engaging fragile states - Woodrow Wilson International Center for ...

People need to feel that development programs have the involvement and backing
of their governments. This is not easy when a host of international NGOs, contractors,
and other people are active all around the country.
A related danger is undermining effective indigenous institutions and practices.
Often, there is an automatic tendency to assume that traditional or local ways
of doing things do not work. Models are applied from outside about how institutions
should work instead of looking at what has already been established. In
Herat in Afghanistan, for example, the city had a functioning system for tracking
and collecting revenue, which was quite efficient. However, the donors focused on
whether Herat needed a more sophisticated information system for revenue collection,
even though the need was not evident.
One way to increase local capacity and ownership in policy decision-making
is to incorporate host country professionals in the process. The need to encourage
national dialogues and inclusiveness is widely recognized, but is often not
easy to carry out in view of local political infighting. To handle this effectively,
a comprehensive knowledge of the country is required beyond narrow technical
considerations so as to develop a good sense of what the real issues are and where
political and social tensions lie.
A difficult balance thus can arise in financial management and oversight. It is
especially important to avoid perceptions of corruption and favoritism in the bidding
and awarding of contracts. There can be a serious loss of legitimacy and credibility
if a program fuels corruption or shows favoritism to one particular group.
However, it is extremely difficult to monitor programs in these settings. Being
overly fastidious about the type of financial management systems that are workable
in post-conflict countries is not realistic, especially as the task requires that
the work be done quickly.
Another adverse, but underestimated, consequence occurs as a result of the
stove-piping structures within the international actors who engage in post-conflict
countries. For example, the signals that foreign ministries send to host governments
regarding priorities as they seek to provide an authorizing environment for
the UN are often very different from the signals coming from finance ministries,
even those of the same government, as they seek to create the authorizing environment
for the international financial institutions. Also, some donors have legislative
earmarks that require them to put a certain percentage of assistance to certain
countries or sectors. As a result, some countries become aid darlings, where donors
end up tripping over each other, causing more problems than they solve. On the
other hand, countries like the Central African Republic or Guinea-Bissau have
only the ex-colonial power and a couple of multilateral institutions working on
certain essentials, but no one else involved.
At the country level, donors often favor certain programming sectors. For ex-
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