Capacity building
Post-conflict recovery: resource mobilization and peacebuilding
Aid is seldom a blank cheque: re-evaluating aid in the peacebuilding process
Authors:
J.K. Boyce
Publisher:
Political Economy Research Institute, 2008
Full text of document [File size: 510mb]
In war-torn societies aid can play an important and constructive role in building a durable peace. However, are positive outcomes the automatic result of good intentions? Furthermore, are donors motivated entirely by the objective of peacebuilding?
In relation to these questions the author reviews evidence on the impact of aid in “post-conflict” settings and offers suggestions for making aid more effective in supporting efforts to build a durable peace.
The paper addresses three key areas:
- how economic assistance and aid conditionalities can be realigned to better serve peacebuilding objectives
- how peacekeeping operations and peacebuilding assistance can better support economic recovery, in particular by helping to build state fiscal capacities
- how the interests and incentive structures that shape the behaviour of aid donors, suggesting that their actions can be part of the problem as well as part of the solution.
Main findings include:
- aid conditionality can be harnessed directly to the objective of promoting peace e.g. donors can use ‘peace conditionality’ to encourage the implementation of peace accords
- IMF loan conditions must be commensurate with the requirements of establishing a viable peace – the organisation’s strict macroeconomic policies have frequently undermined post-conflict reconstruction
- there is a need to build state capacities to mobilise domestic revenue and to allocate and manage expenditure as the flow of aid diminishes during postwar transitions
- unsustainable expenditures, originally provided for by donors, are shortsighted. A well-equipped army that isn’t getting paid ceases to be a security force - it becomes an insecurity force
- the need for geopolitical alliance and the (self-)serving of economic and commercial interests has riddled donor policy i.e. at the expense of altruistic peacebuilding.
