Neutrality: an ethical or a pragmatic issue?
Last week I took part, with colleagues from Conciliation Resources (CR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), in a debate held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Chaired by Tim Jacoby of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, the debate was constructed around the issue of neutrality as seen from the perspective of humanitarian and peacebuilding organisations. In an interesting discussion, what struck me in particular was how instrumentally each organisation seems to view the idea of ‘acting neutrally’.
Neutrality – studiously not-taking-sides or pronouncing on the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of governments and other parties to conflict – is sacred to the ICRC, because only by remaining studiously neutral can they obtain the laissez-passer they need from governments and rebel groups, allowing them to perform their vital humanitarian functions. For CR, a peacebuilding organisation with a strong focus on mediation and dialogue, neutrality is an important public good which, when genuinely practised by those supporting peace negotiations, enhances the power and strength of their ‘good offices’, and thus the prospects for peaceful outcomes. For MSF, neutrality is a fiction: by intervening in a humanitarian disaster one is immediately engaging in a political act and – however slightly – affecting the outcomes in a way that goes beyond the purely humanitarian, but is not something to dwell on, as it gets in the way of their critical mission, saving lives. And for International Alert, where I work: although we don’t discuss neutrality often, it is quite clear to us that peacebuilding is an intrinsically political enterprise, and that by espousing the values and cause of peace we are not neutral, because we clearly believe that certain outcomes are better than others.
I hope I have not misrepresented the perspectives of my fellow panellists, in highlighting merely one aspect of what I heard each of them say. While we had different positions on acting neutrally, all panellists agreed that as NGOs it made good sense to act impartially towards different players in a conflict situation, i.e. to be seen by all sides not to take sides, and to garner a reputation for so doing in order to maintain the space to operate.
What struck me was that all four of us described our approach to neutrality in terms of its relation to our specific mission and the outcomes and aims we seek to attain, meaning that we all took what I would call an instrumental view of the issue. And this implies that neutrality, far from being the much-vaunted ethical principle it is sometimes made out to be in humanitarian circles, is actually much more of a pragmatic choice, even – especially? – for the Red Cross.
THE UTILITY OF VIOLENCE
A second aspect of the debate was, for me, far more challenging. The chair asked all the panellists – who were united in their commitment to peace – how we felt about the utility of violence. Were there occasions when we felt that violence was the right option? This was difficult. I work for an NGO whose raison d’être is building peace; I know from the (albeit victor’s) history I was taught at school in the UK that peace of sorts has often been attained through violence, and am not myself a pacifist… I can certainly think of situations to which the rational and ethical response involves committing acts of violence, not merely in defence but also to obtain a political change where other means have failed. But can I imagine a situation in which the peacebuilding organisation for which I work would explicitly support the use of violent means for peaceful ends?
As a panellist at that point I had to disassociate myself from my organisation and say that while I could personally support the use of violence in some circumstances, and particularly when applied by a legitimately elected government to provide security to its own citizens and/or following the rules of just war, I could not imagine International Alert coming out explicitly to condone violence. Alert’s published Programming Framework – the core philosophy of our approach to peacebuilding – says “though we recognise that there are times when fighting is justified, this is a last resort that is best avoided”, and I cannot recall a time when I was in a group of colleagues discussing or agreeing that a given situation where we work had reached the point where fighting was indeed justified, much less saying so publicly. In practice, we are an organisation which believes not only in peaceful outcomes but also in peaceful means of reaching them – and certainly as far as our own involvement is concerned. And I think this is true of pretty much all international NGOs operating in conflict-affected places.
But consider this: international humanitarian NGOs have been evolving apace over the past couple of decades. They have moved from being rather technical instruments of service delivery, to understand more and more, and embrace in their practice, the essentially political nature of the issues on which they intervene, and of the interventions themselves. As part of this journey they have increasingly embraced a campaigning and advocacy role, in their countries of origin, internationally, and in the countries where they intervene. They are, without a doubt, far more switched on and more interesting than they once were. Some of them sail pretty close to the wind – inevitable perhaps, when engaging in politics in and around situations of humanitarian intervention and underdeveloped and fragile contexts where poverty and exclusion abound.
At the time of the Biafran War, MSF’s founders knew they were committing a profoundly political act by intervening to save lives. The humanitarian imperative led them to act politically. At the time it was new, yet would seem normal today. NGOs continue to evolve and become yet more political, and yet more conscious of the nuances and subtleties of the contexts where they intervene. Some have found themselves – perhaps unwittingly – acting as the “humanitarian wing” of western armies – the way some of the NGOs collaborated with Washington in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion is good evidence of this. NGOs get sorely frustrated by the inability of politicians to resolve armed conflicts which seem tractable. So far, this has led them to respond with ever-increasing political advocacy, and in some cases this has been quite effective. The Iraq Body Count is a simple and effective example. The Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda coalition was formed by a group of frustrated service delivery and human rights organisations saying enough is enough, and I believe it had a significant impact in changing international and Ugandan attitudes to the never-ending LRA war.
