Founding assumptions

Policies are often founded on assumptions that are not just unquestioned but apparently unquestionable. They express a worldview. When policies run into the sand, unless the worldview changes, those responsible for implementation are told to refuel, rev up and drive harder. Such founding assumptions are part of the anthropology of policy and politics and they need to be brought out into the light by looking at unwritten rules and silent norms – the way things are done – rather than just at policy positions, decisions and actions.

When the world changes, as it is changing in these years, therefore, it is well worth trying to bring those assumptions into the light. The idea of looking at the foundations of peacebuilding is not to reject the whole edifice – far from it – but to ensure it is resilient and relevant for current and future needs.

Three founding assumptions in the EU that underlie peacebuilding and also international development assistance alike recommend themselves for a fresh look in these times:

• It’s for others;
• It comes from benevolent power;
• It brings its beneficiaries into a development trajectory that, roughly speaking, is ours.

It’s for others

This is what my most  recent blog post was about. The EU has always thought of peacebuilding as something for ‘out there’ – a wealthy, stable and growing region offering others the benefits of its own success and simultaneously acting self-interestedly to protect that success from insecurity and instability in the wider global arena.

I don’t question that underlying motive. But I look around Europe and I ask myself if peacebuilding is really only relevant for ‘out there.’

No – us too

There are numerous signs of disaffection in our societies.  They are different in form, politics and social basis. They occur in a political and social landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. This background of exclusion, frustration and alienation leans  the disaffected towards something between a tolerance and an embrace for violence.

So – no, peacebuilding is not just for others. It can be brought home. The kind of approaches that offer some degree of hope of stability and forward movement out of repetitive cycles of violent conflict in other countries are worth looking at here as well.

Benevolent power

Closely related to the ‘out there’ assumption, the world the EU saw a decade ago when it adopted today’s commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding was one in which the OECD countries – developed capitalist economies and democratic polities – had the wealth and power and the rest of the world did not. It thus went without saying that what was willed would be done and what was done would be effective. It might take time to get it right, there could be errors along the way, it would be necessary to be self-critical, but when power went to work on weakness – well, the power would work.

Er, what happened to the power?

Except, of course, it’s not like that. That vision of the world doesn’t coincide with reality at ground level and in fact it didn’t ten years ago either. There have long plenty of actors around, powerful in their arenas, whom neither the EU nor the US could bend to their will, whether with aid, bribery or force. And some of those actors are powerful in very large arenas. The problem was visible a decade ago and has only grown in weight in the intervening years. This assumption was always an over-simplified polarisation between the powerful stability of the giver and the weak turbulence of the beneficiary. It was always wrong to see the world that way; now it’s impossible.

The development pathway

With our economies stagnant, joblessness rising, growth next to invisible, politicians impotent and politics alienating, plenty of people are asking what’s so attractive about a development trajectory that leads to where we are. And that’s before we even begin to think about environmental sustainability, climate change and the pressures of demography.

Much of the discussion in Europe about international development aid has got itself tied up in two things – money and measurable targets. But as the debate warms up about what to do after the target date of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, it’s worth taking the analysis further. Current projections indicate that by 2015 not a single MDG will be met in any conflict-affected and unstable country. That is not something that better targets and more money will fix. It is something that should precipitate a rethink. And part of that rethink ought to be about the overall development trajectory.

The development aid discussion has trouble with setting out a desirable destination. With no clear sense of destination, there is no clear direction – there is only good works, which may or may not add up to development.

Here, peacebuilding is different, perhaps because it is newer. It is spending time with the questions, what kinds of countries are stable and why? Both the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 and the independent Global Peace Index reflect this process of inquiry and analysis. And here it turns out that, of course, there are recurrent features of relatively peaceful societies, including not only principles of equality (that are not always respected) but also the institutions that are the basis of how are societies run.

So, perhaps surprisingly, yes, warts and all, recessions and riots notwithstanding, there are things about western societies that make them attractive as development destinations. But in different countries, that destination can look very different. And getting there is not going to be achieved by recalibrating targets and spending more on them.

Power and results

Quickly exploring some of the assumptions underlying peacebuilding has implications for how programmes are understood, discussed and designed. For example, the results agenda that now predominates in many governments’ overseas aid policies is predicated on an untenable assumption about power and effectiveness and has side-stepped thinking properly about the development destination. It could go badly wrong by emphasising short-term results. But if it can be contextualised by greater realism about power and a clearer view of destination, it could be very helpful. It will mean a downwards adjustment in the importance of individual results, which may sound bad to a politician, with proportionately greater attention to cumulative impact.

Destinations and the outsider

Of course, this presupposes a better discussion of destination. That in turns a more honest and perhaps more courageous discussion that stops treating as technical issues that are well understood to be political, cultural and social.

And then there’s the perplexing issue of the outsider – the assumption that peacebuilding is for others out there. Extending the mandate of peacebuilding to include the problems within the EU would bring a new range of approaches to bear on familiar problems. It’s at least an option worth exploring and it would allow us all to get on even terms, sharing with partners in the still vital task of building a more peaceful and secure world.

The EU’s peacebuilding

Since 2001 the European Commission has spent €7.7 billion on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, more than any government or other international organisation and about 10 per cent of its total spending on external aid.

A recent evaluation concluded the money has been well spent overall, albeit with room for improvement – the sort of balanced conclusion you expect from a review like that. The report finds that the EC has undertaken and supported some pretty good work in places as different as the western Balkans, the DRC, Nepal and Central Asia. Not everything works, but nothing has been done that is actually harmful, much that is distinctly beneficial to the common good, and important lessons have been learned.

That was then

The Gothenburg decision was taken at a different time. The Euro and the big enlargement had been decided. Confidence, expansiveness and optimism were in the air. If confidence was shaken by 9/11, the beginning of “the war on terror” and the start of the build-up to invasion of Iraq, nonetheless it was an era of growth and of projecting the EU’s core mission of enlarging the zone of peace to far flung corners of the world.

But in 2007 came the sub-prime crisis in the US and the start of the international credit crunch. In September 2008 Lehman Brothers went down and the world started to be very, very different.

Tragedy and reflection

In fact, for my own organisation, International Alert, things had already started to change. In 2005, the day after London was awarded the Olympic Games of 2012, the city was visited by the worst terrorism it has experienced, far more lethal than anything inflicted in 25 years of war by the Provisional IRA – in four bomb attacks (one on a bus and three on underground trains), 52 people were killed (plus the four bombers) and over 700 severely injured. The city was quiet for the next few days and people worried about whether it was safe to use the bus and tube and go to work.  Two weeks later four more bombs were discovered before they detonated.

In that over-heated atmosphere, on the next day, a policeman shot and killed a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes. It has since been proven that he had no connection with terror groups of any kind. It has been proven that the police had no basis in fact for following him. They panicked and a young man lost his life. I reflected on this and its implications in a post on the day a permanent memorial was dedicated to his memory.

For me and for colleagues at Alert, this awful incident was very immediate: our office happens to be five minutes’ walk from the station where Menezes was shot. Like many others we reflected on these events and we wondered whether skills we have learned in trying to build peace in Africa, Eurasia and Asia since we started up in 1986 might be useful in Britain. We made contact with groups working on community conflict and cohesion and compared notes. Might what we do in Beirut, Monrovia or Kathmandu have some bearing, some relevance in Bradford, south London or Bristol?

The answer was yes (and we now have a programme of activities in the UK), not because we have a magic technique but because we start with a dispassionate analysis of the context of conflict and use a vision-based approach. We don’t only start with ‘what’s the problem and how do we handle it?’ – but with ‘where do we want to be in x years’ time?

This is now

In the summer of 2011, England had its riots. We look around Europe and we see different sorts of disaffection and action: the anger in the anti-austerity, anti-government riots in Greece, the thin patina that people tell me stands between order and a similarly angry chaos in Ireland, the youth movements in Spain, the simmering anger in Italy. Even in a country self-proclaimed by an opinion survey to be among the 2two or three happiest in the world* – Denmark’s capital has been scarred by school-burning and gang warfare in the last couple of years. And at the psychotic and extreme end,  Breivik’s monstrous massacre on the island of Utoya in July 2011 and the discovery of a series of murders of immigrants by right-wing extremists in Germany;

I am not equating these events. This atmosphere of dissatisfaction and violence does not arise everywhere from the same source, the same social groups or the same politics.

But they are nonetheless connected, not by motive or participants, but by the political and social landscape in which they occur.

