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Key Text A New Approach to Post Conflict Reconstruction

Author: Fredrik Galtung and Martin Tisné
Date: 2009
Size: 15 pages (481 KB)

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Summary

How can post-war reconstruction support democratisation and prevent the early entrenchment of corruption? This study published in the Journal of Democracy examines democracy assistance in eight countries recovering from war: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Lebanon, Mozambique, the Palestinian Authority, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste. It argues that citizens need to be involved in the allocation of the public resources that affect their lives. Community-driven accountability can stem corruption and re-engage people in the democratic process. Such measures can begin in the earliest post-war stages, building on local skills and resources.

At the end of conflict, war-torn countries face a number of common problems: the threat of a return to violence; an imbalance between the country's weak institutional capacity to administer aid and peoples' urgent needs; and corruption. Once entrenched, corruption can siphon off significant revenues, affect large numbers of people and destabilise the state-building process. Furthermore, it will only be uncovered if sought.

Governance reforms introduced to combat these issues range from public financial management to procurement reform. The international community tends to use a top-down approach to implement reform. This fails to exploit the social accountability mechanisms that are better suited to the exigencies of a post-war context.

Community-driven approaches can build transparency and accountability from below in the fragile environment of a country trying to reconstruct itself after war.

Community-driven accountability enables the local population to act as accountability agents for more than just the projects that they are directly responsible for implementing.
By engaging local government institutions, civil society monitoring programmes can develop a better understanding of how these institutions work with communities, what their capacities and how to achieve change through consensus.
Infrastructure built with local skills is more sustainable, in part because the technology that it employs will be more familiar to a larger number of people.
Community-driven monitoring efforts are less successful where local government cannot meet the expectations generated by the monitoring.
To play a role within community-development councils, local NGOs and communities need access to information. This is often difficult to obtain, however. Lack of information breeds patronage, heightened suspicion, poor management and corruption.
Local community and government leaders often have their first interactions with foreign donors only after aid has been pledged. As a result, national resources and skills are rarely fully exploited.

Community-driven accountability helps to restore trust. Combined with targeted local-government reforms, such a collaborative process can balance citizens' expectations with states' limited ability to deliver services.

Building on local resources and competencies enables accountability to be implemented rapidly, laying foundations early on for a sustainable, locally-owned reconstruction process.
Access to information is a condition for accountability. Increased aid transparency allows community participation in monitoring.
Distributed approaches to enforcement should selectively target the areas where the risk of corruption would be most destabilising.
Familiarity with the country, its laws, traditions and culture is crucial for external actors, while an understanding of the dynamics of the international donor world and its mechanisms is useful to beneficiaries.
Rapid-learning clinics could help aid workers identify local skills and competencies in the recipient country. They could also provide training to nationals on working with foreigners.

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Source: Galtung F. and Tisné M., 2009, 'A New Approach to Post Conflict Reconstruction', Journal of Democracy, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 93-107
Author: Martin Tisné , matisne[at]hotmail.com ; Fredrik Galtung , fredrik.galtung[at]tiri.org