Development aid and conflict resolution exploring links

Development Aid and Conflict Resolution: Exploring Links Olympio Barbanti Jr.

Development theory and practice have overlooked existing social conflicts and those resulting from development intervention. A few accounts focus on linkages between development and violent conflicts but neglect daily disputes, intractable or not, that undermine or prevent aid delivery. This article explores links between development and conflict resolution, with special attention to intractability aspects.

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evelopment is a strongly prescriptive and normative applied science rooted in the experience of industrialized countries—the donors— that consider their development patterns successful and warranting replication (Sachs, 1995). The meaning of “improvement” is evident with respect to physical systems, such as sanitation, where more is unequivocally better. However, as Peet (1999) argues, development theory and practice get into contentious debates over less tangible issues, such as social and political organization, cultural expressions, or religious beliefs. Moreover, when tangible aspects, such as infrastructure or income, change, they tend to affect intangibles, such as culture and identity.

Development interventions can take place in any society, wealthy or poor. However, development studies have typically focused on developing countries, defined as not yet having achieved basic standards of wealth as measured by their gross domestic product (GDP).

Development interventions are carried out in times of peace or war, during widespread violence and after it, when it is called a postconflict stabilization and reconstruction period. It is in the latter context that development theory and practice converge with conflict resolution, especially regarding peace building. When violence subsides, conflict practitioners

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intervene to promote structural change and reorganize society in ways more conducive to productive outcomes. This article is concerned with linkages between development and conflict during times of peace and during postconflict stabilization and reconstruction.

The Development Intervention-Conflict Link To change societies, development practice undertakes interventions that affect multiple aspects, from macro to micro and from the institutional to the individual level. This has proved challenging: interventions influencing almost all social aspects lead to conflict as they alter social, economic, and political organization and behavior. However, the field of development has had a tendency to overlook conflicts that existed prior to intervention, as well as conflicts deriving from intervention itself. This oversight is surprising, since development aid aims to improve people’s lives, so it is most needed where basic human needs—food, health care, education—are unmet, and people are vulnerable to economic, social, and political downturns and attached to various brands of religious fundamentalisms. Not coincidentally, these are situations are rife with intractable conflict.

One possible reason for the development field’s neglect of intervention consequences is the underlying assumption that the transition from developing to developed conflicts necessarily fades away as societies create mechanisms to improve social, economic, and political performance. The mainstream development economics approach has been greatly influenced by the Russian economist and 1971 Nobel Prize laureate Simon Kuznets (1955), who asserted that social inequality and poverty could be tackled through efficient economic policy, assisted by science, rational behavior, material progress, and urban entrepreneurship. Efficient policy was believed to reduce inequality and therefore alleviate or eliminate the root causes of conflict. More recently, however, classical economists (Deininger and Squire, 1996) found no support in their study of 108 countries for Kuznet’s hypothesis that inequality falls as economic development advances. The emerging belief is therefore that countries may develop economically despite the inequalities and conflicts that are the by-product of this development. Uneven patterns of development within and among nations add fuel to the already unstable international setting, possibly leading to differences ranging from tractable disputes to wars.

One example of the development-conflict linkage comes from the international trade arrangements emerging after the 1994 birth of the World Trade CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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Organization (WTO). These arrangements now appear highly detrimental to developing countries, particularly regarding terms of agricultural and livestock commodities trade. Due to comparative advantages, such as weather, soil, labor costs, and specific products, developing countries could achieve a surplus in their trade balance. However, agricultural markets are also the stage for rather contradictory policies in developed countries, giving rise to conflicts that hamper the very development these countries wish to promote in other parts of the world. Despite a rhetoric of economic liberalism and pressure on other countries to cut subsidies and remove trade barriers, the U.S. government heavily subsidizes its cotton industry to make it competitive in the world market. “Every acre of cotton farmland,” says Watkins (2002, p. 3), “attracts a subsidy of $230, or around five times the transfer for cereals. In 2001/02 farmers reaped a bumper harvest of subsidies amounting to $3.9 billion—double the level in 1992.” This subsidy exceeds the entire U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) budget for Africa’s 500 million people and the entire GDP of Burkina Faso.

