Publication: Building Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries
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2004-03
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2012-08-13
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This brief looks at the challenge of building capacity in post-conflict countries, reviews options for creating capacity, and identifies trade-offs between a rapid result and longer-term impacts of capacity strategies. Six lessons for more sustainable approaches to capacity building are identified: (a) leadership matters, (b) incentives also matter, (c) build on what exists, (d) arrange learning activities within a country wherever possible, (e) training needs to be defined in its strategic capacity, and (f) training should build on the comparative advantage of international partners.
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“McKechnie, Alastair J.. 2004. Building Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries. Capacity Enhancement Briefs; No. 5. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9698 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Building Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-12)This note looks at the challenge of capacity building in post conflict countries, including options for creating capacity and the trade-offs between speed and longer-term impact, the need to ensure that aid management agencies include sunset provisions, and six proposed general lessons for more sustainable capacity building.Publication Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction(Washington, DC, 2003-12)Those of us helping countries to build capacity to manage reconstruction after a conflict has ended need to be fully aware of the context in which we operate. Apart from the obvious destruction of infrastructure, presence of armed groups and difficult working conditions, there are several other characteristics of post-conflict conditions that we need to appreciate. First, civil conflicts seldom end in clear cut victories for one side. Post-conflict conditions are inherently unstable. There are winners and losers. The winners may have settled for less than they sought to achieve. Even if one side appears to have won, how the winner treats the defeated party will be critical to whether national reconciliation takes place and the sustainability of peace. A new government may be an unstable alliance of competing parties or consist of an uneasy collection of former fighters and technocrats who sat out the war in relative comfort abroad.Publication Financing and Aid Management Arrangements in Post-Conflict Settings(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-06)This note, summarizing the analysis and recommendations of an upcoming CPR Working Paper of the same title, looks at issues related to financing modalities and aid management arrangements in post-conflict situations. It makes a number of recommendations based on a review of several recent case studies, of which four are assessed in detail: West Bank and Gaza, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor, and Afghanistan. It focuses on the lessons of experience on multi-donor trust funds and on the recipient government's aid management architecture in post-conflict settings. This paper is concerned with the specific issues of financing modalities and aid management arrangements in post-conflict situations, and advances a number of recommendations on the basis of a review of several recent cases, among which four are assessed in detail: West Bank and Gaza, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor (Timor-Leste) and Afghanistan. While generally applicable recommendations do emerge from the review, the most important recommendation is to tailor the design and sequencing of financing and aid coordination to the circumstances of the specific case.Publication Building Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-12)This note looks at the challenge of capacity building in post conflict countries, including at options for creating capacity, and the trade-offs between speed, and longer-term impact, the need to ensure that aid management agencies include sunset provisions, and six proposed general lessons for more sustainable capacity building. Rebuilding institutions is much more difficult than rebuilding damaged infrastructure. Capacity building is an enormous challenge, a challenge that requires imagination, cooperation, and hard work among those who seek to improve the conditions of conflict-affected countries.Publication Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2002-10)Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post-conflict economic recovery during the 1990s. The authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post-conflict countries. They find that during the first three post-conflict years, absorptive capacity is no greater than normal, but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level. So ideally, aid should phase in during the decade. Historically, aid has not, on average, been higher in post-conflict societies, and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade. The authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post-conflict countries, and in particular, whether particular components of policy are differentially important. For this they use the World Bank policy rating database. The authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post-conflict societies. Comparing the efficacy of different policies, they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies. However, historically, this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post-conflict societies.
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