It is a landscape where people’s sense of social belonging and engagement in the common good is challenged as never before. It is challenged by economics as job opportunities and the belief in a better future diminish before our eyes. Politics is professionalized and in most countries is ever more distant from growing segments of the population, especially among the poor and among the young. Ordinary people feel they are paying the price for mistakes they did not make while those who had the biggest part in the errors in politics and finance are paying a much smaller price.

Some people direct their anger about the injustices at the political establishment, some at the finance world and some – in their confusion at this diminished sense of belonging – against immigrants. But even when the anger is mis-targeted and even when the accusations are false, the feelings that lie behind are real. And sometimes lethal.

Bringing peacebuilding home

How might a peacebuilding approach look? Standard procedure for working in fragile states – rule number one – is to start with context. Which means starting with questions and an open mind.

This makes it very difficult for politicians to bring a peacebuilding approach to their own home patch. At home, they are supposed to know the answers. That’s what we have politicians for – and then we get to choose which answers we like best. Or who answers best, which is not always the same thing.

A peacebuilding approach would not look necessarily at the numbers involved in each action, even the riots. It is a staple of peacebuilding to acknowledge that in countries with a population of tens of millions, it only takes a few hundred unemployed young men, some leaders ready to act, and access to weapons – and you have a war. The IRA’s active forces probably numbered well below 1,000 throughout three decades of war in and over Northern Ireland.

No, rather than the numbers, it’s the background that counts, the social, political and economic context in which this occurs. And the question is whether that background fosters peaceful relations or not.

Last year the UK government brought out its Building Stability Overseas Strategy to guide its approach to peacebuilding in developing countries. Here is some of its analysis, full of resonance for Europe’s current social and political challenges. I have already drawn on it for clues for its resonance for the English riots. But its clues about what questions to ask are so useful it’s worth repeating them (but hurdle over the bullet points if you remember them) (and also get a life – come on).

• ‘The stability we are seeking to support … is built on the consent of the population, is resilient and flexible in the face of shocks, and can evolve over time as the context changes…
• ‘Effective local politics and strong mechanisms which weave people into the fabric of decision-making – such as civil society, the media, the unions, and business associations – also have a crucial role to play.
• ‘All sections of the population need to feel they are part of the warp and weft of society, including women, young people and different ethnic and religious groups.
• ‘Jobs, economic opportunity and wealth creation are critical to stability. Lack of economic opportunity is cited by citizens as a cause of conflict, and is often the most significant reason why young people join gangs…
• ‘Without growth and employment, it is impossible to meet the basic needs of the population, and people’s aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children…
• ‘While an inclusive and legitimate political system is a requisite for stability, confidence in the future comes when people see that their needs and expectations are being met on the ground.’

On the basis of this kind of analysis, you would look at social inclusion/exclusion and marginalisation; at the degree of hope and confidence in the future – or their opposites; at our political institutions – both national and local; at the condition of the economy and whether economic policies are creating opportunities; and at the space for civil society and for bodies such as business associations and trades unions to represent people, articulate concerns and influence politics.

How peacebuilding at home would look

Peacebuilding looks different from one country to the next. But the golden thread that connects it all, expressed in abstract terms, is mobilising social energy for building peace. We work out what form this will take based on need, opportunity and ability in the country where we’re working: police reform, starting new institutions to promote transparency, cultural peace festivals, women’s forums, joint  micro-investment projects involving genocide victims and perpetrators in Rwanda, getting multinationals and community organisations round the table together, communications across the conflict lines, getting conflict-divided communities to cooperate on adaptation to climate change – and much more. Consistently, the theme is people coming together, their energy becoming synergy.

In our atomised societies, bringing people together, asking questions, listening carefully for answers, and shaping common actions: never in the past 60 years has there been such a shortage of this, never has it been more needed.

Growing youth unemployment is causing hurt and anger that a return to economic growth will not be enough to calm. Something else is needed too. It really does seem time to expand the mandate of peacebuilding to include the EU countries themselves.

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* Denmark was ranked top in 2010 in a Gallup poll reported by Forbes in 2010 but more recently may have been shaded out by Norway.

5 criteria for Busan

Just before the meeting, working with colleagues at International Alert, I proposed five criteria by which to judge the success or otherwise of the outcome. Here they are in summary form:

1. Change and uncertainty: A successful HLF4 would be one that recognised that much has changed in this field since the start of the century, causing a great deal of uncertainty – and would set out a way to meet that challenge.
2. Fake consensus: A successful HLF4 would resist the temptation of  shallow consensus and acknowledge that there are different interests, perspectives and approaches – it would, in short, agree to disagree in a grown-up way.
3. More effective collaboration: A successful HLF4 would promote deeper - which necessarily means more selective – collaboration between different actors.
4. Development, not development aid: Success at HLF4 would be reflected by focusing on development and not sliding unthinkingly from the extraordinarily difficult questions of what development means and how countries develop, into the usual concentration on technically better aid instruments.
5. Operationalisation: Finally, a successful HLF4 would encourage countries and organisations either individually or in small coalitions to pursue innovative activities.

So how well did they do at Busan? Does the Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation that was launched with the HLF’s final statement offer real benefits and gains for conflict-affected countries? I wasn’t at Busan nor was anybody from International Alert (and by the end of this article you’ll know whether I regret that), so the scores that follow are based only on the final statement. And note that I am only looking at its relevance for conflict-affected countries.

Change & uncertainty

Change, yes – it frames the opening discussion in the final statement. And by all accounts, the role of China at the meeting made one aspect of change vividly present. The document does reflect on the increase in co-operation between developing countries and the emergence of new aid providers. But that’s not developed as the statement proceeds. Taken as a whole, the flavour is just more of the same.

Uncertainty is barely acknowledged. To be realistic, it’s not really permitted in official communiques of this kind. But that means that a lack of humility is still hardwired into international aid discourse and into its architecture.

And as for conflict-affected countries, in which 1.5 billion people live – they get a mention on page 1 and a paragraph to themselves later on. Not good, not enough and certainly not good enough.

Score: 3/10

Consensus

In paragraph 8 of the final statement, we read, “Our partnership is founded on a common set of principles that underpin all forms of development co-operation.” And that’s it, right there – that’s the fake consensus.

These shared principles are not bad but nor are they profound or inspirational:

• Ownership of development priorities by developing countries
• Focus on results
• Inclusive development partnerships
• Transparency and accountability to each other

The focus on results is new at this level but otherwise this is familiar terrain in which re-statement is easier than investigating why implementation is more complex than was initially anticipated. Rehearsing these unobjectionable and largely technical points masks a wide range of different interpretations about what they mean, which themselves reflect different strategies, goals and underlying principles.

Because there is a great deal of diversity of interest and opinion, it is surely better to agree to disagree – but to nobody’s surprise, the Busan forum reverted to type for such meetings and promoted agreement on technical rather than strategic goals. The final statement lists numerous examples of how actors can cooperate with each other but is silent about what they can and should aim to achieve.

Score: 2/10

Honest collaboration

In the same vein, a sign of success would be that recognition of the need for more effective co-operation (and not just quantitatively more moments of co-operation) would feed through into encouragement for a more selective approach. There could be diversity within this approach, with any government deciding to work most closely with these organisations and states on one issue and those organisations and states on another.

The one place where a push for honest collaboration comes through is in relation to the New Deal developed by the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. This is a valuable statement – drafted well before the Busan meeting – that is specifically directed at the development and peacebuilding needs of fragile and conflict-affected states, made by a group of governments of such countries plus donor government and international agencies. The Busan final statement welcomes the New Deal and continues, “Those of us who have endorsed the New Deal will pursue actions to implement it” – thus distinguishing between those who give the New Deal a passive welcome and those who want to make it work.

Had it not been for this willingness to forego trying for unanimity in action – which usually produces unanimous inaction – the New Deal would have been seen as an initiative that failed at Busan. Instead it comes out of Busan as a going concern with heightened international legitimacy.

Score: 7/10

Aid – or development

In the all too common elision between development and development aid, the latter tends to dominate discussion of the former. Yet in the end aid is merely a potentially important but relatively limited component of development – not the central element. So a successful HLF4 would have agreed that future forums  should be about promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid. HLF4 did not go so far but does include this statement:

“Aid is only part of the solution to development. It is now time to broaden our focus from aid effectiveness to the challenges of effective development. This calls for a framework within which:

“a) Development is driven by strong, sustainable growth.

“b) Governments’ own revenues play a greater part in financing their own development needs. In turn, governments are more accountable to their citizens for the development results they achieve.

