The Rhetoric and Reality of Coordination in Intervention

The Coordination Problem and Its Political Roots

Intervention is carried out by a multitude of international and national actors, among which four different types can be distinguished: The first are the IGOs such as the UN or the EU.

While all these actors are rhetorically committed to cooperation, achiev­ing coherence among them has become a challenge and is aptly described as a hopeless endeavour similar to ‘herding cats’ (Crocker et al.

and the domestic actors. At the headquarters level, coordination problems exist between all the major international actors and the national govern­ments supporting them. Within major IGOs, such as the UN or the EU, there are coordination problems, too, between the various departments and agencies.⁴

For instance, within the UN system, with its long established frag­mentation of responsibilities and bureaucratic turf battles, coordina­tion problems can be observed within the UN Secretariat and between the various departments, agencies, funds, and programs (Müller 2010). Similar problems also exist within the EU, where the European Council and the European Commission regularly encounter coordination prob­lems, as both of these bodies have competencies in crisis management and stability operations. The results are frequent clashes and turf wars over areas of responsibility to the point that the Commission has even sued the Council in the European Court of Justice (Bensahel 2007, 61-62). At the operational field level, where organisations implement policies in the form of projects, coordination problems are equally obvious. The com­bined presence of several UN agencies, other IGOs, NGOs and bilateral donors often leads to a coexistence of political, military, humanitarian, and development actors (Jones 2002; Strand 2005; Cutillo 2006, 24-5). With different mandates and capabilities and reporting to different headquar­ters, in which responsibilities are equally scattered, the situation quickly produces a coordination problem.

The technical, neutral term of ‘coordination’ refers to managerial aspects and challenges to improve collaboration. However, the exist­ing lack of coordination has its roots in well-known problems that are basically political in character. Persistent political conflicts that are about the power to control resources and to determine tasks continue to ham­per coordination. Four of these typical conflicts can be distinguished (Brinkerhoff and Crosby 2002, 119-22):

The first relates to threats to organisational autonomy. Agreeing to coordinate means giving another actor greater discretion over one’s own programs and resources. Coordination can impose significant costs because the alignment with other actors requires adjustments in the pro­gramming cycle, procurement, auditing, and evaluation procedures (van de Walle 2005, 76). Thus, coordination is seen as a threat to organisa­tional autonomy. This is especially true in the marketised aid sector where NGOs compete for money and contracts. Here, the imperative of organ­isational survival undermines coordination efforts (Cooley and Ron 2002; Bennett 2000, 171).

The second conflict is related to the lack of task consensus. A workable task consensus involves agreement about the groups to be targeted, the services to be provided, and the technologies to be employed. Resolving a lack of agreement here can require long-lasting communication and negotiation (Brinkerhoff and Crosby 2002, 120-1). The lack of task con­sensus is especially evident in the simultaneous presence of humanitarian, military, and political actors who are involved in the same operations but disagree about strategic objectives such as peacebuilding, development, or statebuilding (Paris 2009, 59-60).

Third, organisations are subject to conflicting requirements from hori­zontal and vertical linkages (Brinkerhoff and Crosby 2002, 121). Agencies have to maximise their budgets. This forces them to generate support for their activities and to satisfy key domestic constituencies and stake­holders.

The fourth conflict relates to local ‘policy slippage’. Low adminis­trative capacity is often characteristic of those states that receive for­eign assistance. A high degree of politicisation, clientelism, and scarce resources impinge on the quality of the civil service (van de Walle 2005, 96-7). Thus, interveners are often concerned about efficiency, cred­ibility, and trustworthiness when they are supposed to use the partner countries’ institutional infrastructures (OECD 2011a, 48-67). When planning and budgeting processes are compromised by patrimonialism, interveners may prefer unilateral action instead of coordination with their host countries.

The persistent lack of coordination can, to a large extent, be traced back to these unresolved political conflicts which have long been known and often been highlighted by academics and practitioners. While all these conflicts indicate that non-cooperative forms of organisational interaction will most likely persist, the unmet goal of coordination is nei­ther declared untenable nor is the coordination rule questioned. Instead, all actors remain rhetorically committed to it and support the rule of coordination.

The Call for Coordination: Incorporating a Rationalised Myth

Calls for coordination have become widespread in different but increas­ingly related fields. This is true, for instance, with respect to peacebuilding. As early as 1995, the Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in a Supplement to the Agenda for Peace, devoted a whole chapter solely to the issue of coordination within the UN system as well as between UN agencies, NGOs, and regional organisations (UN 1995, 19-23). The issue was taken up again in 2000 in the so-called Brahimi Report (UN 2000, 8) and in a follow-up report four years later which highlighted the importance of harmonisation with respect to peacebuilding: ‘Effective coordination is critical’ (UN 2004, 61).

In the field of development aid, calls for coordination are especially pronounced, to the point that ‘one can hardly say “aid” without adding “coordination”’ (Easterly 2002, 240). In the last decade, the coordination issue received considerable attention within the debate on aid effectiveness (cf. Müller and Sondermann, Chap. 13). A series of four international high-level forums sponsored by the OECD established principles related to better aid coordination. The Rome Declaration on Harmonisation in 2003 outlined the broad goals of better donor-to-donor as well as donor- to-government coordination. This was followed and made more explicit by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 (De Haan 2009, 145-8). In 2008, the Accra Agenda for Action reaffirmed the principles of the Paris Declaration and again called upon donors and developing countries ‘to ensure the maximum coordination of development co-opera­tion’.⁵ As a follow up on the preceding declarations, the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation in 2011 once again reaffirmed the principles of the Paris Declaration and thus renewed the commitment to better coordination.⁶

In the field of humanitarian aid and emergencies, calls for coordina­tion are equally frequent. For instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has highlighted the issue in regular and almost ritu­alised annual statements to the UN General Assembly since 1995.

