known as fragile contexts – have yet to make this step-change from limited to open access order. It seems essential that post-2105 thinking pays attention to development processes that can contribute to these three kinds of changes.
A tactical approach to post-2015 MDGs advocacy
In advocating for a better replacement for the MDGs post-2015, there are two main elements. First, the content: what kinds of things matter in development? Second, the model itself: how best to frame the content so that all those who need to be, are guided, encouraged and incentivised to adopt the right directions? In a crowded advocacy market, which of these should we focus on?
Many people in the field of development and international relations are currently engaged in figuring out what should replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) after 2015, by which date very few of the goals will have been achieved globally, and none in fragile or conflict affected countries. Everyone involved has his or her idea about what the new international framework should contain, and some (though fewer) are discussing the equally important question of what kind of framework we should use to replace the discredited MDGs. Plenty of other issues are preoccupying those involved, not least how to ensure legitimacy, whether the new goals should be universal or not, and how to integrate them with other frameworks like the proposed Sustainability Goals and the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals. But ultimately, the two main questions about the post-MDG framework concern getting the content right, and finding the right model. In this article I will very briefly explore each of these items, before examining which of them matters most from a tactical advocacy perspective.
Content
It will be no surprise to readers of my earlier blog posts, or of International Alert’s many communications on this issue over the past two years, that from my perspective the content of the post-2015 framework should reflect an understanding of development which is as comprehensive as possible, and which combines the political and technical elements necessary for human progress. Although I work for a peacebuilding organisation, I don’t think adding in a couple of extra goals on peace and security will do the trick. What’s more important is that the content of the post-2015 framework as a whole should make sense from a peacebuilding perspective, rather than simply integrating some of the language of peacebuilding into a list of other development issues or themes.
With that in mind, and drawing on history, it seems fairly clear that the post-2015 framework should be designed above all to encourage and incentivise progress towards a world in which people can be reasonably assured of fair access to security and justice, of opportunities to earn a decent income and accumulate assets, of opportunities to participate in decisions which affect them, of supportive and trusting relationships, and of access to opportunities to maintain and improve their wellbeing and that of their families.
Of course, every country and every society is at a different stage in terms of its progress towards the kind of situation I have just described. Nor is there any rule which says that development progress is linear or smooth. Development is an unpredictable and to some extent uncontrollable process, replete with lurches forward and lurches backward. And it happens primarily in households, communities and countries, not globally all at once. So it makes no sense to set up global goals with timebound numeric targets. What kind of model might work?
The model
Much of the discussion about post-2015 so far has been about the process for developing and agreeing the content for post-2015. Not enough has been said about the model itself, which is a pity because this is at least as important as the content. What kind of international model really has the power to persuade, guide and incentivise developmental thinking, planning and behaviour across the world, and especially in places run by governments whose main incentive is to stay in power no matter what? Again, I won’t repeat here in detail what colleagues and I have described elsewhere. Our thinking so far at International Alert is that the best model to replace the MDGs is one with three main elements. This would meet a set of principles we have also enumerated elsewhere – of which the two most important are probably that it should be about development, not aid, and that it would reflect the very powerful concept of subsidiarity, i.e. that plans and activities should be made, implemented and monitored at the lowest or least centralised level possible.
This leads us to propose a model with three main elements:
- An overall vision defined globally, sharing much with the Millennium Declaration, and setting out a normative vision of how people and societies can live together successfully and peacefully with human rights being fulfilled. This would likely contain much of the language of security, justice, income, assets, supportive relationships, governance and wellbeing which I referred to above.
- The major locus of strategy, planning and targets would be the nation – given that we continue to live in a world still made up of nations, their governments and citizens. Countries would have to make their plans according to their own circumstances and realities and, crucially, according to their own political and economic cycles. The trick – and this is where I am still searching for ideas – is how to maximise the incentives for countries and their governments to aim for ambitious yet politically realistic development progress within the comprehensive set of criteria we recommend. Most likely regional organisations can play an important role here. That will be the subject of a future blog.
- The third element, meanwhile, is about the other entities which can have an enabling or disabling impact on national development: multi-national companies, regional and intergovernmental organisations, international NGOs, etc. They too, acting within their mandates, need to consider how they can contribute to long-term sustainable development writ large.
