This report presents the results of a case study of absorptive capacity in the security and justice sectors. This study was organized using the Measuring Absorptive Capacity (MAC) framework developed by the authors and introduced in the first volume of the CSIS Managing Absorptive Capacity series.1 The MAC framework was built to test the possibility that the capacity to absorb foreign aid might not be simply a function of the recipient’s implementation capacity or the amount of aid offered. Rather, absorptive capacity might depend at least in part on the design and intent of the intervention itself, which in turn might be a function of the donor’s capacity to account for local conditions. (The term intervention is used throughout this report to refer to projects, programs, and other initiatives supported by international donors.)
This case study confirms that possibility: absorptive capacity is a by-product of the donor–recipient relationship or, more formally, an artifact of the theory of change implicit in the design and intent of particular interventions. The results of this study, published here and in the first volume, have informed the development of a draft absorptive capacity assessment tool, to be published separately. That tool is intended to help assess the “fit” between donor programs and local conditions in any development, peace-building, and stabilization efforts, as well as security and justice programs.
Over the past two de cades, European and North American donors, multilateral institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have dedicated enormous resources toward building capable states. Between 1991 and 2010, the countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) disbursed approximately $1.5 trillion (2010 dollars) in official development assistance (ODA).2 Between 2007 and 2008, total ODA grew 13.5 percent to $111.2 billion; excluding debt relief, fragile states received about a third of that amount, of which half went to six countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, West Bank/Gaza, Sudan, and Uganda).3 Aid to Afghanistan alone totaled about $15.7 billion in 2010, equal to that country’s gross domestic product (GDP).4 And donors have at times promoted security and justice reform in developing countries without a realistic understanding of the capacity of recipient societies and institutions to absorb financial aid, technical assistance, and political attention from outsiders or of the indirect effects of external support on recipients. “More than ever, in the current financial climate, we have a duty to show that we are achieving value for money in everything we do,” the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) reported after a review of its aid portfolio, which now emphasizes effectiveness and efficiency, focusing on the countries, sectors, and approaches most likely to demonstrably help more people, with less waste.5
More and more, the disconnect between the ambitious rhetoric and goals of many international development efforts and the outcomes of their efforts is being noticed, especially in countries affected by conflict, violence, and fragility.6 Positive and sustainable change in such countries comes about in significant part through the action of institutions for security and justice, among others.7 But the institutions that matter include not only formal, government, or state institutions but also informal, nonstate, and hybrid institutions.8 Moreover, significant improvements in the institutions that contribute to peace, stability, and prosperity take more than a decade, and often more than a generation, to achieve.9 To maintain stability long enough for constructive institutional change to be achieved, uncomfortable compromises usually need to be made in the short term between rule-based institutions and personality-driven decisions (e.g., elite political settlements are helpful).10 Many international donors are unwilling to make those compromises, some turn a blind eye even to the need for such compromises, and as a consequence the assistance they provide is sometimes misaligned with local desires, knowledge, resources, and capabilities in the recipient society. Sometimes that aid takes a form (and sometimes is offered at a scale) that exceeds the capacity of the country to absorb it or adapt to it in a way that fosters progress, with the occasional result of harming the intended beneficiaries.
The problem of absorptive capacity has attracted attention over the past few years, mainly as a result of the sizeable assistance, stabilization, and reconstruction programs in Afghanistan and Haiti, two countries whose institutions have nowhere close to the capacity to absorb the aid and attention they have received.11 But the international development field usually assumes that the capacity to absorb aid is limited by the capacity of the recipient society’s state institutions to function in a way that modern states are expected to function. In fact, absorptive capacity is often measured simply by dividing the amount of money offered to a country for a particular purpose by the amount of money that country is able to spend (verifiably) for that purpose, although at times the method is somewhat more sophisticated.12
But as attention to donors’ role in development pathologies has increased, it is worth considering the possibility that managing absorptive capacity might not be simply a matter of building recipients’ capacity to spend donor funds and implement programs, but rather that it might require attention to how those programs are designed in the first place. If a security or justice program fails, is it because the host nation did not live up to donors’ expectations or because the expectations and design were unsuited to the society or institutions to begin with? If the expectations and design were unrealistic and ill-suited, how can they be made more realistic and better suited? Do absorptive capacity constraints have their source in recipient factors only or in donor factors as well?
Recipient factors that might contribute to absorptive capacity might go beyond a ministry’s ability to properly and accountably spend donor funding and implement donor programs but might also include, for example, a civil servant’s ability to produce the required number of reports, a ministry’s ability to interact with multiple donors at once, an economy’s ability to absorb foreign resources without market distortions, the culture’s tolerance for personality-based versus rule-based decisionmaking and implementation, the division of labor between formal and informal institutions and what locals think about each, or a community’s ability to adapt to a growing number of contracts, projects, and foreign demands.
Different donors have different capacities to adapt their own processes and program designs to local conditions in the places they wish to reach as well. Factors that might affect absorptive capacity can include the donor’s preferred program designs (e.g., size, speed, objectives, and standards), choice of program partner (e.g., government capacity building versus direct cash payments to citizens), operational preferences (e.g., bias toward national and formal over local and nongovernmental operations), organizational culture (e.g., risk aversion in contracting), assumptions (e.g., about local partners’ values, preferences, or objectives), or knowledge (e.g., about history, culture, or power dynamics).
