Seminar Report: Post Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding

It should be recognised, however, that not all the agents in the system need to be engaged in all coordination activities. Barnes reports, in the context of her experiences in Mozambique, that the meaning of coordination often varied depending on which of the stakeholders employed it at a given moment, and that the various stakeholders competed to place their agencies at the forefront of the process to enhance their own legitimacy and subsequent fundraising capacities (Barnes 1998). When evaluating the impact of coherence, one should consider with care the balance that has been struck among the four elements of coherence, the transaction cost in terms of the time and resources invested Massive student loan debt tips forum thread in coordination, as well as any unintended consequences that may have come about in the process (Aoi et al 2007). First, in some cases short-term political and security considerations may override longer-term development considerations and this may undermine the very socio-economic rehabilitation on which sustainable peacebuilding depends. In the real world, peacebuilding agents, more often than not, have to settle for ‘second best’ or ‘partially coherent’ solutions in order to establish a workable foundation for cooperation.22

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If ‘coherence’ is the aim, then ‘coordination’ is the activity through which coherence is pursued. Third, the neutrality, impartiality and independence of humanitarian action may be negatively affected when integrated with political and security activities.23 Whilst these three examples can be said to be examples of poor coherence trade-offs, rather than inherently negative effects of pursuing coherence per se, the more important point is that pursuing coherence can generate unintended consequences. Coherence also needs to be understood in the context of the natural tensions, and therefore trade-offs, between the four elements of coherence. The second identifies two key priority areas where improved coherence and coordination are likely to have the most meaningful impact. In these complex situations the international community faces the critical gap between ‘blueprint’ top-down strategies, focusing at the state level, and the actual interests and politics of the national, local and regional actors involved.

This book presents nuanced and contextually specific knowledge of Sierra Leone’s political and war histories, and the outcomes of the implementation of programmes of post-conflict reforms. The second identified a few priority areas where improved coherence and coordination are likely to have the most meaningful impact. Whilst external partners can facilitate such processes, they need to be truly locally owned and have meaningful power. Meaningful sustainability requires that the internal actors should not just own the problem, but also the solutions. There are two areas within the internal/external tension that have the potential to transform the inherent tensions in the relationship.

In fact, attempts aimed at controlling operational and tactical implementation planning at some central point are likely to cause dysfunction as a result of the simplification that any such central planning process would have to impose. The importance of an overall strategic process is widely recognised and accepted but poorly applied in practice (Paris 2004). Each agent is only contributing a part of the whole, and it is the overall collective and cumulative affect that builds momentum towards sustainable peace and development. The humanitarian community can be recognised as a distinct network within the larger peacebuilding system, in that they have broadly similar aims, operate on the same principles, and consciously try to work together in a networked pattern at country-level through the humanitarian coordinator system, cluster approach and joint resource mobilisation. Thus, whilst coherence and coordination are interlinked, one should not assume a linear or causal relationship, as the one does not necessarily lead to the other.

The Need to Ensure the Primacy of Internal Actors in the Peacebuilding System

While place-based strategies prioritize the reconstruction of physical assets, people-centered strategies strengthen community ownership and social inclusion, improve livability of the built environment, and accelerate the socioeconomic recovery of cities. The case of Lebanon was presented to explain how restoration of historic sites, buildings and markets promoted urban recovery and cohesion between various factions of society. To be successful in the challenging environment of a conflict-torn country, the project applied a flexible implementation approach that relied heavily on local institutions and citizen engagement thus benefiting from their capacity and expertise. Urban areas are frequently at the center of modern conflicts and therefore face a unique set of challenges in post-conflict settings. Internal actors will be best placed to absorb assistance towards the end of the transitional period when some basic capacities have been restored or newly established, and in the consolidation phase, when a newly elected government is in place that have the constitutional legitimacy to determine national priorities.

Corequisites

Implementation planning is best done by those agents that have the responsibility for allocating their resources, and although such plans should be coordinated with partners, shared within sector and cluster coordination processes, and aligned with overall strategy, it would be impossibly complex to design one overall system-wide operational and tactical implementation plan. A strategic framework should reflect a common understanding of the problem, i.e. the root causes of casino1 the conflict and the more immediate triggers that have caused the outbreak of violent conflict, and that may be continuing to stress the peace process. It would thus require considerable political will and focused attention to adjust, but the paper argues that without meaningfully addressing this shortcoming peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction systems will continue to suffer from poor rates of sustainability and success. In this context, coordination is the process that ensures that an individual peacebuilding agent is connected to the larger peacebuilding system of which it is a part. When the need for coherence between each individual activity, the agents that undertake them, and the overarching peacebuilding goal is established, coordination emerges as the tool with which to pursue this logic. The peacebuilding or post-conflict reconstruction system thus consists of all of the agents that are necessary to achieve the overall peacebuilding goal, and the system effect is brought about by their interdependence.