“c) Effective state and non-state institutions design and implement their own reforms and hold each other to account.

“d) Developing countries increasingly integrate, both regionally and globally, creating economies of scale that will help them better compete in the world economy.

“To this effect, we will rethink what aid should be spent on and how, in ways that are consistent with agreed international rights, norms and standards, so that aid catalyses development.”

As far as verbal commitment goes, this is real progress. But there are also a lot of silences and recycled general commitments in the document. Nothing much new is said about international trade or crime and nothing at all about policies that reinforce repressive governments in fragile countries.

It remains to be seen whether the words will be matched by action. But the statement provides a useful marker for future intentions, to which governments can be held to account in the future.

Score: 5/10

Operationalisation

The high ambition of getting global agreement tends to lead to an unambitious convergence on the least demanding positions and commitments. By contrast, some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be based on global undertakings but on commitments made between a smaller number of actors. This will give them a chance to put into practice the new thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding.

The role of a global gathering should not be to control, limit or even initiate such innovative work – but rather to highlight and encourage it.

There are some good points in the final statement on this – the endorsement of the New Deal, an acceptance of the need to be less risk-averse, encouragement for development agencies to delegate greater responsibility to their in-country staff, a general welcome for diverse approaches and actors. But overall the final statement falls pretty flat.

Score 4/10

Overall score

To repeat the reservations entered at the outset, the final statement contains more than I have covered here and doesn’t have much about conflict and fragility. Moreover, not being in Busan means I don’t know some the detail that lies behind the statement.

But taking the Fourth High Level Forum at its word as reflected in its final statement, and having set out my stall beforehand to say how I and colleagues would be assessing it, the average of the scores given above is 42%. That’s not a pass mark. If a student got that, the professor would surely add, not good enough – more effort needed.

But others who were there and saw more may judge it differently and have good grounds for doing so.

money & achievement

The Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) was set an initial target to raise $250 million. In fact, $290 million rolled in over the first two years, from one of the broadest group of government donors of any UN fund. As a new set of institutions, the peacebuilding architecture got going slowly and one of the sharpest criticisms of the PBF in the first couple of years was that it wasn’t spending enough money quickly enough. That was mostly unfair, not only because the PBF was dependent on the speed and competence with which other parts of the system and would-be beneficiary governments moved, but also because any new institution has teething problems and goes slowly at first (and so it should or the teething will be all the more painful). One result of that initial impatience is that only $137 million more have been donated in the past three years. There has been a sense that some of the donor governments were waiting and seeing.

What they see now should be pretty reassuring. The PBF is a funding agency not an implementation body - it doesn’t do peacebuilding, it finances it – active in about 20 countries at a level that is pushing towards its business plan target of $100 million a year. It can respond to fully-fledged funding proposals in around three weeks and has been known to do it in a few days – unbelievable speed by UN standards. And there is starting to be a reasonable body of evaluation and assessment of the activities it has financed, which, with all the normal caveats in this kind of analysis, identifies broadly positive impact.

a looming, paradoxical shortfall

This positive record makes it all the more worrying and strange that donations to the PBF are picking up only slowly. This year, the downward trend stopped with just over $70 million donated or promised compared to about $37 million in 2010. And some governments are making multi-year commitments which brings the security of predictable funding levels. But at these levels, the PBF is still living on its initial income and is steadily spending it out. Without a significant increase in donations, it’ll have to cut spending to avoid a deficit in 2013.

Of course, a lot of this is down to the combined impact of waves of economic and financial difficulties hitting donor governments. But it would be staggeringly paradoxical if the PBF were to be left under-resourced today. Consider:

1. The experimental period of the PBF is over; the PBF has proven its worth.
2. As a contribution to the security of citizens, countries and regions, peacebuilding is far cheaper than peacekeeping or major humanitarian operations.
3. The need for peacebuilding is not declining.

This paradox is a symptom of a systemic hangover in the UN – the after-effects of early uncertainty about the concept of peacebuilding and the role of the PBF, alongside impatience because it seemed not to get its gears engaged quickly enough.

starting with uncertainty

The PBF was conceived along the other two pillars of the peacebuilding architecture – the PB Commission and Support Office – by the High Level panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, established by the UN S-G Kofi Annan, with its 2004 report, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, along with the follow-up response report in 2005 by Kofi Annan, In larger freedom.

The key insight from the High Level Panel was that, though peacebuilding should be seen as an expression of the UN’s core functions of security, human rights and development, it had, thus far, been a missing component from the machinery for securing the basic freedoms from want and from fear. So some new institutional machinery was established to fit in alongside the rest of the UN and focus on peacebuilding.

The term peacebuilding had entered the international vocabulary with Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 report, An agenda for peace. But it didn’t really stick. I realised this when I was commissioned in 2002 by the Norwegian foreign ministry in a project together with the overseas development ministries of Germany (BMZ) and the UK (DFID) and the Dutch foreign ministry to review and evaluate peacebuilding practice. The study set out with the notion that there was a decade’s worth of work to look at and soon tripped over the fact that as late as 2001 and 2002, the high-level adoption of the vocabulary of peacebuilding had had very little traction in on-the-ground practice. My overview report of that study, the so-called Utstein Report* was a small step in early 2004 towards clarifying the meaning of peacebuilding and embedding it in international practice. The significant progress was registered with A more secure world in 2004, In larger freedom in 2005 and later that same year the UN summit that set up the peacebuilding architecture.

So it is not really surprising that as recently as 4-5 years ago, as the UN peacebuilding trio started operating, there was a considerable degree of confusion and uncertainty among different parts of the UN, some donor governments and other multilateral organisations about what peacebuilding was and what the UN PBF was for. Some of this confusion, looking back, was almost certainly deliberate: a turf-based determination among UN agencies to push back the newcomer and, as much as possible, grab hold of the resources allocated to it.

clarifying peacebuilding

The grounds for this confusion and uncertainty have been steadily dispelled in the intervening years. Key developments have been the EU‘s partial adoption of the vocabulary of peacebuilding in about 2008; major policy statements by governments such as Norway (with a strategic paper in 2004 followed by a number of speeches and statements from ministers from 2006 onwards), Sweden and the UK; and developments in OECD-DAC, in the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, and the World Bank with its 2011 World Development Report.

The precise form peacebuilding takes varies from one country to the next because conditions and needs vary so widely. The core is the effort to assist a country that is in a perilous situation move to a situation of greater safety.

While the idea started in the 1992 report, An agenda for peace, as a way of defining the key long-term, post-conflict task, the chronology has since been widely qualified. Building peace after there has been massive violence is, in part, an effort to prevent a relapse – and in principle and also in terms of many of the detailed activities, that effort is qualitatively no different from what is required to help a country avoid tipping into large scale violence in the first place. If some 40-50 per cent of violent conflicts slide back into violence after agreement, how do you know at any one point whether you are in a pre-war or post-war situation?

Beyond this, the focus in the World Development Report 2011 on large scale violence of any kind, including crime as well as political instability and outright war, together with the experience of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 both suggest that peacebuilding has a much wider relevance than a recent war or its looming threat. In both kinds of countries, albeit in different ways, a core need is to develop reliable institutions for citizens’ access to social participation and a political voice, to justice and fairness, to security and prosperity. This is likewise the core set of tasks in peacebuilding. It is part of building a peaceful state and part of peaceful development – and they are a part of peacebuilding.

As the cogency of peacebuilding has become more widely accepted, its wide-ranging relevance understood, and its correspondingly large variety of means and modalities acknowledged, so also the practice has begun to advance and the body of evaluation literature is beginning to build up and reveal impact. With this, the earlier uncertainty and confusion around peacebuilding have dissipated significantly.

the role of the peacebuilding fund

At its broadest, peacebuilding is the process through which risks to human security are diminished and institutions are built so ordinary people can benefit from well-ordered government, the rule of law and relatively fair access to reasonable levels of prosperity. For unstable and conflict-affected societies, it’s a key pre-condition and an enduring component of equitable development.

It is, furthermore, not only a deep-reaching and wide-ranging process but also long-term. The World Development Report 2011 talks of a 15-30 year time frame.

It is not the role of the UN Peacebuilding Fund, aiming to spend about $100 million a year, to accompany a country the whole way along that road. It is its role, rather, to help start the journey and to come back in along the way to help clear some obstacles that may be encountered.

