Month: March 2016
Leaving no one behind in fragile states
SAIS second year student Alexandra Martin reports from the World Bank’s Fragility Forum meeting this week in Washington:
The world appears to be particularly volatile these days, facing challenges that threaten and undermine development progress that has been achieved in the last decade. With an unstable MENA region and a disastrous war in Syria, the most alarming refugee crisis since the end of the World War II, and an increasingly fragile environment across the globe, the ambitious agendas of various international organizations are at risk.
From 1 to 3 March the World Bank is hosting the Fragility Forum 2016 under the theme “Take Action for Peaceful and Inclusive Societies.” Development, humanitarian, security and diplomatic actors are looking for ways forward in collaboration, in order to identify important new steps in reducing the underlying causes of fragility, conflict and violence. The World Bank Group has committed to achieve its own twin goals: to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to promote shared responsibility in a sustainable manner.
The opening panel of the Fragility Forum featured high level global personalities who discussed how to push forward the sustainable development agenda, including in particular the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: peace, justice and strong institutions. Here are a few of the highlights:
Sri Mulyani Indrawati (COO, The World Bank) emphasized the twin goals of the Bank and reiterated that the current and emerging threats such as extremism and inequality jeopardize efforts at ending poverty. She also called for collective institutional action that would enable closer cooperation between humanitarian, development, government and peace-building communities.
Jim Yong Kim (CEO, The World Bank) reminded the participants that “we put at risk our collective hope” to achieve our goals. Inequality has substantially increased and instability has become “normal.” The current situation in the Middle East and North Africa, especially the ongoing war in Syria, creates spill-over not only in the region but also beyond. Violence against civilians, forced displacement and terrorism are now part of a new paradigm in which peace and development must go hand in hand and not sequentially.
Kim asked the participants at the forum to respond to six questions relevant for work in the fragile environments:
- Fragility is not limited anymore to low income countries. How do we cope with this phenomenon in middle income countries?
- How do we improve service delivery and technical capacity in low income countries?
- How can the humanitarian and development people work better together: one humanity, shared responsibility?
- Most of the refugees around the world don’t live in camps anymore, creating pressure on the local communities. How can we ensure that both refugee and local communities are well served and their needs met?
- There is not enough ODA to satisfy current needs. What are the innovative financial instruments which can be implemented? For example, the newly created MENA Financing Facility ($1 billlion).
- We don’t know enough about refugees, who they are, what they want, what are their skills and capabilities, whom they left behind. How can we better adjust our programs to meet their needs?
In conclusion, he highlighted the risk of paying attention only when there is an acute crisis, like the refugee situation in Europe now. Intervention without follow-on efforts creates instability. The World Bank is committed to work together with its partners and join efforts to find new ways forward.
UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson brought to participants’ attention the new “5P agenda”: people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership. He cited the latest achievements at the global level, such as the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. “There is no peace without development, no development without peace and neither peace nor development without respect for human rights,” the UN DSG said while emphasizing that finding a settlement for protracted conflicts is increasingly difficult. There are several factors that trigger conflict: political rivalry, international interference, human rights violations, extremism or weak governance, but it is in everyone’s interest to find peaceful solutions to conflicts.
Eliasson conveyed three key messages:
- Preventing conflicts should become a top priority. This implies a better understanding of the early trends, before there is escalation. Much more pre- and post-conflict work is needed, from the first signs of instability to full recovery. Reducing the risks and building resilience remain an important objectives.
- The humanitarian needs must be reduced. Demands are overwhelming supply. 125 million people need humanitarian assistance today. The $16.4 billion UN response is falling short. The lack of funds affects peoples’ lives
- We must work together. To achieve sustainable peace, more targeted resources that reduce the sources of conflict must be put together. National ownership, national capacities and national leadership need to be supported with international technical assistance.
Last, but not least, Eliasson asked the participants to think about the shared humanity and responsibility that drive our actions and the importance to us all of responding to the expectations of impoverished people. Multilateral cooperation, combined with more credible institutions, are a way forward. Fragmentation of efforts is costly and ineffective. There are no quick and easy fixes to address the disillusion and grievances of the people worldwide.
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Filling Bosnia’s reform gaps 2
Kurt Bassuener of the Democratization Policy Council replied to my Filling Bosnia’s reform gaps:
You’re right, Dan, about the fear element in voting. But fear and patronage are usually a package deal. For example, if a) you’re not sure your vote is actually secret (a commonly held concern) and b) Uncle Adnan has a public sector job and feeds a family of five, are you really going to vote for the powers-that-be? Doubtful. You may stay home, disgusted with all the options on the menu – 46% of the eligible electorate did precisely that. And voters have voted in the past for alternatives, but have usually been disappointed. Witness the SDP’s rise in 2010 and fall in 2014, after a massive proportion of its vote punished the party for perceived betrayal.
So the sense of disgust, despair and hopelessness around elections is justified – one’s vote, at least above the municipal level (where mayors are directly elected), doesn’t seem to matter a bit in terms of delivering meaningful change. The fact that the SDA and HDZ, two parties which have been at the trough since Dayton (with brief spells in the wilderness at the state and entity, but never cantonal, levels) got elected not in spite of what they are, but because of what they are: parties of power and patronage. All voters are rational actors acting within a perverse incentive structure that once was constrained by the “international community,” but hasn’t been for a decade. Voting is purely transactional for a large segment of the electorate, not votes of affirmation.
What’s telling is that even the self-described civic parties – SDP, DF, and Nasa Stranka – exerted no appreciable effort to seek Serb votes in the RS. I’m not saying that’s an easy task. This assessment of seven polls by Valery’s former colleague Raluca Raduţa demonstrates there is a lot of potential common ground with which to work. But to transform that latent potential into political and social power, an effort to develop a supermajority behind a positive agenda for a rules-based society would have to begin well before an election. The only way to change the system through the system would require a coherent 2/3 majority (including overriding the entity vote) behind a common agenda. Nobody is aiming that high right now.
