Policy Brief: Improving the EU’s Local Capacity Building Efforts in Post-conflict Environments
EU capacity-building programmes in post-conflict settings have delivered limited, uneven gains, largely due to weak local ownership and poor coordination with domestic priorities.
Summary
After the failures that accompanied UN interventions in the early 1990s, local capacity building (CB) and local ownership have become matters of concern for the international community. This interest in ‘the local’ stems from the fact that its inclusion is increasingly understood to be essential to successful peacebuilding, providing the crucial link in the search for effectiveness and legitimacy in international peacebuilding initiatives. CB programmes—including training activities, mentoring and advising, and the provision of equipment and large infrastructure—have become key to strengthening capabilities at the individual and organisational levels. But while CB has positively impacted some areas, success has been narrow and uneven.
EU-CIVCAP’s DL 6.1 evaluates international efforts in CB in five geographical areas: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Serbia and Somalia. Overall, the findings of the report highlight that CB programmes have been able to strengthen pockets of capacity in specific organisations and institutions, but they have done so in a manner that has not always been well coordinated with other donor activities or local priorities, and in an environment of wider political, economic and institutional weaknesses that have constrained their impact and on which they have been dependent. Given the scale of the challenge and the timescales over which such activities have taken place, it is perhaps not surprising that they have struggled to be transformative in nature. Yet, as discussed in this report, there are some marked differences between what the international community has been able to achieve in the Horn of Africa and the Western Balkans. The level of success has varied depending on the local context and the level of resources channelled into each of these cases, with the Western Balkans benefiting from a more intensive international intervention in the 1990s/2000s. The prospect of EU/NATO membership has also acted as a catalyst in the Balkans, though not without difficulties.
Despite the differences between the Western Balkans and the Horn of Africa, there was agreement among the report’s interviewees about the extent to which international CB activities have occurred without local involvement at the levels of problem identification, project development and evaluation. This deficit has led to a ‘thin’ rather than ‘thick’ legitimacy amongst local actors, in the sense that the activities have been broadly accepted and often welcomed by a small section of elite local actors, even if they are not always seen to be successful in practice, nor to be particularly cognisant of local needs. The deficit has exacerbated the existing problems of relevance, duplication and sustainability. However, in the case of the Western Balkans, increasing capacities at the local level and more involvement of local civil society actors and regional cooperation has narrowed the gap between the rhetorical commitment to local ownership by international actors, and its implementation in practice. In the Horn of Africa, and particularly in the States of Somalia, this gap remains to be filled. Overleaf is a set of recommendations to improve donors’ CB programmes, specifically in EU programmes and missions.
Keywords
- Local capacity building; peacebuilding effectiveness; EU external action; post-conflict governance; local ownership; donor coordination; institutional capacity; Horn of Africa