This means the PBF has to be catalytic. It has to know how to kick-start peacebuilding and unblock the process if and when that’s necessary. In turn that means it has to be quick. The three-week target for turning round applications for funds is both necessary and impressive. At the same time as speed, it needs to be relevant and precisely targeted. For example, it may not just be a question of police reform but of a specific component of police reform in a particular part of the country that is most needed. Knowing that – and knowing that it may be necessary to ask that question – is key.

All these qualities also mean the PBF often has to be innovative – or gently nudge UN in-country teams and would-be beneficiary governments into taking an innovative approach. And with that goes possibly the most difficult part of this array of qualities so the PBF can fulfil its niche role: it needs to be able to take risks. These risks are not the risks of doing direct damage but of not succeeding – of backing your judgement and getting it wrong.

We may think that the only people whose judgement never fails are those don’t use it much – and the same is true of institutions. But that is not much of a defence when a donor government asks about $10 million that has frankly speaking been wasted on poor programming. The PBF’s donors all support the idea that it should be less risk-averse than other parts of the UN system but not many can be relied on if the risk doesn’t pay off.

where things now stand

All that said, there is a pretty good feeling around the PBF at the moment and good reason for that. It is a quick acting, well managed, flexible financial instrument. It is building a decent track record. It has the support of some important donor governments and what it needs now is for some of those who are in the habit of giving it $1-2 million a year to promote themselves to the the 3-5 million range, while some of those at 5 or so push on for the 10 million mark.

It would be a good idea to start a fundraising push with the EU, which so far hasn’t given any money to UN peacebuilding but could, and then with countries whose economies are actually working and growing. China and India are both regular financial supporters of the UN Peacebuilding Fund: now would be a good time to join the ranks of the big donors and the main driving forces.

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* The group of four governments were known as the Utstein group because their first meeting as a foursome of development ministers was at Utstein abbey in western Norway.

(This post is co-authored with Phil Vernon, with input and comment from several colleagues at International Alert.)

The Fourth Forum

To the initiated it’s HLF4. The previous three were in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). The central output is the final statement – the Outcomes Document. For Busan HLF4 the wording is largely agreed and builds on the output from the previous three.

In one way it’s all a well-oiled piece of machinery. Yet economic and social development and international development assistance are anything but well-oiled. There’s a disconnect between what leads up to and out of Busan and the reality both of development and of development assistance.

A successful Busan HLF4 is one that finds some way to bridge that gap and address the realities.

New thinking on development and conflict

More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict. None of those countries has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDGs).

For all that the MDGs are, as I have argued in previous posts, flawed, generic and blunt instruments for measuring and guiding progress, they are what the international development assistance community has committed itself to – both to be guided by and to be assessed against.

And by that standard, for conflict-affected countries, it’s not working.

There has been a lot of reflection on this over the past few years:

• The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011 outlined a new approach to development assistance in conflict settings. It emphasises jobs, inclusive public institutions and the confidence of ordinary citizens in their state and their future.
• There has been renewed focus on the need for concrete results from aid, to help citizens in recipient countries hold their governments to account. This chimes well with the growing emphasis on transparency among aid donors, recipients and intermediaries.
• There is an increased recognition that development is not just about the economy, health and education but also about how people are governed, their access to justice and whether they are safe from danger. And some development assistance is being used  on the lines of these insights.
• Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are providing increasing amounts of aid, bringing different approaches that are not part of the old aid orthodoxy.

Understanding complexity

Programming aid effectively is difficult, especially in conflict countries. It is not just a question of being more efficient, getting more coherence between donors without wasting time in endless committee meetings, and emphasising projects that produce quick and visible impact.

The very purpose of aid has changed in recent years to embrace the previously unfamiliar language of peacebuilding and statebuilding. It has thus become far more ambitious – and rightly so. Any number of successful development aid projects do not necessarily equate to promoting development, unless peace and the institutions of the state are being built at the same time.

Twenty years ago an aid programme might have built schools and trained teachers. Ten years ago it might have strengthened a government’s capacity to plan, provide and oversee education, including a grant for school building, operating costs and teacher training, while looking to a parallel programme to increase tax revenues to cover recurrent costs. Now some donors want to foster better relations between the state and the people, increasing responsiveness, responsibility and citizenship. This requires change in some of the institutions at the heart of governance and society.

New challenges – and persistent ones

Progress has been made, then – especially in the analysis – but many problems remain, especially in the practice:

• It’s widely agreed that building responsive and responsible citizen-state relations is key to peace and prosperity but not much is known about how to do it, especially at the speed and on the scale that meets people’s expectations. How to get the balance right between progress and stability?
• The lack of decent work for young people is widely acknowledged as a failure of development and a major threat to stability. The orthodoxy says the private sector should create jobs – but that won’t happen at the scale and speed, or with the dependability and stability, that are required in the aftermath of violent conflict or repression. Should we ignore the orthodoxy and go for externally funded 30-year public works programmes?
• Climate change brings new challenges – pressure on resources like land and water, the collision between growth and green priorities, the task of adaptation – together with huge new spending budgets. These are largely managed separately from other aid, raising the risk of increasing incoherence among donors and recipients.
• In conflict countries and fragile contexts, the practice of aid organisations has not kept pace with new understanding of the purposes of aid. Without urgent change, they risk being unfit for purpose.
• We have not yet got the right metrics for assessing progress towards stability. It cannot be done with the same metrics that suffice for health or education and it is increasingly tiresome that aid agencies seem to be pulled towards inappropriate indicators by the results agenda. Rigorous qualitative indicators and a time-frame appropriate to the task are key components.
• The behaviour of governments continues to hinder development. The foreign policy of some donors undermines their own aid goals while some recipients use aid primarily to hang onto power.

A new road after Busan

As so far drafted, the Busan Outcomes Document reflects a lot of new thinking on aid – statebuilding and peacebuilding, human security, transparency and results. But it fails to reflect the scale and complexity of the challenge of supporting development in conflict-affected countries in a changing world.

There is a fairly widely shared view that this is the time to end the High Level Forum process. Let Busan be seen as fourth and last. The world is changing and however the actors in international development want to come together in the future to discuss common issues and concerns, this format belongs to the world before the 2008 crash, before the collapse in confidence within the EU, before the recognition of how important the new big players are.

Changing format will – as any organiser of major events and processes will tell you – have a big impact on how participants will view their gathering. Changing format will permit them to break painlessly from old orthodoxies and assumptions that have served their purpose. It will let them get to grips more decisively and clearly with the challenges identified in the World Development Report 2011 among others.

Success at Busan

All that said, how will we know if the Busan High Level Forum is a success, justifying the presence of 2,000 busy people? Five critical factors in the speeches and statements at Busan will offer evidence of success:

1. Recognising change and uncertainty: The way development and aid need to be framed in policy discussions has fundamentally changed over the decade since the MDGs were agreed. They looked progressive then, unimaginative now. We need new tools and methods to achieve and to measure success. Good work has been done – more needed. Participants at a successful HLF4 will define this challenge and set out a process for meeting it.
2. Getting a balanced combination of agreement and disagreement: Beneath the technical language of aid, development is political and contentious. It speaks to different theories of progress and change. International forums about aid in the past have glossed over this, focussing instead on agreements about process issues. Not unimportant, but when consensus is achieved that way, it is a shallow and artificial agreement that often leaves aid practitioners trapped by official niceties into policies they know are flawed, targets they know are unreal and actions they know are ineffective. Alongside that, the emphasis on the technical masks the big power political, strategic and economic rivalries that are also part of the context. Participants at a successful HLF4 will recognise that their different interests and perspectives lead to quite different views about how development happens and how to aid it. This will allow the issue to be debated more openly as the international community starts to prepare for the world beyond the MDGs after 2015.
3. Improving the effectiveness of collaboration: Regardless of the difficulties of getting agreement beyond the technical and surface level, international agencies, governments and civil society do need to work together. But  – and this especially applies in conflict-affected countries and regions - they need to work together where and when they have a deeper level of agreement that covers more of the core problems. Thus, in line with getting recognition (and therefore respect) for differences of view and approach, participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to promote and mandate a more selective but deeper collaboration among the different actors.
4. Development – not aid: Aid is important and the way it is planned and used matters. But the time for meetings about aid effectiveness is over. Future meetings and processes should be about development strategies. They should debate what constitutes development and identify the policies and behaviours of citizens, governments, businesses, NGOs and IGOs that are most likely to promote progress, and figure out how to encourage them. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree that future international forums should be defined in terms of promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid.
5. Operationalisation: Getting global agreement on critical issues is hard and results in a convergence on least demanding positions and commitments. So it is worth recognising that some of the most important progress over the next few years will not be at the global level. Rather, it will be found at the level of specific countries, organisations, working relationships and programmes of activity. This implies a need to encourage individual countries and organisations to push ahead with operationalising some of the new development thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to prioritise the operationalisation of these new approaches to promoting development in conflict-affected countries.

familiar sentiments in New York

In New York, not without good cause, Nick Clegg, Andrew Mitchell and a host of international politicians are saying things we’ve all heard before:

• There is great need in the world;
• MDGs are a rallying cry to support the poor;
• They have led to unprecedented mobilisation of resources from rich countries for development aid;
• But not enough;
• Good progress has been made but more effort is needed;
• We’re keeping our spending promises so let others follow;
• Come on everybody – one final push and we can do it.

