A Joint Project of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs &

the Centre for International Cooperation and Security

Conflict Prevention, Management and Reduction in Africa

Paper 6

Promoting Conflict Sensitive Development Aid in Africa:

Issues and Challenges

Owen Greene with Tracy Vienings

Financed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of

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Executive Summary

The relationship between development and conflict is complex and much debated. Non-violent tensions and conflicts are intrinsic to any dynamic society or development process. But violent conflicts, and their associated insecurities, obstruct, undermine or distort economic, social or political development; as has been the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, development processes affect the patterns and risks of violent conflict. Progress towards poverty reduction and development can reduce the risks of violence, for example by addressing ‘root causes’ of conflict or by empowering peacemakers. But development processes also contribute to conflict in Africa; for instance by changing balances of wealth, influence and power within societies.

This is as true for development or humanitarian aid as it is for internally resourced development processes. International aid always has impacts on the politics of the recipient countries, including on prospects for peace or conflict. The key aid principle is that international development aid should at least do no harm, and also take opportunities for doing good. ‘Conflict sensitive’ development aid policies and programmes are designed and delivered in a way that systematically addresses risks of contributing to violent conflict and opportunities to promote conflict prevention, management and reduction and contribute to peace-building.

For many years, international, EU and OECD country development aid agencies avoided systematic engagement with conflict or security issues, in case such concerns polluted or diverted their development programmes. These days should now be long passed. Since 1997, the OECD DAC has issued guidelines to promote conflict sensitive development aid, which EU institutions and member states have adopted in policies. In practice, these policies remain inadequately developed and implemented. Effective adoption of the ‘do no harm’ and ‘take opportunities to support CPMR’ principles requires substantial development of institutional capacities and procedures amongst the EU, bilateral donors and their partners.

There are several well-established tools for conducting the conflict assessments that are essential for conflict sensitive development aid. These have strengths and weaknesses, but now the key challenges are to ensure that they are effectively used in the design and implementation of aid programmes. Efforts to ‘mainstream’ conflict sensitivity into EU/EC and other development aid programmes have only been partially successful. The same applies to efforts to promote coherence with other aspects of EU engagement with developing countries, for example relating to trade or foreign and security policies.

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1. Introduction

Sub-Saharan Africa suffers both from widespread poverty and from wars and violent conflict. Poverty and distorted patterns of development undoubtedly contribute to the risks of wars and to the vulnerability of the poor to violence and insecurity. Those who aim to help to prevent, manage or reduce violent conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa thus need also to actively promote effective development aid to the continent. Similarly, violence and insecurity obstructs and undermines development programmes. Thus conflict prevention, management and reduction (CPMR) are important issues for the development aid community.

This Paper examines the issues and challenges for promoting ‘conflict sensitive’ development aid in Sub-Saharan Africa, and examines issues and challenges for the EU and its partners. It is primarily concerned with violent conflict. Non-violent tensions and conflicts are intrinsic to any dynamic society or development process. They are not in themselves a problem. It is risks and realities of violent conflict that are particularly undesirable.

The term ‘conflict sensitive’ development aid refers to development aid policies and programmes that are designed and delivered in a way that systematically addresses risks that development aid might unwittingly contribute to violent conflict, and takes opportunities to promote CPMR and contribute to peace-building. International aid always has impacts on the politics of the recipient countries, including on the prospects for peace or conflict. The key aid principle should be that international development aid should at least do no harm in this respect, and should as far as possible take opportunities for doing good.

Section 2 of this Paper outlines the emergence of international concerns and debates about conflict-sensitive development aid. Section 3 examines and illustrates the risks of ‘conflict insensitive’ aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. Section 4 then examines the concept of ‘conflict-sensitive’ development policies and programmes, and clarifies what they involve. The following sections focus on key operational aspects of a conflict sensitive approach to development aid. Section 5 discusses analytical tools and procedures for conflict assessment. Section 6 explores the requirements for implementing conflict sensitive development programmes. Section 7 identifies some key issues and challenges for the EU and its partners. The Paper ends with some brief conclusions and suggestions for further reading.

