Should Aid Finance Southern Peacekeeping?

The expansion of Official Development Assistance (ODA) definitions to include new security-related expenditures will reportedly be discussed at an OECD Donor Assistance Committee (DAC) Senior Level Meeting (SLM), ie. Heads of agencies, in early December 2004.

Howard Mollett, BOND EU Campaigns Officer, tackles the issue of whether ODA definitions should be expanded to include the financing of developing country capacity to pursue Peace Support Operations (PSO). This article is published as part of BOND's research and advocacy work under the 'Global Security and Development' project.

The gap between the demand for donor countries to intervene in conflict situations in developing countries and their willingness or ability to respond remains wide. Most NGOs would support efforts to build the Peace Support Operations (PSO) capacity of regional organisations in the developing world. The EU's Africa Peace Facility is one such initiative. M O'Hanlon and P W Singer suggest that international forces in Afghanistan are short of at least 10,000 troops in order to create lasting stability in the country. The benefits of a regional dimension to conflict prevention and resolution strategies are also clear ('African solutions for African problems'). But should development aid fund Southern peacekeeping and peace-enforcement?

Recent G8, African Union (AU) and DAC proposals
The current debate on building developing country PSO capacity relates largely to African initiatives; in particular efforts to establish a PSO focus under the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the AU. In 2003, the Joint Africa/G8 Plan to Enhance African PSO Capabilities identified a number of building blocks to enhance African PSO capacity including: ‘Consensus-building in the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) to free up aid for PSO-related activities’. The implications of including PSO operations and capacity-building under Official Development Assistance (ODA) deserve some reflection. These proposals follow moves to include counter-terror and migration 'containment' related conditionality and expenditures in ODA. For example, the April 2003 DAC policy statement suggesting that ODA criteria be widened to include counter-terrorism. The current review of the EU Cotonou Agreement with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries may include political conditionality on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and counter-terrorism.

Definitions of PSO and aid
The term 'Peace Support Operations' includes a broad range of tasks: from peacekeeping and peace enforcement to civilian tasks such as civil administration, humanitarian elements and policing. Some of these activities are already eligible for ODA-financing under the framework of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation and security system reform programmes. At present, ODA criteria permit the inclusion of any additional, non-military expenditure incurred by OECD donor countries in their own peace support interventions in the South. Thus additional logistical expenditure (eg. travel costs) can be counted as ODA, but bullets and bombs cannot. However Southern capacity-building and the delivery of the 'hard security' end of PSO by developing countries, ie. peacekeeping, peace enforcement and policing, are not eligible for ODA funding at present.

What is UK Policy?
Until the mid-1990s, UK defence diplomacy focused largely on Eastern Europe as part of post-Cold War reprochement. This was financed by defence diplomacy budgets and conceptualised under a multilateral (NATO/UN) 'international peace and security' framework. UK aid to conflict resolution in developing countries, such as in Africa, is now funded under the 'Africa Conflict Prevention Pool' initiative (ACPP) and the 'Global Pool' Fund for other regions. Under interdepartmental budgetary arrangements (DFID, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Ministry Of Defence (MOD)) funds can be passed to the department best placed to support a given intervention. If this involves PSO, UK support is channelled through either MOD or FCO and is not reported as ODA. This means that DFID and the aid budget are detached from funding but participate in discussions on policy and strategy. For example, in Cote D'Ivoire, the Pool provided a £3.5 million support package to facilitate the deployment of Ghanaian troops as part of ECOMICI. This included support for transport, communications, observation equipment and the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) running costs.

PSO: Security and/or Development?
It is now a cliché to state that there can be no development without security and no security without development. As the 1990s brought a convergence between development and security policy objectives and constituencies, questions about how to achieve synergy while respecting differences in means and ends have become more pressing. Thus, for development advocates, the question ‘Should ODA fund Southern PSO capacity and operations?’ relates to the boundaries between coherence, co-operation and co-option in security and development policy.

Arguably, notions of 'collective security' provide the normative background to PSO capacity-building. This would suggest that investment in PSO capacity in the South could be conceived of as part of a collective security strategy, with the implication that it be financed from defence/security budgets rather than ODA.

What are the 'development-friendly' reasons to shift the financial responsibility to ODA? PSO capacity-building funded from ODA might help anchor it more firmly under a development policy framework - as opposed to it being driven by strategic defence objectives. In turn, aid actors may feel they have more influence on its allocation and evaluation (eg. human rights monitoring). More 'negative' reasons for the shift may include defence budgetary structures and the 'post-development' discourse. The latter posits that purist development approaches have failed the 'failing states' and intractable conflicts of Africa and calls for a foreign policy and security-led agenda. The risks of including PSO under ODA, in terms of diversion of ODA from non-strategic sectors and regions, are obvious.