But the political tools available in conflict are often too blunt to make enough of a difference. Just as politicians at times find themselves using military force to pursue ‘politics by other means’, I wonder how these increasingly political NGOs will end up. Many humanitarian NGOs – as distinct from peacebuilders or human rights organisations – have long accepted an overlap with armed forces: think of NGOs protected by militias in Somalia, or armed military escorts for humanitarian convoys in almost any other war zone. As their political evolution continues, can we envisage, at some point in the future, humanitarian NGOs operating a paramilitary wing? Or will they from time to time, but outside the public glare, raise funds from politically interested billionaires to hire Executive Outcomes to intervene with force, as a rational and ethical response to the lack of political will for peace which they so often encounter in long-running, vested-interest, status quo-reinforcing civil wars where they so often find themselves sticking a band-aid on a festering wound?
OK, I know it’s nonsense. Just a thought experiment and a mere blog. But it is intriguing to wonder how the political evolution of values-based international NGOs will continue.
The politics of development is the development of politics
Lots of good buzz in and around the UN General Assembly in New York this week on the international development front. David Cameron making it clear he’s still committed to a growing UK aid programme – and co-chairing the first meeting of the UN’s High Level Panel on a new development framework to replace the MDGs after 2015. A large group of NGOs involved in the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding produced a great 6-pager – Bringing Peace into the post-2015 Development Framework – explaining why the post-2015 framework needs to have peacebuilding and conflict prevention at its heart, which would help fix one of the problems with the MDGs, which are far too technical and not nearly political enough.
At International Alert, where I work, we discussed whether to sign up to the Bringing Peace paper. We wanted to – we agreed with practically all of it, and it made sense that we’d show solidarity with fellow NGOs working on the same issue as ourselves. But in the end we decided we couldn’t, because the paper diverged from something we’ve been saying consistently for the past two years. The Bringing Peace paper suggests the need for the MDGs to be replaced by another set of global goals, and that individual country plans must be tailored to hit these goals and targets.
From our perspective, global goals and targets make no sense, and we have explained why on our website. We have developed a set of principles the post-2015 MDGs need to follow. One of these is subsidiarity, which Wikipedia defines as follows: ‘Subsidiarity is an organizing principle stating that a matter ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority capable of addressing that matter effectively. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level.’
With subsidiarity in mind, along with the widely accepted aid doctrine of Taking Context as the Starting Point, it seems absurd to set goals, targets and indicators globally, when development happens nationally and locally. We’ve instead proposed on our website a post-2015 framework with three dimensions:
1. The need for a global vision, drawing heavily on the Millennium Declaration, setting out in broad terms the kind of world we aspire to live in, where people would have access to economic opportunity, justice, security, representative governance, the chance to participate in a supportive community, and steadily improving prospects for personal and family well-being.
2. Meanwhile the main focus of planning and implementing progress would continue to be the nation state and its component parts, right down to local level; national and other plans would be encouraged to show how they will make progress in line with the global vision, but they will be tailored primarily to the needs and opportunities of their specific context.
3. Meanwhile international organisations, regional groupings of nations, and businesses would also play their part.
In the end, even though the international community can do its best to incentivise individual countries to do their utmost to move in the direction of the global vision, it seems pointless to say that each country must make its plans to fit the vision. That ignores local politics, would utimately leave the international community whistling in the wind, and would feed cynicism about the whole endeavour.
Because in the end so much development is about politics, in two ways. First, the process of development itself is primarily political, concerned with highly political issues like equality, equity and changes in access to knowledge, power and resources. Secondly, development is also about the evolution and acceptance of a different politics – of institutions, practices and norms which favour broad participation and accountability.
One of the civil society representatives at the UN this week, Lancedell Mathews from Liberia, put it well when he spoke at an event in front of several heads of state, including his own. Referring to the New Deal for Effective Engagement in Fragile States, an agreement between donors and fragile state governments which is laced with good ideas (and fancy acronyms), he said – my emphasis added:
“It is our thinking that the New Deal is not only about the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals, FOCUS, TRUST and other acronyms. For us, it is essentially about building and maintaining honest, respectful and mutually accountable relationships, not only between the international community and states, but also and more importantly between both of them and the people they serve. As already mentioned throughout various messages that we spread this week, we believe that the New Deal should be used to change national planning processes because we strongly believe that peacebuilding, and conflict prevention, should and certainly must be made the priority if we want to see progress in development. This agenda is not only relevant for societies that are already conflict-affected – the events of the Arab spring and the global financial crisis show us that no society is immune from fragility – and that all societies can guard against it through the principles of inclusiveness, responsiveness, fairness and accountability.”
Justine Greening: The Reluctant Minister for International Development?
“I didn’t come into politics to distribute money to people in the Third World”, Justine Greening is said to have told PM David Cameron when he moved her from Transport to DFID in last week’s UK government reshuffle.
At first sight it looks like a double whammy for the British overseas aid programme: on the one hand, losing Andrew Mitchell who, whatever his original reasons for getting into politics, had shown every sign over the past five years that he was very happy to devote his political career to overseas aid, and who had impressed his staff and others with his sincerity, energy, and some of his ideas. On the other, finding that he’d been replaced as Secretary of State for International Development by Justine Greening who it seems would have preferred almost anything other than DFID; indeed, is said to have seen her move to DFID as a demotion.
