Stability Operations and Development in a New Era: Making the Whole of Government Approach Work

Creative Associates and Lockheed Martin put together a great conference on stability operations and foreign assistance reform - two conversations that need to be drawn together more. Couldn't stay for the whole thing, but the first panel with John Nagl, Andrew Natsios and other industry luminaries was great stuff.

I was excited to see development and foreign assistance reform addressed as part of a single conversation, but disappointed by our inability to really draw the connections in a substantive way. It's not enough to argue that effective foreign assistance is important 1) for effective public diplomacy or 2) addressing underlying grievances that anger foreign populations or 3) building indigenous state capacity to address internal threats. The conversation needs to move beyond these truisms and begin to address what these intermediate goals mean for the "how" of foreign assistance.

The US continues to execute foreign assistance by creating delivery systems (for food, education, medical supplies, etc.) that run parallel to the partner government's systems. By creating parallel systems we 1) forgo the opportunity to build the partner government's legitimacy and 2) undermine support within the partner government to fund delivery of services. Point (1) undermines the democratic relationship between government and governed, generating a charity dependent rentier state. Point (2) generates long term dependency between recipient and donor (Liberia's NGO circus). Yes there are a large number of countries where service delivery and not institution building needs to be the priority, but to quote Gen. Petraeus, "Tell me how this ends?"

Note that none of the above addressed the question of efficacy - Andrew Natsios and the Center for Global Development address that issue more eloquently than I could hope to. In order to coherently address the ways we seek our strategic ends, we need a clear assessment of the means available to us.

More than anything else we need strong leadership from the White House and Sec. Clinton on foreign assistance reform. Congress can't do this on its own.

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Jared Diamond on why societies collapse

Jared Diamond gave this TED talk back in 2003, but it was only just publicly posted in October this year. He gives a brief overview of his thesis from Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed.

Though the discussion is facilitated by a wide variety of examples, clearly Diamond is concerned about the sustainability of our current global society. Sustainability is also an important issue for those of us engaged in development activities, or have concerns about the regional and global impacts of fragile states' collapse.

I summarize the talk below, but it's worth listening to the entire thing.

Principally Diamond speaks about the Norse in Greenland, the Easter Islanders, and most interestingly the state of Montana (at risk). He touches on many other collapsed societies though.

His framework for analyzing why societies collapse:

1. What is the human impact on the environment and the resources that society depends on (endogenous environmental change)?
2. How does climate change affect the environment and resources that society depends on (~exogenous environmental change)?
3. How does the society's relations' with neighboring friendly and unfriendly societies impact their sustainability?
4. How does the society's political-economic-cultural characteristics impact its ability to recognize and respond to environmental challenges?

What characteristics make a society and problem set make it more or less apt to recognize and respond to the threat of collapse? A variety of collective action problems.

1. Conflict between the short-term interest of elites and the long-term interests of society as a whole.
2. Conflict between traditional sources of strength and the innovations necessary for survival.

Time:

1. Rapid collapses may occur immediately after a society reaches its peak of wealth.
2. Our society will have either succeeded or failed in addressing our own challenges within about forty years from now.

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Barnett's Hard Sell

I'm not endorsing this (I'm not in the solution business just now) but it's very much worth a listen. Tom Barnett sells his vision of what the future of the U.S. national security system looks like at the 2005 TED conference. His vision has large implication for USAID types. Plenty of rice bowls get broken, which is of course what makes it interesting. He's an engaging speaker to boot.

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