N°3 - Promoting Resilience in Situations of Conflict and Fragility
Topic overview
SUMMARY
- Promoting resilience in situations of conflict and fragility means factoring in the state’s incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions, and the looming shadow of armed conflict.
- The added value of the resilience approach resides in (i) addressing not only the symptoms of the crisis but also its root causes; and (ii) synergising across policy communities. This approach holds great promise in situations of conflict and fragility.
- Both the symptoms and the root causes of a crisis need to be addressed — this is particularly important in situations of conflict and fragility, where history tends to repeat itself.
- When identifying the causes of crisis and how they interact, process matters. It is also useful to identify areas of both risk and resilience.
- Mapping ongoing and planned interventions will help to identify gaps, contradictions overlaps, and areas for greater synergy, as well as consider their sustainability.
- Designing a resilience programme, or more generally applying the resilience approach, entails learning from past experience, addressing both emergency needs and longer-term resilience building, and factoring in risk.
- Implementing a resilience approach requires special attention to coordination mechanisms; thinking about peacebuilding and state-building issues from Day 1, even if they are long-term issues; and engaging with national counterparts according to context.
In 2012, 16 % of development assistance from the EU to fragile and conflict-affected countries went to strengthening government and civil society (OECD statistics, 2014). Moreover, a lot, if not most of development assistance provided outside of the governance sector had a direct and sometimes profound influence on democratic governance and human rights.
‘Respect for human rights and democracy cannot be taken for granted’ (2012 EU Strategic Framework and Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy). Violations of human rights and governance shortcomings constitute both a cause and a symptom of fragility. If addressed inadequately or too mechanistically, governance challenges risk further feeding the fragility cycle and missing the EU goals of peace, security and sustainable development.
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‘I realise with fright that my impatience for the re-establishment of democracy had something almost communist in it; or, more generally, something rationalist. I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly.’ Vaclav Havel |
This note aims at providing EU staff with practical guidance to define objectives, engage with relevant partners and adopt a realistic tailored approach to promoting democratic governance and human rights in fragile situations.
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