Effective transitional governance is one of the most formidable challenges facing reconstruction and stabilization missions in war-torn, failed states. How can these states secure lasting peace without institutions of governance, accountable leaders, and support of the governed?
Summary and Recommendations
- Effective transitional governance is one of the most formidable challenges facing reconstruction and stabilization missions in war-torn, failed states. Absent functioning institutions of governance guided by accountable leaders and the support of the governed, these states will be unable to secure lasting peace.
- Governance is not a mission that intervening parties can ignore; it is a necessity for successful reconstruction and stabilization operations and the ultimate withdrawal of international assets, including peacekeeping forces and international civilian staff.
- Approximately fifty key experts and practitioners met during the course of late 2004 and into 2005 to define the main issues and recommendations for those who must create or reform systems of governance in states emerging from conflict. In addition, leaders of current and past interventions from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Eastern Slovenia, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Timor-Leste convened in public and private sessions in March 2004 to offer their recommendations.
- These recommendations are the ideals toward which intervenors should strive; however, intervenors should also understand that real-world constraints and trade-offs are likely to challenge them at every stage.
- The period before deployment of troops and civilian staff offers the intervenor a critical and historically underutilized opportunity to prepare the mission for success.
Predeployment requirements for a successful mission should lead the intervenor to
- Conduct assessments of the condition and the needs of the mission area, as well as an audit of the financial flows, prior to mission deployment.
- Craft the mission mandate from the assessments and audits.
- Ensure that the mission mandate gives the mission leader executive authority and provides adequate personnel and money for national and local governance, transitional strategies, and administration.
To fulfill this mandate, the mission leader must be able to
- Procure enough resources to quickly set up ministries and other key local and national government institutions.
- Develop plans to provide resources to fund, train, and equip local and national civil service employees.
- Create a mission structure that provides for unity of purpose between civilian and military components and for broad participation from contributors by
- Including key contributing nations and neighboring countries in consultative, administrative, or support structures.
- Assigning robust security forces who are authorized to prevent the resumption of hostilities, including robust police units capable of operating in anarchic conditions, followed by individual police, judicial, and penal personnel to restore the rule of law.
- Embedding governance advisors in the intervening military force structure to be responsible for establishing local authorities in advance of civilian deployment in unstable areas.
- Developing intelligence capabilities and coordinating them in support of the overall mission objectives.
- There is a short window of opportunity, which typically lasts from the beginning of the mission through the first six months, to develop public institutions and programs.
Postdeployment requirements call for the intervenor to
- Incorporate legitimate components of the former local and national governance and bureaucratic structures into the transitional administration as quickly as possible.
- Implement revenue-generating or revenue-management strategies.
- Ensure, if needed, that the constitution-writing process is inclusive, consultative, transparent, and participatory, while also providing legal advisors and conducting a public information campaign on the process.
- Create institutions of consultation and coadministration at the local and national levels by
- Committing to empowering, training, and funding local personnel in coadministrative or administrative governance structures.
- Ensuring communication and coordination between local and national governance structures.
- Curb corruption early in the mission and at all levels by providing legal advisors and consultants to help develop anti-corruption legislation, designing anti-corruption public education campaigns, empowering indigenous watchdog mechanisms, ensuring that civil service personnel are properly compensated and that they receive their salary payments in full and on time, and establishing a system of meritocratic criteria for civil service.
- Provide initial accountability through audits and oversight in key agencies and ministries to ensure that political processes and institutions are transparent and accountable, and develop civil society's monitoring capabilities.
- The postdeployment requirement of developing political participation should begin at the onset of the mission but be built on a foundation of rule of law and the maturation of political processes.
The postdeployment requirements for developing political participation call for the intervenor to
- Incorporate power brokers, including spoilers, if possible, into the political process. If they cannot be incorporated, constrain them from violence or remove them from the community.
- Seek out and empower new political leaders, especially those on the local level.
- Facilitate the development of political representation, the registration of political parties and candidates, and the implementation of political education and training programs.
- Allow time for political processes and the rule of law to mature before holding national elections.
- Hold local elections when circumstances permit and before national elections.
- Disarm and demobilize combatants and other armed groups and develop strategies to reintegrate these groups before elections are held.
- Protect minority rights by establishing the rule of law.
Introduction
Effective transitional governance is one of the most formidable challenges facing reconstruction and stabilization missions in war-torn, failed states. Peace can be sustained only when power is attained through political rather than violent means and when government institutions are legitimate.
