USAID Workshop on
Conflict Prevention Management

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Crisis Prevention and Development Cooperation: The Role of the State Dr. Johanna Mendelson-Forman, USAID, Office of Policy Planning and Coordination June 7, 2000 The consensus that violent conflict is the greatest challenge to development in the next century is what brings us here today. What fuels such conflicts, and how state actors respond to or fail to respond to these political challenges may be the next frontier where developmental experts must pioneer a way to engage policy makers in an important dialogue about bridging their geopolitical objectives with basic human security needs. The study by the government of Germany underscores what in practice we see is happening: that the old principles under which development cooperation takes place, sustainablity and partnership/ownership must be adjusted, and even redefined in situations where conflict occurs. Moreover, the greater political development needs, as identified by foreign policy of a particular state are critical if we are to integrate a response that prevents conflict from escalating. Making this happen, however, is the greater challenge in bureaucracies that fail to see the changes around them. How donor governments respond to conflict and its prevention is often challenged by bureaucratic obstacles that deliberately obfuscate the lines between development needs and political realities in any given bilateral relationship. Even the mere fact that development agencies are sometimes removed from the political decision-making process often affects the very outcome of strategies to prevent, let alone reconstruct societies torn asunder by warfare and violence. I would categorize the types of prevention obstacles into the following categories: Bureaucratic barriers Communication gaps among actors, state and non-state - e.g., the failure of many development agencies to address governance reforms in the security sector as one blind spot in prevention. Lack of policy cohesion between traditional development objectives and the changing climate of international assistance. There are also the important issues in US policy between strategy gaps expressed in our national security strategy and those of our development objectives. The overlap is sometimes unclear, or indistinct. (For example, USAID is now making poverty reduction a central theme, and it has been indeed engaged in this area, but it fails to take into consideration the linkages between human security and global poverty, even in light of the World Bank surveys.) The United States is a big bureaucracy. Many new actors have entered the conflict prevention arena - including the Department of Defense, Department of State, USAID, and even Treasury through its work on military expenditures. What is driving conflict prevention, however, is not an objective with obvious remedies, and it is treated as a separate field of inquiry rather than a part of governance, economic growth or environmental security. The cross-cutting nature of conflict prevention is really the first step to understanding and providing action toward a genuine set of operational policies in this area. USAID - has many loci of prevention activity, but only in the last month has an effort been made to work them through a multi-sectoral approach, with representation from different parts of the agency. Humanitarian assistance is still considered a side-show, disaggregated from prevention work, but rather discussed in terms of conflict mitigation. Transition work looks at reconstruction as a prevention activity, i.e., preventing the re-ingniting of violence, but it has yet to link it to the follow-on development activities. Work in governance has also been disconnected from the early prevention needs, in many ways a reflection of some of the stove-piped approaches still predominant in the strategies that are used in the field. Integrated strategic planning, a process that took into consideration cross sectoral programming in the context of the crisis in the Greater Horn of Africa, is being applied in the Africa region, but it has yet to take root. Issues: How do current development tools limit our options for prevention response? Does the US ignore the work of international organizations at our peril? How can a culture of prevention become a part of a culture of development? Can we instill a "do no harm" approach into our strategic thinking? Must we sit at the table with our partners at State and DOD and create a new paradigm for working in the national interest? Questions must be answered so that we all use the same vocabulary and definitions for our approaches. USG must move toward an understanding of how we will advance this process. To do so will require greater efforts to first understand the needs of countries "in special circumstances" and creating an operational approach to prevention that can be implemented in spite of geopolitical concerns. Even if we use third parties, other partners, or other means than USG sources, we must develop a concensus on how to work in this field, and this is still a project for the future.

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