Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

“The ultimate goal was to engage people for two or three
years, but in many cases, we made a successful transition to
keep activities going on. And that was evident across all the
program components. CSP created jobs. CSP engaged youth.
But at the local level, it really achieved something special.”
— Barzan Ismaeel
CSP was originally known as the “Focused Stabilization
in Strategic Cities” program, which was descriptive
of the COIN philosophy of quick-impact relief and
reconstruction with short, targeted missions. Unlike
traditional development programs, CSP was fluid,
scaling up or down in response to evolving priorities
in the most insecure areas of key cities like Basra,
Kirkuk, and Mosul. But as CSP evolved from concept
to implementation, “focused stabilization” began to
mean more than geography. IRD’s broader mission
of trying to establish a wholly integrated stabilization
program with discernible short- and long-term benefits
led to a system of “checks and balances.” Individual
program components were afforded flexibility to meet
their goals, but they also maintained a focus on adherence
to the complete package model. As CSP rapidly
scaled up, this tightly integrated approach proved
important.
The initial cooperative agreement was for $265 million
and six months of activities in Baghdad. Expansion
was expected, but funding increased rapidly in
response to Department of Defense and USAID needs
to add cities to the program. These changes eventually
pushed the total obligation to $644 million. At
the height of the program, CSP had 1,800 staff and
was spending an average of $21 million a month.
Program operations easily could have spiraled out of
control, but the overall design didn’t allow it. “When
we started expanding to other cities, the initial processes
and procedures were taken to those cities,”
Michele Lemmon said. “But they had to be adapted,
because each city had its own circumstances, different
communities, and a different acceptance of the
program. Remember, we were doing what the Iraqis
wanted to do. All the programs were designed by the
Iraqi staff, with a helping hand from us. Now, consider
going from one city, Baghdad, to 15 cities in a matter
of months. That’s how large we became. Really, the
success we had in those circumstances is owed to the
strong program design. It kept CSP focused almost by
default.”
Community infrastructure and essential
services: CSP’s entry point
CSP categorized employment as either short term
(fewer than three months) or long term (more than
three months). By traditional labor standards in a
modernized country’s economy, three months would
hardly seem long term. In an environment like Iraq,
however, that measure helped differentiate between
jobs created by traditional development tools such as
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