I too regret that DFID has lost Andrew Mitchell’s leadership: he brought commitment but also a welcome degree of skepticism to his brief, and he was quite rightly very conscious of the need not to take UK taxpayers’ generosity for granted, and to treat them with respect. But what’s done is done, and I also see two bright aspects of Greening’s arrival on the scene.
First, the good news for Greening which I hope her officials have already shared with her, is that in general DFID’s role is not to “distribute money to people in the Third World” [wherever that is]. Instead, it’s to help stimulate and promote the values, institutions and practices which both enable and represent development progress. As her officials have no doubt explained, this is a challenging business bearing little relation to the distribution of money in poor communities which, as Graham Greene illustrated in The Comedians many years ago, is not usually very effective, and can contribute to conflict. If Greening likes a challenge, she should find her time at DFID very stimulating indeed.
Second, there is a great deal to be said for the idea of The Reluctant Minister. I don’t recall the exact circumstances of Douglas Alexander’s appointment to DFID in 2007, but do remember very well how his initial skepticism led him to ask much more difficult questions of DFID than his predecessors had done. At first this was confusing, and some of us doubted his commitment. The word from some corners of DFID was that “he didn’t get it”. Thank goodness for that, because as a result of his questions and the directions he set as Secretary of State, DFID produced probably its best ever White Paper – Building our Common Future – in 2009, focussed clearly on critical issues like climate change adaptation, economic recovery, and strengthened citizenship and citizen-responsive state institutions in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
DFID is a world leader among international development institutions. It’s been among the pioneers of new thinking about what “development” means, and how rich countries like the UK can promote and stimulate development in poor and fragile countries. But there are still many many questions to answer, and I’d like to think that once the new Secretary of State gets her head round her new brief, she’ll bring a fresh set of eyes to these.
People and organisations in the UK’s overseas development sector are getting hot under the collar. This is because the government is not prioritising legislation to enshrine a perpetual commitment to spend 0.7% of UK Gross National Income (GNI) on overseas development aid (ODA). Letters are being drafted, articles are being written, politicians are being lobbied. After all, this issue has cross-party support, so why not just rush it through parliament?
Well, there are several reasons why not.
First, it’s politically naïve to push this issue now. In case NGOs haven’t noticed, most voters are not clamouring for this to be made into law. In fact, most people would rather see UK aid reduced, not increased in line with the 0.7% pledge. The Daily Mail is among voices asking why we are helping people far away when we have so many problems at home. On the whole it’s only aid specialists and some among the political elite who want to increase aid. So pushing the Overseas Development Spending Bill through parliament now would be like raising a red rag to a bull. Asking a government already under pressure to raise a red rag to a bull seems rather naïve – especially when it has already committed itself to raise the aid budget to 0.7%, and when its own backbenchers already have difficulty explaining the overseas aid budget to their constituents.
Second, there’s no logical basis for 0.7%. In fact, what is this obsession with 0.7% all about? No-one really seems to know where it came from. As far as I know, someone calculated a few decades ago that the investment gap in what was then known as the Third World was the equivalent of 0.7% of OECD GNP, ergo by transferring that amount from the First to the Third World over a period of a few years, developing countries would catch up. That rather simplistic notion of “development” has long been blown apart, but somehow the mythical, or perhaps I should say “mystical” figure of 0.7% remains. Paul Collier has argued that because aid is a global public good, there is a problem of free-riding and therefore it’s useful to have a target, however arbitrary, to aim for and hold governments to. Hmm, fair enough perhaps, but why should it be 0.7%?
Third, surely it’s basic economics that an arbitrary target creates a perverse supply incentive?
Fourth, it seems absurd to enshrine this in law. Are any other budgetary targets similarly enshrined, such as the percentage of GNI to be spent on defence, education, health, etc? I doubt it, as it would make little sense to base one’s national education, health or any other policy on the cost of inputs, when one should rather be focused on the outcomes. The same should be true of aid. In any case, I find it profoundly undemocratic to pass laws which simply cannot be enforced, and which bind the representatives of future UK voters to spend a fixed proportion of their voters’ money on overseas aid, whatever circumstances they may be in at the time.
Fifth, and most important: it’s the quality of aid that matters, not the volume. The current government has rightly emphasised results and value for money in its approach to overseas aid. This is partly to head off the anti-aid critics, but it’s also a healthy reaction to more than a decade in which UK aid grew and grew and grew, but with far too little attention being paid to whether it was targeted at the right issues, in the right places, nor whether the theories behind it and delivery mechanisms being used were right. One can certainly argue that the current government has swung too far in the other direction with its near-obsession with value for money, but even so it’s understandable it felt the need to do so.
Squaring the circle
The UK government has a difficult circle to square. It is committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of GNI, with or without passing the Bill. Even though we are in recession, that implies an increase of more 25% in aid expenditure over the course of a few short years. Meanwhile, its criticism of the previous government’s approach to aid means it has called into question some of the delivery mechanisms which allow DFID (the UK’s Dept. for International Development) to spend money in fairly big sums at a relatively low internal cost: large scale budget support to developing country governments, large grants to the UN and other inefficient multilateral organisations, and strategic grants to UK-based development NGOs, to name three. It is also committed to bringing down DFID’s in-house costs, which are already among the lowest in the world compared to DFID’s international peers, by cutting staff numbers and their admin support (ask any DFID staff member how easy it is to get a new stapler, or get the photocopier fixed….). The government is also committed to spending about one-third of its overseas aid in so-called fragile states, where systems are weak, governments are relatively undemocratic and unaccountable to their people, and where aid needs to be programmed with particular care if it is not to be wasted, misused, stolen or to do outright harm. And finally, people in the aid sector now understand that “development”, especially in fragile contexts, is far more complicated than providing roads, schools and clinics – it is about the emergence of stable, democratic and accountable insitutions including a social contract: thus development aid is also far more complex and complicated than we used to think.