Advocacy tactics
So getting the nature of the content right and the nature of the incentives model right must be the two main ambitions for those with in interest in the post-2015 framework – whether or not they agree with our specific proposals for each. The perfect post-2015 framework can thus be shown symbolically by the blue circle on following graph, in which the x-axis represents the nature of the model, and the y-axis represents the nature of the content. For simplicity, let’s consider the content along a spectrum from “narrow” (à-la MDGs) to “comprehensive”, and the potential model along a spectrum from “MDG-type” (top-down) to “in line with subsidiarity” (i.e. in keeping with my proposal above).
Now, even though we haven’t yet figured out the right mix of incentives and rules to make this proposed system work, my gut feeling is that others with more knowledge of international relations and governance can. So I feel pretty strongly that the blue ball in the graphic represents the right outcome. Nevertheless I know it’s an unlikely one. There is too much invested in the MDG-type goal based concept already, to let it go; and other ideas than Alert’s will also prevail in terms of content. Others are in a similar position to me: no matter what their preferred ideal content and model are, they won’t see them enshrined in international protocols by the UN General Assembly in 2016. Compromise is the name of the game.
Tactically then, it is useful to consider the trade-offs, and a simple way to do so is in terms of the outcome of a bargaining game. There are four outcomes to consider as represented by the second graph below, with blue circle A as the perfect outcome: comprehensive content as seen from a peacebuilding perspective, and a vision-based global framework based on the principles mentioned above, especially subsidiarity.
A second outcome, the result of pushing hard for maximum success in terms of both the model and content, is represented by the yellow circle B. In this case, by holding out for a high standard on both content and model, the advocates have effectively bargained away too much of both. The outcome is mediocre on both counts.
The green circle C, meanwhile, represents an outcome in which the subsidiarity-based model is largely intact, while the content is less comprehensive than one would like to see. And this is balanced in the graph by the fourth possible outcome shown by the red circle D, in which the incentives model has been eroded a great deal, but the peacebuilder’s perspective has been maintained with regards to content.
Of course this would not be a bargaining exercise in real life. Those of us arguing for circle A have limited influence and power; perhaps the best we can hope for is some version of B, i.e. a post-2015 framework which is somewhat acceptable from a peacebuilding perspective, and somewhat acceptable as an incentives model. But since B is neither strong in terms of content, nor likely to be an effective international approach, it might be better to aim for either C or D, putting more effort into persuading others of the merits either of our preferred content, or our preferred model. But which one?
My first response to this question was: Circle D is a better advocacy outcome than Circle C. After all, international incentives, whether MDG-type or other, have limited currency in the real world unless backed up by the likelihood of powerful carrots and sticks, and these still seem far off. And we know that aid money – one carrot that certainly does exist – is not the main driver of change, so an insufficiently powerful carrot! And getting the content right is surely more important? But on reflection, I think the better advocacy aim is Circle C. Why?
First, insufficient attention is being paid, at least thus far in the post-MDG discourse, to the incentives and measurement model. (Indeed, we still don’t know what to call it, with the rather weak “Post-2015” doing service until an appropriate abstract noun accompanied by an adjective or two can be found). That is odd, because there are reams of papers roundly and soundly criticising the way the MDG model has been (mis-)used. Therefore it seems only right to make more noise about and galvanise thinking about a better alternative. Second, from the way some of the High Level Panel members are talking, as well as insiders in the UN system, it seems that the battle for a less technical, more political and less a-historical post-2015 framework is already largely won, so better to put our resources as peacebuilders into stimulating some creative thinking about the model itself. And third, if we do succeed in achieving a model based on subsidiarity and the other principles defined by International Alert, then there will be ample space within the system for civil society and other voices in fragile and conflict affected countries to push for the content which they see as appropriate in their context. They may have to work hard for it, but that is the nature of political change – and it is well known that civil society space and voice which is hard-won, is hardest to reclaim.
Kyrgyzstan and Guinea?
I am fond of saying that one of the biggest problems in the international development & peacebuilding sectors is the hammer-nail phenomenon. I.e. when organisations tend to identify the problems (nails) for which their particular methods and tools (hammers) just happen to be the most likely solution. This applies most worryingly with the big international beasts of the development sector like the World Bank, UNDP, USAID and DFID; but also to smaller NGOs like the one I work for. It also applies in a slightly different way to individuals, each of whom when designing strategies and projects tends to bring the same set of analytical lenses to the task. I’m the first to admit that I tend to analyse any context in terms of the political economy of peace first and foremost, and I also tend to see the need for interventions which influence the policy discourse, wherever I go. This inherent “professional bias” is why individuals need to work within diverse teams when doing strategic analysis, and why organisations need to make sure they integrate multiple perceptions when they do theirs.
