How to re-think international aid agencies to fit the findings of the 2011 World Development Report?
The 2011 WDR is a radical document. It’s well-packaged in the politics and jargon of international aid, and so just about palatable to those individuals who have invested their careers in a now-faded approach to development; to donor governments who have invested their billions in both the Washington Consensus and the post-Washington Consensus consensus; to borrowing governments who prefer their grants and low-interest loans linked to soft, technical conditions; and to the many organisations – NGOs, IGOs and private companies – which benefit from and have helped define the way aid has been dispersed over these past couple of decades.
Within this clever wrapping, the WDR has a hard, core message: that in countries experiencing or threatened by violence, where 1.5 billion people live, one of the main “development” challenges is how to foster the emergence of the right kinds of institutions; and among these the most important are those which mediate a functional relationship between a responsive state and responsible citizens.
The World Bank and other development agencies are now considering the implications of the WDR for the way they define and implement their role. This will be difficult, as it is always hard for institutions – especially large, well-established ones – to imagine a radically different role and thus genuinely to radically restructure themselves. Simply put, the question should not be “how can we adapt our existing institutions to the revised terms of reference implied by the WDR?”, but rather “what kind of institution would best be able to foster the emergence of institutions which reduce the fragility of fragile states and societies?” In other words, don’t take the institution you are sitting in as the starting point, as it will get in the way of clear thinking. Instead, take a zero-based approach.
This implies first of all an attempt to define, generically, what kind of tasks this new development assistance role implies. Here are just a few suggestions.
1. Defining the strategic approach
Thinking strategically on a continuous basis, and adapting accordingly, is as or more important than having a perfect strategic plan. Nevertheless, organisations need strategy documents for planning and reference, so it’s important to invest in the right kind of strategic analysis every few years. Some people are recommending that outside agencies – the WB, DFID and so on – conduct their strategic analysis entirely in concert with the host government of the aid-recipient country. This is a seductive idea, in keeping with the Paris Declaration, but – like so much connected with the Paris Declaration – it’s a mistake.
It woud be immensely difficult for the staff of – say – the World Bank to discuss issues of legitimacy and citizen-state relations completely truthfully with the representatives of relatively undemocratic regimes, whose own political survival often depends on untransparent and inequitable policies and practices; and even on a dysfunctional relationship with the populations they are meant to represent. Any joint analysis of such issues would therefore be conducted without complete honesty, would therefore be be based on half-expressed diagnoses, and would therefore recommend incomplete or just plain wrong approaches. This is one of the things which was wrong with the PRSP model, so let’s not make that mistake again.
So while the strategic analysis should obviously be based on wide-ranging conversations with different stakeholders, inlcuding the host governnment, local civil society, businesses, other internationals, etc., it nevertheless needs to be done by the international institution itself, so as to preserve the integrity of the analaysis. It also needs to be based on the right conceptual model. There is no perfect prescription for this, and a thousand methodological flowers should be allowed to blooom, but those conducting the analysis should aim to understand as well as possible:
- How does the political economy actually function, where is it positive for peaceful outcomes, where does it obstruct them, where are the potential opportunities for improvement, and how can those in positions of economic/political power be persuaded to allow or support changes?
- What institutions currently exist in society, what function do they/could they play?
- What is a realistic vision for transformation over the next 25 or more years, in tems of reducing fragility and fostering the emergence of institutions which ensure that people are safe and justly treated, and that they have a voice in decisions which affect them?
- Who are the likely leaders of such changes?
- What people or factors might stand in the way of progress, and can they be prevented from doing so?
- Finally: can we envisage any role for our (international) organisation, which would help enable the kinds of changes we have in mind? (The potential for a “no” answer to this question should be taken seriously).
2. Recognise the difference between humanitarian and development aid
Humanitarian aid is often just a synonym for emergency aid – like the support currently being provided to millions of people in the Horn of Africa in dire need. But it may be that a lot of so-called “development aid” is really just humanitarian aid dressed up in a more intellectual, less sentimental construct.
Take international support for capital investment and recurrent costs in the education or health services of states whose economies will take decades to reach the levels at which they could pay for such services themselves from tax revenues, and where the institutions of power are so flawed that the schools and clinics built and staffed with aid may quietly crumble away or be destroyed due to social violence. Is that really an example of development aid – i.e. supporting the establishment of an enabling environment for societal progress – or is it more like humanitarian aid – i.e. sending money and technologies to fill a gap in service provision? If the task is to help shape a society which is more likely to both want and be in a position to provide schools, clinics, and universal health care and education to its members, is the best way to achieve this to send them money and ideas about schooling and health care? Or should that more properly be described as fulfilling a numanitarian impulse along the lines that “it seems wrong for children to be denied the opportunity to go to school, so we fund school programmes in countries far away”…
It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. But to me it does seem clear that the test for any “development” investment ought to be whether it is likely to contribute to a change in the likely outcome for society several years hence, and whether that change is likely to contribute to the emergence of effective institutions, and a reduction in fragility. Anything else is a humanitarian transfer of resources. I am not arguing against this kind of humanitarianism, simply for clarity of purpose. But it is also true that humanitarian investments should be undertaken with great care, lest they inadvertently make things worse.
An obvious example of the latter would be a programme which inadvertently reinforces inequalities in society – as for example happened in eastern Zaire where international programmes designed to improve livestock management benefited herders over farmers, hence skewed the terms of trade between cattle and land, and contributed to conflicts which have yet to be brought under control in a quintessentially fragile environment. It was particularly unfortunate that herding and farming were, as so often, linked to different ethnicities, so the livestock improvement programmes may inadvertently have fuelled inter-ethnic tensions.
3. Seek out and support change agents – wherever they may be found
Change comes largely from within society, and is often led by inspired and inspiring individuals, at local level or on a wider scale. It stands to reason therefore that international agencies looking for ways to support transformation need to find ways to identify such individuals and support them.
The support doesn’t only have to be in the form of funds: it might equally be in the form of solidarity, the provision of opportunities to broaden horizons and explore ideas with others, or may take other forms, depending on circumstances.
As to identifying leaders: that is clearly a task fraught with risk. We need to accept that, as in the old European fairy tale, we may have to kiss a lot of frogs before we catch our prince. Above all, it’s very labour-intensive: looking for and getting to know leaders and potential leaders, and isn’t something which many international civil servants spend much time doing, as of now.
4. Provide long-term economic subventions to provide decent job opportunities
One of the core findings of the WDR is the need, in fragile and conflict affected contexts, for jobs. Young people, especially young men, are vulnerable to being recruited to violence by political leaders, in inverse proportion to their access to decent economic opportunities. Meanwhile, societies which exclude young women from decent economic opportunities are holding themselves back in terms of their ability to harness the potential for progress. Ergo, an economy in which jobs and other economic opportunities are in short supply is one which remains vulnerable to instability…
… Ergo, one might think, donors and other international agences would invest large amounts in job creation in conflict-affected contexts. But they don’t, at least not on the scale which one might expect. Take Sierra Leone, for example: it’s commonly accepted that one of the main factors underlying the civil war was the lack of opportunities for young men. Indeed, post-war elections have been marked by the mobilisation of violent youth militants representing both the main parties. The analysis of the UN, World Bank and other donors – and the government itself – all make a big issue of the need for jobs. But none of these agencies appear to have plans to invest in a way which will create the tens of thousands of jobs which are needed to build peace in Sierra Leone. Instead the international agences fall back on the mantra of “sustainable economic growth”, and the main investment focus is on mining and oil, neither of which are likely to create large numbers of jobs per GDP percentage point of growth – and which are associated in other contexts with instability.
Surely the problem here is that the agencies are failing to develop a strategy to match their own analysis. Rather than support peacebuilding, by subsidising job creation on a massive scale – e.g. through large scale, labour-intensive public works – they prefer to stick to the economic development orthodoxy that says it is wrong to distort the economy by creating jobs with external transfers. But it will take years, decades, for a country like Sierra Leone to create sufficient jobs in its own economy to absorb enough of its young people to reduce its vulnerability to destabilisation. Surely the orthodoxy is standing in the way of what the agencies’ own analysis tells them is needed? Which is worse: artificially subsidising jobs which thus reduce the risk of violence, but which may have unintended consequences for endogenous economic growth; or taking the longer-term, orthodox approach, stimulating FDI and local entreprenership – but enhancing the risk of more cycles of violence?
So one of the most important questions facing large international development agencies, post-WDR, is how to fast-track the creation of jobs and other economic opportunities in a careful way, so that the short-term gain of getting young people active in the economy – laying the foundations for peace – is not achieved at the expense of laying the foundations for healthy economic development which will in time, perhaps 15 years or more, replace the international transfers.
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These are only a few of the things which international agencies need to consider in their programmes in fragile and conflict-prone contexts. What they imply is that the agencies – the World Bank, DFID, the EU, and so on – need to have a capacity for disinterested strategic analyis and planning, within a clear conceptual framework of how societies changes over the medium term; for the identification and support of change agents; and for implementing and supporting very different kinds of programmes, designed to fit the local context, and which at times seem to go against the orthodoxy of both the Washington Consensus and the post-Washington consensus. That’s quite a challenge.
Land grabs in Africa are much in the news. For example we read in a recent Oakland Institute report that up to 60 million hectares (an area the size of France) were bought or leased in Africa by outside investors in 2009 alone. It’s widely reported as an iniquitous state of affairs and so it is, when African governments take advantage of low levels of transparency and citizen accountability to sell or lease off large parcels of land at prices and terms and conditions which disadvantage their nation and their people, and especially people local to the land in question. In that sense it has much in common, as a phenomenon, with the way some mining and oil companies have long dealt with African governments, and vice versa.
This seems completely wrong. But, taking a closer and dispassionate look, are there at least two possible silver linings to this cloud?
First, this kind of behaviour by governments and international agribusiness creates just the kind of situation around which civil society activists in Africa can mobilise, and demand a higher level of transparency and accountability of their leaders. Because it touches on land – something dear to the heart of many people at a very cultural level – it is an issue around which it’s possible to mobilise a wide constituency of opinion, including influential civil society in capital cities, as well as in rural communities more closely affected. Governance improvements emerge, it seems to me, when citizens pull together in support of a real common interest, rather than when they get together to “improve governance” for its own sake in the abstract.
Second, and no doubt more controversially, perhaps this is just the kind of opportunity through which the rural sector of some poor African economies can begin to be modernised, making agriculture more efficient. This might in its turn mean that more people would move to the cities, which would certainly create new social and political challenges. But there are also far greater opportunities in cities than in the countryside for women and men, young and old, to engage in civil society in pursuit of their interests. In this way, a secondary impact of the change could be a reinforcement of the kind of citizen-state relationship which is needed for governance to improve, and which is often so lacking in rural parts of the continent.
It’s dangerous to generalise, and I don’t mean to claim that land grabs are an inherently good thing. But nor would I want to be the one trying to make the argument that peasant agriculture in marginal parts of Africa is a sustainable basis for a growing economy. Something has to give.
World Development Report 2011 – will it make a difference?
The World Bank released its latest World Development Report (WDR) this week. It does this every year and few people usually pay much attention, unless their job requires it, and/or they are development nerds. Often the best thing about WDRs is that they are just the right thickness to place under the leg of a wobbly table; otherwise, they tend to gather dust on the book shelf.
But WDR 2011 is different, and it is well worth paying attention to. Indeed, given the subject matter and quality of the document, which contains a great deal of primary research and analysis, it should become a seminal text guiding development thinking and practice for years. The focus this year is Conflict and Security, and the report does a good job of explaining, using a lot of data and analysis, why the development community has to find better ways to work in conflict-affected and fragile contexts. According to the report 1.5 billion people’s lives are affected by conflict, and it provides plenty of evidence to back up what’s obvious anyway, that violent conflict is a huge drag on development. For example the average civil war sets back GDP growth by about 30 years, while countries lose about 0.7% of GDP growth per year while their neighbours are in conflict.
The 2011 WDR makes a convincing case that international development institutions are failing the people who live in countries affected by conflict. Not a single low income fragile or conflict affected country has achieved a single one of the Millennium Development Goals. And the report provides new data about recurrent conflict, showing that 90% of new violence onsets in the decade after 2000 occurred in countries with a history of previous conflicts, even as the total number of violence onsets declined, indicating how hard it is to break the cycle of violence that keeps people poor.
There’s nothing particularly new about the link between violent conflict, insecurity and lack of development. It’s not only intuitive but has been written about for years. What’s of interest about the WDR is that it’s the World Bank – perhaps the leading development institution, by size and influence – which is saying it; and that the report offers some intriguing lessons drawn from conflict affected countries suggesting how the problem can perhaps be overcome. The report is full of these, and International Alert has produced a more thorough review of the report but I pick six of them to highlight here.
