Description

Objectives

Expected outcome or impact

Relationship to conflict prevention and mitigation

· DA projects can be specifically designed to remove or mitigate root causes of violent conflict in an area.

· DA can be provided to conflict-vulnerable areas for primary objectives other than for conflict prevention or resolution under the assumption that economic growth and reduced poverty will increase stability, reduce the potential for conflict and make it easier for governments to take responsible steps in pursuit of peace.

· DA in areas in conflict can integrate components deliberately designed to monitor, evaluate and reinforce DA’s positive impacts and minimize negative impacts on conflict issues.

· DA can be offered to government or other recipients as an incentive on condition they carry out certain policy changes donors believe will help prevent or mitigate conflict—conditionality is covered in a separate profile in this section.

DA can be targeted to specific at-risk areas, either in the early stages of violent conflict to prevent greater violence, or to mitigate ongoing conflict, or post-conflict to focus on reconstruction in an attempt to prevent the recurrence of violent conflict.

At the same time, DA can provoke violence.

· Changes in the distribution of and access to resources, even moves toward more equitable distribution, may be disruptive and cause conflict as they threaten to alter the status quo. · Actual or potential change in the socio-economic status quo alters relative political power; this can provoke violent power struggles.

· Development work may sometimes result in the perception of greater relative deprivation by some groups, resulting in intensified conflict.

· DA to certain areas or groups risks accusations of favoritism from non-beneficiaries; this resentment can exacerbate conflict.

· Development assistance can produce negative impacts in the short run even if its long-term effects reduce conflict.

· Unconditional foreign aid can encourage a government’s tendency to forcibly impose its will and repress internal opponents. However, appropriately designed DA can help a government to be more responsive to the needs and demands of fractious elements within society, encouraging compromise and thereby mitigating or preventing conflict.

Implementation

Organizers

Donors can channel funding through bilateral organizations, PVOs, or multilateral organizations. There are also regional and national organizations in recipient regions and countries: IGAD, ECOWAS and SADCC are three prominent African regional organizations. Local NGOs are proliferating in recipient countries and are attracting increasing amounts of bi- and multilateral aid.

DA activities can be initiated by any of the above parties. They can be funded bilaterally or multilaterally, with joint support from the beneficiary or without matching funds. Projects can be controlled by the donor or implementor, either totally or in partnership with a national government or private entity, or in some cases are controlled partially or totally locally.

Participants

Activities

Programs designed to increase growth, income and/or employment. This category encompasses the vast majority of DA programs, often targeting specific, underdeveloped sectors, such as agriculture, infrastructure or political institutions. These programs generally do not aim directly at conflict prevention per se; a conflict prevention or mitigation component must be built into such programs. To reduce the potential for conflict, donors, planners and implementors must:

· Carefully examine DA programs during their design, implementation and completion or final evaluation for the effect on conflict of policies that seek to distribute or redistribute resources, especially if they have potential to change the ethnic balance of economic opportunities and rewards as in the case, for instance, of investment or preference schemes. A conflict-impact matrix could be designed similar to the environment impact study matrix for large development projects.

· Reformulate programs to increase their contribution to conflict prevention, or at least not to exacerbate conflict. There are likely to be trade-offs between conflict prevention objectives and the DA’s other goals. Policy-makers may have to adjust the conflict aspects of development projects according to donor government priorities.

· Take steps to reduce DA programs’ negative impacts, to offset or compensate for them or avoid implementing certain projects during times of heightened tensions until the society is better able to withstand the negative effects. Structural adjustment policies, for example, often aggravate political and economic instability, partly by exacerbating inequalities. International financial institutions consider economic reform and structural adjustment programs’ potential for increasing political and economic instability, then incorporate a monitoring responsibility and a temporary safety net program with the adjustment policy and proactively seek to design adjustment interventions to address some of the economic disputes which fuel elite competition. International agencies should also be aware of their projects’ potential to undermine traditional authority structures, integrating these structures into project planning and implementation when appropriate, and assessing their contribution to local conflict or to its prevention.

· Monitor and evaluate for impact on conflict: integrate analyses of conflict, political impact, and human rights effects throughout planning, design, and implementation.

Investment promotion and commerce. Economically weak, ethnically diverse regions are often prone to violent ethnic conflicts. In regions and communities populated by ethnically, regionally or politically non-dominant groups, directing investment toward such measures as infrastructure improvements, health clinics, improvements to transportation networks to link non-dominant group areas, job training and education programs can help alleviate tensions. Commercial interests which benefit from stable investment climates can become strong advocates of conflict prevention. DA directed towards increasing commerce between communities and promoting export opportunities could increase beneficiaries’ vested interest in defusing conflicts.

Business, employment or education opportunities. DA can sponsor programs such as education and training programs, employment incentives, preferential treatment and business incentives including investment, business licenses, contracts and loans to discriminated or under-represented groups. Affirmative action programs—quotas for hiring, preference in government jobs—can benefit a weak, non-dominant group or an under-resourced region. However, this can also increase conflict, especially in the short run, as dominant groups or other non-recipients feel threatened or left out.

