Donors, technical assistance and public administration in Kosovo

Mary Venner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784992729
• eBook ISBN: 9781526101211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The reconstruction of Kosovo after 1999 was one of the largest and most ambitious international interventions in a post-conflict country. The United Nations, other major multinational organisations and many large bilateral aid donors all played a role in restoring stability and establishing governance in the territory. This book looks beyond the apparently united and generally self-congratulatory statements of these international actors to examine what actually happened when they tried to work together in Kosovo to achieve this goal. It considers the interests and motivations, and the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major players and how they contributed to the creation of new institutions in public finance and public sector management. Although in general the international exercise in Kosovo can be seen as a success, in the sphere of public administration the results have been mixed. More than fifteen years later, some institutions of government perform well while others face ongoing challenges. The book argues that much of the current day performance of the Kosovo government can be traced to the steps taken, or not taken, by these international actors in the crucial first years.

1

The setting

Kosovo’s post-conflict era began on 9 June 1999 when a military-technical agreement was signed between NATO and the Governments of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia on terms for the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army and Serbian police from Kosovo. The next day, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1244 (UNSCR 1244) and the UN began rapid preparations for a large-scale peacekeeping mission. Many of those engaged in negotiating the resolution may not have fully grasped the magnitude and difficulty of the task they were handing to the UN. The Security Council debate made few references to the implementation arrangements for the peace agreement.¹

Major aid donors and international aid bodies, however, had very clear ideas about what international action in post-conflict Kosovo should involve and had already developed quite detailed plans. Their proposed development and reform agenda was significantly more expansive than the UN’s modest ideas about transitional administration and placed Kosovo firmly on a path to economic transformation. Events unfolding on the ground from the moment the peace agreement was signed, however, rapidly made the job of all parties much harder. Ongoing inter-ethnic hostility and the flight of most of the Serb population, a complex political situation with competing groups claiming to be the legitimate government, and a desire by many in the local population to return to the certainties of the past rather than to embrace rapid transformation presented significant challenges to the international intervention.

How Kosovo became an aid project

The UN scrambled to organise the Kosovo Mission in the days after the Security Council decision, but other organisations had been planning for the post-conflict period long before the conflict ended. On 2 April 1999, shortly after the start of NATO military action against Yugoslavia, the World Bank and the IMF held an emergency donor meeting to discuss the impact of the conflict on the region. This was followed a few weeks later by a high-level meeting of international financial institutions and donor countries to discuss their responses to the conflict.² The subject matter of these meetings went well beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis and included an exchange of views ‘on a medium to long-term approach for economic reconstruction and recovery, growth and progress in reaching social stability in the region once peace is achieved’.³

In May, a joint World Bank/European Union office was set up in Brussels to coordinate aid in South East Europe, including Kosovo, with the goal of implementing a comprehensive regional framework for economic development.⁴ In the same month, the European Commission announced a new ‘stabilisation and association’ process (SAP) for South East Europe. The SAP would provide financial assistance and cooperation to the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Albania in order to ‘draw the region closer to the perspective of full integration into EU structures’.⁵ In addition, in June 1999, G8 leaders endorsed the EU’s proposal for a ‘Stability Pact’ which would provide a political framework for Balkan countries to integrate into ‘the Euro Atlantic Structures’.⁶ So, while the conflict was still under way and a large part of the population was scattered across the region in refugee camps, the major international powers and donor institutions were already drawing up plans for Kosovo’s economic future and integration with the EU.

Defining the ‘liberal peace’

As soon as the UN Security Council resolution was passed, a succession of donor meetings and press conferences, and numerous World Bank, IMF and European Commission reports further developed the agenda for the post-conflict period. A High Level Steering Group on Kosovo Reconstruction, comprising Ministers of major donor countries and senior officials of the lead international organisations, met on 13 July to discuss the strategic direction for economic reconstruction, stabilisation, reform and development in the region.⁷ A donor conference to mobilise aid resources was held in late July in Brussels, attended by over 100 donor countries and international bodies.⁸ The World Bank prepared a paper on ‘Strategic Directions for Economic Recovery’ for discussion at the conference, and outlined its own plans to provide policy advice and donor coordination.⁹

The World Bank and the European Commission produced further documents on economic reconstruction and development priorities for a second donor conference held in November 1999, also in Brussels. These reports defined the main policy tasks facing the interim civil administration, with a concentration on establishing economic institutions, strengthening the public administration, rapid transition to a market economy, reforms in education, health and social protection, and setting the stage for private-sector-led recovery.¹⁰ The conference participants confirmed donor support for the programme set out in these papers.¹¹

