Robert D. Lamb - Absorptive Capacity in the Security and Justice Sectors. Assessing Obstacles to Success in the Donor-Recipient Relationship

Robert D. Lamb is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation at CSIS and a research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. Dr. Lamb studies governance and development amid conflict, with recent field research in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Pakistan. His current research touches on complex violence, hybrid political orders, nonstate-controlled territories, political transitions, international intervention, absorptive capacity, and alternatives to state building.

Dr. Lamb has presented his work to policymakers and experts in Afghanistan, Colombia, Germany, India, Pakistan, Romania, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; has appeared on CNN, NPR, and NBC News; and has been quoted in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, and other media outlets. He lived for nearly a year in Medelln, Colombia, studying gang governance and legitimacy and joined CSIS as a visiting scholar after returning to Washington in late 2009. As a strategist in the Defense Departments Strategy Office in 2006 and 2007, he advised defense policymakers on terrorist, criminal, and insurgent networks and comanaged an interagency study of ungoverned areas and illicit havens. He earned his PhD in policy studies in early 2010 from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy in a program combining security, economics, and ethics. He received his BA in interdisciplinary studies from Gettysburg College in 1993, spent half a year in Nicaragua with a microdevelopment project, then worked for nine years as an editor and journalist, winning a National Press Club award in 2001, before changing careers after 9/11.

Kathryn Mixon is program coordinator and research assistant with the CSIS Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation, where she researches absorptive capacity, nonstate-controlled areas, resilience, political transitions, and private-sector development in fragile states. Before joining CSIS, she conducted research for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Richard Lugar, where she focused on crises in Belarus, Russia, and the European Union. Ms. Mixon earned a BA from the George Washington University in international affairs with a concentration in conflict and security and a minor in religious studies.

Andrew Halterman is a research intern with the CSIS Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation, where he has worked on U.S. intervention, private-sector development in fragile states, aid agency bureaucracies, and nonstate actors. Mr. Halterman earned a BA from Amherst College in political science, focusing on military interventions, bureaucratic culture, and the relationship between international nongovernmental organizations and donor agencies. Before joining CSIS, he conducted research on democracy aid and social movements in Kosovo as a Fulbright fellow.

T his report presents the results of a case study of absorptive capacity in the security and justice sectors. This study was organized using the Measuring Absorptive Capacity (MAC) framework developed by the authors and introduced in the first volume of the CSIS Managing Absorptive Capacity series. The MAC framework was built to test the possibility that the capacity to absorb foreign aid might not be simply a function of the recipients implementation capacity or the amount of aid offered. Rather, absorptive capacity might depend at least in part on the design and intent of the intervention itself, which in turn might be a function of the donors capacity to account for local conditions. (The term intervention is used throughout this report to refer to projects, programs, and other initiatives supported by international donors.)

This case study confirms that possibility: absorptive capacity is a by-product of the donorrecipient relationship or, more formally, an artifact of the theory of change implicit in the design and intent of particular interventions. The results of this study, published here and in the first volume, have informed the development of a draft absorptive capacity assessment tool, to be published separately. That tool is intended to help assess the fit between donor programs and local conditions in any development, peace-building, and stabilization efforts, as well as security and justice programs.

Over the past two de cades, European and North American donors, multilateral institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have dedicated enormous resources toward building capable states. Between 1991 and 2010, the countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) disbursed approximately $1.5 trillion (2010 dollars) in official development assistance (ODA).

More and more, the disconnect between the ambitious rhetoric and goals of many international development efforts and the outcomes of their efforts is being noticed, especially in countries affected by conflict, violence, and fragility. Many international donors are unwilling to make those compromises, some turn a blind eye even to the need for such compromises, and as a consequence the assistance they provide is sometimes misaligned with local desires, knowledge, resources, and capabilities in the recipient society. Sometimes that aid takes a form (and sometimes is offered at a scale) that exceeds the capacity of the country to absorb it or adapt to it in a way that fosters progress, with the occasional result of harming the intended beneficiaries.

The problem of absorptive capacity has attracted attention over the past few years, mainly as a result of the sizeable assistance, stabilization, and reconstruction programs in Afghanistan and Haiti, two countries whose institutions have nowhere close to the capacity to absorb the aid and attention they have received.

But as attention to donors role in development pathologies has increased, it is worth considering the possibility that managing absorptive capacity might not be simply a matter of building recipients capacity to spend donor funds and implement programs, but rather that it might require attention to how those programs are designed in the first place. If a security or justice program fails, is it because the host nation did not live up to donors expectations or because the expectations and design were unsuited to the society or institutions to begin with? If the expectations and design were unrealistic and ill-suited, how can they be made more realistic and better suited? Do absorptive capacity constraints have their source in recipient factors only or in donor factors as well?

Recipient factors that might contribute to absorptive capacity might go beyond a ministrys ability to properly and accountably spend donor funding and implement donor programs but might also include, for example, a civil servants ability to produce the required number of reports, a ministrys ability to interact with multiple donors at once, an economys ability to absorb foreign resources without market distortions, the cultures tolerance for personality-based versus rule-based decisionmaking and implementation, the division of labor between formal and informal institutions and what locals think about each, or a communitys ability to adapt to a growing number of contracts, projects, and foreign demands.

Different donors have different capacities to adapt their own processes and program designs to local conditions in the places they wish to reach as well. Factors that might affect absorptive capacity can include the donors preferred program designs (e.g., size, speed, objectives, and standards), choice of program partner (e.g., government capacity building versus direct cash payments to citizens), operational preferences (e.g., bias toward national and formal over local and nongovernmental operations), organizational culture (e.g., risk aversion in contracting), assumptions (e.g., about local partners values, preferences, or objectives), or knowledge (e.g., about history, culture, or power dynamics).