How to meet the challenge of failed or fragile states? Those who stress the threats that they represent for the international community often advocate direct intervention, even placing them under international trusteeship. But might it not be better to rethink development aid? Could not part of this aid be devoted to rebuilding a collapsed state, and thus financing its security forces, for example? For the richest donors, the answer is clearly in the affirmative. The author nevertheless points out the risks and difficulties to which the necessary restoration of the rule of law and thus the state’s power gives rise.

Donor countries deciding in a panic to pay several months’ arrears in salaries to an African state’s civil servants are not unusual these days. Is this development aid? Definitely not. However, would development programmes be able to continue without the state’s faithful servants’ services?

Flashback: In the early 1970s, many voices were raised in Europe and North America to decry wasteful (due to mismanagement) aid policies. The target of all the criticism at the time was the white elephant, that is, a metaphor for a gigantic project that produced little in return for the population. In attacking the white elephants, the critics were challenging all state-to-state co-operation, for it often benefited the Third World countries’ ruling castes. It is true that at the height of the Cold War overseas development aid also served to support friendly regimes, regardless of their legitimacy or integrity.

At the time, a new generation of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) arose and proliferated, thanks to an original concept: direct co-operation between people in the North and South to bypass the states and their bureaucratic labyrinths. Community development, microcredit, local capacity building, and support for the structuring of civil society thus sprang up – all approaches that many NGOs continue to use today. You have to admit that it is the simplest way to help the poorest people and simultaneously bypass corrupt civil servants.

The formula was so successful that even the donor states hopped on the bandwagon and, with them, powerful international institutions such as the European Union and World Bank, first by cofinancing¹ thousands of NGO projects throughout the world, then by becoming direct operators of microdevelopment. This was what was modestly known as “decentralised co-operation”, in which the donor spoke directly, without intermediaries, with the municipal or provincial authorities, even with representative local groups.

Law and order first
However, today some of these states, which were greatly mistrusted at the time, and rightly so, are falling apart and crumbling before the powerless donors’ very eyes. Others are keeping up appearances, but are actually “K.O. on their feet” that have been euphemistically given the kind name of “fragile states”. And so, all the players in overseas development work (but humanitarian organisations as well) are painfully rediscovering the benefits of public power: peace and security, of course, but also law and order, infrastructure maintenance, national education, free health care, and many other services for society, including – oh the irony of it all! – a certain measure of bureaucracy. Professionals from all walks of life have lost no time in repeating to anyone who will listen that development is not possible without security and all efforts must be made without delay to strengthen fragile states and above all rebuild those that had collapsed, with the active support of NGOs from North and South. Who would have wagered a single dollar on such a catastrophe scenario in 1975?

Meanwhile, development agencies are in a very awkward situation, for raising and keeping a state afloat used to be an approach diametrically opposed to their principles. However, the most ticklish business consists in winning acceptance of massive support for rebuilding national security. Would things go as far as buying arms with development aid money?

Luckily, we have not reached that point, and the donors vehemently oppose such thinking. Proof of this is an interesting document from the Development Assistance Committee of the Western donors’ club, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)². At a meeting in March 2005, the OECD’s high-level experts discovered the list of new expenditures that were submitted for inclusion in the very official calculation of official development aid (ODA): They included in particular support for the Ministries of Defence (but only for activities that were not directly military) and the collection and destruction of weapons (but not by force and not by military personnel).

While people actually working on the ground liken this approach to a contortionist’s act, many development officials show no such lack of enthusiasm. In the European Union’s new strategy for Africa, the Commissioner for Development Louis Michel feels that the EU should develop “a strategy and capacity to foster security sector reform (SSR) in Africa”³. Now, this famous SSR is none other than aid for creating new integrated national armies, training them in military discipline and modern combat techniques, and, finally, equipping them fully. Part of the EU’s development aid will thus serve military objectives. The North’s NGOs have clenched their jaws, but can they deny that sustainable development is inseparable from peace and security?

Twelve principles, nine guinea pigs
The failed states must be set back on their feet; that is clear. But won’t the donors be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job? For, in the absence of tax revenue in a destructured economy, all the vital sectors of government action must be financed directly and for an indeterminate length of time. Given that there are currently some ten failed states on the books and even more fragile states, all the world’s development resources could be channelled to them without for that matter any guarantee of success. So, since 2003 the OECD has taken up the issue and mobilised experts on the highest level to increase the aid’s effectiveness. The Paris Declaration⁴ provides, for example, for a list of mutual commitments based on a sort of “gentleman’s agreement”: The beneficiary countries guarantee more strictness, integrity, and transparency in using the funds, while the donors promise to align themselves more with the beneficiaries’ national development strategies, to give the partner countries more control over their own policies, to avoid duplication of effort, and to simplify aid’s delivery. Everyone becomes responsible for the final outcome.