Reducing incentives for military recruitment. Socio-economic needs often drive people to join armies and militia. Investment in home regions of militia members with DA that creates opportunities for productive livelihoods might draw back some members back to their home areas and enable democratic, peaceful elements to compete for the loyalty of young men at risk of being lured into engaging in violence. Efforts to ease rural poverty, reduce the isolation of rural areas, and integrate rural people into national life would make it more difficult for grievances to fester in remote areas and reduce the attractiveness of resistance armies or militia.

Programs that explicitly target root causes of the conflict—causes such as access to resources, corruption, political or economic mismanagement, lack of political access, absence of legal recourse—can deliberately seek to increase communities’ stake in the absence of violence through increased trade or promoting joint cooperate ventures. DA can also be conditioned to policy changes to reduce conflict.

Appropriate DA includes promoting investment, generating alternative employment, land settlement or reform programs, programs aimed at increasing access to opportunities for non-dominant groups (women, indigenous populations or other minority ethnic groups), and sustainable development programs (health, education, family planning, water and sanitation, roads, ports, agriculture, livestock, or resource management, cooperation, or conservation programs).

Where violence is already present it may be difficult to draw a clear line between development assistance and humanitarian assistance. The distinction often depends on participating agencies’ level of follow-through to the projects, the capacity they develop to sustain projects after donors’ departure, and the degree of community participation they solicit.

In conflicts with a strong ethnic component, assistance to affected areas can address causes by focussing on transforming relationships between ethnic groups by supporting education, legal system reform, civil society development, employment generation and post-conflict projects or programs aimed at reconstruction and peacebuilding.

DA can proactively reduce regional and ethnic tensions and avoid widening those divisions by designing aid programs for needy beneficiaries in a target area, as opposed to targeting a particular group. To avoid accusations of regional or group favoritism, DA should not be limited to areas where a particular group dominates, and beneficiary criteria should be open and transparent.

Cross-line/intercommunal programming. DA can be programmed in many ways to bring hostile communities together to cooperate with one another in various sectors and perhaps help forestall escalation of hostilities.

· Animal vaccination programs and health programming across battle lines can be feasible when animals are critical to local communities. DA programmers can add conditions so that if raiding continues, aid will not.

· Human health programming brings precedents such as the UNICEF-brokered "days of peace" and "corridors of tranquility" to carry out immunization programs for children or the Carter Center’s using guinea worm eradication to promote temporary cessation of hostilities. Such programs can be a vehicle for intercommunal dialogue and planning.

· Education and training across conflict lines give tomorrow’s adults more experience in interrelating peacefully with their neighbors. Short-term training programs can be a vehicle for bringing different perspectives and representatives of conflicting communities together for technical joint problem-solving.

· Water: joint planning for regional drilling, maintenance and use can act as a mechanism for cross-line discussions.

· Housing initiatives can bring members of conflicting groups together as in Gitarama, Rwanda, where a CRS-assisted housing reconstruction program provides Hutu locals with raw materials for building or repairing housing for returning Tutsis.

· Trade and other commercial activity can support stability and address some of the root causes of violence.

· Transportation and other actions to promote exchange mechanisms between communities engaged in conflict can help keep lines of cooperation open between neighboring communities with strained relations. These include supplying transport for locally produced and traded commodities, back-hauling goods by air, allowing trucks bringing inputs to be used for transporting local goods, or providing vehicles such as bicycles or canoes to facilitate the movement of goods between communities.

· Cooperatives and other forms of community cooperation can support local conflict resolution mechanisms and keep lines of communication open.

· Cross-line communication mechanisms can contribute to conflict prevention, providing fora to discuss rather than fight over misunderstandings and resource questions. Strengthening cross-line communication may influence peace-seeking elements within neighboring communities to see mutual interests in cooperation. With communication and cooperation partially restored, neighbors can trade, graze animals, and maintain other ties even while fighting continues. Providing lines of communication is critical for buttressing conflict prevention processes, focusing community attention on the visible benefits of cooperation and avoidance of conflict.

Addressing the economic roots of conflict. Donors can use DA to address the economic disruptions at the root of many complex emergencies. At the local level, conflicts arise more frequently over resources than ethnicity, especially as concerns water, grass and land use. DA agencies should specifically work to understand traditional uses of natural resources and how communities apply their own laws and mechanisms to resolving conflicts as part of planning development interventions. At the sub-national level, where local resources fuel tensions, aid can address some of the igniting factors, and aid agencies have a comparative advantage in addressing such conflicts given their day-to-day proximity.

· Promoting access to resources provides a measure of economic independence, lessening any economic dependence on military authorities and thereby reducing the economic rationale for joining militia.

· Land programs can help prevent or mitigate conflict when lack of access or legal title to land by an ethnically non-dominant group is a major source of conflict. DA programs to increase access to land can include resettlement programs, legal title reforms, migration programs, and land reform programs. These programs should support community or government institutional abilities to resolve competing claims prior to (re)distributing inputs.