Yes, yes, but as I’ve been arguing (see my post of 20 Sept among many) and as a new International Alert report explains in more detail, while the MDGs are unarguable as individual goals they do not encompass development as a whole. For the most part, they focus on life-saving help for people, which is undeniably important but is not the same as development.

doubts and the need for a new narrative

There is a growing constituency that, probably having been concerned at the time about the simplicity of the approach to development that is reflected in the MDGs and was articulated in the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, but largely keeping those doubts quiet at the time, is now more willing and more confident about openly questioning some development tenets that previously went unchallenged. This was reflected at the Manchester conference on Ten Years of War on Poverty, well reported and summarised by Michael Edwards, and also in some of the media coverage and discussion of the issues at the New York UN Summit.

The old development consensus faces a scissor-blades attack that is not generated by those of us expressing reservations about the grail of the MDGs. One blade is the background of public spending cuts. The other blade is that for every MDG success anyone can show, there is a development failure on the other side of the scales. Having accepted a narrative that development just needs more money and more effort, generous charity-supporting and tax-paying publics may start to question whether that narrative works. And if it doesn’t work, why spend money over there when it’s badly needed up here?

Avoiding the scissors requires a new narrative. It entails accepting that good development projects and even meeting the MDGs do not necessarily and everywhere add up to development. That is the nettle that the development consensus has not managed to grasp. And the most straightforward way of grasping it is by focusing on the particular challenges of supporting development in conflict-affected countries with poor governance.

new thinking in London

Refreshingly, it seems to me that Andrew Mitchell has done so. So, to be fair, did his Labour predecessor Douglas Alexander. But Mitchell has gone further and while a single speech in Belgravia to the Royal College of Defence Studies does not have the policy weight or detail of a government white paper, he has set out an approach that offers a solid intellectual and practical framework for development aid.

In a blog post a couple of weeks back, I picked at the threads of previous coalition government policy statements and a couple of leaked DFID documents, and said that I had some concerns about how well grounded and rounded the government’s new approach to development in the shadow of conflict would turn out to be. A key issue was about the possibility of aid becoming an inappropriate add-on in situations such in Afghanistan where UK forces are engaged in combat. But I argued that it was too early to judge how serious these concerns would be and that Andrew Mitchell could put doubts to rest by a single speech.

And on 16 September, Mitchell made a speech.

the distraction of ‘securitisation’ …

Critics and sceptics voice the fear that the government, by focusing on supporting development in insecure, war-torn or -threatened places, would ‘securitise’ aid.

Over the years I have found many things to say about securitisation, which I think has degenerated into a boo-word to throw at development policies that do anything other than fund health, education and women’s empowerment. Among the things one can say is that the entire modern edifice of overseas development assistance has its foundation in US global security strategy in the Cold War and Harry Truman’s Point Four Declaration in his 1949 Presidential Inauguration (“Point Four” because he announced “a bold new program … for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” as the fourth point of US foreign policy). In other words, there has always been – for better and/or worse – a bigger policy context to development aid.

There is one part of the securitisation concern, directed at the Conservatives in opposition and in government, that I have shared. This is that policy statements about the importance of addressing conflict problems in order to achieve development outcomes tended to focus on British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and left out all the other conflict-torn countries where British aid policy is engaged.

… and laying it to rest

Faced with the text of Mitchell’s speech of 16 September, therefore, I asked myself one single, simple question: what examples does he use to support and illustrate his case?

Answer: Afghanistan, Balkans and specifically Bosnia and Kosovo, Burma, Cyprus (his personal experience in peacekeeping), DRC, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, northern Uganda, Yemen.

Conclusion: government policy on development and security is not over-focused on the high profile and very particular cases of Afghanistan and Iraq.

THE BONES OF THE ARGUMENT

Mitchell’s speech can, without damage (I hope he and his speech writers will agree), be expressed in the form of one single over-arching theme and nine propositions about development assistance, of which three express basic principles and six address the foundations of practice.

The over-arching theme is “putting development at the heart of an integrated approach that supports the world’s most vulnerable people and protects Britain from external threats.” Key words here:

• “At the heart of an integrated approach“: Critics may jump at this and say development policy is being buried in security policy. A more measured response is that the effect can work the other way: development thinking can be (a central part of) what shapes the overall approach. Only experience will show which way round the effect works.
• “The world’s most vulnerable people“: Because the most vulnerable are those living in impoverished and conflict-affected countries.
• “Protects Britain“: This is the core component of Mitchell’s argument – the link between international development and UK security against external threat.

Proposition 1 is that “The indirect consequences of overseas conflict represent a real and present danger,” with a sub-proposition, 1A, that it is “a danger that cannot be dealt with exclusively by counter-terrorist means.”

So the first pillar of the argument is that we British citizens and tax-payers (and, by extension, of course, you citizens and tax-payers of other well off countries) have a basic interest in  preventing violent conflict (“upstream”) and aiding recovery from violent conflict (“downstream”) in order to improve our security. To this we add Proposition 2 – it “is also in the interests of the world’s poor.”

Those who have read other of Mitchell’s speeches or Conservative policy statements on development in the last several years know that the interest-based argument generally gets some philosophical moral support, so we can feel good about benefitting from doing good. This time is no exception. Proposition 3 is that “(O)ur commitment to help the vulnerable and persecuted endures.” That’s the underlying morality, though note the neat insertion of “persecuted” instead of “poor”, which more directly links the moral case to the need to focus on conflict and peace issues.

These three propositions of the interests and moral issues at stake are followed by six that set out the basis of the policy in practice:-

Proposition 4 is the importance of strong analysis and a strategic focus so as to “concentrate on those countries and regions that are at greatest risk; those that are of greatest interest to us; and those where the UK as a whole is likely to have greatest impact.”

This is another point where critics and sceptics might leap, or at least ask the DFID policy train to pause for thought. The question is whether these three points are criteria that all have to be satisfied. After all, not every country where need is great engages the UK’s interests, and not in all those will the UK have the greatest impact.

What happens if UK interests are not much engaged but the UK could do a lot of good? If the idea is that the UK “as a whole” must have impact, does that mean that when the UK military component would have little discernible impact, the government would say, well, don’t intervene there.

If need, UK interest and UK impact are three criteria, all of which have to be satisfied, then the number of countries that might be assisted will fall quite sharply. But if they are guidelines, the policy will as a result be more permissive, therefore capable of doing more good and, therefore, if Mitchell’s basic principles are on target, capable of making a greater contribution to UK security.

Proposition 5 puts “inclusive politics” at the heart of action by the UK because that is the way to build “an accountable state”. This chimes well with the approach that peacebuilding NGOs have brought to their work and to their critiques of state-building approaches that merely focus on building technically capable and efficient departments of state. The way states are built is ultimately through the relationship between ordinary citizens and the holders of power, and accountable states emerge when the people can constrain and hold the powerful to account.

Proposition 6 looks for partnerships in “a networked world” in which we former colonial powers have a limited role. Hearing this from a Conservative Cabinet member speaking at the Royal College of Defence Studies – yes, that is refreshing.

Proposition 7 reflects on the complexity of building peace – it takes time and requires long-term commitment. So that’s a welcome end to Treasury-imposed three year quantitative targets for UK policy on preventing violent conflict. Or at least, a peaceful shot across the Treasury’s busy bows.

Proposition 8 returns to the notion of an integrated approach “drawing together all the development, diplomatic and defence tools at the UK’s disposal.” There can surely be little argument with the idea of a government acting in concert with itself. And Mitchell went to pains to say that DFID’s programmes would not be coerced into meeting non-development objectives: “Our aid will stick to development principles and to the OECD-DAC definition of what constitutes aid.”