At the end of this lengthy pondering, the OECD drafted twelve principles of effective international support for fragile states⁵. Behind the deliberately technocratic jargon we see the donors’ determination to rationalise, harmonise, co-ordinate, plan, and give more consistency and flexibility to their intervention. More eloquent words without deeds? That is not certain. Some OECD Member States have undertaken to field test these twelve principles in nine “guinea pig” states⁶. Belgium, through its Minister for Development and Co-operation, Armand De Decker, has volunteered to lead the exercise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The idea is to establish a new co-operation policy based on co-ordinating the various donors’ work with the new government that will come out of the elections at the end of the transition. 2006 will thus be the year in which these principles will be put into practice and assessed to determine their true relevance and impact, prior possibly to broadening the experiment to other fragile states.

Large NGOs such as Actionaid and Oxfam are not opposed to this process, but point out that some other grand principles, such as tied aid or making aid contingent on opening up markets and privatising services, could also be overhauled⁷. The European Network for Central Africa (EURAC) would like co-operation with all of the Great Lakes countries⁸ to be based on the observance of human rights. For example, it has serious reservations about the aid that is granted to Rwanda, a country that is showered with attention from Europe despite serious violations of freedom of expression.

Some bitterness
The severest challenge to development policies comes from US academic circles. The Center for Global Development has published a commitment to development index in the journal Foreign Policy each year since 2003⁹. This new appraisal tool makes it possible to rank the world’s twenty-one richest nations by the quality of their efforts to help the countries of the South. Far from limiting themselves to development aid budgets, the index’s designers also take account of the ways trade, investments, and immigration, environmental, technology, and security policies help or hinder poor countries. The biggest countries are not always the best placed in this ranking: the United States ranks twelfth; France, Spain, and Italy are below the fifteenth place; and Japan comes in last.

How can one help but be somewhat bitter? In the past forty-five years development has reached not a single one of the fabulous goals that it set itself in the heady days of decolonisation. Today we discover that it has not yet touched bottom, for the spiral of under-development is doing wonderfully well and dragging its victims into an ever-deeper abyss.

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¹ The state or international organisation involved in each cofinanced project doubles, triples, or quadruples the funds contributed by the NGO. In Belgium, for example, the first law on development NGO cofinancing dates back to 1974.
² Comptabilisation dans l’APD de certaines dépenses en rapport avec les conflits, la paix et la sécurité, Development Co-operation Directorate, Development Assistance Committee, OECD, DCD/DAC/RD(2005)4/RD3, 1 March 2005, 2 pages.
³ EU Strategy for Africa – Towards a Euro-African pact to accelerate Africa’s development, Communication from the Commission to the Council, European Parliament and European Economic and Social Committee, Commission of the European Communities, SEC(2005)1255, 12 October 2005, p. 23.
⁴ Paris Declaration on Development Aid Effectiveness, High Level Forum, 28 February-2 March 2005, Paris, printed document, 15 pages.
⁵ Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States, Development Co-operation Directorate, OECD, DCD(2005)8/REV2, 7 April 2005, 4 pages.
⁶ The states selected are the DRC, Guinea Bissau, Haiti, Nepal, Somalia, the Solomon Islands, Sudan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. See Piloting the Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States, Development Co-operation Directorate, OECD, DCD(2005)11/REV2, 17 August 2005, 13 pages.
⁷ “Millstone or Milestone? What rich countries must do in Paris to make aid work for poor people”, Actionaid International UK and Oxfam International, February 2005, 11 pages.
⁸ Benchmarking for Regional Peace: European Development Aid in the African Great Lakes Region, EURAC, October 2005, 15 pages.
⁹ Commitment to Development Index (CDI). For the 2005 index, see the Center for Global Development’s site (http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/cdi?print=1) or Foreign Policy (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3221 ).

Further reading:
HEUHAUS Gabriela, “Comment coopérer quand l’Etat est défaillant ?”, Un seul monde, June 2005, pp.26-28. This interesting article asks a key question, i.e., “Can development aid help to solve conflicts, or is the resolution of political conflicts a prerequisite for combating poverty effectively and lastingly?”