1. It’s the institutions, stupid
As Deborrah Baksh and I argued in our paper last year one of the keys to development progress is the presence of effective institutions within society. These are formal institutions like parliaments, governments, courts, stock exchanges etc., and informal institutions which are harder to see, and which have been called “the rules of the game” – the norms and values which guide and govern how people live together. The WDR argues convincingly that violent conflict occurs when a society’s institutions are inadequate to deal with the internal and external stresses placed upon them. An obvious example of this is in Côte d’Ivoire, where the organisation of elections unsupported by the institutionalisation of democracy within society led to a breakdown of law and order and civil war.
So what comes across very clearly in the report is that if international development institutions – WB, UN, donors, NGOs, and so on – are to contribute more effectively to development in fragile and conflict-affected countries, they need to learn how to promote and enable the emergence, strengthening and transformation of institutions. This is far easier said than done, and it certainly is not what most such institutions are well versed in. They may be good at putting into place the formal mechanisms, in ministries, courts, parliaments and commissions, etc. But the role of transforming institutions, encouraging the emergence and internalisation of democratic values, and of allowing innovative and context-derived institutions to evolve, is not yet the stuff of World Bank training courses or how-to manuals.
2. Security and justice for citizens, not subjects
The WDR uses the word “citizen” a great deal, as a way to stress repeatedly the importance of responsive states for peaceful development, where people have a voice, and live securely within the rule of law. Insecurity holds society back in so many ways. It creates a climate of fear, which can easily be exploited by those with the capacity to protect themselves and to either provide or withhold protection from others. The Mungiki gangs of Kenya have shown this – running protection rackets in Nairobi for years. All too often the mechanisms of the state are intertangled with such rackets: in Kenya the protection rackets run by the Mungiki for matutu taxi operators have now been officialised and legalised under the cover of compulsory Savings and Loans schemes. But they are still protection rackets, still run by the same gangs.
Insecurity also holds back economic development because those who feel insecure tend to be risk averse, unwilling to take business risks, seeing their assets as savings, rather than investment capital; and obviously when people lose their assets, due to criminality or political violence, they have to start again at zero.
Again, if the international development organisations wish to make a difference, they need to find ways to create and improve confidence by improving security and fair access to justice. This too must be viewed through the institution-building lens, and represents a huge challenge. This is all the more true in many African countries, where one of the legacies of colonial and post-colonial history is frequently a repressive and corrupt security culture, whose transformation into policing by consent within the rule of law is not a project for the faint-hearted.
3. Jobs (not growth)
GDP growth remains central to international development orthodoxy, even after years of counter-argument, and evidence of the importance of factors such as remittances. Of course economic growth is essential to provide for the needs of growing populations, and ultimately it’s got to be at a rate which exceeds demographic growth if per capita income is to rise. But the WDR comes out firmly in favour of choosing the right kind of growth. This means for example that in Sierra Leone, where the role of under-employed youth in the genesis of civil war is well-known, it is not enough to rely on boosting GDP through mining and mechanised agriculture, since neither of these sectors will provide enough jobs or self-employment opportunities to go round. Goodness knows that the Niger Delta provides sufficient examples of how oil – or for that matter mining – can contribute to long-term unrest as much as it does to GDP.
Another part of orthodoxy of the past few years has been that economic development must be “sustainable”. Yes, that’s important, but what’s the point of developing “sustainable” economies which will be torn apart by civil war or undermined by the shadowy and violent narcotics trade? The international institutions have got to accept that long-term subsidies for labour-intensive public sector work can be a good investment in the sustainability of the polity itself, and thus a “good”, rather than an unorthodox skewing of the economy and thus a “bad”.
Meanwhile, the same institutions need to find creative ways to support the emergence of a less corrupt political economy, where mining and oil are less likely to lead to criminality and violent conflict.
4. Rome was not built in a decade…
We’ve known it for years, but the WDR says it loud and clear. It takes at least two generations to establish the foundations of the kinds of institutions that allow progress to be made peacefully. Even the “fastest” countries to do this are claimed in the report to have taken over 40 years to establish the basic rule of law. So we’ve got to come terms with a longer time frame, using a vision-based approach, and measuring progress towards that vision, rather than trying to create perfect institutions in five or ten years. It means we’ve got to learn to do what works in the context, rather than trying to fit the context to international project planning cycles. That will allow space for innovation, for the right processes and institutions to emerge, if the right incentives and support are provided.
This also means that we have to resist the over-simplification in which Burundi, after decades of troubles, is now seen by its government and by the international institutions as having “graduated from peacebuilding to development”. The difference between peacebuilding and development a false dichotomy, since without peace you can’t have much development. But by any sensible measure estimation, it is unlikely that a country in like Burundi can become stable and democratic, ready for economic take-off, after a couple of elections. All those interested in Burundi’s continued development, wether Burundians or outsiders, need to see the context for what it is, and act accordingly, rather than determine their strategy and approach according to a categorisation based on a combination of bueaucratic and political compromise.
5. … and was built by the Romans
The Romans built their state, and then expanded it to be their empire. The international community just has to accept that the establishment and emergence of institutions and values is almost entirely an endogenous one – unless it plans to build an empire, that is. The role of international institutions is one of supporting, incentivising, advising and promoting. It cannot make institutions happen, only do what it can to enable them to happen. A major part of this is to avoid getting in their way, by purposely or inadvertently reinforcing the institutions which block them. It’s easy to see how the international community has done this in North Africa over the past few decades, for example strengthening the role of an Egyptian state which denied the opportunity of citizenship – as understood in the WDR – to Egyptians for years.
6. Creating an enabling international environment
Lastly, but far from least, what the international institutions can indisputably do more of is create a better enabling environment both regionally and more broadly. The elements of this have been well-rehearsed, and they include issues such as free movement of people within regional economic blocs, a fairer playing field for trade, a greater effort to stamp out cross-border flows of illegally-obtained money, and a more thoughtful and strategic international approach to narcotics. A particularly important element of this is to strengthen the regional institutions themselves: formal institutions such as ECOWAS and the AU, as well as informal institutions – the rules of the game – which have allowed people like ex-president Gbabgo to be protected and treated with impunity by fellow heads of state over the years.
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Challenging our assumptions
Those who know the international development institutions well will see straight away that the messages of the WDR represent a major challenge. If taken seriously, this report changes the very nature of how international development is conceived and delivered, at least in conflict affected and fragile contexts and thus in much of Africa. It raises as many questions as it answers. Indeed, if taken seriously it undermines some of the comfortable assumptions which have underpinned most international development thinking and action for the past fifteen years. For example:
- That legitimate development progress is based on a partnership between the international community and the government in power in a fragile state – which in practice can exclude the people whom the government is supposed to represent, but seldom does
- That institution building can be limited to formal institutions, without including informal institutions and values; and without recognising that this a task of transformation, not just incremental improvement
- That domestic institutions are built through technical assistance in making their mechanisms work better, without also improving their legitimacy and levels of participation
- That it is OK to focus on only some aspects of reform, such as fiscal systems, while ignoring more difficult issues such as land tenure, which has huge implications for conflict in rural economies
- That economic growth, rather than broad participation in a growing economy, is the key to progress
- That working on the symptoms of underdevelopment (hunger, sickness, etc., i.e. the MDGs) will somehow address the causes
- That change can be accomplished at a pace defined by the international community’s need to show results, rather than at a pace defined by local factors and which recognises the historical reality that building a new relationship between citizen and state takes many decades – probably at least half a century to be confident it is sustainable.
Unlike some of the institutions in fragile contexts, the institutions of the development sector are highly resilient. When under pressure they heal as quickly as a wound in the mouth. I mean both the formal institutions – look how hard it was for Wolfensohn to change the World Bank – and the “rules of the game”. While it would be entirely wrong to say that international aid instutitions are doing nothing right in conflict-affected countries, it is nevertheless true to say, as does the WDR, that they need to do much better and that this means a complete rethink in their approach.
But institutions don’t readlily rethink their own approach. It’s just not what most institutions do. So it is of tremendous importance that over the coming months, those who believe that this WDR contains important truths about doing development in the conflict-affected and fragile contexts where 1.5 billion people live, take every opportunity to keep this discussion alive. Read the report and check out the live webcast on thursday this week. And if you see this WDR being used to stop a table from wobbling, put it back up on the table in full view, where it belongs.
The UN Security Council has put itself and others in a difficult spot over Libya. This is because it has mandated those of its Member States who are operational in and around Libya to take all necessary measures to protect civilians, when the avowed policy intention of so many of them is in fact regime change. France, the UK and the USA to name three of the governments most involved in military action, have all in different ways said so. Just to be clear, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Channel 4 News last night that he saw no future in a partitioned Libya, and did not expect others at today’s international summit in London to see it as a desirable outcome. So what we are witnessing and many are celebrating is surely a UN-mandated operation expressly designed by those planning and implementing it (whatever the actual intentions of those who voted for it), to help lever Gaddafi from power. This may well result in a political vacuum, in a fragile state whose political institutions are inadequate to deal with this kind of massive change, and thus the distinct possibility of further conflict in the months and years after he’s gone.
Of course, it looks clear that proportionally more violence against civilians is being conducted by Gaddafi’s forces than by the opposition. So, for now at least, it’s easy for NATO and its members to justify a military action which so far is entirely targeting one side in Libya’s civil war, in terms of UN SCR 1973. I’ve limited knowledge or understanding of the nature of the Libyans and Libyan groups taking part in the uprising, so no way to know how likely they are (whether now, fighting against Gaddafi, or later in a possible future fight among themselves) to commit atrocities against civilians. On the basis of the news currently emerging, they seem to be conducting themselves more decently than Gaddafi’s people. So intervening on their side seems virtuous. But it’s important to look at this on a longer-term and a wider canvas.
I’m personally an agnostic on the question of whether the international military intervention is the right thing to do, simply because I have insufficient knowledge of Libya to be able to estimate the most likely results of such an action over the medium and longer term. And after the revelations of Coalition ignorance about the Iraq they decided to invade, and the lack of forethought about what to do about the crockery they were about to break, I’m somewhat afraid that the UN and its Member State governments also lack the detailed intelligence to enable them to make an informed assessment of what might happen next in Libya. But I certainly back the principle of the international community intervening militarily under its Responsibility to Protect, provided the justification for doing so is based on solid intelligence that allows it to fulfil the requirements of a just war.
A Just War – jus ad bellum – paraphrasing St Thomas Aquinas and others, is one which is waged with legitimate authority, with just cause and “right intention”. It must be likely to result in the restoration of law and order and the conditions for the fulfilment of human rights; it must be a last resort; and it must be fought proportionally. Finally, it must have a high probability of success: be winnable in the shortest possible time causing the minimum amount of harm.
We can of course be wary of a set of rules drawn up by the mediaeval Catholic Church to provide its secular co-establishment – the kings and princes of mediaeval Europe – with a religious justification for their military exploits. Nevertheless, jus ad bellum was not entirely cynical in its origins, has evolved over the intervening centuries, and continues to provide a basis on which to consider the ethical dimensions of something – waging war – which will always be a predominantly political enterprise.
The difficulty in the case of the international engagement in Libya is obvious. Its legitimacy is in doubt, since it appears to be premised on a confusion: on the one hand, the UNSC – the supreme authority – has mandated operations to protect civilians; on the other, the governments with authority over NATO forces have declared that their policy goal is Gaddafi relinquishing power. Sophistry aside, it’s hard to separate the one goal from the other.
The actual political goal of the action therefore seems to be regime change. Can this be considered Right Intention? I’d say yes, given the Gaddafi regime’s record of poor governance and abuse of rights – and its own flagrant abuse of the rules for waging war, jus in bello : proportionality, distinction between military and civilians, and military necessity. But with one caveat: will the regime that replaces Gaddafi be significantly better than his regime, and will that improvement be worth the death, suffering and damage incurred? On balance, the answer seems likely to be yes.
However, it also behooves us to look at this on a wider canvas. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is still very new. It says that:
“Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it…
“… The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity…”
R2P was adopted as a text by the UN General Assembly in 2005, which may well be seen by historians in the future as a critical point in the evolution of global governance to rival St Thomas and his Just War ideas. But it will take time for this principle to become a genuine part of international doctrine. For that, the R2P needs to be cited in important decisions, and a body of precedence in its use needs to be accumulated, so that decision makers in the future – be they heads of state making decisions about how to treat their citizens, or internationals deciding whether to intervene on behalf of those whose governments fail to protect them – have an operational framework to go by.
Libya is perhaps the first time R2P has been invoked so publicly, on such a scale, and used within the UNSC to justify a major military action. So the way it is framed and the way it plays out take on an importance even greater than the well-being of Libyans; affecting the well-being of future populations whose governments fail to live up to their responsibility. Getting it wrong may mean years of delay in turning R2P into a doctrine that’s widely accepted and provides legitimacy to protect civilians elsewhere, and in the future.