The 2011 World Development Report (WDR) highlighted the role that capable and legitimate governance institutions must play in bringing about and maintaining stability. But it also recognized the risks involved in trying to do “too much, too soon” to transform formal and informal institutions: “With deficits in the quality of governance in many sectors in most fragile situations, the best approach may seem to be rapid, across-the-board institutional transformation. But the scope and speed of reform are themselves risk factors—and attempting to do too much too soon may actually increase the risk of resumed conflict.”13 Pathologies resulting from exceeding absorptive capacity must certainly derive at least in part from “too much, too soon” donor practices.
Current measures of absorptive capacity in the development field tend to focus primarily on a recipient government’s capacity to spend official assistance.14 In this report, we do not assume that absorptive capacity is mainly a function of institutional shortcomings in poor countries. Building on the 2011 WDR’s recommendation to pursue “best-fit” reforms, we explore donor factors as well as recipient factors as potential determinants of absorptive capacity.15
The next chapter summarizes the MAC framework that was used to organize the case histories, published in the subsequent three chapters: a security program in Lebanon, a justice program in Cambodia, and a justice program in Colombia. The final chapter presents the results of the case study and offers three sets of questions to help planners and implementers of security and justice programs identify some illustrative constraints that might derive from the recipient’s implementation capacity, its political economy, or the donor’s delivery capacity. The report ends with a reminder that absorptive capacity cannot be measured as if it were an objective feature of recipient societies: it can be measured only in the context of specific interventions.
1. See Robert D. Lamb and Kathryn Mixon, Rethinking Absorptive Capacity: A New Framework, Applied to Afghanistan’s Police Training Program(Washington, D.C.: CSIS/Rowman & Littlefield, June 2013).
2. Includes ODA flows to all recipients in all sectors from all OECD-DAC countries; OECD-DAC, “DAC1 Official and Private Flows” data set, April 6, 2011, http://stats.oecd.org/qwids.
3. OECD, Resource Flows to Fragile and Conflict-Affected States (Paris: OECD, November 2010), 50.
4. “Transition in Afghanistan: Looking beyond 2014,” World Bank, November 18, 2011, executive summary, 1, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/02/17423299/afghanistan-transition-looking-beyond-2014.
5. Department for International Development (DFID), UK Aid: Changing Lives, Delivering Results (London: DFID, 2011), 26, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/67584/BAR-MAR-summary-document-web.pdf.
6. World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development [hereafter WDR 2011] (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, May 2011); Bruce Jones and Molly Elgin-Cossart, Development in the Shadow of Violence: A Knowledge Agenda for Policy: Report on the Future Direction of Investment in Evidence on Issues of Fragility, Security and Conflict, Geneva, September 22, 2011 (New York: NYU Center on International Cooperation, November 2011).
7. WDR 2011, pp. 145–214.
8. Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Kevin Clements, and Anna Nolan, On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: State Formation in the Context of “Fragility” (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2008); Robert D. Lamb, “Microdynamics of Illegitimacy and Patterns of Complex Urban Violence in Medellín, Colombia, 1984–2009” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, 2010), appendix A, pp. 429–445 and 463–480; and WDR 2011, p. 8.
9. Lant Pritchett and Frauke de Weijer, “Fragile States: Stuck in a Capability Trap?” WDR 2011 background paper, November 5, 2010; cf. Jones and Elgin-Cossart, Development in the Shadow of Violence, p. 12; and WDR 2011, pp. 108–110.
10. Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, “Institutionalizing Peace: Power Sharing and Post-Civil War Conflict Management,” American Journal of Political Science 47, no. 2 (April 2003): pp. 318–332; Roy Licklider, “The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (September 1995): pp. 681–690; Jones and Elgin-Cossart, Development in the Shadow of Violence, p. 10.
11. See Robert D. Lamb with Brooke Shawn, Political Governance and Strategy in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: CSIS, April 2012), http://csis.org/files/publication/120426_Lamb_PolGovernanceAfgha_Web.pdf.
12. See, e.g., Violeta Alexandru, Elena Iorga, Petko Kovachev, and Dragomir Konstantinov, Transparency and Effectiveness of Use of Structural Funds in Romania and Bulgaria: Learning by Mistakes (Bucharest: Institute for Public Policy, 2013), http://www.ipp.ro/library/IPPUsestructuralfundsROBG.pdf.
13. WDR 2011, p. 145.
14. See, e.g., Rosario G. Manasan and Ruben G. Mercado, “An Assessment of the Absorptive Capacity of Agencies Involved in the Public Works Sector,” Discussion Paper Series 2001-17, Philippine Institute for Development Studies, August 2001; and Kabul International Conference on Afghanistan, Afghanistan National Development Strategy: Prioritization and Implementation Plan, Mid-2010–Mid-2013, vol. 1. (Kabul: Afghanistan Ministry of Finance, 2010), pp. 14–15.
15. WDR 2011, p. 107.