6 | Findings and Recommendations

Security and justice sector reform programs generally aim to reduce crime or violence, improve conflict mediation, or increase access to justice. Programs and projects to achieve these objectives are varied, ranging from building court houses and training NGOs to train-and-equip programs for security forces, judicial system reform, and security-sector governance. CSIS’s research on absorptive capacity supports the hypothesis that donor and recipient capabilities and practices jointly determine absorptive capacity: constraints on effectiveness can derive from issues with the recipient’s implementation capacity, a poor fit between the intervention and the local political economy, the donor’s delivery capacity, or any combination of these. That means it is impossible to say where constraints on absorptive capacity might emerge in security and justice programs generally, because absorptive capacity is a function of the design and intent of particular interventions.

That said, our research has identified a number of common themes in both the literature on security and justice sector reform and the security and justice programs we studied. Most generally, in the cases where the recipient institutions were not able to productively use the inputs provided by the intervention, the fault seemed to be a disconnect between the way the program was designed and the resources and capabilities that would have needed to be present in the recipient system to make that program work. In other words, the programs provided some missing inputs but not all—and the donor institutions and the implementers wrongly assumed all prerequisites were present. Beyond this general observation, several specific issues arose across the cases and are worth accounting for in future planning for security and justice programs:

• Donors and implementing partners often have different understandings of a mission or program and face different incentives and objectives from the start. As a consequence, they end up working at cross-purposes without the donor realizing it until too late. In Lebanon, the United States believed both that the program was working toward long-term security and that the training program could be permanent, but the Lebanese police considered it a short-term remedial program.
  
  
• In a lot of countries, societal perspectives on and interactions with police forces, security forces, and judicial systems are different from those in Western Europe and the United States. It is therefore not safe to assume that the population considers the formal system their first port of call when problems arise: they might regularly use informal or illicit systems to address their needs instead. In Colombia, for example, the judiciary had such a poor reputation that even after the reforms were implemented, people still seldom used the court system for dispute resolution.
  
  
• Host-nation citizens can be endangered by interacting with international workers, participating in aid activities, or undertaking donor-funded advocacy. Encouraging advocacy is a common strategy of justice-sector reform programs. This could limit interest in a project and delay or prevent its implementation. Rural activists in Cambodia were encouraged to use aggressive, Western-style advocacy, but this resulted in harassment and intimidation. Retaliatory court cases were common.
  
  
• Donor-imposed financial controls and burdensome paperwork requirements often failed to account for the human resources available in recipient bureaucracies, resulting in projects not being completed before the deadline. Some recipient-country agencies have very bureaucratic processes that require multiple signatures in different ministries. Others do not have enough educated or skilled employees to comply with donor requirements.
  
  
• In some cases, recipients wanted foreign aid but not in the form the donor wanted to provide. Donors also sometimes wrongly assumed that the recipients were willing participants in the effort. USAID had contracted the Cambodian Bar Association to set up a law fellows program that would provide clinical legal education. However, after a year or so, it became clear that the Bar Association did not intend to implement it.
  
  
• In training programs, trainees might not have the knowledge or capabilities they need (such as literacy) to learn what is being taught; might not want to be trained; and might not have the support of the institutions they work for to apply their new skills in their jobs. For example, in Lebanon, senior officers did not allow newly trained cadets to operate according to how they were trained.
  

In short, where programs failed to achieve their objectives, it was often because the donor did not select partners who had the power to effect change, did not account for local culture or for the local political economy, demanded unrealistic project timelines, failed to engage agency and government leadership to learn their desires or communicate the benefits of a project, or failed to collect data that would have been needed to identify whether the intervention’s prerequisites were actually met at the local level.

Most countries that are in need of security and justice sector reform have certain technical, cultural, societal, political, and economic conditions that make implementation difficult. They often have high levels of poverty and severe income disparity, due to urbanization, internal migration, armed conflict, structural violence, and so on. Many have a poor business environment, lacking appropriate market incentives, regulatory and supervisory capacities, or other capabilities that support private-sector development. They might have poor economic growth, poor infrastructure, and weak state capacity in general. The land and water might have been subject to environmental degradation. Unemployment levels might be chronically high. Many people might lack access to water and electricity. And economic and power relations might not take place primarily in formal governance systems and the formal economy. Not all of these issues will be known to planners and implementers; some of these issues might represent a missing prerequisite.