The scope of my job changed this year. Having previously been overseeing International Alert’s Africa and its cross-cutting thematic work, I took on a wider responsibility, including for our work in Asia. After working in and on Africa since 1985, it has been fascinating to try and understand the peacebuilding context in Asian countries where we work. During a trip to Nepal, I was struck by how ideological some of the peace and conflict issues are, compared with my experiences in Africa over two and a half decades. If African conflicts are all too often about how to cut the cake of power, in Nepal I had a sense that at least some of the conflict actors have a genuine desire to bake the policy cake in different ways. One young ex-Maoist soldier interviewed for a documentary was genuinely puzzled that her leaders had agreed to a peace in which they hadn’t yet achieved their (her) aims of changing society.
On my first ever visit to Kyrgyzstan this month, I had another surprise. During the week or so I spent there, I found myself referring again and again to programming options we had selected in the Republic of Guinea, in West Africa; and seeing them as highly relevant to the Kyrgyzstan context. People were surprised and, frankly, so was I. While human societies everywhere exhibit many similarities, I hadn’t expected to find many connections between vast, mountainous landlocked Kyrgyzstan, with its sub-zero winters and ski-resorts, and hot, tropical Guinea, nestled on the West African coast. Yet barely an hour went by without me thinking of similarities in programming, so what was going on? Undoubtedly this was partly because of my professional bias, but was there something more?
On reflection, I realised that there were an uncanny number of similarities between the two countries, for example:
- They were both colonised by European powers in the nineteenth centuries; both cynically exploited by the metropolitan power in question, and both decolonised in a rush. The leadership of both was captured by big men, post-independence.
- Neither had much of pre-colonial history of the “nation-state” as the basis for political governance and identity. In any case, the colonial powers undermined and skewed the governance systems they found in place.
- Both were coloured by communism: Kyrgyzstan as part of the USSR, and Guinea as a soviet client after independence.
- Both countries have an interesting and at times difficult ethnic mix, and in both cases, one of the main ethnic groups is traditionally pastoral, and another primarily sedentary. In both countries ethnicity and ethnic identity provide simple labels which have been exploited for political and economic purposes by leaders.
- Both are sparely populated countries with limited infrastructure, and the inherent challenges of communication that brings.
- In neither country does the population have a great deal of confidence in the capacity of the central government to represent its interests well – although both countries are currently presided over by elected heads of state who seem genuine about promoting national reconciliation, following political disruption in the recent past. Probably it is also fair to say that both governments are operating in a political system which inherently obstructs such efforts.
- Both are situated in an inherently unstable neighbourhood, where conflicts can spill across borders.
- Both are countries in which high value improved agricultural land is at a premium.
- Both face the challenge of exploiting mineral wealth peacefully, in the face of all the well-known ingredients for mining to spark violence.
- Both have a tradition of out-migration for jobs and economic opportunity.
- Both have a large bulge of young people with limited economic, political and social prospects – and who are easily attracted to religious or ethnic narratives offering an apparent alternative.
- Both are major transit routes for drugs – from Afghanistan to Russia, and from Latin America to southern Europe.
- Both countries are receiving a great deal of assistance from the international community, which finds it hard to figure out where and how best to apply its help conflict-sensitively.
- In Guinea a few years ago, when designing a project, my colleagues and I were struck by the difficulty Guineans had in pursuing political discussions to consensual outcomes. As a then senior politician said to us: “we have difficulty talking about issues in ways which allow us to find feasible solutions”. This month in Bishkek, a civil society activist told me “we don’t know how to talk about the difficult issues in Kygyzstan”… Uncanny.
So perhaps, yes, I find it hard to shed the analytical lenses I tend to carry from country to country. But perhaps, too, it’s not that surprising that conversations with West Africans and Central Asians lead me to think that a similar mix of programming options make sense in both locations:
- Extended dialogue, based on a comprehensive political analysis, carefully facilitated to allow participants to explore difficult issues without retreating to knee-jerk pre-defined positions, and linking them too readily to questions of ethnic identity.
- Research and policy dialogue on how economic development can better serve the interests of peace – and including a focus on the extractive mineral sector and land.
- Finding ways to help young people shape their future, through education and economic support.
- Building a local capacity for mediation – i.e. so that people within communities can intervene at an early stage in local disputes, and help avoid them escalating out of control and taking on an ethnic hue; and in so doing reinforce the idea of peaceful co-existence.
- Working with local actors to try and shape the institutional environment – governance – to be more conducive for peace; and with international institutions like the UN and the World Bank so that their programmes do the same.
Phil Vernon 