So in short, Her Majesty’s Government is trying simultaneously to increase overall aid expenditure, spend a greater proportion in difficult places, tackle ever-more complex problems and find new, more effective and efficient delivery mechanisms which are fit for new and more complex purposes. How can it possibly square that circle?
A few years ago I was discussing this issue with an ex-minister for UK overseas development who by then had long retired. I explained why I felt it was more important to focus on the quality, not the quantity of aid. He readily agreed, but he told me that when he’d been a minister, he had felt constrained by the politics of aid to keep increasing the ODA budget, even when his officials told him they were overwhelmed. I think he felt that it was important to keep stepping up the voltage applied to ODA, lest momentum be lost.
Squaring almost any circle is made harder by politics, and I would not go as far as to recommend cuts in the UK government’s aid spending. That would be naïve, and probably also wrong. But the argument against reducing DFID’s staffing and admin support, making it harder to deliver aid effectively in fragile contexts is one that can and should be made. And I certainly think it’s time to stop pushing for the 0.7% figure to be reached as fast as possible. Above all it is entirely the wrong moment – if there ever is a right one – to enshrine 0.7% perpetually in law.
We have to start having a more honest conversation about development, and development aid. The message of Make Poverty History and those who campaign incessantly for 0.7%, that global poverty can be overcome simply by financial transfers, is misinformation which insults people living in poor and fragile countries while doing little to change their long-term prospects. Development is about political change and societal transformation in fragile contexts, not just financial transfers. It’s time to move the terms of this conversation on, before the Daily Mail does it for us.
The post-2015 MDGs: to which tribe do you belong?
Discussions about how or whether to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), after they “expire” in 2015 are gathering pace. I have argued elsewhere that although it is perhaps unlikely to produce a model that will satisfy those of a progressive disposition, the discussion itself is valuable, as it provides an opportunity to debate what “development means” among a wider group of people than are normally involved.
Dorine E Van Norren recently published an interesting article outlining how the MDGs might be expanded and made more useful as a communication tool. Specifically, for communicating a deeper and broader analytical narrative of what “development means”.
She also identifies, rather neatly, four categories of people with regards their perceptions of the MDGs:
- Optimists: those who see the items contained in the MDGs as key to change
- Strategic realists, who are happy to use the flawed MDGs to hold politicians’ feet to the fire over their commitment to poverty reduction
- Sceptics like myself, who doubt the utility of the MDGs and question whether they represent human development effectively
- Radical critics, for whom the MDGs represent a waste of space and the failure of the system.
Her article spurred me not only to self-identify as a member of the Sceptics tribe with an eye on how my cousins the Radical Critics and Strategic Realists are getting on, but also to identify four broad categories of questions which those with an interest in the post-2015 MDG agenda are debating. These are, grosso modo:
- Ideology: how should we define development or human progress?
- Purpose: if we truly need the MDGs or something to take their place, what are they for?
- Model: once we have decided on the purpose of the post-MDG thing, what kind of framework is most suitable for this purpose?
- Process: what is the right and legitimate process through which to articulate the answers to questions 1-3, and who should be involved?
Big questions, all. And clearly in the right order. Provided that after developing one’s own, or one’s organisation’s answers to all four, one answers them all again, following the process defined in response to question four. And so on until the music stops….
Framing development as history looking forwards
Good news that UK Prime Minister David Cameron is co-chairing the UN High Level Panel to shape an international framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. His appointment to this role is presumably a reflection of and reward for the leadership role the UK has played in international development assistance over the past fifteen years since Clare Short set up the Department for International Development (DFID). No doubt his appointment was a result of strong lobbying by the UK. (To imagine it as a subtle way for Ban Ki-moon to stiffen Cameron’s resolve in the face of a media and backbench push back against the government’s commitment to increase UK official development assistance (ODA) up to 0.7% of GNI is perhaps going too far!)
Good news also that Cameron’s co-chairs are President Yudhoyono of middle income but still fragile Indonesia, and President Johnson-Sirleaf of grossly underdeveloped and war-recovering Liberia. Both are twice-elected presidents of countries still experimenting with democracy and freedom. One is an ex-general; the other an ex-international civil servant. Meanwhile Cameron is struggling to deal with coalition government, a free media and serious economic constraints. Quite a broad set of real world perspectives, so hopefully suitable for the leadership of such a panel.
Good news also that Cameron has a broad and deep level of aid and development expertise available to him in DFID and other parts of the UK civil service, along with a large professional UK-based aid and development community, and a significant proportion of global academic development expertise based in the UK; and that the country he leads has a tradition of international humanitarianism.