Finally Proposition 9 asserts the need for “flexible, bespoke solutions crafted in response to specific needs on the ground.” Again, it is hard to imagine any serious argument against this, which is, moreover, what peacebuilding organisations have been urging on donor governments, international organisations and development NGOs for most of the past decade.

And a few quick questions to finish off with

So it was an important and valuable speech, marking a point when the (still) new government has made considerable strides in drawing its policy together, coalescing the different elements into a single approach. The first big question, which cannot be answered now, is how it will turn out in practice. Implementation and results are the key test of any policy, however well framed and articulated. But there are a few other questions, short of that, which are worth asking now.

1. Do all development priorities, even in conflict-affected countries with bad governance, require the concerted “whole of the UK” approach? Take building resilience so as to be able to adapt to face the consequences of climate change: if there is not a role for MoD or FCO, does that make it less important for DFID? Presumably not, so how do/will the mechanics of prioritisation work?
2. Working on conflict and peace issues demands strong analysis (see above, Prop 4) and strategic focus, both of which need people. It is work that is knowledge-intensive and labour-intensive. Where will the knowledgeable people be if DFID has to go through with the staffing cuts apparently demanded of every government department? More generally, with DFID’s budget protected but its staffing levels not, how on earth do you think you are going to get the extra work done except by outsourcing it? Or is that the idea? And if so, how will you sustain the ability to ensure quality?
3. Andrew Mitchell’s capacity to identify both interest-based and the moral arguments for aid suggests a talent for squaring the circle. I like it. But here’s another one. The 16 September speech delivered on the promise visible in earlier speeches and policy statements, to give a rounded view of development policy in conflict-affected countries, solidly asserting the importance of “upstream” conflict prevention as part of government priorities. Addressing conflict and engaging with politics, however, are not what the MDGs are about and Mitchell’s speech describes the MDGs as the UK’s development policy “lodestars”. The usual way to square this circle is by arguing that, in order to achieve the MDGs, it’s necessary to prevent and resolve violent conflict and to secure peace. But come on: isn’t there a better way? And isn’t the policy narrative going to need that better way as we move towards 2015 and a raft of MDGs not being met? And isn’t it a good idea to start developing it now?

NB Apologies to any early readers of this post. I pressed the wrong button at some point and the post uploaded itself while still in early draft form.

At a launch meeting a couple of weeks back in London, the moderator – the BBC’s Bridget Kendall –  asked the report’s lead author, Phil Vernon, “You clearly seem to have a problem with the MDGs – what’s that about?”

Yes, what is it about? A call for the rich to support the poor that has garnered the support of all UN member states and a glittering array of international stars and celebrities – who could object? Or, more precisely, what’s the nature of the reservation that has been nagging away at some people for a decade since the MDGs were first articulated and is now starting to be aired in a variety of media and forums?

For me the problem with the MDGs comes down to five main inter-related issues:

1. They are not comprehensive so do not fully depict what developing countries should aim for – or what richer countries should assist them in. The MDGs include much that is of fundamental importance for development.* But among the key factors impinging on development that the MDGs wholly leave out are peace, the system of governance, security, law and order, justice, corruption, statutory law, human rights and education beyond primary level. Of course, setting out big development goals in a relatively concise form necessitated selection. However, the items that have been left out are not (or should not be treated as) mere after-thoughts or add-ons; these are some of the fundamental, determinative considerations of development.

Initially, it was the Millennium Declaration that set out the aspirations – a commitment to a better world defined through values, principles and basic goals (take a look at them in the footnote below).** The MDGs took two elements from the Millennium Declaration – #3 on development and poverty eradication and #4 on the environment – and re-fashioned them into eight global goals. The selectiveness of the MDGs, in short, was conscious, a point to which I return below. Even within a narrowly defined view of development, the MDGs are selective, with three focusing on health but none on agriculture, for example, while complex issues of trade, global finance and investment are wrapped up under the heading of MDG #8 on global partnership.

2. To a considerable degree, however, the problem resides not in the MDGs themselves but how they are used. Even though the MDGs omit some of the fundamentals of development, nobody could disagree with them. I will not object to the goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015, for example. But when you hear a donor government official say that he cannot fund secondary education because his government, committed to achieving the MDGs, wants education programmes to focus on the primary level, then you think something might be wrong. And I have heard that and comparable sentiments voiced on more than one occasion. In a similar way, for several years the MDGs have given licence to donor government officials to avoid thinking about how to address problems of peace, security and governance in their ODA policies and programmes.

In other words, the real problem is not just that the MDGs are incomplete but that they are treated as if they were a comprehensive guide, which can only produce misleading results.

3. The MDGs express some broad aspirations well but creak under the burden of being treated as quantifiable indicators of progress. If the MDGs were treated merely as expressions of intent, there would be much less to dispute. But they have been given the task of measuring progress and thus have become not only both ends and means but also quantitative indicators and planning guides.

From the Millennium Declaration to the MDGs,  out of which came targets and indicators and, now, a whole world of data on development progress. And these indicators have been used not only to assess global progress but also to guide strategic planning for individual countries. With that, the purpose of the MDGs seems to have become thoroughly twisted and this selective set of eight goals has seriously been over-loaded.

I  appreciate the arguments of those who say that the world of ODA has improved and strengthened enormously since 2000 because the MDGs functioned both as a clarion call to support international development and as a concrete, hard-data way of measuring progress and therefore holding political leaders to account.

But the communication potential of the MDGs is one thing; their statistical robustness is another matter entirely. Even so strong a supporter of the MDGs as one of their initial architects, Mark Malloch-Brown, acknowledges that the reason why progress towards halving the number of people living on less than $1 per day (Target 1A) looks pretty good is because of economic growth in China and other parts of Asia (which especially includes India). What goes by in silence is the point that China’s and India’s growth rates have not been fuelled by ODA or indeed by UN or international action.

Late editorial addition: here it is worth checking out what Michael Edwards reported on openDemocracy from the big academic conference on Ten Years of War on Poverty, held 7-10 September in Manchester. In particular, take a look at what the academics were saying about the unreliability of poverty statistics. One expert refers to the figures as “nonsense on stilts” while others affirm that there is no valid way of answering the question of whether world poverty is declining – and far less explaining why.

So keep MDGs or other similar goals in order to summon people to action to help eliminate world poverty – but don’t use them to measure and far less to guide government policies because they will only sow confusion.

4. Though selective, the MDGs are generic. In other words, they manage the not inconsiderable and somewhat paradoxical feat of being too broad and too narrow at the same time. In badly governed, conflict-affected countries, boosting primary education and focusing on some basic health issues are not likely to move the country’s development agenda along. These activities will help people and do therefore express the basic humanitarian impulse that is part of the driver of ODA from rich countries but that is not the same as development.

Improving primary education and basic health is an absolute good but programmes to that end, if not connected to an effort to ensure that the national capacity for delivering education and health services is strengthened, may foster a culture of dependency. That is the opposite of what real development needs and generates. In other countries, where conflict and governance are not such overwhelming issues, the health and education focus may be key to kick-starting development. Then again, in such countries roads and communications might be what are most needed.

It depends – it is bound to vary from one country to another. In that sense, by being generic, the MDGs are drawn with too broad a brush while what they draw is too limited.

5. And then there’s the a-political politics of the MDGs. So why are the MDGs so narrow? Part of the answer is about politics while part of it is, frankly, a bit of a mystery. The MDGs focus largely on those aspects of development in which politics play little part. There are two exceptions:

• MDG #3 promotes gender equality and the empowerment of women. While the accompanying target translates that goal into gender equality in education alone, the indicators include proportions of women in employment and in parliament.
• MDG #8 is a vaguely worded aspiration for a global partnership for development, which is translated into targets that are partly about trade, some types of investment, world finance and debt relief.

Those are highly political questions but the world community has become adept at air-brushing the politics out, removing their bite, and then making snail’s pace progress at best on what’s left of their filleted content.

Going back to 2000, what was for the most part possible to agree is a set of actions that are a-political, non-contentious and humanitarian. The challenge for implementation can then be seen as essentially technical – a matter of getting the programmes, financing and indicators right. There can be little argument against the proposition that while government leaders could agree that sort of big vision in 2000 (or now), there was little likelihood that they would agree to a series of goals addressing both international imbalance of power and the very limited participation by ordinary citizens in the affairs of so many developing countries. The biggest single limitation in the MDGs is that they do not challenge interests that are vested in the status quo – and nor, realistically, could we expect them to.