2. Emergence of international agendas for conflict-sensitive development

In 1997, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) agreed on a set of Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development Co-operation.[1] In 2001, these were supplemented by OECD DAC Guidelines on Helping to Prevent Violent Conflict.[2] In combination, these are now a key reference point for the international development aid community. They are based on the principle that international development co-operation should aim to do no harm and guard against unwittingly aggravating existing or potential conflicts, as well as to take opportunities to prevent conflict and address underlying causes of poverty and conflict.

These OECD DAC guidelines were hard to negotiate within the development aid community. Although they are now adopted policy for almost all bilateral and multilateral development agencies, they are still inadequately implemented and indeed widely ignored in practice.

This may seem to be strange. In view of the almost obvious importance of conflict and security issues for poor people and for development, one might have thought that such guidelines would have been established many decades ago, and would have become mainstream practice. The reason why this is not the case is not only because these are complex and difficult issues, but also because for many years most development aid agencies and professionals tried hard to avoid systematic engagement with conflict and security issues. Indeed, resistance is still widespread. It is useful briefly to review its’ sources and history, to clarify what is needed to overcome such resistance

In past decades, many in the development aid community judged that the risks of becoming engaged with conflict and security matters outweighed the potential benefits. The risks included becoming excessively entangled in the self-interested foreign and security policies of the main donor states; politicising and ‘polluting’ development aid programmes; increasing risks to development and humanitarian aid workers in the field; and rendering development aid budgets vulnerable to exploitation by powerful government security agencies.

These risks were real. During the Cold War period, for example, development aid policies and programmes of NATO and Soviet Bloc countries were frequently distorted in the service of bilateral cold war competition. Large aid budgets were allocated to sympathetic governments in Africa, as elsewhere, in order to consolidate alliances, with little regard to the development aid merits or to the risks of corrupt diversion of resources. How else can we explain the squandering of vast development aid during the Cold War provided by the ‘west’ to President Mobutu of Zaire (now DRC), or by the Soviet Union to Angola or Ethiopia? Ex-colonial powers such as Belgium, France and the UK similarly often used development aid programmes more to promote political influence than to alleviate poverty.

In this context, it is not surprising that many development agencies and professionals tried to avoid engagement with conflict and security issues, which were inevitably relatively politicised. For similar reasons, Parliaments and other oversight bodies tried to isolate development aid from security or military assistance programmes. The OECD deemed that virtually all types of security assistance did not quality as ODA (overseas development aid), and the mandates of most development agencies and international financial institutions (such as the World Bank) banned or heavily restricted involvement in such aid.

In rhetorical support of this approach, naïve understandings of the relationships between development aid and violent conflict developed amongst development professionals. These included over-simplified understandings about poverty as a ‘root cause’ of conflict, and assumptions that well-motivated development aid and poverty alleviation programmes almost automatically contribute to CPMR. These were almost statements of faith, and bore little relationship with the results of research on the risks of violent conflict.

In fact, all evidence shows that the inter-relationship between development and violent conflict is more complex. For example, there is little correlation between absolute levels of poverty and risks of war or violent conflict. Instead, it is changes in relative poverty levels within and between societies (or expectations of such changes) that have more effect on the risks of violent conflict, and their impact depends greatly on the context. In practice, the risks of large-scale violence do not appear to be governed mainly by underlying ‘structural’ root causes, but rather through the complex and dynamic interaction between such structural factors and a multiplicity of national and international actors and processes (as discussed further in section 4). This means that even well-motivated development aid can either contribute to or reduce risks of violent conflict, according to the context and characteristics of the aid programme.