Good news too, that this is all happening after, and can thus draw on the deep and comprehensive work done by the World Bank for its 2011 World Development Report on Development and Security, which laid bare some of the tired misconceptions of how development happens in places where there’s not yet the rule of law or responsible, responsive and representative governance. The ongoing International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding has also produced some useful interim work on how to promote the emergence of peaceful and effective states, on which the new High Level Panel must draw.
Even better news however, that Cameron is not personally an aid or overseas development expert; and nor is Yudhoyono. Because, as I’ve argued before, the great limitation of aid experts is that we tend to have a rather narrow view of the possibilities of development and aid, constrained as we are by our own experiences and by the vested interests of our organisations and allegiances. The co-chairs will be better able to see the wood from the trees if they avoid surrounding themselves too tightly with the usual ODA suspects.
And finally, this is presumably good news for UK-based and -linked groups wanting to influence the post-MDGs agenda – including the global coalition Beyond 2015. How then should we use this opportunity of access to the co-chair of the commission? Here are ten initial ideas.
1. Scope: it’s time for a truly global framework. This is a brilliant opportunity, at a time when globalisation, environmental limits, and climate change really do imply that we are all in it together, to develop a framework which applies globally – not just to poor countries. This means coming up with a framework which is relevant throughout the world, and which avoids objectifying poorer nations. It also recognises that all nations have significant problems to overcome, and different comparative advantages in the overarching global progress project. This approach would also help take the conversation away from a narrow focus on aid.
2. Frame this project around human progress, not aid. Whatever people might say, the MDGs are really about aid, not development; they only really apply to aid-recipient countries, and their real purpose has always been as a spur to increase aid flows and focus them on a few generic issues. That has not worked well: they haven’t served the purpose of mobilising politicians, civil society, businesses and civil servants to develop sustainable development strategies based on a comprehensive context analysis and political vision for change. Instead, because they are so narrow and aid-focused, they’ve probably impeded the development of a broad and far-reaching vision for change in some countries.
3. Timing: take it slow. A very visible and rather contentious high level panel is the kind of scenario in which civil servants and sherpas will typically encourage the leaders to set out an aggressive calendar to pre-form the outcomes much too early in the process. Of course, that’s their job. But in this case they should resist business as usual. Two main points to make here. First, it really doesn’t matter if we have something finalised in time for the 2015 UN General Assembly or not; the world will not stop turning, and development policies, funds and strategies will not grind to a halt. Second, it’s absolutely critical to cast the ideas net as widely as possible before coming up with potential models for discussion. This is a large and diverse world, in which that will take time. And the prize is well worth the waiting. Indeed, in some ways the debate is far more important than the final product.
4. Preparation: get out there and start listening, and avoid formulating specific proposals for as long as you can. The Panel needs to spend at least the next two years simply looking around at and listening to people’s ideas, and consulting widely. It’s important to canvas a whole range of ideas from a wide range of sources, from poor and marginalised people to elites, from political oppositions to incumbents, from NGOs to the UNDP, from insurgent rebels to the militias fighting them, from local businesses to multi-nationals, from scientists to philosophers, from novelists to historians, from children to mums and dads, from heterosexuals to homosexuals, from farmers to hedge fund managers, from Cubans to Americans and Greeks to Germans, from Keynesians to the Chicago School, Moslems to Christians, from migrant labourers to the rentier classes, from the Chinese Communist Party to the American Republican Party, from immigrants to indigenous people, from islanders to continentals, from the Taleban to the US Marines, from DFID to the FCO… and yes, let’s even ask both the Occupy protesters and the bankers what they think.
… And ideally of course, these different groups – and others – need to be brought together to discuss and confront each others’ ideas so the dialectic process can do its work. This is quite a challenge, and it will take time and resources – and excellent project management. Perhaps the greatest challenge will be to find the best marriage between technical and political views of development progress, and between different ideological views. But it’s important not to shy away from ideological debate, as development practitioners have often tried to do in the past.
5. Get the purpose right, so form follows function. There are plenty of people and institutions out there who seem to know what the post-MDGs framework should look like; and of course each of them is pushing a particular agenda. No harm in that, but the first question the Panel needs to answer is: What is the purpose of the new framework? Form should follow function, after all.
In my view the purpose of any global post-MDGs framework should not be to set out precise goals and indicators as with the MDGs. It would be more useful to create a broader vision of how people in different contexts can be better governed and live more prosperous, peaceful and fulfilling lives. Specific countries and institutions can then use these for inspiration as they determine their own goals and strategies.
One clue as to how to frame our aspirations is to imagine how historians in a hundred years might frame the history of human progress in 2015-2030. Put simply, development planning is history looking forwards.
6. Take time to learn what was good and what not so good about the MDGs. There’s masses of literature on this, but I think it’s widely agreed that the MDGs have significant strengths and weaknesses, among which:
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7. Don’t aim for a fine level of detail. Last time around, not many people were paying attention to the MDGs as they were developed and agreed. There were a lot of other things going on. So the framers were able to push their product through without too much fuss and argument. This time, every UN agency is already preparing its pitch; Rio-plus-twenty will produce a pitch; every lobby you can imagine will be figuring out what it wants to see and – perhaps more importantly – what it doesn’t want to see included. It will be very hard to get agreement on detail except at the lowest common denominator level. So aim for something broader. But for goodness sake don’t base your ambition on what can most easily be agreed: this issue is more important than easy consensus. It’s worth arguing about.
