humanitarian.info

Texas in Africa:

Here’s one of the great mysteries of our age: why, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on peacekeeping, peace deal negotiations, democracy promotion, humanitarian aid, development assistance, and celebrity awareness-raising, is the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo still an anarchic war zone?

TiA goes on to cite research by Severine Autesserre¹ that suggests the answer lies in the false assumptions that dominate the international efforts to bring peace to the Congo, and the way that those assumptions shape their actions. There’s some truth to that, obviously, but such research runs into three problems:

1. This research is almost entirely counterfactual, which means that while we can definitively say that what was tried did not work, we can’t with any authority say that what was not tried would have worked any better. Possibly the research (and book, apparently) goes beyond that, but it’s paywalled, so no comment is possible.
2. Conflicts are complex, while almost all of our interventions are linear. Not only will linear interventions frequently fail in complex situations, but they will also a) generate unintended consequences which will increase complexity, and b) work against other linear interventions being attempted  in other geographic and sectoral areas.
3. Finally and most importantly, the question of why all those activities failed to bring peace might have a much simpler (if unpalatable) answer. Perhaps those activities don’t work very well, if they work at all, and perhaps we don’t have anything close to a good enough understanding of those activities to make them work well even if they do work.

Assumptions abound on all sides:one commenter says “At least the elections have reaffirmed Congolese territorial integrity, which seems to me a major step forward”, which of course is true only if you think reaffirming Congolese territorial integrity is a good thing in the first place. Some parts of the research make good points but for the wrong reason:

Autesserre discusses the ridiculous overemphasis on holding elections that permeated the international community’s response to the conflict. This, she argues, resulted from post-Cold War norms. Elections were the “obvious” or “natural” choice for statebuilding and the way to guarantee international peace.

I agree that elections are ridiculously overemphasised by the international community – the only people who’d disagree with that statement are people already working in the booming elections industry. The growth of that industry tells us all we need to know about why elections are so popular – not because they result from post-Cold War norms, but because they are a linear process which is easier to manage than the complex process that is democracy.

While the elections went mostly smoothly… the advent of so-called democracy has done little to improve the lives of anyone in the east. In fact, the situation has gotten worse since 2006, leading to much disillusionment with the idea of democracy.

Assumptions again: democracy in general improves specific peoples’ lives. This is false, and it’s no wonder that people become disillusioned with democracy when that’s the message that we send them. Elections are a useful signifier- highly visible, which is very appealling to the donors and the media – but they’re mainly a technical exercise. However “elections = democracy = a better life” is a nice simple equation that can be messaged to death, so that’s what we do.

Autesserre makes a convincing argument that “a transition process carefully planned over ten years to build a lasting peace at all levels, reconstruct the administrative and economic capacity of the country, minimize visible international interference, develop the preconditions for free and fair elections, and explain the advantages of this strategy to the population would probably have been received well” by the Congolese. It also might have worked.

Well, it might have worked, but it might not – that sauce isn’t strong enough to add much flavour to my dinner. A “transition process carefully planned over ten years to build a lasting peace at all levels” and so forth – this would be a great thing, but in the actual world in which we live it’s never going to happen. We need to do two things: first, demolish and restructure the industries that have grown up around democracy promotion, development assistance, etc; second, work with what we’ve got rather than what we wish we had.

1. Didn’t I work with Severine in Kosovo? Answers on a postcard please. [↩]

Duncan Green’s post on NGO advocacy makes a case that well-designed advocacy gets results – in this case, reform of the Social Subsidies Agency in Georgia. Yet the case study highlights a difficult question about advocacy in general – how can you tell if your advocacy has had any results, and how can you tell if the results of your advocacy have had the impact that you intended? To summarize the sequence of events as presented by Duncan (and please excuse the extended quote):

Following the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 the new government made an attempt at revamping the country’s cumbersome and ineffective social protection scheme, inherited from the Soviet Union. In 2005, it set up the SSA (Social Subsidies Agency) to manage its new social assistance programme…The government and the donors declared victory, but monitoring by Oxfam and a local partner NGO – the Association of Young Economists of Georgia (AYEG) -showed that the system was not working… We held a number of closed door seminars with the representatives of the SSA (without involving the media so as to build trust) and backed them up with lobbying meetings. Nothing happened – we built up good relationships with young and motivated civil servants, but there was no appetite from their bosses for overhauling what was generally portrayed as a success. That all changed with the civil unrest of 2007, a political shock born of public disenchantment with government policy and reforms. The government was desperate to refurbish its image…Step forward a new and sympathetic Minister for Healthcare, with a background of working with NGOs, who gave his political backing…

Now this sounds (to me, at least) like quite a common story. It usually takes an external shock of some kind for any organisation to make radical  changes – in this case, first the Rose Revolution, and then public protests against the path taken since the Revolution. The problem is that this account of events also sounds (again, to me) like a large number of biases stacking up to explain something that was largely out of the two NGOs control. Duncan reports that

… our Georgia team put success down to three factors: the shift in the political environment; the rigorous use of evidence and the cultivation of contacts with a range of decision makers and officials.

Now clearly the shift in the political environment was a major factor, but the other two factors? The case looks much weaker. Duncan has described  the government as “desperate”, and I doubt that the rigor of the evidence that was presented to them was as critical as the fact that they were being offered a ready-made reform package that they could sell to the public. The “cultivation of contacts” were undoubtedly useful, but the key figure appears to have been a new Minister with an NGO background. This is crucial, because somebody from an NGO background is likely to have an automatic bias towards proposals from NGO (and the sort of approachs that NGOs propose). The Georgia team’s appraisal of what made change possible definitely has some merit – but it also looks like a way of retrospectively justifying personal and professional investment in an extremely worthwhile and challenging project.

Now I have no opinions on the actual reform proposals that Oxfam and AYEG put forward – certainly the brief description in Duncan’s article sounds good, but then the original concept of the SSA sounds pretty good as well. I have no reason to think that this reform has done anything except improve the welfare of the people the SSA is intended to support – but I also think that we need to examine the potential biases that lead us to assume that Change Y is the result of Action X, particularly in macro environments which are extremely complex.

This holds true for any area of aid work – how justified are our claims that our work helps people?