Coordination and related terms such as ‘alignment’, ‘harmonisation’, and ‘partnership’ have become buzzwords in the debate on peacebuilding, development aid, and emergency relief (Rottenburg 2009; Paris 2009, 59). Calls for better coordination can be found in a host of official state­ments, declarations, and policy papers. Being constantly evoked like a sacred formula by donor governments, IGOs, NGOs, and state agencies, the idea of coordination can be characterised as an institutional rule or rationalised myth. The myth says that improved coordination will result in greater efficiency and effectiveness and is therefore fundamental for suc­cess in meeting broader goals, be they peacebuilding, aid, or development. As a legitimating narrative, it has been incorporated into the strategies and policies of a wide range of actors. The political conflicts that are at the heart of the coordination problem, however, are rarely addressed or even mentioned in these official representations. Instead, the typical solution to the lack of inter-organisational coordination is the creation of yet more organisations.

The Rise of the Coordinating Bureaucracy

The task of coordination can be seen as the attempt to rationalise the rela­tions between organisations by agreeing on formal rules and procedures in order to establish a predictable and calculable environment. In the field of intervention, these attempts have often led to the setting up of new insti­tutions. The typical result of putting coordination into practice in the last decade has been the establishment of specialised departments, bureaus, or secretariats tasked with coordination.

This development has been favoured, first of all, by a typical perception among actors that considers coordination as a centralised top-down com­mand structure, whereas ad-hoc or consensus-driven approaches have been seen as less favourable (Gillmann 2010, 58). Moreover, the establishment of special coordination bodies or agencies is seen as necessary to achieve better coordination results. Reindorp and Wiles (2001), for instance, see coordination as a full-time task that requires resources and skilled staff to perform essential functions and services. According to these authors, coordinators need to have sufficient management skills as well as elements of command at their disposal, such as control over funding. Furthermore, coordination needs clear lines of reporting and accountability and a clear structure of competencies, including monitoring capacities, in order to reward good or sanction poor performance (Reindorp and Wiles 2001, 18, 22). Hence, the authors conclude that,

the challenge is to construct a body or structure with sufficient author­ity to be able to manage and guide humanitarian action—whether directly through a management line of one single humanitarian agency, or through a sufficiently powerful new structure that stands above existing funds and programmes (Reindorp and Wiles 2001, 51).

Many coordination approaches follow such logic of institutionalisation and involve the creation of institutions in the form of councils, commis­sions, consortia, committees, or umbrella agencies. Typically, the setting up of such institutions includes the establishment of by-laws and statutes, the election of a board, or an executive committee and the establish­ment of a secretariat which administers a budget, manages the day-to-day activities of coordination, and is answerable to the board (Bennett 2000, 169-74; Strand 2005, 92-3). Moreover, such institutional arrangements often embody a hierarchy, because effective coordination is mostly per­ceived as requiring leadership by one actor as well as bureaucratic control (Gillmann 2010, 51-61). Current UN approaches at better coordination, such as the Humanitarian Coordinator System or the Cluster approach, are very much based on hierarchical arrangements and can be portrayed as centralised top-down processes, similar to a pyramidal, single-headed structure (Gillmann 2010, 93-103, 173-4). The more actors to be coor­dinated, the more complex coordination becomes and the more likely the organisational complexity of the coordinating organisation.

A prominent example has been the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the peacebuilding tasks after Dayton were divided among a plethora of IGOs, NGOs, and donors. The establishment of the Office of the High Representative aimed precisely at the strategic and operational coordina­tion of all actors, who were brought together within an unwieldy admin­istrative framework to implement the Dayton accords (Jones 2002, 90-1; Caplan 2005, 35-7, 179-94). A more recent example is the Peacebuilding Commission of the United Nations, which is designed to bring greater coherence to the myriad activities of UN peacebuilding and is supported by a Peacebuilding Support Office. Another example is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, whose responsibili­ties encompass the mobilisation and coordination of humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies. While NGOs are difficult to coordinate and favour non-hierarchical arrangements (Bennett 2000, 171; Gillmann 2010, 26-7), the same institutionalising tendency is true for larger NGO coordination bodies such as InterAction, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, the Inter Agency Standing Committee, or the Voluntary Organizations in Cooperation in Emergencies (Walker and Maxwell 2009, 126-8). Specialised offices serving as focal points for interagency coordination in the field of statebuilding and peacebuild­ing have also been created at the national level in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada (Bensahel 2007, 43-54). At the operational field level, attempts at coordination have often resulted in the simultaneous establishment of parallel coordinating bodies because of the coexistence of political, military, humanitarian, and development actors in many countries (Jones 2002, 107; Strand 2005, 95-7; Cutillo 2006, 24-5). Thus, the rationalised myth of coordination has not only been incorporated into policy doctrines but is also reflected in the creation of specialised bodies which are especially mandated with coordination.