The wealthy countries’ inconsistency in the international commodity markets has undermined developing countries’ faith in the promise of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods, partly because dispute settlement mechanisms at the global level (such as the WTO) have been unable to counter the consequences of unfair trade policies. Thus, the Western democratic model that has given support and meaning to economic liberalism and to fair play has itself been called into question.

The upshot is a loss of trust in Western democratic institutions that support ADR. The contradiction between wealthy nations’ development aid intentions and their actual trade practices has had a negative impact on perceptions of Western models in developing countries. A country’s commercial practice can be, rightly or wrongly, identified with its people’s beliefs and moral values. American trade practices are taken by some to represent American values, seen as the main source of developing countries’ growing poverty and inequality.

The economic development pursued by many nations has “created a crisis of sustainability as our propensity to consume exceeds our capacity to conserve diversity and control wastes; removing national barriers has exposed poor and ill-equipped peoples to the threats as well as the benefits of free trade and competitive markets; globalizing communications has reduced cultural diversity and exposed everyone to the temptations of an often materialistic and trivial international media industry” (Brett, 2000, p. 20). According to CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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Brett, the demands of competition in the capitalist setting have transformed workers into workaholics, with implications for stress-related illnesses, family breakdown, and the loss of traditional values and community solidarity. Therefore, current economic arrangements overall are conducive to intractability in the human relations they generate.

Globalized markets have affected employment. Alternative forms of earning income have grown faster than formal and secure work. Over time, global companies have shifted to developing countries all production stages involving financial and human risk (Dupas, 2000). The logic of globalization has tended to homogenize once-diverse institutions and the cultural frameworks derived from them (Beck, 2000). As a result, life in developing countries has become more unstable, generating and even expanding conflict, from crime to intrahousehold violence, to environmental destruction and unfair competitive practices.

International development patterns may lead to conflicts between and within countries. Thus far, this linkage has been analyzed mainly in relation to violent conflicts (for example, Addison, 2000). The link between development intervention and day-to-day intractable conflicts remains to be investigated.

Aid Delivery and Intractable Conflicts Development interventions are multifaceted, covering almost all aspects of social organization, from government structure and policies to communitybased projects. Conflicts may erupt in any of these areas if policies or projects are poorly conceived or implemented. USAID (2006) recognizes that “a peaceful, stable world is a key foreign policy priority for the United States. Yet violent conflict and instability are widespread in the developing world, affecting almost 60 percent of the countries in which USAID operates. Many of the most important causes of violence and instability—such as stagnant or deteriorating economies, weak or illegitimate political institutions, or competition over natural resources—are the central concerns of aid.” The agency rightly refers to development as “a tool to avoid or reduce violent conflict and protect human rights” because development can, in fact, reduce conflict. However, lack of development implies a state of “ill-fare,” as opposed to welfare, when only a few receive the benefits of economic growth. Since dominant groups want to hold on to their power and their often disproportionate level of benefits, intractable conflict may result, which impedes development.

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The implications of this vicious circle—lack of development leads to conflict, which prevents development—seem to remain hidden from development theorists and practitioners. Therefore it seems necessary to explore links between the structure and practice of development aid and intractable conflicts. Five development practice issues stand out, demanding attention. They relate to the rationale and implementation methods of development aid. These issues contributing to the intractability of development conflicts are discussed next.

Complexity of Development Interventions and Lack of Coordination

One source of intractability is the great complexity of development aid in terms of policy design and projects delivery. In many countries, bad infrastructure hampers logistics; groups living in isolated areas may be unreachable and feel excluded. But although complexity may result in intractability, the opposite can also occur. The needy live close to the subsistence level or may quickly slide to that level, so they may prefer to remain silent and keep conflicts latent to decrease their vulnerability. Such latency can prove a hidden minefield for development workers who try to benefit everyone in society but are unaware of these intractable but latent conflicts.

Famines illustrate well the complexity-intractability relationship. Lack of food may not be due to production shortages but rather to availability, which is regulated by economic and political power. Sen (2006) described the Wollo famine in Ethiopia in 1973, when food was moving out of that region, where the people had no money, into areas where the Ethiopian elite could afford it.

Development goals are intertwined. Educational goals are frequently linked to health objectives, and both relate to poverty alleviation measures. Dealing with such complexity demands partnership for joint decision making. It demands power sharing, and in many cases this implies a need to reframe the problem so all parties can agree on how intervention should proceed.