There is no obvious political vehicle – and as you note, no international will to be a catalyst. The understandable but myopic focus solely on “CVE” [countering violent extremism] neglects the fact that by effectively paying for quiet (while thinking it is buying stability), the West is supporting the patronage structure and maintaining a system which can only generate violent extremism. So the current approach amounts to whack-a-mole triage to deal with effects after years of unwillingness to tackle the systemic root cause: institutionalized lack of accountability.
This isn’t a problem that can be solved programmatically; it’s a POLICY problem. Absent the will to be confrontational with the beneficiaries of the Dayton system, who are supposed to be partners in reform according to the EU’s enlargement theology, even the programs you suggest, Dan, won’t make a dent. The West has it within its power to painfully constrain the political class’ room to maneuver by reducing their ability to leverage fear, then their ability to employ patronage funded with external infusions. Then developing a partnership with citizens to squeeze them in the right direction is possible.
Finally, “holding perpetrators accountable” means getting them convicted and keeping them convicted in the second instance, which rarely if ever happens. Right now, it seems likely that the EU will surrender on a crucial element of BiH’s judicial architecture – the ability of the state to assume cases begun at lower levels if it is determined the crimes in question have sufficient impact on the state. RS Prime Minister Dodik has wanted this for a long time, but politicians in both entities would benefit from a retreat on this, getting de facto immunity.
If the US and EU were serious on criminal accountability – and on “CVE” – we’d maintain that extended jurisdiction, and furthermore return international prosecutors and judges to the state judicial systems organized crime and corruption investigation, prosecution, and adjudication continuum. The Organized Crime and Corruption chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the body which tries violent extremism and terrorism-related cases, so if we’re really serious, that’s where it will show.
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Filling Bosnia’s reform gaps
This USAID “gap analysis” for Bosnia and Herzegovina dropped into my inbox last week. I encourage those interested in the prospects for political and economic reform there to have a flip through the powerpoint slides. Bottom line: whatever the international community and the Bosnians have been doing about reform since 2006, it isn’t working.
There are likely several reasons for this. The ethnonationalist polarization of Bosnian politics intensified rapidly in 2006 after the rejection of the “April package” of constitutional amendments. Bosniak candidate for the presidency Haris Silajdzic amped up his rhetoric against Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik, who replied in kind. Both enjoyed political success as a result, though Dodik has last much longer and gotten much louder.
At about the same time, the European Union chose Christian Schwarz-Schilling as the international community’s High Representative responsible for ensuring implementation of the Dayton accords. Schwarz-Schilling was committed to lightening the touch of the Hirep and vowed not to use the dictatorial “Bonn powers” that had been bestowed on that office in 1997. This relieved a great deal of the pressure for reform and freed the country’s politicians to pursue their private interests at the expense of the state, as they would no longer find themselves summarily sacked for doing so.
The financial crisis of 2007/8 then took the wind out of the Bosnian economy’s sails. With growth slackening, the politicians found less cream to skim and naturally slowed the pace of reform even further, hoping to husband some state resources for their own benefit and to protect themselves from the electorate’s wrath at the reduced patronage benefits available. The corrupt and costly consequences of their behavior are well-documented. Corruption in Bosnia is not an aberration. It is the system, as Valery Perry has recently shown.
The question is: what should a foreign assistance organization like USAID do with its money in a situation like this?
Obviously not what it was doing before, which was grants to lots of widely scattered even if worthy projects. Nor, in my view, should it try to push reform by financing it. The money AID is likely to have in the future for Bosnia is nowhere near enough to convince a rational actor to undertake the kinds of reforms that are needed. Only the EU and the international financial institutions have that kind of money these days.
But conditionality and external pressure is not enough. The current Bosnian leaders won’t reform unless they feel some pressure not only from the international community but also from their own constituencies. One of the few reforms Bosnia has gotten right in recent years is its electoral system, which runs reasonably well. The problem has been that voters keep electing the same ethnonationalists who promise to protect them from other ethnonationalists. This mutual security dilemma keeps all three varieties in power, each for fear of the others.
Were I in charge, I would take all of the AID money and put it on a single objective: mounting a serious, sustained campaign across ethnic lines to unseat corrupt politicians and replace them with people committed to transparent and accountable governance, again across ethnic lines. The money might go to independent investigatory media, auditing bodies, judicial training, civil society organizations and thinktanks to support the kind of analysis and social mobilization required to unveil corrupt practices and hold perpetrators accountable.
The 2009 AID Anticorruption Assessment Handbook recommends pretty much that kind of program. In a country where “high-level figures collude to weaken political/economic competitors,” it suggests:
–seek gradual pluralization of political system with new competing groups emerging based on open, vigorous and broad-based economy
–build independence and professionalism in the bureaucracy, courts and legislative institutions.
There is a serious question whether an effort of this sort can be run out of an American embassy. Valery Perry thinks yes. I doubt it. American embassies have too many other urgent priorities to worry about the merely important. The latest is countering recruitment of foreign fighters, which has pretty much taken precedence in all countries with significant Muslim populations for the past year or two. Bosnia has contributed a more than proportionate number of fighters, so that priority is likely to crowd out most everything else.
Of course any ambassador worth her salt would want to know if the US government is funding a program of the sort I suggest and exercise oversight. But wisdom might dictate that it be conducted, transparently and accountably, through non-governmental channels. There are lots of American and non-American civil society organizations capable of such work. I hope they get the resources needed to make a real go of it.
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