8. Don’t base yourself only on what we already know how to do: there is so much we still have to learn – the UK still hasn’t figured out how to provide free mass public education effectively, even though it’s the sixth biggest economy and has been “developed” for quite some time now.
9. While thinking outside the box and casting the net widely, nevertheless take care to identify what’s already agreed. A good place to start might be the 2000 Millennium Declaration, which is pretty comprehensive – certainly far more so that the narrow and prescriptive MDGs.
10. Above all, avoid simply injecting new momentum behind the existing MDGs, as has been proposed by some, on the grounds that they haven’t yet been achieved and because it will be hard to find consensus on a better model. That would be a cop-out. Two presidents and a prime minister leading a high level panel should be in a strong enough position not to cop-out.
Unpicking the language of the New Deal
International aid donors and the poorer governments they fund have overlapping, but far from identical interests. They overlap in their common desire to spend donor money in support of development progress, broadly put. But they often differ on what are the best development choices, and on issues like the need or opportunity for compliance with human rights and good financial stewardship norms. Meanwhile donors have to pay attention to their tax-payers’ and media opinions about aid if they want to stay in office, while recipient governments are often keen to use aid money to oil the patronage systems that they hope will keep them in power. (It’s an over-simplification, but broadly accurate to distinguish between politicians in the West being “in office”, whereas those in many poorer countries where the offices of state have yet to become institutionalised are more likely to be simply “in power”.)
The overlap between the interests of donor and recipient governments is often quite narrow, but they usually conspire to present it publicly – and perhaps also to themselves – in ways which make it seem much wider, and to minimise their differences. (The Paris Declaration is a good example.) It’s politics, after all. And as in politics more generally, one way they do this is by finding formulas of words amenable to different interpretations. Last year’s agreement between the governments of 19 conflict-affected and “fragile” countries (the g7+), and many of the main bilateral and multi-lateral donors is a case in point. As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding (IDPS) produced two key high level outputs last year: a set of five Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals (PSGs), and the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States.
Choice of words matters
The five PSGs are pretty good. True, they are skewed more towards statebuilding than peacebuilding, but they are intellectually cogent. They cover legitimate politics, livelihoods, taxation and government services, security and justice. Taken together, they provide a useful generic framework in which to plan and monitor progress in the evolution of peaceful and peace-promoting states which are both responsible and responsive to the societies in which they sit. I.e. less fragile, in the current jargon; or more resilient.
The New Deal also seems to tick many of the right boxes. It refers to the PSGs, defines a generic process for reducing fragility, and talks about a partnership between fragile country governments and donors. But after reading it more closely, it is easy to be sceptical. The document is quite schizophrenic. It seems to have been written using the language of peaceful, responsible and responsive statebuilding from the donors’ perspective, while for the governments of fragile countries it seems to be more about making sure that donors agree to give them the money in support of their plans to build their states. The difficulty with the latter is that such governments are – by the definitions of the PSGs they have signed up to – not yet fully legitimate representatives of their people. So by implication one should not simply take their plans as being the right plans. In this sense the New Deal is redolent of and a worthy descendant of earlier fudged incarnations such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the Accra Agenda for Action. Just as with those earlier agreements between donors and developing country governments, the pitfalls of the New Deal might be superficially hidden by a clever use of words.
I can see three kinds of problem with the use of language in the New Deal: political sleight of hand, sheer wrongheadedness where generic language has been used without due attention to operationability, and the unhelpful choice of words. All of which undermine the high purpose which the New Deal purports to promote.
1. POLITICAL SLEIGHT OF HAND – the choice of verbs reveals a lot
By sleight of hand I mean cases where the document at first seems to use the right language – claiming the broad overlap between donors’ and fragile governments’ interests – but where on closer inspection the language used reveals the narrowness of the overlap and even undermines it. In fact this is the main problem with language in the New Deal.
A blatant example appears on page one, which introduces the idea of a partnership – a “deal” – between fragile countries, donors and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). At first sight the language is good, with its references to mutual trust, peacebuilding and statebuilding goals, constructive state-society relations, and so on.
But hold on a minute, even on page one the underlying use of words gives away who is really committing to what – and it’s pretty clear that the high-minded purpose of the IDPS is under threat. The document is supposed to represent the commitment of fragile states, donors and IGOs to a common purpose. But when it describes their commitment to “support inclusive country-led and country-owned transitions out of fragility…” it is quite clearly signposting that the commitment is being made by the donors and IGOs, not by fragile state governments themselves. The use of the verb support gives it away: if the g7+ governments were truly committed to transitions out of fragility, they would be using verbs like “lead”, not “support”. Similarly on page three the g7+ governments only commit themselves to “support political dialogue and leadership” – … er, if they don’t commit to provide leadership on this, surely there is something missing here, and their commitment is in great doubt?
Another nice touch is in the use of the word “country” as the modifier of a number of critical phrases. Transitions will be “country-led and country-owned”, in pursuit of a “country-led .. vision and … plan”, and a “country-compact [will] … implement the plan”. This language reflects a genuine challenge, and the importance of widening the circle beyond the government, its allies, and external donors. But although the document does clearly cite the need for mechanisms of participation, these do not come across very powerfully as a fundamental component of the New Deal, which mostly appears to use “country” to mean “government”.
