The United Nations and Democracy in Africa
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The United Nations and Democracy in Africa

Zoë Wilson

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The United Nations and Democracy in Africa

Zoë Wilson

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About This Book

This book explores UN bureaucracy and the development dysfunction it sows in four 'most different' African countries: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and Tanzania. Wilson's original purpose for researching this book was to uncover new solutions to some of the United Nations' most vexing implementation problems. Yet, as research unfolded, it became clear that the reasons for those problems lay tangled up in bureaucratic and philosophical quagmires of a much more fundamental nature. The United Nations and Democracy in Africa is the documentation not only of these bureaucratic and philosophical absurdities that find expression through development practice, but also the journey of the author from ardent defender of the UN to profound sceptic.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2007
ISBN
9781135862558

Chapter One
Power, Politics and Doomed Projects

Africa makes us look stupid. It makes us realize that our assumptions require re-examination and reformulation.
—Robert H. Bates, Political Science, Harvard1

INTRODUCTION

If there is such thing as the development zeitgeist, it is characterized today by three concepts: good governance, democracy and human rights. This agenda is set, in large part, by the United Nations, the author of such core development texts as the Human Development Report(HDR) and the Millennium Declaration. In 2002, the HDR was subtitled: Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World, and referred to one or all of these concepts on every page. Yet, even a cursory look at the history of successive UN development decades makes it hard to escape the observation that the turn to “good governance” does not crown a list of stunning development achievements.
Current fashion in the explanations of development failure has turned towards the lack of coordination, as Gerald Ruggie notes (20032):
The most distinctive institutional feature of the UN system . . . is that it is not designed as a matrix at all but as a set of deeply rooted columns connected only by thin and tenuous rows. Nothing that has transpired since 1945 has transformed that fundamental reality.
Pinpointing development failure as the result of institutional messiness seems to suggest that not only is the intellectual content more or less on target, that, indeed, it is more coherent than its institutional delivery mechanism. Ruggie goes on, in fact, to argue that the effects of the UN’s institutional fragmentation are partially mitigated by a new conceptual clarity (ibid.):
At the conceptual level, the consensus encompasses the centrality of governance, the rule of law, education, and health to economic success . . . and the need for governments and international institutions alike to forge partnerships with the private sector and a wide range of civil society actors.
In the forthcoming chapters, however, I synthesize the evidence that led to the conclusion that this “conceptual clarity” is a hall of mirrors—at least with respect to the political and institutional dimensions of the good governance agenda. If a reader vigilantly interrogates key documents such as the Human Development Reports for the meaning and the means of such good things as democracy or human rights, what she will find is a sum of fragments, reflecting tensions between structured totalities and splintered pieces, and which obfuscate rather than illuminate what is really at stake: the restoration of the failing state/state-system project. Sandwiched within a seemingly incoherent combination of fragmentary concepts is a “dominant discourse” of state-system restoration that is both internally consistent and deeply troubling—especially for its anti-democratic tendencies.
That is, Ruggie emphasizes the transformative potential of what he calls the Millennium Development Goals Network—“an unprecedented . . . unifying substantive framework”—and argues that we have entered something of a new era in country coordination with the Common Country Assessments and Frameworks. In related analyzes, both Thomas Weiss (2000: 9) and Jean-Phillippe Thérien (1999: 14) applaud evolutions in the UNDP’s governance agenda, arguing respectively that it represents an “incipient heresy against conventional wisdom” and that “the UN paradigm seeks to take into account all the complexity of the social environment in which poverty exists.” The forgoing evidence, however, suggests that if such a unifying conceptual framework exists, its most substantive elements are the privileging of UN expertise, top-down intervention, the enhancement of state power and the bracketing and disciplining of the ways in which people can participate in conversations about where their communities are going and how they want to get there. This argument is based on “thick description”3 of the UN’s good governance agenda—whose political features are typically championed by the United Nations Development Progamme.4 The chapters that follow trace policy and praxis from global documents such as the Human Development Reports (2000; 2002), to African regional documents such as the Causes of Conflict Report to the Secretary General (UN General Assembly 1998), to country documents and interviews with UN country staff in four country case studies: Angola, Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania.
Thick description fleshes out a picture of a governance agenda that everywhere exhibits a commitment to top-down intervention at the level of a hypothetical apolitical and uncomplicated developmental state, but also everywhere and simultaneously, makes concessions to more progressive, even radical, democratic thinking. These two streams, top-down and state centric on the one hand, and democratic and participatory on the other, often conflict and contradict each other. The effect is a conceptual framework comprising an awkward and often incoherent sum of multiple ways of understanding the problematic of democracy and development.
The chapters that follow also explore the functions served by the ambiguities and contradictions embeded within the governance agenda. Does ambiguity and internal contradiction have a role to play in creating the illusion that the latest UN development thinking has answered its worst critics and redressed its most harmful tendencies? In mixing, even jumbling together, top-down and bottom up epistemologies, the governance agenda is all things to all people. It has something to please everyone, from state elites of various persuasions to grassroots movements clamouring for greater voice. In this light, evidence indicates that caution should also be exercised when assuming that the governance agenda will be more successful and participatory and less harmful than the social engineering experiments of the development past. The evidence considered later suggests a propensity for the governance agenda to create space for elitist and authoritarian regimes to flourish, while providing few substantive opportunities for the people whose poverty has become the raison d’être of the humanitarian machinery to participate in conversations—and political processes—concerning where their communities are going and how various members want to get there.
Before saying any more about this, however, I would first like to explain why and under what circumstances my research question, methodology and geographical focus changed substantively over the course of the research process. Research evolved from interrogating why UN Peace Support Operations in Angola floundered throughout the nineties, to a multi-levelled analysis tracing UN aspirations to foster good governance, democracy and human rights in four African countries. In the process of this explanation, I hope to illuminate, and to some extent justify, why the research project was ultimately transformed from a theory-bounded to a theory-building exercise. That is, in the interests of theory building, the remaining chapters describe the progressive integration and analysis of multiple perspectives on and dimensions of the governance agenda in an effort to see how the greatest number of pieces of the puzzle fit, or do not fit, together in heretofor unimagined ways.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

