SESSION III: DEMOCRACY AND
GOVERNANCE: JUSTICE AND SECURITY
"Transition in Governance: The UNDP Framework and How It Is Being Made Operational"
Frank O'Donnell, Deputy
Director,
Crisis Management and Governance Division, UNDP
June 7, 2000
UNDP has zeroed in on governance in recent years due to its failure to create strong institutions. Conceptually, UNDP's overarching goal is poverty eradication. Governance fits by fostering the enabling environment for this goal. Currently over 50% of UNDP's activities falls under governance. 94 countries have programs, and the strongest demand is to help strengthen the capacity of democratic governance institutions. The general programmatic goals involve promoting good governance through 1) securing structural stability, 2) assisting countries in designing coherent policies, and 3) assisting in the pursuit of peace agreements.
Ten years ago, UNDP would abandon a country in crisis. The Programme has come far since then. Its record in working with crisis counties is checkered, however. It has invested rapidly in postconflict programming, while there has been too little work done on preventive development. Many in UNDP see preventive development as nonsense. Development by definition is preventive, they say. UNDP's emergency response division has largely focused on disarmament and displacement, but has missed the boat on many core sociopolitical issues. In non-crisis countries, governance dominates, but this has yet to affect programming in crisis countries. UNDP has released two main reports examining governance and conflict: Governance Foundation for Post-conflict Situations and Promoting Conflict Prevention and Resolution. Both can be found at the "Governance in Crisis" subsection of the UNDP website: http://magnet.undp.org/.
There have been major changes worth noting in UNDP's approach towards conflict in recent years. First, the interdepartmental UN framework (mentioned by Tom Beck the previous day) has had an effect. It has helped bring out critical issues and broader perspectives and has become a kind of early warning system for the UN. For the UN's various agencies involved in conflict, it has become an effective network of sorts and not just a system for sharing information. Second, the UN has attempted to craft a strategic framework in one country only. The country picked, however, could not have been more problematic for this purpose: Afghanistan. Most critically, it was not a postconflict country and remained wracked by continuing civil war. Not surprisingly, the framework quickly became heavily dominated by a humanitarian agenda, with governance issues falling by the wayside. Guidelines have recently come out for Sierra Leone, but like with Afghanistan, they are heavily dominated by a humanitarian agenda. Put simply, UNDP and the UN are making mistakes by picking the wrong countries. East Timor could be a more successful scenario for a strategic framework. Also, the UN needs to learn how to bring in non-UN agencies into the process as it crafts a strategic framework in countries.
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