In the printed document of around 160 lines, I only counted 16 or 10% which had clear references to mechanisms for participation, and in truth these are mostly generic statements of aspiration, whose light tone belies the difficulties involved in meeting them. By contrast, the entire document constantly repeats and reinforces the need for cooperation between donors and fragile state governments – after all it is a New Deal between them, while civil society is on the outside, looking in.
There is a 12-line paragraph on the proposed “compact” between governments and citizens of fragile countries and their international partners, on how to reduce fragility. This gives lip service to the need for citizen participation, citing the need for a “broad range of views from multiple stakeholders and the public, to be reviewed annually through a multi-stakeholder forum” – as though that were the simplest thing to achieve in a country like the DRC for example. The ten remaining lines of the paragraph are then deivted entierly to the details of the far simpler arrangements for donor-government collaboration. The underlying message is clear: citizen participation is a good thing, but less important than donor-government collaboration.
In similar vein, the document declares a joint commitment to “support the greater transparency of fiscal systems”. Again, it hardly seems enough for the g7+ governments to support greater transparency – they should be implementing, or ensuring, or improving transparency….. So it’s clear that the actual commitment is from donors (for whom support is a very relevant verb in this context), while the g7+ governments have made no worthwhile commitment at all. Meanwhile, as if to confirm that transparency is really the business of international aid, rather than a critical aspect of good governance, the reference point for transparency is the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The IATI is doubtless a worthy international effort to make aid more transparent. But let’s be clear that in the context of the New Deal it is merely a distraction from the far more important national and local, constitutionally-based transparency standards which citizens of fragile countries need if they are to hold their governments to account. One would have to think that the g7+ governments are once again failing to make a worthwhile commitment.
All in all, the underlying message seems clear: donors commit to support democratic improvements, while g7+ governments commit to very little indeed.
2. WRONGHEADED IDEAS which are impossible to implement as stated, thus undermining the integrity of the New Deal
The second category of interesting language in this flawed document is what I call wrongheaded ideas: the inclusion of ideas which haven’t yet been fully developed, or perhaps on which there was insufficient agreement on the detail; and which therefore don’t stand up to scrutiny. Those who endorsed the New Deal agreed to use the generic PSG indicators to monitor progress in specific countries. But this is an elementary mistake. The right way to monitor and hold stakeholders to account for making progress in reducing fragility in a specific country is by the use of indicators developed to measure the goals and strategies of the country plan, based on the country fragility assessment. Generic indicators are only useful for measuring generic progress – and might be quite irrelevant in some places. It is hard to imagine the governments and people of Afghanistan, South Sudan, Liberia, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the DR Congo (the seven pilot countries) all devising the same pathway out of fragility. Therefore it is hard to imagine a generic set of indicators being very useful in measuring their progress. Does this agreement to use ineffective indicators undermine the sense of commitment? I think it does, whether by artful design or accident.
3. UNHELPFUL LANGUAGE impedes ownership and participation, and lessens the potential for success
A third category is what we might call unhelpful language. A premise of the New Deal is the idea that fragile states, fragile countries, fragile contexts or fragile societies – all these phrases have been used over the past few years, and probably others too – lack the capacity to manage their differences and conflicts successfully and without violence. Screeds of documents have been written about this, and fragility has proven in some circumstances to be a useful metaphor.
But like other metaphors which are designed to aid communication, it can also unhelpfully impede communication. It’s unpalatable for political leaders to have their countries, their states, and by implication their own governments, described in what seem like pejorative terms. This creates a political difficulty which will be hard to overcome when developing “a country-led assessment on the causes and features of fragility”; and a difficulty which can easily be exploited by spoilers to derail or undermine the process. I’m sure you can imagine the headlines in newspapers owned by governments or their allies: “Who do they think they are, calling us fragile? We reject outside interference.”…
This difficulty can be mitigated by focusing on positives and aspirations, rather than on negatives. If fragility is at one end of a spectrum, then resilience is at the other. If fragility provides a framework for problematising, then resilience provides a framework for creating a positive vision and plan for a better future; and without the pejorative baggage that comes with being forced to describe ones context as “fragile”. Hence, it would be far easier for governments and others to conduct a joint resilience assessment, than a joint fragility assessment. This would be positive, forward-looking, inspirational and aspirational, rather than negative and problematising. It would give governments, politicians, civil society and their international partners something to aim for, rather than something to reject; and it would be simpler and less difficult to communicate widely to the population at large. Above all, it makes logical policy sense to identify and build on the resilience mechanisms already there – every society has them – rather than start with an analysis of their absence.
Conclusions?
Perhaps this analysis is unkind; if so, its lack of generosity is born of my own scepticism derived from monitoring earlier agreements. Nor is my intention here to criticise the drafters – no doubt they did as they were bid. Let me say very clearly that the New Deal represents much good work, and a platform to build on. The idea of complementing poverty reduction and economic development objectives with a more politically oriented focus and on justice and security is something for which I have long argued, and it is very welcome. There are many other good ideas contained in the New Deal – the focus on concrete results, the references to parliamentary monitoring and the need for a more legitimate politics, and many more. Even if the idea of a Compact, organised around “one vision, one plan” may not be realistic in the real world, it’s a commendable aspiration and is an idea which can evolve differently in different settings. So please don’t take my comments as being wholly negative.
What I wanted to clarify is that this document of agreement is also a document of divergence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that in the field of international politics and diplomacy, provided we don’t – as happened with the MDGs, or with the Paris Declaration – start to over-sell or over-believe the rhetoric of agreement, and thus act illogically. There is a long way to go yet.
In fact, the New Deal and the PSGs probably do provide a good basis for continued discussion between outsiders (donors and INGOs) with their particular interests, and representatives of fragile state governments with theirs. One reason for this is that they are written in a way which gives incompetent and semi-legitimate governments a let-out. Because the PSGs emphasise the structural – i.e. historical, hard-to-shift, before-I-came-to-power – causes of fragility, they allow fragile state governments the opportunity to say, and with some veracity, “you can’t blame us for being semi-legitimate, and unresponsive to our electorate: that’s the best one could hope for in Rwanda [or Liberia, or South Sudan, etc….] today. We’re working on it.” The test, of course, is on whether they are actually “working on it”, and if so, whether they have the right vision and plan of action in mind. Which is where the country-specific compacts, assessments and pathways-out-of-fragility plans come in.
If the New Deal is to be useful for people living in g7+ countries, I would suggest that it should not be taken too literally as an agreement of principle, but as the basis on which practical plans and agreements can be developed in specific country contexts. In that respect it can be used as a framework in which civil society and forward-thinking members of governments can persuade their more conservative counterparts to explore policy and strategic approaches to improving resilience (instead of overcoming fragility) and thus enabling peaceful development. Donors and IGOs might also want to support these, if they can do so without undermining them. But I hope the main channels for pursuing the PSGs in South Sudan, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, the DR Congo and elsewhere are not seen as aid, but as public policy, civil society and business initiatives. Ultimately, the New Deal will be useful if is used honestly as a framework within which to seek practical agreement; and useless if treated as an agreed framework which just needs to be operationalised.
A luta continua.
Crisis management or peacebuilding in West Africa?
Yesterday Charles Taylor was convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, for his role in fomenting and prolonging civil war and violence in that country. Meanwhile ECOWAS, the West African regional economic community (REC), decided to send troops to Guinea Bissau and Mali to enforce a return to civilian rule following recent coups there. Two reminders of the need for regional and international vigilance and a willingness to act, given the fragility of democratic rule and institutions in many countries in Africa.
ECOWAS was instrumental in restoring order to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the past, and thus in removing Charles Taylor from power, and is one of the strongest RECs in the world when it comes to crisis management. More than most of its peer organisations, it seems to combine a capacity to intervene in high level diplomacy – as it also did over Guinea Conakry a couple of years back – with a willingness to send in troops. Let’s hope that this combination of political intervention and military threat will work in favour of the citizens of Mali and Guinea Bissau this time.
What both ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) are not yet so good at, is working to reduce the likelihood of these crises by improving the resilience of their member states. It is one thing to intervene in a crisis, but quite another to support long-term peacebuilding. The former requires authority, skill and the threat of a big stick. The latter is far more subtle; and is made harder by the resistance of member state governments to “interference” by international clubs of which they are members.
With hindsight, the coup in Mali was predictable. The peace agreement signed between Tuaregs and Bamako in the early 1990s was in many ways an elite bargain: patronage for Tuareg leaders in return for an end to civil war. “You leave us alone in our northern drylands, and we’ll cease confronting your state of which we feel no part”. As such it was unsustainable and needed to be followed up with a major programme of development initiatives to create alternative livelihoods and better governance in northern Mali: to incentivise Tuaregs to become citizens of Mali through the flexible provision of services and opportunities for peaceful political and economic participation. Not easy, but necessary. But this programme, such as it was, was derailed by three major and clearly visible factors:
- The international fear of Sahel-based Islamic terrorism pushed Mali’s donors to skew their support for the country towards repressive measures in the north of the country
- The Latin American drug cartels began smuggling huge quantities of their products through Mali to Europe, creating huge opportunities for the criminal involvement of the state and local leaders; and further skewing donor support
- The toppling of Colonel Ghaddafi pushed his well-armed Tuareg allies back into Mali.
Simply put, these three factors upset the fragile and unsustainable political settlement achieved in 1995. New donor incentives and drug-related rents gradually persuaded Bamako to renege on its 1995 commitments (at least as seen from the north); competition for drug-related opportunities probably undermined the settlement among the Tuaregs too; meanwhile well-armed Tuaregs returning from Libya had the incentives and the means to muscle their way in to a political settlement from which they felt excluded.
The result is now history. The important lesson from this is the need for RECs and the AU to put far more effort into long-term peacebuilding than they do into crisis management. Military coups have been far less frequent in recent years, but this should not kid us into thinking the democratic institutions are yet resilient enough to survive. A concerted effort is still needed to transform the way West Africans experience issues of power, economic opportunity, security, access to justice and to the basic services they need for their well-being. Short-term political settlements are seldom sustainable in themsleves over the long term, and need to be adjusted as circumstances change; and they need to be seen as steps on the way to an institutionalisation of politics, even though that may take many years to emerge, and cannot be over-rushed simply because we want it.
Phil Vernon 