What I find a little mysterious is why, after politics had been selected out, there was even further selectivity at play. While mentioning HIV/AIDS and malaria, why was TB relegated to “other diseases”? Why primary education but not secondary and why were university graduates (even if only to provide teachers to deliver primary education) not seen as important for development? Why did agriculture not get a look in? What about roads?

This week

All in all, we can agree that it was quite some achievement to get the MDGs established. The governments of the world probably went as far as they could collectively go with the Millennium Declaration and the more specific MDGs. The latter are selective but that might have posed no difficulty, except that they were then simultaneously reified as objectives and deployed to shape and assess policies.

It is worthy of note that the summit’s 13,700 word draft outcome document , while largely structured around the eight MDGs, includes quite long passages on economic interdependence and trade, recovery from the recession, peacebuilding and conflict issues, universal access to basic social services, anti-corruption measures and human rights. With this, the summit reflects the way in which the real problems of development are increasingly being included in the frame of reference of the major international development institutions. It is an implicit recognition of the partial nature of the MDGs.

This is welcome movement. It is reflected in OECD-DAC and its work on peacebuilding and statebuilding, in the World Development Report 2011 from the World Bank, with its focus on development in fragile and conflict-affected states, and in the evolving policies of a few donor governments, in particular the UK (on which, more in my next post).

I am sceptical that it will get much news coverage – but inching towards a future beyond the MDGs is actually the big story in this week’s MDG Summit.

___________

REMINDERS

* The eight MDGs are: 1 Eradicate extreme poverty & hunger; 2 Achieve universal primary education; 3 Promote gender equality & empower women; 4 Reduce child mortality; 5 Improve maternal health; 6 Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria & other diseases; 7 Ensure environmental sustainability; 8 Develop a global partnership for development.

** The eight elements in the Millennium declaration are: 1 Values & principles – promote dignity, freedom, equality, equity, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, shared responsibility and the sovereignty of nations; 2 Peace, security & disarmament; 3 Development & poverty eradication; 4 Protecting our common environment; 5 Human rights, democracy and good governance; 6 Protecting the vulnerable; 7 Meeting the special needs of Africa; 8 Strengthening the United Nations

NOT A LOT (FIRST leak)

In mid-August the Left Foot Forward web-site reported that DFID officials were recommending “slashing 100 projects to help the world’s poor.”

Well, not exactly. The recommendation, which could be read in full because Left Foot Forward included the link in its article, was much less dramatic: the memo proposed commitments, not projects, against which DFID would no longer hold itself publicly accountable. There was no slashing of projects but, rather, a distancing of a government department from a raft of undertakings made by the previous government (which was, lest anyone has forgotten, the government of a different political party).

So there’s much less here than first meets the eye, which is why there wasn’t much of a media fuss about it. It’s hardly unreasonable, after all, that a new government undertakes this kind of review and clear-out. And since the Labour government had a habit of governing by initiatives, it left behind a pretty big pile of commitments for its successor to take a vinegary look at.

At the same, the memo was far from vacuous. It warns that DFID Directors will be asked to review commitments that are not retained and “where work is not in line with new Ministerial policy priorities or not providing value for money, it should go.”

Nothing unreasonable about this either – new governments are supposed to take up new and drop old. But it does mean that a discussion is going on, decisions will be taken, and it is likely that some projects and policies will be dropped, and this will probably lead to some good old-fashioned political debate about aid priorities. So Left Foot Forward did well to publish even if it got carried away with the headline.

Put another way, the memo shows which way the wind may blow – but it’s far too soon for a gale warning yet.

a BIT MORE (second leak)

The second leak came a couple of weeks later when the Observer picked up another internal DFID document. The article led with the claim that the government is planning “a wholesale change to Britain’s overseas aid budget,” in which “the new national security council, which oversees all aspects of foreign policy, is requiring that national security considerations are placed at the heart of aid projects.”

Again, not exactly. The full text wasn’t put up on line but the article hinges its report on the following gobbet from the DFID document: “The national security council has said the ODA budget should make the maximum possible contribution national security consistent with ODA rules. Although the NSC will not in most cases direct DfID spend in country, we need to be able to make the case for how our work contributes to national security.”

Though the article huffs and puffs a bit, it’s hard to see how these two sentences – with the exception of the references to the NSC - are very different from what an internal DFID document might have said under Labour. There are acres of common ground between this DFID and the last one as another sentence quoted from the memo makes even plainer: “We need to explain how DfID’s work in fragile states contributes to national security through ‘upstream’ prevention that helps to stop potential threats to the UK developing (including work to improve health and education, provide water, build roads, improve governance and security).” This is standard DFID vocabulary, strikes a widely used balance between national and universal interest and makes a common linkage between development and human security.

The most important bits of these two quotations are not the word “security,” upon which the big development NGOs might well leap with shock and horror to complain about the imminent “securitisation” of aid. The most important bits are the words “make the case” and ”explain”.

The document – or, at least, those parts quoted by the Observer – is primarily concerned with the narrative about development aid and about the need to learn how to use security terms to cast a narrative that supports traditional development projects (health, education, roads, water) along with new kinds (governance and security).

The public’s willingness to provide overseas development aid (ODA) is going to come under increasingly stressful tests from the twin pressures of big cuts in public spending and growing discomfort that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met. There is, therefore, an urgent need for a new narrative to support ODA, by reconsidering what development is and how to support it. This in turn, in my view, entails moving away from the single-minded focus on the MDGs. International Alert has a new report out this week that explores the flaws in the MDG-led approach and argues for a different vision of the goal and means of development.

The coalition government, however, remains wholly focused on the MDGs as the way to guide and measure development. It has yet to bring the critique it developed of target-driven policy on health, for example, into the field of ODA. It has nonetheless seen the need for a new narrative. If that new narrative includes improved UK security as one of the benefits of ODA, I see no problem.

On the other hand, there could be a difficulty if the policy narrative emphasises UK security to the exclusion of other benefits for the UK, other security benefits not confined to the UK (e.g., in those countries receiving ODA) and other larger benefits in general. If the narrative then wags the policy around, it could be that the worst fears of the development NGOs would be realised and that ODA would directed to meeting narrowly defined UK interests rather than promoting the well-being of people in developing countries.

As far as policy narrative is concerned, it’s hardly deniable that this is a risk . Calling security in aid of ODA has, in the current government’s hands, thus far foregrounded the case of Afghanistan, where the coalition government like its Labour predecessor, justified UK military intervention on the basis of the need to strike at source against a present threat to UK security. The broader, more subtle and less directly military components of security – while, interestingly enough, comfortably accepted in national security discourse in the UK – have not been so prominently recognised in recent government discussion of the relationship between security and ODA. 

So there is a risk. But, first, the problem’s easily correctable with a speech and some quotable comments. Second, even if that doesn’t happen, it’s not inevitable that the narrative defines the policy. And third, it can take quite some time before policy changes play out in the actual practice of a major government department. So it’s not more than a risk – a possible outcome – and it’s really too early to say any more.

even less (to judge by the reaction)

That was probably only one of the reasons why media reaction was so muted. The Guardian, Observer (see above) and New Statesman online covered it and drummed up some reactions from here and there on the Labour benches and there was a Guardian online article by John Hilary of War on Want. Where the New Statesman article saw a possible silent softening of the commitment to increase ODA to 0.7 per cent of national income, Hilary attacked the government for a myopic approach to aid, fixated on “outputs”. But while both articles used the leaks as a news hook, it was difficult to make out a better than tenuous connection between their arguments and the substance of the leaks.

ISSUES & QUESTIONS NONETHELESS

All in all the leaks and so forth added up to not quite a storm in something smaller than a teacup. But to my way of thinking, there are some important issues and questions here, which get partially occluded by the knee-jerk myopic-Tories-make-mean cuts response. This is understandable and even necessary as part of the cut and thrust of politics but it’s a distracting sideshow when it comes to thinking through the real impact of different kinds of changes in UK ODA. Here are three linked areas that need some thought:

1. Setting strategic priorities What’s the most important aid? And – different question – where is it the most important for the UK to put its ODA pounds?

The security dimension and potential of ODA could affect strategic decisions about allocation in a couple of ways. It might lead to a focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, because British forces have been / are in combat there and because what happens there is seen by policy-makers to have a direct impact on UK security.  By extension, it could also put emphasis on ODA to Pakistan, which both has its own tangled development and conflict issues and is inextricably part of Afghanistan’s development and conflict issues.