The remainder of this report, therefore, offers several sets of questions that those who are planning or implementing security and justice sector programs might take under consideration. It focuses first on recipients’ technical implementation capacity, then on local political economy issues, and finally on the delivery capacity of donors themselves. It is worth remembering that this is only an illustrative set of issues that might arise in security and justice programs. Because absorptive capacity is a by-product of the design and intent of particular interventions, the specific intervention being planned (or assessed) will need to be evaluated using the MAC framework—or some other methodology that similarly combines technical and political economy assessments with planning tools—to identify the potential absorptive constraints it might face specifically.

Recipient Implementation Capacity

• What has the recipient community, institution, or society achieved in the past with regard to crime and violence reduction, access to justice, security-sector governance, and so on? What have other societies, donors, or civil society organizations achieved in the past, and how? Would the recipient need to outperform itself, or outperform most other similar efforts, in order to achieve the objective? With this in mind, is the objective actually achievable in the time and with the resources available?
  
  
• Does the host government have processes and personnel available capable of oversight and implementation? Do the economy and revenue base support operating, maintenance, and support costs for the program? Does the implementer actually exist (e.g., are there ghost companies) and have the capacity to work according to the donor’s requirements? Does it have the ability to allocate resources, manage day-to-day project implementation, and coordinate between donors and beneficiaries? Does it have enough staff with the right skills, mandate, desire to participate, and financing as the program requires?
  
  
• Are participants available, willing to participate, and able to get to the program location? If a donor holds training sessions, for example, in areas that are inaccessible due to road conditions or requires participants to travel so far that overnight stays are necessary, participation rates may be lower. Would recruiting the needed participants (e.g., trainees, implementers, troops) have unintended consequences, such as an “internal brain drain” (i.e., poaching the “best and brightest” from the government) or wage pressures (up or down) that disrupt the labor market in a way that damages family incomes and economic activity?
  
  
• For projects requiring building, are the necessary physical materials both locally appropriate and locally available, or if they are not locally available, can they be easily transported to the area of operation? This might require an assessment of the country’s infrastructure (roads, bridges, transportation facilities, electricity grids, and so on) and of the supply chains for the building program. There might be an opportunity to use this intervention to improve those supply chains and therefore the local economy, beyond the objectives of the intervention itself. There is a risk that importing needed materials could undermine the local economy as well.
  
  
• Does the intervention’s success depend on the existence of an institution that either does not exist or does not function? For example, although it might be relatively straightforward to build the capacity of a police force, if the overall security and justice system includes arrests, due process, prosecutions, trials, and so on, then each security and justice institution depends on the others to function. If police have the capacity to arrest a lot of people but the justice system does not have the capacity to process those prisoners, there is a risk that offenders will remain in detention indefinitely or that they will be set free—neither of which contributes to a healthy system.
  

Political Economy

• Does the recipient—especially the political leadership and those who control the security forces—actually share the objectives of the security or justice program? Would they use weapons and training to, for example, reduce crime and violence or improve access to justice? Or might they end up using them to harass or kill political opponents and others? Is it possible that they would use the weapons and training to carry out the donor’s immediate objectives but that they would later turn on their opponents—or on the donor itself? Are the security forces already being used for the donor’s intended purposes, or does the regime consider them to be a regime protection force rather than a public protection force? A good general rule: do not build the capacity of those who do not share your objectives (in either the long or the short term). This is especially true of building the capacity for violence.
  
  
• Is the intervention designed in such a way that it would tilt an existing balance of power in favor of the specific recipient or beneficiary (e.g., state security forces against an oppressed ethnic minority)? Might tilting that balance embolden the recipient to attack or harass internal rivals who are not receiving aid and possibly lead to a resumption of conflict rather than a reduction of conflict? Who will bear the costs imposed by the intervention? Who will enjoy the benefits? What is the relationship between those two groups?
  
  
• Does the society interact with recipient institutions, such as courts, in the way donors assume? Does the population use competing (e.g., informal, tribal, customary) institutions, and might strengthening formal institutions at their expense undermine a traditional, stabilizing social practice? Do the recipient institutions themselves operate like modern state institutions or like personal fiefdoms or patronage networks? If the latter, would building technical capacity make any real difference to how these institutions operate? Are police, military, or courts viewed as hostile, threatening institutions? Are their decisions relevant to what people do?
  
  
• Do the country’s laws actually allow the kinds of actions or changes that the donor is proposing? Does the society’s culture support the practices being promoted by the donor’s intervention, or might they be considered offensive and therefore potentially destabilizing? Might the perception that the recipient is too close to foreign influences actually undermine the recipient’s effectiveness? How entrenched are the attitudes and practices that would need to change in order for the intervention to succeed?
  