Despite numerous interventions around the world, establishing governance has too often been an elusive goal or an ephemeral achievement. Attaining this objective can involve prolonging the intervention, as was done in Bosnia, or repeating the intervention, as was done in Haiti. When the objective to establish governance fails, the entire mission may collapse, as it did in Somalia. By attending to the governance lessons from the past decade and a half, intervenors can identify and incorporate best practices into the planning and conduct of interventions to help societies move from bullets to ballots effectively and expeditiously.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for establishing governance in states emerging from conflict. The environment international intervenors inherit when mounting reconstruction and stabilization missions will differ widely in scope and scale from state to state. The quality of the peace settlement that permits the mission to operate, including the presence or absence of fundamental power-sharing agreements, can lay the foundation for success or failure. Even with adequate peace settlements, some states lack any semblance of functioning government institutions and have no tradition of civil participation in governance. Other states offer the workable remains of past government institutions and have vibrant civil societies.
While conditions do vary, most international intervenors trying to establish transitional governance encounter the following challenges:
- Public order and security need to be restored.
- Political authority, absent in most cases, must be resurrected.
- Institutions of the state must be refashioned.
- Political processes leading to a representative government must be created.
- A constitution must often be written.
- Delivery of essential services must be ensured, as well as basic infrastructure repair and job creation.
- Ongoing fighting and tensions between warring parties must be halted and addressed.
- Criminalized power structures must be dislodged, and a functioning legal system must be established.
- A culture of fear and repression must be replaced by a culture of civic participation.
- Ultimately, free and fair elections need to be held to cement the transformation from bullets to ballots.
The description below of the conditions in Afghanistan in late 2001 provides an example of recurrent challenges facing those who are charged with establishing transitional governance.
In late 2001, Afghanistan: had not convened a formal parliament since 1973; suffered from one of the poorest levels of delivery of public services and the lowest health indicators in the world; contained no viable infrastructure; had years of devastating drought and stymied development of natural resources; was a society governed by "rule of the gun" instead of rule of law; had lost both its legal texts and legal documents that governed the state before the war; possessed no functioning national government buildings or equipment, no government institutions at the local level, and no banking sector. (Barnett et al., 2005)
Common challenges are exacerbated by two major gaps that consistently plague the implementation of these operations: (1) the failure to move fast enough to stabilize a country and begin reconstruction and (2) the failure to provide sufficient resources and personnel, guided by a strong mandate at the mission's outset.
Once a mission deploys, there is a limited time--the window of opportunity--to create law and order, establish governance, provide essential services, and begin to show progress on economic and social reconstruction. Most missions, however, face critical personnel and resource shortages at the outset and fail to meet civilian staff and force requirements for at least six to nine months. The window of opportunity typically closes long before an operation is fully staffed and resourced. The UN mission in Cambodia had "barely 200 UN civil administrators [who] were supposed to supervise 140,000 State of Cambodia civil servants" during the mission (Dobbins et al., 2005). More than a decade later, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, overseeing a country of 26 million, staffed its governance team with fewer than two dozen people.
This report provides an overview of many of the lessons and recommendations that have been identified as vital for success in this difficult endeavor. It addresses transitional governance as a two-pronged process, implemented either through direct administration or through power-sharing arrangements, and aimed at achieving two essential goals: (1) to boost the capacity of domestic institutions of government to a level at which they are capable of providing basic security and services to all segments of the population, with only a minimum of outside intervention and in a transparent and accountable manner; and (2) to construct free and fair representative political processes in which individuals participate and compete for power through nonviolent means.
These twin requisites of governance are interrelated and cannot be executed sequentially. Where one prong in this process has been ignored or relegated to later phases of the mission, the mission has either stalled or failed. Bosnia offers the example of a mission that created state institutions but failed to erect legitimate political processes. The first mission in Haiti focused on support for political leadership and processes but woefully neglected the institutions of government. As a result of failing to recognize the interdependent nature of these goals, the international community remains mired in Bosnia ten years after the birth of the mission, and has returned to Haiti for a second time. The "Post-Conflict Reconstruction Essential Tasks Matrix" on transitional governance developed for the U.S. government by the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the U.S. Department of State recognizes these two goals and the need for nonsequential implementation, and so does this report.
- Part I addresses lessons and recommendations for the predeployment phase that establishes a foundation for success and includes assessments and audits, mandates, force structure and resource procurement, and mission planning and organization.
- Part II addresses lessons and recommendations for the development of public institutions and programs.
- Part III examines lessons and recommendations for the successful development of political participation.
The report concludes with suggestions for further reading.
About the Report
This report is based on a series of consultations under the auspices of the Transitional Governance Working Group, chaired by Ambassador James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND Corporation, and Daniel Serwer, vice president of the Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations at the United States Institute of Peace.
The Transitional Governance Working Group is part of the Institute's Filling the Gaps series of working groups, which aims to systematically address the causes of failure in specific areas in reconstruction and stabilization operations and to generate policy options for those in the U.S. government and elsewhere who lead and staff these missions. Filling the Gaps is directed by Serwer and managed by Beth Cole DeGrasse, senior program officer at the Institute. Cole DeGrasse and Christina Caan, research assistant at the Institute, co-authored the report.
The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions.