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| Statebuilding - External Assistance | ||||
Overview The structural factors contributing to conflict include "political, economic and social inequalities; extreme poverty; economic stagnation; poor government services; high unemployment; environmental degradation; and individual (economic) incentives to fight." Thus economic under-development may not in itself be the cause of conflict; factors such as inequality and private economic incentives also play a part. Development assistance has as one of its main aims the alleviation of these important structural causes of conflict, with policies that "promote inclusive development; reduce inequalities between groups; tackle unemployment; and, via national and international control over illicit trade, reduce incentives to fight." Perhaps the most important principle of development assistance is the use of Aid Conditionality as a source of leverage to promote economic and political practices that strengthen peacebuilding. Thus, not only is provision of aid dependent on all sides signing peace accords, but ongoing development assistance is made conditional on continued commitment to implementing and consolidating the peace. Local capacity is key to ensuring that, once the donors leave, the country will have durable governance and economic structures that can function independently of aid. Inequalities between groups must be alleviated, particularly groups with a history of conflict. Inclusive government must be secured, as well as a healthy economy in which groups and individuals stand to gain more by participating within the normal economy than outside it. in countries where conflict revolves around allocation of significant natural resources - such as diamonds in Sierra Leone or Angola - efforts should also concentrate on means with which to take these resources out of the hands of warlords and profiteering elites and make them benefit the country as a whole. Many of the challenges associated with Humanitarian Aid apply equally to external development assistance. There are also some issues that apply exclusively or differently to development assistance. Most problems relate to the way that the provision of development assistance is structured, although conceptual problems, i.e. how to best help countries develop, also apply. Development Assistance Can Encourage Conflict While development assistance rarely acts as a structural feature or a trigger of conflict, it can support both of these causal factors when it is administered without taking into consideration the social and political context in which it operates. Even if aid claims to be "apolitical" it takes a great deal of care and thought to make it politically or ethnically neutral. James Boyce discusses ways in which IFIs should modify their fiscal policy recommendations to bolster peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts, rather than concentrating simply on reducing government budget deficits. This could include influencing domestic spending priorities, and promoting more equitable fiscal policies to alleviate inequalities between conflicting groups. Such an approach would require a more intrusive and 'political' role than the IFIs have taken traditionally. As Boyce writes, to concentrate solely on increasing the size of the economic pie, without considering how that pie is divided, is an approach "singularly ill-suited to war-torn societies."
The problems described above can be traced in part to the institutional cultures and organizational dynamics of donor agencies, and their deficiencies in dealing with post-conflict or deeply-divided societies. With IFIs success is often measured in terms of the amount of money disbursed, rather than the outcome of programs. This distorts incentives for the agencies on the institutional and on an individual staff level. Furthermore, it is not enough to measure the net benefits for the recipient country. In a deeply divided society the benefits that accrue to each side, and the subsequent effect on the balance of power between them, must be carefully calculated. As we have seen, IFIs carry strong ideological biases, and it is these, rather than the need to reduce social tensions and political instability, that inform policies. Lack of inter-donor coordination can also hinder efforts, making aid conditionality, for example, difficult to impose effectively. Little by little the MDBs are reforming to take into account lessons learned. Conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction units are being formed, such as that at the World Bank, to try and deal with these issues. Increasingly agencies take into account potential for conflict when designing their program and moderate them accordingly. Increasingly there are calls for projects to undergo conflict or ethno-national impact assessments, in addition to the usual cost-benefit analysis. For example, privatization must be dealt with extremely carefully in countries with poor ethnic distribution. Another important measure is to involve the IFIs more closely in the peace negotiations in order to strengthen their understanding of the appropriate measures for dealing with post-conflict aid recipients, to bridge the traditional gap between peacebuilding and economic reconstruction, and to improve overall coordination of post-conflict development. Bilateral development assistance also carries problems. Donor governments inevitably have competing multiple interests, peace-building being only one of them. Geopolitical concerns were paramount during the Cold War, leading to US support of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, in the 1980s, or to the French backing of the Francophone Hutu regime prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. There are also important economic and commercial interests at stake, with roughly half of all bilateral aid 'tied' to imports of goods and services from the donor country. The need to take into account geopolitical, economic, and commercial interests, added to the role of public opinion, makes calculation of peacebuilding potential only one of multiple concerns for bilateral donors when calculating policy. Additionally, donor countries can, in turn, strongly influence the policies of multilateral development institutions, exacerbating the effect. Inadequate funding mechanisms: Most donors award funding on a year by year basis. This makes forward planning very difficult for agencies. It also means that each year's budget has to be used up before the next year's funding can be obtained. This pressure to disburse funds in a very limited time may mean that there is not sufficient time to assess what projects would be most beneficial. As a result projects may not be well planned or thought out, leading to wastage of funds and/or adverse political consequences. Additionally, the international community tends to take a fairly short-tern view of post-conflict reconstruction - whereas in reality it can take many years for processes like reconciliation or refugee returns to occur.
Difficulties with Conditionality of Aid Conditionality has proven very effective in coercing parties to follow through with implementation of peace accords and consolidation of the peace. A notable example was securing the arrest of indicted war criminals for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia by withholding aid from Croatia and Serbia. However, there are significant difficulties faced in trying to design and enforce aid conditionality. Donors must be coordinated to prevent them undermining each other; alternative sources of revenue that might weaken leverage, such as access to lucrative natural resources, must be cut off; the potential cost to the more vulnerable members of society must be considered, and if necessary alleviated, through the use of 'smart sanctions' with humanitarian exemptions. Careful use of carrots and sticks can involve, as James Boyce writes, slicing the carrot - providing aid in installments in order to maintain leverage. Donor agencies can be reluctant to impose political (as opposed to economic) conditionalities on aid. This is inappropriate in a post-conflict environment or in a country with potential for conflict, where inequalities between groups have fuelled conflict, and where the government cannot be relied upon to ensure equitable distribution to all minority groups. Furthermore, not imposing conditionalities is not neutral, as it sends signals about what is acceptable, and impacts on local politics. Efficiency and Effectiveness of Development Assistance Interference with local capacities to deal with problems: Both humanitarian aid and development assistance are often implemented without considering the way in which they affect local capacity to deal with problems. This can make recipient countries dependent on aid, as well as encouraging development techniques that are unsustainable without a huge influx of external resources. In addition, the most educated and capable of the local population tend to gain employment with IOs and NGOs that pay the best salaries in a distorted conflict economy of a poorly-performing post-conflict economy. They often work as drivers, translators or administrative staff. As well as wasting valuable human capital and expertise, this leeches expertise from local initiatives to govern and develop, "imposing foreign values and suffocating local initiative" (Guest). If local NGOs are encourages, this often takes the form of monetary grants. This encourages initiatives that wil use such money and thus be unsustainable when foreign aid dries up. NGOs will focus their resources on winning such grants, and instead of working together as allies may become locked in competition against each other. What civil society initiatives really need, it has been mooted, is inexpensive but long-term commitment - something far removed from the international community's relatively short-term approach to post-conflict development.
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