Publication: Building Capacity in Post-Conflict Countries
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2004-03
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2004-03
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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 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 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 Post-Conflict Aid, Real Exchange Rate Adjustment, and Catch-up Growth(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-04)Post-conflict countries receive substantial aid flows after the start of peace. While post-conflict countries' capacity to absorb aid (that is, the quality of their policies and institutions) is built up only gradually after the onset of peace, the evidence suggests that aid tends to peak immediately after peace is attained and decline thereafter. Aid composition broadly reflects post-conflict priorities, with large parts of aid financing social expenditure and infrastructure investment. Aid has significant short-term effects on the real exchange rate (RER), as inferred from the behavior of RER in the world. While moderate RER overvaluation is observed in post-conflicts, it cannot be traced down to the aid flows. The empirical evidence on world growth reveals new findings about the pattern of catch-up growth during post-conflicts and the role of key growth determinants on post-conflict growth. Aid is an important determinant of growth, both generally and more strongly during post-conflict periods. Because RER misalignment reduces growth, RER overvaluation during post-conflicts reduces catch-up growth. Aid and RER overvaluation combined also lower growth. But the negative growth effect of RER overvaluation declines with financial development.
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