I understand that it’s naïve to think we can divorce weighty decisions like suspending the sovereignty of a UN Member State, from issues of realpolitik. Nor is this blog an argument against the international action in Libya. But we must be wary of the kind of dishonesty inherent in the international system, which allows powerful Member States to lead the way in persuading the UN-SC to mandate violent action against a regime which those same States have already declared needs changing, using the language of R2P.
In Iraq, the arguments about invasion hung mainly on two hinges: getting the UN’s blessing, and the presumed existence of WMD. What was too often missing in public discourse was a frank discussion about the real objectives and plans. This would have allowed people to make an informed political and ethical judgement. The righs and wrongs got lost in the fog of sophistry. In the future, if we are to evaluate the rights and wrongs of international intervention being proposed under R2P, it is of utmost importance that the language used to frame and justify the intervention is as honest and frank as possible, both at the UN and in the parliaments and public discourse of those doing the proposing. It seems a pity that this lesson hasn’t yet been learned; or that the system and culture of international governance still makes frankness such a rare commodity.
From the technical to the political
Over the past few days I’ve been spending time with a Kenyan organisation which has an important role in peacebuilding. They are helping heal some of the wounds in Kenyan society caused by violence after the last presidential election, and by other actual and perceived injustices.
Meanwhile, there’s a massive amount of change going on in Kenya, with the coming into force of a new constitution which implies no less than a radical shake-up of the systems and culture of governance. Some of these changes will be very hard to implement, because they strike at the heart of the political economy, threatening vested interests and injecting a degree of uncertainty into the political calculus. They include new levels of government with new powers, new constituencies, new land laws, and so on. Ironically therefore, the new constitution which heralds a more equitable and more transparent governance – surely a major ingredient of peace – may create new conflicts in Kenyan political society as it beds down, a process likely to take some years.
And Kenyan political society has a habit and a history of manipulating elements of the population to act on its behalf, sometimes violently, to protect its interests (surely the opposite of what politicians are supposed to do?). To some degree that’s what seems to have happened in 2007-08 when violence broke out in some areas after the election results were announced. Therefore any conflicts due to the coming into force of the new constitution over the next few months and years will need to be carefully managed so they don’t become violent, and this too is one of the things which the organisation I’ve been spending time with is trying to cope with: for example anticipating where flare-ups may occur, and supporting local efforts to avoid them.
I was impressed – humbled – when I met one of the local groups working on this last week. This is a group of local leaders who have come together to help build and keep the peace, in an area with a history of conflict over land, and where some ethnic groups regard themselves as indigenous, and others as interlopers; and in a country where politics and ethnicity have long been intertwined. They explained how they had taken active steps to minimise violence, working across ethnic and religious lines; and how they had made it possible, once the post-election violence died down, for people who had been displaced to return safely home. I met a man who’d fled the violence, and who bore witness that he’d have been unable to return home without their intervention.
Sitting in a small room in a small rural town with members of this local group, our discussions were almost entirely political in nature. We talked about political manipulation; about which politicians from which parties would be likely to form coalitions in next year’s elections; about ways that the impending prosecution of six Kenyans by the International Criminal Court might affect local and national politics and conflict dynamics; and so on. It was fascinating, even though I am quite sure that as an outsider I only understood 10% of it all.
The intensely political nature of the discussion made me reflect on other discussions I’ve had as a development worker with local groups in a dozen or more countries in Africa over the past quarter-century, and how the nature of those conversations has changed. In Sudan in the 1980s I must have worked and talked with thousands of villagers, figuring out with them how to grow tree seedlings and plant or replant forests and gum arabic orchards. Land use and access to land were clearly issues, but I don’t remember discussing the politics of it in any significant way with the farmers involved.
Looking back at the intervening years, I can see that little by little, politics did become more prominent in the “development work” I was engaged in. Whether it was about access to land in Rwanda, governance of public resources in Mali, the management of forests and schools in Ghana, the voice of civil society in Benin, the rights and protection of civilians in northern Uganda, or the ability of local women to stand up to armed groups in Congo; the conversations I have had with those involved at the sharp end have become less and less technical (how to plant trees) and more and more political (who has power on this issue? Can the balance of power be altered for better outcomes?)
So that makes me ask a question. Is this simply the journey of an individual (me) through time, becoming slightly less naive as the years go by; or perhaps becoming more interested in the political, and therefore seeing it where he had not seen it before? Certainly that’s part of the explanation.
I’d like to think that a more important part of the explanation is that the “development community” – the UN, the World Bank, local and international NGOs, donors, politicians and civil servants, etc. – has been making this journey too, and probably much faster than I: understanding more and more that the process of development is at least as much about political change as about technical change; understanding more and more that progress is measured as much by how much political voice people have, as about the kind of crops they grow.
If I’m right, and this evolution of understanding is something affecting wide swathes of the development sector, then we face a great challenge in figuring out what to do with this knowledge. Back in 1985, when I understood my role as helping to grow and nurture tree seedlings in arid parts of Sudan, it was relatively simple to see what to do and how to go about it. But when the challenge expresses itself in terms of a transformation of the way people govern and are governed, how does one begin?
The Kenyan organisation I have been visiting for the past week or so seems to have part of the answer to this: identify local leaders with vision and values and support them as they work through the issues confronting them; and thus by precedent establish ways to live together peacefully and productively as they and their fellow Kenyans continue on a political journey towards a future where the values underlying the new constitution – transparency, equity, unity, integrity, dignity, justice, democracy, non-discrimination – are no longer an aspiration but a lived reality.
Last year a colleague and I at International Alert published a report called Working with the Grain to Change the Grain: Moving Beyond the MDGs, a critique of the prevailing development paradigm as often applied to poor countries, and especially of the Millennium Development Goals. We found the development paradigm to be full of far too much lazy group-think. And we found the MDGs to be too narrow, too technical, top-down, and unstrategic. A particular flaw lies in the way the MDGs confuse ends with means.
As we approach 2015, the target date for achieving the MDGs, it will become increasingly clear not only that they won’t be met, but also that the goals themselves paint a very incomplete picture of what human progress means. Don’t get me wrong: I completely agree with the idea of eradicating hunger and economic poverty, getting children of both sexes into school, improving health outcomes and reducing child and maternal mortality, etc. But I also know that if we were to write the history of more developed countries it wouldn’t be written in such narrow and apolitical terms. It would also include difficult processes such as agrarian and industrial revolution, land reforms, labour unrest, revolutions and so on. Critically, it would include the strange and largely unpredictable evolution of institutions and organisations in society, and of values which gave rise to and were in turn nurtured and strengthened by democracy.