This reconstruction agenda in Kosovo was well within the parameters of the ‘liberal peace’ strategy. The World Bank argued that ‘economic growth and prosperity in Kosovo is clearly a pre-requisite to its stability’¹² and the theme of economic development as the path to peace is repeated often in the documents and speeches of donors. The World Bank’s Johannes Linn argued that ‘our efforts to help rebuild Kosovo must be comprehensive and not limited to the reconstruction of damaged economic assets’,¹³ and a paper presented to the conference by the EU official who would head up UNMIK’s ‘Pillar IV’, Joly Dixon, boldly stated that ‘UNMIK’s mission is to turn Kosovo into a multi-ethnic democracy with a well-functioning economy firmly based on market principles and the rule of law’.¹⁴ In his remarks to the conference he added ‘the idea of just putting the thing back as it was before is not very attractive. We must have a higher aspiration than that’.¹⁵

Putting development into UNSCR 1244

The only legal authority for any international organisation or donor government to act in Kosovo without the agreement of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), however, was UNSCR 1244, so the statements of international and bilateral donors made it clear that their activities could in some way be linked to or justified by reference to that document. This required some expansive interpretation of the wording of the resolution. The stated function of the UN civilian presence in the Resolution was to provide:

an interim administration for Kosovo under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and which will provide transitional administration while establishing and overseeing the development of provisional democratic self governing institutions to ensure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants of Kosovo.¹⁶

The Resolution made only passing reference to economic prosperity and no reference at all to markets or the private sector. The documents produced by donors and international financial institutions, however, linked ‘a peaceful and normal life’ in Kosovo with economic reform and development and thus cited UNSCR 1244 as the authority to implement development programmes beyond immediate transitional administration.

These aspirations for Kosovo, it was clear, would require the application of significant amounts of donor funds. The World Bank and the EU envisaged a large, multi-year assistance programme of reconstruction and economic recovery to put Kosovo on the path of sustained economic and social development. At the second donor conference they proposed a comprehensive reconstruction and recovery framework over a period of four to five years at an estimated cost of US$2.3 billion.¹⁷ Their reports acknowledged that such a large programme would be an ambitious and complex exercise and would involve a large number of actors and a substantial amount of technical assistance and training. The ideas and methods of development assistance were thus brought to bear on the post-conflict recovery exercise and the major international aid organisations and leading bilateral development agencies all saw a role for themselves.

While economic development dominated the discussions at donor conferences, the range of issues that were of concern to other donors and non-government bodies was much broader and rapidly expanding. A report on activities implemented during 1999 and 2000 describes donor initiatives in the environment, sport, media, culture, road safety and the preservation of historical monuments, among other things.¹⁸ While some of these projects involved restoring or restarting institutions and facilities that had existed before the conflict, many had wider objectives of modernising, restructuring, reforming or establishing for the first time major components of daily life in Kosovo. There was thus a significant gap between the initial peacekeeping concept encapsulated in UNSCR 1244 and what donors wanted to see done.

There were other ways in which donors’ ideas about the programme in Kosovo deviated from the words negotiated in the Security Council. As well as extending the scope of the task, the main donors, including the EU, the World Bank and USAID, showed little hesitation in their reports and press conferences in discussing Kosovo as a separate entity from Yugoslavia or Serbia, in spite of the wording of the Security Council resolution, which emphasised that Kosovo’s autonomy would be ‘within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’.¹⁹ They generally took the view that what Kosovo needed was a complete break with the past. In this respect there is a significant difference in tone and approach between the carefully neutral stance of UN documents and the language in many donor statements. Although World Bank reports occasionally refer to the status of Kosovo as an entity within Serbia, and note the need for cooperation with Serbia and Yugoslavia on the degree to which ‘substantial autonomy’ will be exercised, they also note that UNMIK and KFOR are responsible for relations with Yugoslavia and leave these issues to them to resolve, while pressing on with calls for significant reform.²⁰

The intransigence of the Milošević regime in Yugoslavia at the time and Serbia’s poor image in international affairs following the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo made it easy for donors to take this position on Kosovo’s assumed separation from Serbia. Had the Yugoslav authorities been prepared to cooperate more actively with the UN and encouraged Serbs in Kosovo to participate in the interim administration, things may have been different. However, in effect Kosovo was treated by many international aid bodies as an independent entity from the start. UNMIK, operating under the constraints of UNSCR 1244 and subject to scrutiny by the Security Council, was obliged to take a more conservative stance on this questio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The setting
• 2 The actors
• 3 Public finance management
• 4 The civil service
• Conclusion
• References
• Index