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. 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.
To test this hypothesis—that absorptive capacity is determined by the donor–recipient relationship rather than by recipient capabilities alone—the authors studied the following four cases of security and justice programs, which had been completed, evaluated, and found to be at least partly unsuccessful, in the sense that not all of their objectives were achieved:
For each case, the MAC framework was used to collect information about the program’s objectives, its design, the assumptions (called “prerequisites”) on which the success of the program’s design was based, the actual outcomes, including the obstacles to success that had been identified, and the delivery capacity of the donors. The authors determined whether the obstacles to success—called missing prerequisites—were associated primarily with the recipient’s technical implementation capacity, with the recipient’s political economy, or with the donor’s delivery capacity.
In all the cases studied, success was constrained not only by recipients’ implementation capacity but also by problems of donor knowledge, culture, processes, and incentives. Where the programs failed to achieve their objectives, it was not only because recipients were unable or unwilling to implement them, although that was often the case as well. It was also because the donor did not select partners who had the power to effect change, did not account for local culture or 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. These problems seem to have blinded the donors to the missing prerequisites in the political economy and technical capacity of the recipients.
The hypothesis, in other words, was confirmed: absorptive capacity is a by-product of the donor-recipient relationship, or more formally, it is 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, which is being 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 in security and justice programs.
This report offers three sets of questions that those who are planning or implementing security and justice sector programs might take under consideration: recipients’ technical implementation capacity, local political economy issues, and the delivery capacity of donors. 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, any 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.