  
• What is the overall state of the country? Is it in need of emergency humanitarian aid? Is it experiencing a war? Are institutions functioning? Are tensions or violence rising?
  

Donor Delivery Capacity

• Has the donor funded programs or projects attempting to achieve the same objectives in other places? Have those interventions had a very high degree of similarity, perhaps suggesting that the donor has a history of using “blueprints,” that is, taking more or less the same approach in different places? Has its implementation of “best practices” tended to amount to the same thing: the use of blueprints? Have most of its security-sector efforts been train-and-equip programs? Alternatively, has the donor demonstrated an ability to try to achieve similar objectives in different places using different approaches? An affirmative answer to this last point would be an indicator of higher delivery capacity.
  
  
• Does the donor have processes in place to seek advice from regional, technical, and sectorial experts as well as local stakeholders in the host country? Does it have an internal culture whereby planners, implementers, and evaluators seek out external advice, peer review, or “red teams” (i.e., a group of experts tasked with finding flaws in plans or analysis)? Does it regularly undertake assessments that go beyond assessing needs but consider technical requirements and political economy questions as well? Alternatively, does the donor have leadership that regularly rejects the advice of its own advisers and experts in favor of their own preferred approaches? To what degree are the monitoring and evaluation functions marginalized within the donor institution (e.g., how is staff morale in those departments)?
  
  
• Are all or most of the donor’s governance or reform programs geared toward supporting or developing formal state institutions into “modern” bureaucracies? Are its civil society efforts focused primarily on urban nongovernmental advocacy organizations? Are its judicial efforts focused mainly on courts and lawyers rather than customary conflict-mediation practices? Are its security efforts focused mainly on training and equipping security forces, without coordinated efforts with other sectors or recognition of informal security practices? These are possible, though not definitive, indicators of a lack of imagination with respect to how power is actually distributed or how social change happens in that society.
  
  
• Similarly, does the donor have a history of stating objectives or requirements that are clearly beyond the scope or time frame of its intervention, such as full compliance with human rights, rule-of-law, transparency, and other norms or extremely high reductions in crime, violence, or corruption within a few years? How comfortable does the donor’s leadership seem with incremental progress? How often has it offered substantially more funding that its recipients have been able to spend? This latter issue is a potential indicator of a habitual problem delivering appropriately scaled or locally customized support.
  
  
• Does donor reporting on similar interventions focus on measures of inputs provided (e.g., how much money was spent, how many vehicles were provided, how many hours of training were offered), on output measures (e.g., how many buildings or weapons, how many recruits or trainees), or on outcome measures (e.g., how much more effective or efficient, what is being done differently, what has changed)? Higher donor delivery capacity might be reflected in a higher proportion of outcome measures, with lower delivery capacity suggested by reporting of output or especially input measures. Likewise, do the “assumptions” or “risks” sections of planning documents contain useful details and clear warnings, or do they seem to be treated as afterthoughts?
  
  
• Do program managers, planners, contracting officers, finance and accounting officials, and others take full advantage of the flexibility they are legally permitted, or do they tend to be risk-averse and unwelcoming toward experimentation or requests for waivers? Are processes in place for changing course quickly if a crisis arises during implementation? Does the donor have a history of flexibility and experimentation?
  
  
• Do security rules punish personnel security officials if something bad happens to field staff, or do they have clear guidance giving them flexibility to approve field-staff requests to operate in dangerous areas?
  
  
• Do human resources processes and management philosophies allow for the development of regional or country expertise and offer rewards to personnel who take on high-risk or experimental projects? Or do certain rotations or high-risk projects inhibit career advancement?
  
  
• Do budgeting rules give field staff or implementers flexibility in how much they can spend (e.g., are they required to spend a minimum amount) or in how long they can take to spend it (e.g., are they required to spend it all during the fiscal year)?
  

Concluding Remarks

It is not fair to assume either that aid programs are benign or that aid programs take a linear path from program element to systemic outcome. Outcomes are probabilistic, emerging from the way the prerequisites interact with each other and with the intervention at a historically contingent moment in time. That is why it is important that planning, monitoring, and evaluation efforts take these prerequisites into account. The more that is known about how an intervention can lead to the preferred outcome—that is, the better the prerequisite structure is understood—the more likely the program will be designed in a way that accounts for enough prerequisites to have a decent chance of actually leading to the preferred outcome.

The MAC framework developed for this project proved to be useful in identifying constraints on the capacity of recipient systems to absorb and adapt to aid and on the capacity of donors to adapt their own requirements and practices to local conditions. We intend to continue refining and testing this framework to develop it into a formal assessment tool for estimating constraints on absorptive capacity.