Like humanitarian assistance and peace building, development aid demands extensive coordination between donor and recipient countries but also among donors. This international cooperation has proven difficult. It usually happens on a bilateral basis, with industrialized nations providing foreign aid to developing countries. Typically each donor creates specific bureaucratic demands and wants to keep close control over funds.

Consequently, beneficiaries sometimes expend more time on paperwork than on fieldwork. In addition, donors’ overlapping or contradictory demands complicate the situation even more.

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Aid Agendas Imposing Values and Conditions

Donors include governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, private entities, and even individuals. Frequently, the thematic areas and geographical locations for intervention reflect donors’ political interests in their home countries but are not necessarily the most relevant for aid recipients.

For example, in the late 1980s, presidents of the seven most industrialized countries (G-7) decided to help reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Brazilians insisted that support for urban development be included in the project, to improve people’s living conditions and provide alternative sources of income, thereby obviating the need to cut down the forest. Donors refused to finance urban activities, arguing it would be politically difficult to explain to their constituencies that this strategy helps reduce deforestation. Foreign donors forced the Brazilian government to accept their choice to finance only forest-based projects.

This donor-dominated decision process blocked negotiations for almost five years and strongly undermined the partnership character necessary for joint implementation of projects.

Added to politically oriented preferences in planning and delivery of development, ethnocentrism may trigger intractable conflicts, although the urgency and the intensity of short-term basic needs often eclipse them because poor people may prefer to avoid risking their livelihood.

Development aid is often based on donor rather than recipient values.

For example, much development aid assumes the recipient aspires to a modern Western lifestyle, based on political pluralism, religious freedom, social cohesiveness, and strong institutions. Frequently, however, the recipient country does not share these values or ways of achieving them (Crush, 1995).

Finally, conditions are sometimes attached to aid delivery (Peet, 1999).

Donors may impose on recipients certain sources for the acquisition of products, the use of services, and the adoption of technologies as conditions for the grant award. This may prevent use of indigenous sources and ignores local values and practices. For example, in Brazil, many children die from dehydration. In the past, children would have been given a simple and effective homemade serum. As a result of Western aid, doctors prefer high-tech, expensive solutions that the local population distrusts and resents because of lack of sensitivity to, and respect for, native traditional practices and beliefs (Mazzili, 2004).

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The Role of Civil Society and of Badly Conceived State Reform

From the mid-1980s onward, development interventions changed orientation from a welfare approach, aiming to benefit all society, to a focus on two societal groups: the neediest and those most capable of achieving results through their own entrepreneurship (Panayiotopoulos and Gerry, 1991).

This new neoliberal agenda emphasized the role of civil society in advancing development. As a consequence, public spending declined, and implementation of development projects was largely transferred from the state to NGOs. NGOs were also expected to help the state in promoting political pluralism by fostering dialogue and public participation (Howell and Pearce, 2001). After one decade of reliance on NGOs and other social movements, those working in development are beginning to challenge the usefulness of this approach.

There are two major sources of conflict in this model. First, there is an increasing perception of lack of legitimacy. NGOs may receive money to implement projects, but they do not control the budget.

Although their capacity to influence policy and choices relating to projects is quite limited, they are responsible for implementing activities at the local level, and therefore they are the first line facing the critics within their own constituencies. Their actions are limited to a locality, so they are unable to benefit all groups in society, a responsibility that belongs to the state.

Second, in developing societies, NGOs contributed considerably to the empowerment of individuals and social groups. For many decades, these organizations were able to act in defense of the powerless, increasing awareness of social, economic, and political sources of exploitation, enhancing people’s self-esteem and surfacing conflicts that would remain latent otherwise, to the detriment of the weak in society. However, having partnered with governments, today’s NGOs no longer contribute to empowerment, because that might lead to conflicts between societal groups and the government. As a result, all groups, but especially the less powerful, are now underrepresented in their dealings with the state.

This problem could have been alleviated if the neoliberal agenda had been implemented while fostering strong public governance. However, development initiatives have been unable to promote widespread, sound state reform across the world, despite some measure of progress in public administration. For example, in many countries today, public spending based on populist choices has been gradually replaced by fiscal discipline, CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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so governments no longer spend more than they collect. However, the quality of public spending remains problematic, as do other ingredients of governance such as transparency and accountability.