We proposed an alternative model to the MDGs, for incentivising and holding leaders accountable for investing in development progress. Rather than applying a narrow set of largely technical pre-ordained goals to all developing countries, we suggested a vision-based approach. This took as its basis the idea that a “more developed” society is recognisable by five key characteristics:
- Equal access to political voice, and the legitimate and accountable use of power.
- Equal participation in a vibrant and sustainable economy.
- Equal access to justice, and equality before the law.
- Freedom from insecurity.
- The ability of people to maintain their mental and physical well-being, to have aspirations and make progress towards them…
…. and that these are all underpinned by a sixth feature: the self-reinforcing presence of institutions and values that support and enable equitable progress and peace.
We saw this as a quite broadly accepted vision, while recognising that there may be many different pathways towards it, and that development strategies should be based on an analysis of how to move closer towards the vision, tailored to each specific context. Our title – working with the grain to change the grain – was intended to illustrate the idea that the transformation of society is most likely to happen when it is in the interests of the elite (who would otherwise successfully resist it). Just to be clear, we made no claim that any country has yet reached – or even come very close to – the vision. But I do claim that the USA, Korea or France for example are closer to the vision than the DRC or Côte d’Ivoire.
A fellow blogger has written an interesting piece, drawing on our report, an article in Mother Jones Magazine, Andy Sumner’s excellent recent report and other sources, in which she takes our six-point vision and applies it to her own USA, pointing out how far away the USA is from the vision. She looks in particular at the trend of increasing income inequality there, and points out that the USA ranks near the bottom of rich countries for access to justice and access to health care (coming behind Botswana for immunization coverage and 23rd in the world for infant mortality, despite its great wealth).
2015 is a few years off, but already discussions are starting about whether or how to replace the MDGs with something more fit for purpose. As part of those discussions the Beyond 2015 Group held a consultation at the recent World Social Forum in Senegal. One of the questions they posed was whether the “post-2015 MDGs” should apply only to less developed countries or if they should be universal. Interesting that the unanimous response was that they should be universal, applied to rich countries as well as poor, based on the notion that all societies are all embarked on the long journey of human progress, and none have yet attained the vision. Saundra Schimmelpfennig’s Good Intentions Are Not Enough Blog quoted above seems to support that view.
The Wheel Has Turned: UK Aid Policy
The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) published the results of its Multilateral Aid Review and Bilateral Aid Review today. The reviews had been ongoing more or less since the coalition government took office last May, and the results were much-anticipated, and not without anxiety. The government had long ago ring-fenced the aid budgeted and was committed to increasing it, so the anti-aid brigade knew they had little to hope for in today’s announcement. Many supporters of aid meanwhile were anxious that too much aid would be linked to the UK’s military adventures in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, and taken away from other parts of the world less linked to the UK’s security in this era of international terrorism. Others were of course worried that their particular perspective or interest would be ignored or dropped. But overall, I’d say that most people will admit, whatever their fears and particular interests, that the government has done a fairly good job in trying to make a bit more sense out of its large, complex and unwieldy aid programme.
At the heart of all this has to be a recognition that the aid wheel has turned. For over a decade since DFID was established in 1997 by Clare Short, it had been subjected to little really rigorous scrutiny at the fundamental level, for a number of reasons. Because the moral case for aid was and remains strong, it was easy to label those asking difficult questions as heartless. Meanwhile, the aid enterprise was so vaguely and broadly defined, and was in any case clearly a long-term endeavour whose outcomes ought not to be measured too soon, that it was by nature difficult to know what success looked like, and thus how to hold its institutions accountable. In this respect it was almost a faith-based enterprise, undertaken and supported by people and institutions whose faith in its importance was sufficient to maintain their energy and commitment. In any case, most aid experts were in one way or other part of and party to the system, so why scrutinise it too closely?, especially when anti-aid critics might seize upon any criticism to propose cuts or abolition. Finally, when the economy was doing pretty well, most people were happy for a relatively small proportion of GDP to be spent on the welfare of poor people elsewhere; in fact for most people in the UK, DFID was fairly invisible. This phenomenon was not limited to the UK, but applied to other OECD countries too.
But the economy took a turn for the worse, the offices of government changed hands, in the UK as elsewhere, and it was time to shine a brighter light on the institutions of aid. In the UK the new government to its credit committed itself straight away to maintaining a large and growing aid programme, despite the views of many – perhaps most – taxpayers who were concerned that the budgets of other government departments were being cut while aid kept growing. Instead of cutting, the government would review and revise the aid programme to be less focused on process and more on results, and ensure that its contribution to UK security and prosperity were maximised. DFID’s spending is more or less divisible into two main instruments of roughly the same size: bilateral aid, targeting specific countries; and multilateral aid, supplying funds to the UN and other multilateral agencies. Hence, the two reviews whose results were announced today: the Multilateral Aid Review (MAR) and Bilateral Aid Review (BAR).
The BAR will cut the number of core bilateral aid partners from 43 down to 27 over the next four years (though it may actually be 28, as Sudan is due to split into two countries come July this year). China and Russia are out, along with other nations deemed no longer in need of UK aid such as Serbia and Vietnam; and other nations where the UK was deemed to lack a comparative advantage, like Burundi. Of the countries the UK will continue to support, a significant number are “fragile” or conflict-affected, in recognition of the “double whammy” faced by citizens there, and the extra support they need. In all 27 countries, DFID’s focus will be on a broad and comprehensive set of results, loosely grouped under five headings:
- Wealth Creation
- Delivery of the Millennium Development Goals to improve health, education, water and sanitation, and reduce vulnerability, hunger and poverty
- Governance and security
- Climate Change adaptation and mitigation
- Humanitarian assistance.
The result of the MAR – a rapid and complex assessment of 43 multilateral recipients of UK aid money – is that four agencies are being dropped, because their mission fails to overlap sufficiently with DFID’s goals and/or their performance fails to come up to scratch. These are UN-Habitat, the International Labour Organisation, the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the UN Industrial Development Organisation. Some other recipients were put on notice that their funds may also dry up if they fail to improve.
Both the BAR and the MAR have been conducted with the degree of professionalism and excellence we have learned to expect from DFID over the years. And with a good degree of transparency too. Despite the speed with which the reviews were done, the resulting reports clearly demonstrate a reflective approach and a recognisable methodology for decision-making.