The paper focused on two areas where the lack of coherence has had the most damaging effect on achieving sustainability, and which, correspondingly, hold the most promise for improving peacebuilding coherence, once addressed. Although well intended, the result is that large amounts are spent on activities that the internal actors simply cannot absorb. Whilst the first emphasis is thus on generating the processes that will serve to realise the human rights of the internal actors to determine their own destiny, the second emphasis is on ensuring that the combined and cumulative effect of the assistance offered has a positive effect on the internal actors, and that it is delivered at a rate that can be absorbed. Without it, however, any investments made in peacebuilding systems are unlikely to be sustainable. This rights-based approach implies that there should be processes in place, controlled by the internal actors, that generate the needs-based information needed to assess, design, plan, coordinate and implement assistance programmes. The first is the need to establish a new basis for the internal/external relationship, namely a rights-based approach that recognises that the internal actors have the human right to determine their own future.

They are overwhelmed by the pressure to engage with all the assessments, proposals and plans generated by the sudden influx of external actors, and they are frustrated that despite all this activity there is typically little to show, in terms of immediate delivery, for their time and effort. The principle that peacebuilding systems should be locally owned and led is well established in the policy realm. As a result, the Peacebuilding Commission’s integrated peacebuilding strategies are designed around the demands of the consolidation phase of peacebuilding systems.

• According to the Commission’s annual report the purpose of an integrated peacebuilding strategy is ‘to ensure coherent, prioritized approaches that involve international donors and agencies’ (Peacebuilding Commission 2007).
• This is because the parties emerging out of conflict typically represent ambiguous constituencies, and there are often conflicting claims of ownership and support.
• There is now broad consensus that inconsistent policies and fragmented programmes entail a higher risk of duplication, inefficient spending, a lower quality of service, difficulty in meeting goals and, ultimately, a reduced capacity for delivery.13 There is, however, a considerable gap between the degree to which the benefits of coherence are held to be of self-evident and operational reality.
• Using a critical approach to the liberal peace agenda, the chapter investigates the nexus of reconstruction and democracy through two main pathways.
• There are two areas within the internal/external tension that have the potential to transform the inherent tensions in the relationship.
• In this context, the role of coherence and coordination is to manage the interdependencies that bind the peacebuilding system together.

There seems to be a tension between the need for improved coordination on the one hand, and the potential limiting effects coordination may have on the ability of individual agents to exercise control over their own programming and allocation of resources. The time and resources devoted to coordination necessarily increase the administrative costs of delivering assistance.24 There is a point at which the cost benefit ratio will become negative, and coordination activities should thus be proportional to the overall effort. Paris (2004) cautions that coordination can create a sense of ‘false-coherence’ where fundamental tensions and differences are glossed over for the sake of operational expediency, only to re-surface and undermine cooperation at the critical moments when cohesion is most needed. Donini (2002) argues that the effective provision of assistance requires that duplication, waste and competition among agencies be avoided, but he cautions that the objectives and organisational cultures of the development, humanitarian and peacekeeping communities are essentially irreconcilable within a single centralised structure. Whilst coordination seems to be the most obvious and logical of pursuits, especially in the highly dynamic and fragmented complex emergency context, empirical evidence suggests that it is, in reality, a highly controversial and dysfunctional activity.

Consultations undertaken under pressure, for instance during rapid needs assessments, often serve to legitimise pre-conceived perceptions rather than add value by generating independent and objective opinions and analysis, and thus fail to reflect the true needs and priorities of the internal actors. External actors find it difficult to identify credible internal actors with whom they can enter into a meaningful partnership, especially in the stabilisation and transitional phases before elections are held. The Rome Declaration and related policies are aimed at addressing the core structural inequality of the international assistance regime, namely that the external agency is empowered by virtue of being the benefactor. The humanitarian community has developed the humanitarian Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP), but this is more of a resource mobilisation tool than a strategic planning tool.