The end of the Cold War stimulated changes in policy debates relating to conflict, security and development. It reduced pressures on development aid programmes to serve selfish national security interests. For example, western aid budgets to the corrupt government of Zaire could be allowed to fall without strategic concerns about possible Russian influence. During the 1990s awareness of the risks of civil war and complex humanitarian emergencies also developed rapidly. At a time when development aid agencies had more scope to focus on poverty alleviation, the impacts of violence and insecurity on the poor and vulnerable attracted increasing attention.

The inadequacies of many development and humanitarian aid agencies’ approaches towards conflict and insecurity were increasingly cruelly exposed. Humanitarian aid programmes in conflict areas were manipulated or exploited by conflict parties or militias, and may even have served to prolong the conflict (see for example Box 1 on Rwanda). Development aid programmes in weak or conflict-prone countries not only missed important opportunities for CPMR, but also may actually have done harm. For example, some irrigation projects in the Horn of Africa to help agricultural communities also heightened grievances amongst pastoralists or power imbalances with other rival communities.

The failure of the international community to prevent the genocide in Rwanda in the mid 1990s provided further impetus to review the relationship between development assistance and conflict. Studies have made a strong argument of how foreign aid in Rwanda actually contributed to structural violence – both directly and indirectly, through action and inaction, through its mode of functioning and its ideology – and this realisation resulted in more attention being given to the design and implementation of conflict sensitive aid and trade.

Box 1: Aid and the Rwandan genocide
An example of the risks that development and humanitarian aid can contribute to violence is the case of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda in 1996 stated that “By and large, relief agencies had only a very limited understanding of the structures of Rwandese society and very little account had been taken of the views of the beneficiaries in the design and implementation of the programmes…[During] the first weeks of the refugee crisis….traditional structures of authority had been used to organise food distribution and very high levels of diversion had occurred and vulnerable groups often received very little…attempts to rectify these failings were met with violent resistance.” Even if food distribution had been more effective, the high levels of insecurity and violence within the refugee camps and the negative impact the camps had on the surrounding populations precludes this intervention from being considered a success. In subsequent years, the pernicious exploitation and (mis-)use of refugee camps by Rwandan militias became another salutary lesson for humanitarian relief agencies.

The resulting debates led to important reviews of conflict, security and development issues amongst development aid agencies and practitioners. For example, the EU adopted policies to promote conflict prevention and reduction, with explicit implications for EU/EC develop aid policies. Several bilateral donors (including Canada and the UK) emphasised the particular importance of security from violence for poor and vulnerable people. Practitioners working in war-torn or conflict prone countries became more critical of the conflict-insensitive programmes they experienced. It was in this context that the OECD DAC Guidelines on Helping Prevent Violent Conflict were developed and widely adopted by donors as policy.

Meanwhile, priorities and discourses amongst security practitioners and agencies also changed profoundly. There was increasing concern about civil wars and complex transnational violent conflicts. Conflict prevention and post-conflict peace building were priorities for the UN, EU and the rest of the international community. The security agenda was broadened from state and international security to include the concept of ‘human security’. Human security embraces the twin objectives of ‘freedom for fear’ (the threat of violence, crime and war) and ‘freedom from want’ (economic, health, environmental and other threats to people’s well-being).[3] A human security approach takes a holistic view of poor people’s needs, increasing the efficacy of development initiatives. Conflict puts both the twin objectives in jeopardy. By definition the human security approach demands conflict sensitivity.

Human rights, justice, reconciliation, humanitarian protection, good governance and the rule of law were increasingly accepted as important dimensions of both development cooperation and CPMR. The EU as well as many governments and donor agencies established crisis response, conflict prevention and peacebuilding units. New departments and coordination mechanisms were created at the United Nations (recently including the UN Peacebuilding Commission). Several multilateral and non-governmental peacebuilding networks were created. Regional and sub-regional organisations in Africa were restructured or their mandates broadened to address violent conflicts and insecurity as well as development. The international responses to the terrorist attacks such as those of 9/11, including the so-called ‘war on terror’, added further dimensions to the review of traditional security and development policies: highlighting the importance of renewed engagement with governance issues, alienated communities, and fragile, failed or conflict-prone states.