Although the development aid discourse does not neglect the importance of state reform, the emphasis on possible contributions of NGOs and the lack of proper support for public administration reform have left untouched a core source of conflict in developing countries: the inefficient and sometimes corrupt state (Addison, 2000). Ineffective, biased, or contradictory public policies are the main sources of intractability, as they often result in unfair distribution of resources and power in society.

Lack of or Inappropriate Communication and Absence of Independent Media

Aid agencies have failed to include communication strategies in their project design. Worse, there is usually no provision for any kind of communication with society. This problem is key, because in developing countries, the media are rarely independent; in fact, where levels of literacy are low, powerful private groups tend to control radio and TV broadcasting, whose programming does not reflect social interests.

Bad communication opens way for hoaxes that can interfere with social relations. In societies with low levels of literacy and attachment to traditional beliefs, where power relations are not in balance, hoaxes and manipulated communication can appear credible and generate protracted conflicts. These conditions impair people’s ability to understand and take part in debates (Wertheim, 2006), inhibiting effective partnerships, aid delivery, and conflict resolution.

By neglecting communication or by viewing it as an information technology issue, development agencies left a window open for the powerful to mobilize society against developmental goals. One example comes from the Brazilian Amazon area. Those who benefit from forest destruction have managed to spread the idea that those promoting sustainable development, whether foreign NGOs or governmental agencies, seek in fact the so-called internationalization of the Amazon (Carrasco, 2003). By “internationalization” they mean loss of Brazilian sovereignty over the area, which would be controlled by a foreign government or a multinational body such as the United Nations, all interested in exploiting the Amazonian mineral and water wealth and its biodiversity.

“Internalization” has great currency in Brazil today, as many believe this process is real and happening. This perception has increased the CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY • DOI: 10.1002/crq

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polarization of parties in relation to international aid. Brazilian public agencies at the federal, state, and municipal levels do not invest systematically and meaningfully in sustainable development, so the attack against development aid weakens international agencies and leaves the powerless in society even more vulnerable to many forms of encroachment by cattle ranchers, miners, and loggers, among others.

Through selective communication, the developing countries’ elites manage to retain a strong grip on power. Typical ways of using communication to benefit the few include obscuring moral differences and maintaining latent conflicts, so the conditions that lead conflicts to intractability fester as divisions in society are maintained and even deepened.

Time Frames and the Assessment of Achievements

Development agencies are accountable to their governments, whose political agendas they have to match through their accomplishments in developing countries. This may lead aid agencies to privilege the kinds of impact assessments (Cracknell, 2000) that identify results they can display to their funders and political supporters. As a result, projects emphasize short-term, highly visible achievements, even if these are not the most pressing at the moment. This kind of behavior undermines local communities’ trust in aid agencies and fosters conflicts among groups that were supposed to cooperate. Such situation may be aggravated when private companies are involved in development projects. When social goals are subordinated to private companies’ social marketing, economic goals tend to prevail, while social, political, cultural, and religious needs tend to be minimized or ignored.

The donor’s need for an evaluation of results that shows tangible achievements creates another quandary. For economic and political accountability needs, project monitoring and evaluation are usually based on quantitative indicators (Cracknell, 2000) that fail to capture beneficial qualitative dimensions of development, especially those related to intangible needs such as self-esteem and social respect. These intangible needs play a paramount role in people’s identity, which gives them a strong sense of who they are and how they frame their reality (Northrup, 1989). In addition, result-oriented projects based on quantitative indicators often fail to include the participation of beneficiaries or ignore the needs of more vulnerable groups in society, such as women and the elderly.

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Conclusion Development aid may stem from altruism to some extent, but mostly, it reflects donors’ social, economic, and political interests. Development means change, and the process of social change is value laden and conflicted. Development studies and practice have not paid sufficient attention to their connections to social conflict. This neglect may reinforce existing conflict trends and may exacerbate them, pushing them toward the intractability end of the spectrum. So intractability is expected to rise in development interventions owing to the very rationale of aid as well as its implementation approaches.

The development process links to intractable societal conflict are still poorly understood. Further research should explore these links and develop some responses and tools that can alleviate problems, since the need for aid to flow from developed to developing countries shows no signs of abating.

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Olympio Barbanti Jr. is a faculty member in the Department of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has extensive experience in fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon region.

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