How should we judge the results of this fast-paced, politically driven policy review? On the whole, it seems a pretty welcome wake-up call. Taxpayers’ money is being spent in large amounts, and should be subject to rigorous accountability. Those who feared that the new government would flex its muscles just to show that it meant business have been reassured that the process has been undertaken without such cynicism. Certainly there will be people and organisations, and especially in the countries and organisations which will no longer benefit from UK aid, who have cause to complain. Personally I am very disappointed that Burundi is being dropped, since it’s something of a donor orphan and needs plenty of help to recover from decades of conflict. But decisions do have to be made after all, and there will always be winners and losers. On the whole, there is plenty to welcome about the BAR:
- The decision to focus on fewer places makes complete sense. Development aid is labour-intensive work, especially in complex, fragile or conflict-affected environments. Civil service numbers seem to be going down, even in DFID whose budget is going up. So it makes excellent sense to focus its efforts on fewer places where its efforts can be planned, executed and monitored with care, and adapted on a regular basis as needed.
- Fragile and conflict-affected contexts do need special attention: they are the places where rapid progress is hardest to achieve, and where people live with the least hope of improvement.
- From the documents that were released today, DFID has done a pretty good job of squaring the circle between the need to deliver on a set of concrete results which look, sound and feel good to a sceptical electorate, and the need to tailor its support to the specificities of each context. This means tangible headlines like 11 million children in school, and saving the lives of 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth, and 250,000 newborn babies; alongside less concrete but, in the scheme of things, equally important issues like “turning the police into an accountable, community based service” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “promoting stability and strengthening accountability” in Kenya, and “increasing the ability of citizens to hold [their government] to account” in Sierra Leone. Getting this balance right is tremendously important, so that the aid programme does not get hijacked by the need to support only those programmes which are concrete and easy to measure. Development progress is more complex than that.
- The attention to fragile states does not appear to have tipped too far towards AfPak and other areas of current or recent UK military operation. The aid programme in Iraq will be phased out, since Iraqis are considered to have sufficient resources of their own, especially from oil.
- Countries which have not made the cut are not just being dropped, but will be phased out over a few years, and the UK will respect commitments already made.
- The bilateral programmes will be complemented by regional programming, able to focus on cross-border or regional issues, such as trade. This is particularly welcome for conflict-affected regions, where conflicts all-too-easily cross borders, and thus peacebuilding efforts need to do so, too. In this respect for example, the UK’s continued and enhaced support for conflict-sensitive and confidence-building economic cooperation across borders in Africa can make a big difference.
So as far as the BAR goes, DFID appears to have done a creditable job and what’s important now is to ensure that the platform it has thus established from which to build on and improve its work in 27 countries over the next few years is exploited with as much care as necessary, especially in the fragile contexts. DFID is helping to lead the ongoing International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, in which a number of donor and recipient countries, along with multilateral organisations, are trying to figure out how international cooperation, including aid, can help build peaceful societies and effective states. It is not easy and the answers are not yet clear, so DFID just like others will need to adopt a patient and adaptable approach if it is to achieve its aims in this respect. Support to Peacebuilding and Statebuilding should no more be immune from scrutiny and accountability than any other aspect of aid; but nor should we pretend that it can be reduced to a set of one-size-fits-all results as some might like. And nor should the UK’s support to fragile and conflict-affected societies be limited to “aid” in its classic sense. A subtle approach, tailored to the context and based on a sophisticated analysis of the political economy and its potential to adapt and transform, will be needed; and DFID will need to ensure that its staff in each context, as well as those who support them in London, are well versed in the skills and talents to do this, and are held accountable for it. There will be times when, even in this new results-based era, the planned programme and some of the expected results will have to be set on one side because other issues become more important.
DFID and its sister UK agencies are not there yet, in terms of their ability to act in this politically astute way, but they are trying and can get there with the right political leadership. But this is the very area where the multilateral agencies have been found wanting. The MAR is a very impressive document, applying a clever combination of simplicity and sophistication as one must when measuring such a wide and diverse array of agencies as UNICEF, UNHCR, UNESCO, the EC, the World Bank and the Red Cross and Red Crescent. My gut feeling is that the MAR is harder to defend than that of the BAR, mainly because the task was a much harder one based on less solid conceptual foundations. If DFID’s budget is increasing, even while its staff complement goes down, and it commits to spend at least 30% of its funds in fragile contexts where – by definition – the institutional capacity is limited, it has no choice but to work through the multilateral agencies who operate in such places. Four agencies are being dropped, and a few others given fair warning they need to up their game. Fine, but 39 (90%) are being retained. Is this a fair reflecton of their worth? Are all 39 agencies good enough?
The report found that, setting humanitarian agencies apart (since they would after all be expected to understand how to operate in fragile contexts) not a single organisation was considered “strong” at operating in fragile contexts. While 14 were rated “satisfactory”, 15 were “weak”, and 4 “unsatisfactory”. Almost all of the multilateral development banks and private sector development organisations were weak or unsatisfactory at operating in such contexts, which speaks volumes about the challenge of meeting economic recovery needs in the places they are most needed – and where the political economy is often at its most complex and resistant to change. As DFID says, “all the multilateral banks are actively engaged in fragile states, and often play a significant role….[and they] generally have good policies and guidance on working in fragile states …[but] lack adequate in-country capacity”.
The review also found multilaterals in general to be poor at incorporating gender. This is very worrying indeed on its own account, but also because an inability to apply a gender lens is likely to be a symptom of a more fundamental inability to understand the complexity of the societies in which mutilateral agencies work, and which they aim to help transform. And this is made worse by the poor scores they received for transparency and accountability which are likewise key to successful performance.
As the MAR very clearly says, the world needs effective multilaterals, which potentially have the legitimacy and the scope and reach which individual donors like DFID can’t aspire to. But too many of them have become unresponsive, too often taking on the characteristics of monopolies. Too often they are held accountable for the wrong processes and the wrong set of outcomes. Working in fragile contexts needs decentralised organisations, able to adapt and react to the context. Too few of the multilaterals are able to do this yet.
So I welcome the MAR as the first step in a process in which the UK, along with other like-minded Member States and funders, pays far more attention to shaping the ability of the institutions it supports and helps lead, to operate more politically and more sensitively in complex political economies, with a view to improving not only the economic and social indicators as measured by GDP and the Human Development Index, but also the much-harder-to achieve-and-measure outcomes such as better and more responsive and participatory relations between citizen and state.
Going beyond impunity for rape in the DRC
Like others I welcome the conviction this week of a number of soldiers, including their commanding officer Lt-Col Kibibi Mutware, for crimes against humanity for their part in the horrific rape of more than sixty women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The attack took place at the beginning of January in Fizi in the province of South Kivu. It appears to have been essentially an act of terror, designed to intimidate and keep the people of Fizi under the thumb of Lt-Col Mutware’s forces.
Unfortunately this kind of incident is all too common in eastern DRC. Rape has been called an act of war there, and in many cases this is an accurate label, since soldiers of all sides appear to have used – and been encouraged or even ordered to use – rape as a way of humiliating their enemies. But in the not-war/not-peace situation which prevails in large parts of eastern DRC, rape is not so much an act of war as an act of domination in the exercise of governance by military forces, whose hold over local populations is a way to control and benefit from the local economy in their own interests while supposedly representing the interests of the state.
Lt-Col Muware is an ex-rebel who has been “integrated” into the government’s army as part of the peace process, and as such is supposed to represent the Congolese state. But the atrocious behaviour of his soldiers in Fizi is a grotesque caricature of Weber’s concept of the state exercising the monopoly of violence. As one women quoted in The Times yesterday put it, “Most of the rapists are still right here in our village. If we go to the river for water, we get raped; if we go to the fields for food, we get raped; if we go to the market to sell our goods, we get raped. There is no peace.” So by her account, in Fizi rape is now the normal price to be paid for access to water and food, the very stuff of life.
The special military court which convicted Mutware and others this week was paid for and assisted by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and we should applaud their willingness and initiative to put resources and action behind what has otherwise become a largely hollow call by the international community for an end to impunity for rape in the DRC. This is at least one instance of people being held to account, under the DRC’s own laws, for their role in a serious crime committed in a context where it would normally have gone unpunished.
But one trial does not create sufficient disincentive to stop others from doing what Mutware did, in a context where rape has become a norm. The woman of Fizi quoted above clearly believes that it will not prevent the same behaviour from being repeated there. We should salute the courage of those who gave evidence at the trial, many of whom now face the double injustice of being excluded from their communities for the shame of having been the victim of violent rape, and the risk of revenge being taken against them by Mutware’s allies who are still at liberty. There is a strong case for the UN to beef up its police and military presence in Fizi to provide greater protection for these witnesses and their families against future reprisals.
It’s also very important that people in the DRC see that those who are convicted in cases such as this do actually serve the sentences which the courts have imposed. As such courts continue to do their work, they must also be seen to act against any and all perpetrators. Some people have claimed that Mutware had fallen foul of the powers that be, hence was a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But my opinion doesn’t much matter. What is essential is that Congolese people see and believe that all those who abuse their positions of power are subject to justice, and all those who rape are subject to justice. Whoever they may be, and whomever they may know.
Meanwhile, there’s a deep and complex transformation process needed. Practically everyone in eastern DRC is caught up in a situation not of their own devising. Even soldiers who commit crimes like the ones in Fizi are in a sense victims – committing acts which they know are wrong. A new report soon out by International Alert explores this issue, and shows that increased incidence of sexual violence is not just an act of war, as it is sometimes simplistically reported, but rather a specific and explicit element of the social and political economy of the area which has both led to and grown out of war, and which must change significantly, for there to be a chance of sustainable peace.
Further court cases are an essential part of any strategy to address the issue of impunity. But rape and sexual violence will only be substantially addressed through a process of comprehensive transformation, based on a thorough and honest understanding of how thing are. Clearly this cannot be imposed from outside, but those Congolese who are trying to bring it about can be supported with resources, with ideas and with solidarity. For example by help with further research to better understand and explain the part sexual violence plays in the social and political economy, and identify realistic ways to change this.
How do outsiders measure the results of their peacebuilding work in conflict affected environments?
I spent two days last week at a conference surrounded by experts in peacebuilding, and in monitoring evaluation. The challenge? To try and figure out how to measure the success of the increasing volume of efforts by well-meaning outsiders to contribute to peacebuilding in places like Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, etc. Why? Because it’s important to know if well-meaning efforts translate into impacts on the ground; and because the governments and international agencies who fund and mount these efforts have to be held accountable for the good use of resources.
Working for a peacebuilding organisation myself – albeit a much smaller one than the likes of the UN and big donors like the UK who were represented at the meeting – I know all too well how difficult it is to measure the impact of what we do. In fact I tend to use the word estimate, rather than measure, since it’s such an approximate art.
The difficulty for many of those involved in peacebuilding is that they frame their work as “conflict prevention”. This gives rise to two problems. First, conflict per se is not necessarily a problem, provided it does not become violent. After all, without differences, without conflict, how would we make progress as a society? So preventing violent conflict is really what they mean.
Second, if you set out to prevent violent conflict, it is hard to measure success except through the use of counter-factuals, and what-ifs? But then one is in the realms of speculation. Can one really uses measures such as “a civil war avoided” as a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of peacebuilding programmes? How can you demonstrate the war would otherwise have happened? And anyway, how likely is “civil war averted” to be sustainable as an outcome, since you are unlikely to have been able to magic away the underlying causes of the putative war through outside intervention, and thus the war has more likely just been postponed?
I think the clue is in the word “peacebuilding”. This is not so much about negotiating a solution to a specific conflict which has become or threatens to become violent. It is about building the attributes in society – locally, nationally, even internationally – which allow people to anticipate and resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence. These are wide ranging and complex. They include the way people relate to one another in society, and whether they have institutions, systems and a culture which provide mechanisms to resolve problems. Parliaments and other councils are obvious examples, but mostly such institutions are deeply embedded, cultural.
Other elements of peacebuilding are that the economy has to be working well enough for most of the people: they have decent opportunities for work, or to run a business. There should be a relatively high degree of well-being, with regards education, health, etc. People should feel safe, and that they will have access to justice, should sonebody harm them or if they are accused of harming others. And above all, access and opportunity to all of the above – political voice, economic opportunity, well-being, safety and justice – should be open to all, regardless of gender, ethnicity, etc. If you doubt that these are the attributes of a peaceful society, consider the degree to which they are present in Libya, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the core countries of the Middle East.
Obviously these attributes take time to build; and in the main, they cannot be gifted or imposed from outside – though outsiders can certainly provide assistance. They can, to a large degree, be measured, and thus they provide the basis for the international commnity to judge whether its long-term peacebuilding efforts are bearing fruit. What they need to do, if they want to know if the billions of dollars they are spending in places like Congo and Sudan are making a difference, is look at whether progress is being made in the areas I have mentioned above, and whether their efforts have contributed.
Phil Vernon 