Governing When Chaos Rules: Enhancing Governance and Participation

In many cases after a conflict, a country has neither a legitimate government in place nor agreement on how to arrive at a process to determine what constitutes a legitimate government. Even if a government is in place and many of the country's citizens deem it legitimate, war and the attendant chaos often render its ability to deliver services to the population virtually nonexistent. At the same time, many citizens are hesitant to become overly involved in the political rebuilding process, having been conditioned by wartime realities to defer to individuals who exercised authority through the barrel of a gun. In addition, potential spoilers—those with an interest in undermining both a peace accord and the development of a new order—abound.

Arguably, the single most important factor that determines the success or failure of a postconflict reconstruction effort is the extent to which a coherent, legitimate government exists—or can be created. Having such a government is key to providing essential security, justice, economic, and social functions and to channeling the will, energies, and resources of both the indigenous population and the international community. Because little in the way of legitimate, capable government often exists in the wake of conflict, however, the international community must find ways to support this indigenous self-governing capability. The effort involves at least three sets of activities: (1) helping to support a process for constituting a legitimate government; (2) enhancing the government's capacities; and (3) helping to ensure broad participation in the government and the reconstruction process. All these steps are crucial to the political process of maintaining peace by identifying and progressively isolating potential spoilers and their independent bases of power.

While seeking to build up local governance and participation capacity, the international community must observe the cardinal rule of governance: indigenous ownership of the process is key. Even when local actors are disorganized and disempowered in the wake of conflict, they must be given a leadership role in the rebuilding process. Likewise, even when international actors must assume certain functions temporarily, they should always train and empower indigenous counterparts.

Unfortunately, the international community's existing instruments for undertaking activities to enhance governance and citizens' participation are poorly adapted to the special requirements of postconflict environments.

Governance and Participation

Good government requires an interactive two-way process between the government and the governed. The first challenge is to ensure that the government has the ability to deliver the security, economic, social, political, and justice goods that the population demands—the top-down process that will be called "governance" in this paper. As the term is used here, the definition of governance is consistent with definitions used by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). According to USAID, "Governance issues pertain to the ability of government to develop an efficient and effective public management process ... [that is able] to deliver basic services." ¹ According to the UNDP, "Governance is the exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority to manage a country's affairs at all levels and the means by which states promote social cohesion, integration, and ensure the well-being of their populations. It embraces all methods used to distribute power and manage public resources, and the organizations that shape government and the execution of policy." ² The UNDP definition contains an additional quality, one that can be considered the essence of participation: "It encompasses the mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations, and resolve their differences." ³ The World Bank's definition of governance—"the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources"—is significantly narrower than the one used in this article. ⁴

In postconflict situations, building the capacity for governance involves a broad range of tasks. ⁵ Frequently, fundamental agreement on how the political system should be structured...