10.3 |
Reconstruction: oil, commercial interests, debt relief, asylum and
stabilisation policy
improved
co-ordination in-country, but that the UK was “not yet delivering
on its full
potential
to engage in fragile states”. Five issues were
highlighted:
“The first
has been a mismatch between ambitions and resources … a gap
existed
between
what was expected by Cabinet Ministers and promised to the public,
and
what was
resourced by way of programmes and capabilities …
“The second
concerns the mechanisms for the allocation of resources … and
the
decisions
on relative priorities … The current system pushes effort towards
current
crises at
the expense of forestalling future crises [and] perpetuates an
imbalance
between the
use of military and civilian tools …
“The third
problem is the fact that loyalty remains to departments rather than
to the
Government
as a whole … Pooled funding arrangements account for only a
small
proportion
of resources devoted to fragile states.
…
“Fourth,
there are still areas where the UK’s ability to send the right
people … to
work in
hostile environments needs to be on a more sustained and reliable
footing …
The gap
between government ambition and UK capability on policing, for
example,
has if
anything grown rather than diminished.
“Fifth and
finally … Lessons are recorded and stored by the MOD, DFID, the
Foreign
Office and
academia, but rarely dusted off when new decisions have to be made
at
Ministerial
or official level.”
965.
In November
2010, the SU produced a paper on lessons learned from the
UK’s
growing
experience of stabilisation activities.612
Designed to
“provide policymakers and
practitioners
with accessible material, which conveys both the breadth and depth
of
challenges
facing the UK and other international partners”, the lessons
included the
need
to:
•
exercise
caution when transferring lessons from one conflict to
another;
•
ensure that
economic and development objectives complement and
support
efforts to
promote a peaceful political process (an effective response
required
understanding
of multiple political interests and how they are leveraged
to
impede or
facilitate stabilisation);
•
form a
single multi-disciplinary and multi-departmental team;
•
implement
activities in a way that builds on local culture, context and
the
operating
environment;
•
adopt a
flexible and adaptive approach to monitoring and
evaluation;
•
secure
community engagement;
612
Paper
Stabilisation Unit, November 2010, ‘Responding to Challenges in
Hostile and Insecure
Environments:
Lessons Identified by the UK’s Stabilisation Unit’.
521