This book began its life as a doctoral thesis proposal promising to explore the reasons why United Nations (UN) Peace Support Operations (PSO), succeed, fail, or simply muddle along of their own accord. Primary field research was to be conducted in Angola in April 2001, where I hoped to observe intervening variables that could account for why things did not always work out as planned. Research proposed to identify where specific changes could be made at the operational level to help PSO strategies perform better.5 To do this, I first identified the independent (causal) variable as the plan or strategy—in this case evidenced in the 2001 Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeal and April 2000 Report of the Secretary General on the United Nations Office in Angola, and the UNHCR Angola statement, Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Protection Programme: July 2000- December 2001. These documents were also situated within global UN strategies, including the Millennium Declaration and Human Development Reports, of which they were seen to be a part. In other words, from these documents I assumed I would be able to determine what it was that the UN wanted to accomplish in Angola. My thematic emphasis was on human rights promotion, often used interchangeably with the term “protection.” Thus, the plans and strategies floated within the global emphasis on “human rights, democracy and good governance” and “protecting the vulnerable” (Secretary General 2001a: 4).
This simple plan was foiled mainly because it proved difficult to isolate a clear set of causal variables related to human rights. All official documents, including “Road Maps,” tended to be relatively vague and inexact. For example, characteristically, the Implementation Strategy found in the IDP Protection Programme: July 2000-December 2001 (3) asserted:
The [IDP] programme uses community-based implementation. The capacity of communities to respond to urgent needs of IDPs is strengthened through public awareness campaigns, capacity building, and affirmative action to entrench an understanding of IDP rights, and to use that understanding as a launching pad for the recognition of other fundamental human rights.
It sounds good at first blush, although ideas such as “affirmative action to entrench an understanding of IDP rights” were never fully explained or linked to concrete practices. Nevertheless, I remained wedded to a realist notion of language as neutral and purely descriptive. I expected, then, that the content of the practices would become clear with first hand experience and observation in the field. Practices that were not described in the strategic plans would certainly speak for themselves on the ground.
Fieldwork began in 2001, with an internship at the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Luanda, and later the northern province of Uige. What I observed subverted my hope of identifying a clear and coherent set of strategies and practices. Both the documents and practices expressed multiple and often conflicting approaches to understanding and actualizing human rights objectives. Further, these processes were rendered yet more complex by operating procedures that were, inter alia, simultaneously decentralized, fragmented, and crosscut by rigid (and often resented) hierarchies emanating from New York and Geneva head offices. For example, Provincial Working Group meetings (including UN and non-governmental organization partners) in Luanda highlighted the interplay between the various institutional cultures and individual perspectives on a wide range of issues. In a particularly interesting exchange, the representative for the Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)—the the newly appointed coordination agency—admitted that despite the fact that OCHA was not yet competent in many key areas,6 approaches had shifted wildly over the past year, from consensus-based to “OCHA led and dominated.” The latest approach was to be characterized by a focus on big picture constructive engagement, guided by Mary Anderson’s “do no harm” guidelines for humanitarian intervention. According to OCHA, the new thinking was that protection goals were best viewed through the prism of medium- to long-term constructive engagement.
A number of paradoxes were in play. Concerns about accountability, corruption, authoritarian tendencies and human rights abuses were expressed, yet seemed to co-exist more or less discretely from fresh commitment to the idea of constructive engagement designed to enhance the capacity of an idealized “developmental” state (such as the dispersal of funds, the creation of bureaucratic capacity, etc). At the same time, the emphasis on “do no harm” corresponded to a scaling back of expectations for and commitment to the humanitarian mission and broader social engagement. OCHA’s representative cautioned everyone at the meeting not to expect much in terms of enhanced standards of living for Angolans over the next couple of years. This was not a sentiment equally well accepted by all parties present. One UN official commented later: “It looks like the whole mission is just a sacrifice at the altar of Big Oil.”
The meetings also revealed that actors and agencies competed over differing interpretations of fundamental ideals such as human rights, good governance and gender equity. This was expressed as a plethora of struggles between contending visions and aspirations—between and among both individuals and units and other partner and sub-contracted actors. For example, the UNHCR remained committed to the creation of a quasi-political body called the Human Rights Committee7 in the northern province of Uige where it played the Lead Agency role. In OCHA- and UNDP- led provinces, both the project and the underlying principles had been set aside. The OCHA representative commented: 8
Initially OCHA was supportive of the parallel structure approach [to institution building], but now we are going in a different direction, towards engagement. We may be going in a horribly wrong direction. If so, we will move back to the first strategy. We are still relying on informal chats with key informants at various organizations, however.
The UNHCR, nevertheless, remained committed to the Human Rights Committee (HRC) and its grass roots methodology, and clearly viewed the HRC’s principles and potential differently than some of the other members of the group.
Similar differences of opinion and perspective characterized other key issues. For example, the representative for the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern that attempts to insert gender equity requirements were, at times, insensitive to cultural norms and counter productive. The representative for YME, an international stream rehabilitation NGO, however, felt that international acquiescence to so-called cultural norms was often unstudied and unwarranted. He insisted that gender parity for village water committees had been unproblematic. He also argued that all-female water committees were more difficult to organize. But given women’s sole responsibility for provisioning water to the household, it was unclear what underlay this dynamic, and if, indeed, it was deeply entrenched. Similarly, World Health Organization staff reported that the practice of yielding to male household demands for food dispersals had resulted in much of the food aid bypassing women and children, ultimately ending up at the informal markets of Luanda. At the least it was clear that the mental models upon the decision to disperse food to the household unit (and correspondingly models of household headship) were deeply flawed. Overall, interviews and meetings attended in both Luanda and Uige revealed a high degree of variance in the interpretation of gender equity norms and how they might best be applied, and to what end.
In short, the ubiquity of political negotiation over contending principles and projects, and the manifest lack of a coherent set of strategies or programmes that unified the Mission (or parts thereof), conflicted with both the conceptual clarity celebrated by Ruggie and others, and indeed, the clear plan or strategy I expected to see, based on a review of the general and Angola-specific UN documents. My interest was, however, piqued by several new observations:
  1. The co-existence, in the discourse, of contending guiding principles and differing interpretations of key concepts such as human rights.
  2. The extent to which the implementation context, among other things, comprised struggles and conflicts over the meaning of key UN concepts such as human rights and women’s equality.
  3. That there were likely important political implications attached to both what the discourses expressed coherently (i.e. the idea of the state) as well as the multiple, co-extant and competing minor discourses.9 (This final observation would become the central theme of subsequent research.)
At this point, initial assumptions in favor of the UN—assumptions which took the organization and its strategies as more or less unproblematic—became untenable. Rather, it would be important to start from the observation that the UN is a complex social organization, partly defined by inexplicit discourses and political conflict among its staff and partner implementers.