Programs that address conflictual behavior itself include supporting conflict resolution and conflict management programs or initiatives, developing mediation mechanisms, democratic development, and judicial/legal reform. Expenditures in this last category are dwarfed in dollar terms by other DA expenditures, yet they are rapidly increasing as donors place more emphasis on civil society development, democratization and conflict prevention and resolution activities.

Incorporating conflict prevention/resolution into assistance. Development agencies operating in conflict areas should take steps to gain thorough knowledge of conflict issues in their operating areas and of potential conflict prevention/resolution initiatives. DA agencies include issues of peacebuilding and reconciliation in programming and develop clear, systematic principles for operating in conflict areas and for avoiding exacerbating conflict. DA agencies should explicitly consider the impact of programming on actual or potential conflict, from program content, beneficiaries and location to implementation staff.

Cost considerations

Other resource considerations

Set-up time

Timeframe

to see results

Conflict context

Stages of conflict

Typically, few traditional DA activities occur during a conflict’s acute phase, often because of poor security, absence of counterparts, or implementing agencies’ institutional requirements. Many experts encourage DA practitioners to engage during times of conflict; some point out that violence subsides for prolonged periods or in certain geographic areas in even the most violent conflict, and that these moments of reprieve should be used for DA to help draw combatants away from the conflict.

Types of conflict

Causes of conflict

Prerequisites

DA can address operational or structural causes of conflict depending on the type of intervention undertaken and the approach used toward conflict prevention.

Past practice

Within the Greater Horn

With the help of some agencies and donors, cooperatives and other local producers in Western Equatoria, sell surplus production, opening up old trade routes, some of which cross borders.

Somalia. Checkpoints on the road from Boraama to Hargeisa in Somaliland were in place because people all along the road needed money to buy water from the limited number of usable water points. When UNDP dug two additional water holes, the checkpoints disappeared. The fighting over water points in Bakool Region in the spring and summer of 1995 between the Jiron and Hadame sub-clans was amenable to resolution through elder negotiation backed up by agency support for the eventual agreement provision of digging additional water points.

Outside the Greater Horn

Bosnia. The European Union’s Administration in Mostar (EUAM) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure, utilities, small-business development and civil society strengthening to reunite the town’s divided communities and forestall further conflict between Bosnians and Croats. Although Mostar remains very polarized, renewed fighting has not erupted.

Evaluation

Strengths

DA is a versatile tool that can target social, economic, political and cultural issues related to conflict within a community or a country.DA’s long-term horizon and incremental approach can help build political will with conflicting parties as well as with international actors who might otherwise be reluctant to engage in a process they might view as problematic.

DA has sometimes shown success in buying political good will on the part of hard-liners who might otherwise want to resume conflict.

Thoughtfully programmed DA can draw people away from conflict by offering alternatives to violence. This can be sometimes be done during the conflict ("spot reconstruction") or in the wake of the conflict when societies are often most prone to renewed violence (community revitalization projects).

Weaknesses

There can be disagreement over whether donors should channel aid to non-governmental organizations or to governments. Critics charge the external resources provided to NGOs weaken state structures and lead to greater fragmentation. Proponents point out that local NGOs are important civil society institutions, and as civil society is relatively weak in many less developed countries, support for NGOs can be a good thing for these societies over and above the specific programs that NGOs carry out.

If not carefully planned and implemented, DA can be ineffective or even harmful to conflict prevention. DA can undermine indigenous development, create dependency, prop up corrupt regimes, favor certain classes or groups at the expense of others, or allow leaders forego compromise, postpone needed economic reforms or waste the country’s own resources on unproductive expenditures such as excessive military spending or engaging in war against internal enemies. Using foreign assistance to contain an explosive situation can become its objective rather than addressing the causes of the conflict.

Projects can be ill-chosen and exacerbate regional, class, or ethnic resentment or strengthen authoritarian regimes. By giving only a glimpse of a better life without providing full access, aid can create resentment and exacerbate radicalism. Land reform programs to secure access to land by particular groups may inadvertently increase ethnic tensions. Recipient countries’ to absorb outside money and to undertake technical projects efficiently may be limited. DA can be siphoned off by corruption or wasted on poorly conceived development schemes. In situations of conflict, insecurity, limited access, problems with or absence of central authorities and lack of local counterparts can inhibit DA results.

The relatively modest sums contributed through DA programs in some cases may be powerless to address the economic causes of certain conflicts.Offering preferential treatment in business opportunities or employment programs may cause a backlash from the groups left out. Economic incentives have a slightly higher likelihood of motivating private and public sector organizations to improve the access of non-dominant groups to the job market.

References and resources

Dorrnbos, Martin et al. (eds.), Beyond Conflict in the Horn: The Prospects for Peace, Recovery and Development in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan, The Red Sea Press, Trenton, NJ, 1992.

Macrae, Joanna. and Anthony Zwi (eds.), War and Hunger: Rethinking International Responses to Complex Emergencies, Zed Books/SCF-UK, NJ and London, 1994.