Or it might lead to a focus on a much broader range of conflict-affected countries (in violent conflict, threatened by it and/or trying to recover from it). These are the countries where all the development indicators – including the very limited set that have been blessed as Millennium Development Goals – are showing the worst results. These are the countries where development projects can be successfully delivered for years without it all adding up to development. These are the hard cases, the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable, and generally their chaotic and kleptocratic state apparatuses are part of the problem.

There is obviously a close connection between these two strategic directions and the larger – the second – need not exclude the cases to which the former is limited. But there is a big difference between them.

• In the first, security is seen exclusively in UK terms and exclusively as the product of hard power; development projects should be in support.
• In the second, security is seen in UK and broader terms and hard power is only one of the dimensions of the threats to human security and of the ways in which security can be sustained. 

The leaked documents from DFID basically have nothing revealing to say about this. What is needed – and soon, for preference – is a speech by UK Secretary for Development Andrew Mitchell setting out his priorities in the area in which development and security overlap and indicating which of these two broad paths his department will now take.

2. The aid add-on problem Depending on which strategic path is taken, the question that arises is whether ODA will be a relatively independent or a highly subordinated activity. This is a separate issue from the relationship between DFID and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office but connected (see below).

If aid projects are subordinated to military activities in the field, there is a risk that ODA will be relegated to the hearts-and-minds category, echoes of Vietnam – first we bomb ‘em, then we patch ‘em up and send ‘em home. Then we have to bomb them again. Kind-a puzzling.

Consider a parallel: big corporations extracting mega-profits from the poorest regions of struggling countries have long tried to buy off dissent and resentment by scattering largesse around – the odd kindergarten here or there, a clinic and nice road. While the companies claim these as expressions of Corporate Social Responsibility, they are simple add-ons – sops to conscience at best, shallow PR exercises at worst – and while they might sometimes fool people back home, they have zero impact in the field. Real responsibility is expressed not through add-ons but in changes to the core activity.

The same is true for ODA and military operations. If aid is an add-on, impact will be zero. DFID might get more credibility in some parts of Whitehall if its projects in Afghanistan were to be subordinated to military activities but there would be no steps forward in DFID’s own mission, nor would it contribute to the real security of ordinary Afghans or the development of their country.

For a department that under the new dispensation is focused on results, results, results – so focused that it gets accused being fixated - it would be a catastrophic irony if its main priority started to be aid add-ons in Afghanistan.

It has not happened but it would be foolish to deny the possibility. Again, a clear statement by Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell is much needed.

3. The inter-departmental sort-out Setting strategic priorities and the add-on risk both raise the question of DFID’s relationship with the rest of government and in particular with the FCO and the Ministry of Defence. In their green paper in 2009 (see my review 24 October 2009), the Conservatives identified a problem of DFID being too independent. I depicted this in terms of DFID being the uppity teenage off-spring of New Labour to whom the Conservatives would now give a bit of discipline. In their view, FCO should set the policy and DFID would do the implementation.

Yes, well – it’s not that simple, not least because of reductions in FCO capacity over the years, and also because the distinction between policy and implementation is not quite that crisp. On top of which, there’s another kid on the block – the Ministry of Defence – who is a particularly self-confident as well as powerful player on security issues.

The role of the National Security Council, which has been significantly strengthened by the coalition government, in relation to the three departments of state will be sorted out on this terrain of the relationship between security and development.

There are issues of control of policy and of budget at stake as well as departmental prestige, individual ambition and coalition politics. Taken together, all this may make it difficult for Andrew Mitchell to make the clear statement about his strategic path that I think is necessary. Yet it also makes it more important.

And he is not without allies both inside and outside government.

It is a fine line to walk, not impossible by any means, demanding political skill and nuance. That’s what politicians are for.

Think conflict

Unfair on the World Bank and the UN? Think about this:

• In Liberia World Bank spending on consolidating peace and security started to decline rapidly in 2008, tailing off by 2011, yet the country still depends on a UN peacekeeping force as the guardian against a return to the 13 years of civil war and depredation up to 2003, and that force is itself is set to be phased out in 2011;
• The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for Liberia – the strategic development document that is, as in every other developing country, largely a product of the Bank’s work – is 192 pages long and devotes just eight paragraphs to conflict;
• In Burundi, UN Peacebuilding Fund projects have concluded and the integrated UN mission in the country is set to draw down by the end of the year, just when instability and violence are mounting and rumours of fear and a return to war abound;
• In Somalia, the World Bank continues to prioritise development programming that ignores conflict and is increasingly at odds with its own thorough and sophisticated context analyses.

Think context

In 2007 the acronymicly challenged OECD-DAC (Development Aid Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) produced a set of principles for engagement by donor governments in unstable and conflict-affected countries. Rule number 1 is, Take context as the starting point. Seems obvious enough. At International Alert a group of us were recently pondering the way the big development beasts work and I caused genuine hilarity by asking, ‘Do the international institutions take context as the starting point?’

Of course not. The starting point for such behemoths is set by their own institutional norms and realities.

It’s not impossible for big institutions to respond to context rather than to the organisation’s standard operating procedure but it takes effort and it requires – as DFID has done to some degree at least – a process of decentralising some of the key decisions. Subsidiarity in EU-speak – the principle that the decision should be taken at the lowest possible level in any hierarchy so it is shaped by the reality it will itself shape. High-level decision-making should be strategic; the details should be sorted out in the field.

But to do this, it is axiomatic that staff must be well resourced, trained and motivated. Trying to do development in conflict contexts is not easy. It is labour intensive and knowledge intensive work. It needs people who know the issues and who know the country working in a team along with those who know the financial instruments, the technical assistance measures and all the rest of it.

Monitor constantly

The review of multilateral agencies’ use of the UK taxpayers’ money, announced by Secretary of State for Development Andrew Mitchell is, therefore, a very timely opportunity to shine the light precisely onto this issue – the conflict sensitivity and context responsiveness of the big beasts.

But an uncomfortable thought occurs. DFID will find it hard to do this in the time frame that has been announced – a 4-month period in which to review how 30 organisations spend £3 billion a year.

Of course, if DFID had been doing this already, responding when the Secretary of State ordered the review would be much easier. So one outcome of the review should be DFID setting up a monitoring group to keep the multilaterals’ work under continued scrutiny.

Criteria for conflict sensitivity

Sensitivity is a quality. How do you know if an institution is displaying that quality in relation to, in this case, conflict? Here are some template questions for a multilateral agency:

1. Does the agency follow the OECD-DAC principle of taking context as the starting point? Following this line of thought:

• Does it have a country team or other kind of capacity for continuing analysis of the context? If not – if a context analysis is done every few years – you can forget it: contexts change faster than that and you have to be able to follow them as they evolve.
• Who does the country team try to involve in doing the analysis? If the answer is its own staff plus a few officials and NGOs based in the capital, it’s taking a limited view of a complex situation that may be different in different parts of the country. And it may well find it misses out on understanding the power dynamics in the country.

2. If the agency is notionally committed to “local ownership” and participation, as most of them are on paper, does the reality of practice match the intention? Henry Kissinger once warned a US Senate Committee to “watch what we do, not what we say” – a good principle of hard-headed analysis. Agencies frequently go in for lumbering, one-off consultation processes with a few key interlocutors. Findings are very often outdated by the time they are circulated. Better instead to make the consultation wider and continuing. In that theme:

• What does the agency do to draw in interlocutors from outside the capital? Does it pay attention to the different elements of diversity in identifying with whom it should be in discussion?
• Does it publicise its programmes and its consultation so people can contribute uninvited?
• What do people who have been engaged in consultation think about it? (Views on this are consistently acidic.)
• Can the agency show a case where policy was changed (and not just re-spun) in response to results of a consultation process?

3. To analyse the conflict context, the agency’s staff are going to engage with political questions amid diverse and divergent views and in the face of competing needs of different groups: can they do that?

• Does the agency’s mandate support conflict and context analysis? And does management practice extend that support to individual staff or are they out on their own?
• Does the agency have an internal culture that permits disagreement and discussion so as to arrive at the most accurate possible and nuanced analysis?
• What training have the staff received that helps equip them for this work? How is a talent for context analysis spotted and supported?
• Does the agency recognise that gender awareness is not only about the participation of women but also means thinking about the impact of different kinds of masculinity on prospects for peace or conflict?
• When personnel move on, how is their knowledge shared with colleagues including their replacements arriving from a different location and a different kind of assignment?

4. Does the agency understand and measure success in both qualitative and quantitative terms? – because, if not, it’s missed the point entirely.