Irrelevant or Indispensable?: The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century

14. Working Better Together: Implementing the High-level Panel’s Recommendations on Peacebuilding

I In its analysis of the United Nations capacity to promote and maintain peace, the Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change identified a key institutional gap: there is no place in the United Nations system explicitly designed to avoid State collapse and the slide to war or to assist countries in their transition from war to peace. That this was not included in the Charter of the United Nations is no surprise since the work of the United Nations in largely internal conflicts is fairly recent. But today, in an era when dozens of States are under stress of recovering from conflict, there is a clear international obligation to assist States in developing their capacity to perform their sovereign functions effectively and responsibly .…Strengthening the United Nations capacity for peacebuilding in the widest sense must be a priority for the organization.1 There is by now ample evidence of substantial gaps in the planning, financing, and implementation capacities for the critical civilian components of complex missions. While substantial improvements have been made over the years in the international community’s peacebuilding capacities, concepts, policies, and practice continue to evolve within the UN system, including the international financial institutions , and among bilateral donors. In proposing the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission and related Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) in the Secretariat, the High-level Panel (HLP) is seeking to build on and consolidate these advances in order to strengthen national as well as the UN’s and international community’s shared capacity to prevent state failure and more effectively manage post-conflict peacebuilding . shepard forman 14 WORKING BETTER TOGETHER implementing the high-level panel’s recommendations on peacebuilding 153 The Peacebuilding Commission (together with the PBSO) is intended to create an authoritative, intergovernmental mechanism that can make the substantive link between diplomatic, security, and development functions and ensure that for each specific country situation a comprehensive, integrated mission plan is followed, that there is adequate coordination among the diverse intergovernmental and national donor agencies, and that sufficient resources are marshalled to ensure that the bases for sustainable peace and development are put in place. How to make this work in practice is the subject of this chapter. II Consistent with the HLP’s focus on the centrality of responsible and effective states to ensure peace and security, there has been increased attention in recent years to institutional frameworks for setting policy and delivering outcomes, both among donor nations and in intergovernmental organizations. Various UN departments, programs and specialized agencies have worked hard to develop their individual civilian response capacities, as have the Bretton Woods institutions, and some regional organizations.2 Recognizing their own civilian response shortcomings, bilateral donors, most evidently the United Kingdom and the United States, have developed their own national-level policy planning and coordinating bodies to more effectively address issues of post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding, and to these same ends other European donors are seeking ways to build flexibility into their funding lines for relief and development. These efforts at national-level coordination and resource mobilization are milestones in the recognition of the importance of engaging fully and effectively in conflict management and post-conflict peacebuilding. However, they also signal the additional importance of developing an effective international or intergovernmental mechanism , such as the HLP’s proposed Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office at the UN, for at least two reasons. First, there is a clear need to increase coverage beyond the limited capacities of individual governments or intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). By most counts, more than fifty civil wars have been terminated since 1989;3 yet, the UN-mounted, Security Council-mandated peacebuilding operations in only twenty-one, or less than half of these, as well as in Afghanistan and East Timor, and the US was involved in less than one-third, not counting Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, over 154 shepard forman the past five years, there has been an average of fifteen conflicts occurring concurrently, with US aspirations limited to addressing at best two to three of these simultaneously. Under these circumstances, the vast majority of post-conflict cases will continue to fall into the category of forgotten or neglected crises with increased risk of a reversion to conflict. Given the mobility of global terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and organized crime, triage among these pockets of instability will not provide a certain enough safeguard against these threats to...