A Project Re-conceptualized

Theory-bounded approaches typically decide up front what kind of data is relevant. The main criticism of such approaches is that methodology and epistemology can pre-determine findings.
[A]t a certain moment, therefore, it is necessary to turn against method, or at least to treat it without any founding privilege as one of the voices of plurality—as a view, a spectacle mounted in the text, the text which all in all, is the only “true” result of any research [emphasis in original] (Barthes in Der Derian 1989: 7).
That is, in order to fully explore the implications of my Angolan observations, it would be necessary to take into account a richer more textured body of data, diverse enough to capture as many dimensions of complexity as possible; and only then would it be appropriate to assess how well the data maps onto existing theories and methodologies (see Chapter Nine), and/or to what extent theory-building is necessary for explaining how the pieces of the puzzle fit or fail to fit together. To this end, I sought to generate a body of data comprising multiple perspectives and angles, while simultaneously attempting to “fit” increasing layers of complexity into “something that works cognitively, that fits together and handles new cases” (Schwandt 1994: 127). An approach that takes all phenomena as potentially relevant requires a fundamentally different ontology. The project needed to be re-conceptualized. At this point, it became a theorybuilding project rooted in the principles of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1994).

The Selection of Additional Country Cases

Mark Duffield (2001) recently described post-cold war peacekeeping as the merging of security and development. This is consistent with the Peace Support Operations continuum, which env...

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