Improving local governance in fragile states—practical lessons from the field
Summary –
Over the past 15 years, major international donor agencies shifted their approach to local politics in fragile states. In order to build stable state-society relations in conflict-affected societies, they committed to studying popular expectations on states, which may differ greatly from international norms like competitive elections and service provision. This blog post examines donor interventions to improve service provision in refugee-crisis-affected communities in Lebanon and Jordan from 2011 to 2019. Donor states hoped that improving service provision capacity of municipalities would increase public trust, but encountered problems with block voting and patronage, leading them to question the value of service provision. Future posts discuss alternate strategies that some donors attempted.
Legitimacy in fragile states -
Legitimacy is the extent to which the people being ruled consent to being ruled. Ruler’s who people trust to exercise coercision are legitimate. Authority is force (coercion) with legitimacy. A majority of Americans may dislike Donald Trump, but they continue to pay taxes to him and few people are advocating we instead address our taxes to Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein. The hanging chad controversy in 2000 was a legitimacy question because it called into question whether the electoral college should confer the right to rule.
Readers from developed countries are used to always knowing the relevant public authority due to a clear division between state and society. The mayor decides who can park where, and whoever wins the biannual mayoral election gets to be mayor. The president appoints the head of the IRS, and whoever gets the most electoral college votes becomes president, et cetera. But in fragile developing countries the question of who wields authority is more often contested. If there is no mayor or the mayor is a figure head appointed by a distant authority, communities some other authorities must judge which spaces are for parking or market stalls and provide other local governance services. In the absence of legitimate, functional state actors, other actors such as tribes, sheikhs, armed groups and charities often compete for legitimacy. We call these diverse, competing local actors public authorities.
Why do we care -
In the 2000s the concept of legitimacy became important to the international donors. The donors are government and intergovernmental agencies who fund overseas assistance projects, like USAID, DFID, the World Bank and the Kuwait Fund. Among other factors, the 2000s saw well-funded donor attempts to create stable, legitimate governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. These projects did not go as well as intended, particularly given the sums involved. In fancy reports at the Development Assistance Committee, USAID, and DFID studied how both state and non-state actors legitimate themselves, hoping to reform state-building and improve assistance in fragile states.
The primary outcome of these studies we call the empirical legitimacy agenda. Previous interventions had assumed normative legitimacy, meaning that states achieved legitimacy by adhering to normative standards such as competing in elections, providing services, following clear and transparent rules, etc. Now donors recognized that they could not predict popular expectations of the state. Legitimacy is instead constructed through a variety of complex, idiosyncratic practices which may not resemble western legitimacy-making. At least some legitimacy-making practices will likely be shared in non-western systems, such as providing security and social services, or listening to citizen participation, sometimes through intermediary representatives like tribal leaders. Some legitimacy-making practices which are frowned-upon in the west are common in fragile states, such as claiming a right to rule through shared religious belief. Patronage is especially common, in which higher elites provide resources in exchange for support to clients. While patronage degrades state capacity and alienates non-elites, in practice it can be a source of legitimacy. Anecdotally, I doubted people could say “What our political system needs is more nepotism, but directed toward my ingroup”, until I heard people say it myself.
According to their global strategies, donors adopted empiricism to understand how legitimacy is constructed, but their goal remained the creation of legitimate, rules-based governance. The purpose of understanding practical legitimacy-making is to help states emerge from fragility, meaning to become legitimate and effective with strong connections to their societies.
This blog series investigates how the empirical legitimacy has affected aid policy in practice in Jordan and Lebanon during the Syrian crisis.
Improving service capacity
[I am now switching to academic jargon, so this language can integrate directly in my paper]
The most common theory of change involving local legitimacy is that improving the services of municipalities will increase the their legitimacy (LCRP, 2016). The Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) cites this narrative, writing “the sector will then develop and strengthen a wide range of community support and basic services projects, which will serve the dual purposes of alleviating pressure and competition of resources at the local level, and—more importantly – building the confidence of local populations in municipal capacity (…)” (LCRP, 2016: 18). This narrative is presented frequently both in project proposals and in multi-donor strategies. USAID’s Lebanon strategy for 2014-2019 reads “In order to deepen connections between the public and their local representatives, USAID will build the institutional capacities of municipalities and strengthen their ability to deliver quality services, (…).” Proposals usually support this narrative using survey data that indicates service failures caused by refugees are a source of tension, as in the UK CSSF’s programme document which reads “The increase of refugees is placing considerable strain on already overburdened municipal systems, and in doing so, threatens social stability and cohesion” (CSSF, CLCR; 2). The implicit assumption is that municipal leaders currently rely on performance based legitimacy from successfully providing services, that the influx of residents from the crisis has worsened the quality of said services, and that increasing the services will therefore legitimate the municipal leaders. Several proposals in turn assert that greater municipal legitimacy will lead to greater social cohesion, possibly implying less animus against refugees.
The capacity increasing programs provide direct grant funding to municipalities, assist with procurement, and provide training to municipal staff. The UK’s CSSF has provided municipal grants depending on the refugee portion of the population in a region. The World Bank’s Municipal Services and Social Resilience Project (MSSRP) in 2015 provided US$ 54.5 M to 21 municipalities calculated by a base allocation per municipalities plus 19$ per Syrian. USAID’s CITIES program provides qualifying municipalities with HR audits, training on development planning and zoning among other services. The DMFA, through UNDP, funds facilities repairs and trains municipal police forces in Lebanon (DMFA, 2016; Activity Number 29568).
Overtime in Jordan and Lebanon donors became less confident that capacity building along would accomplish their governance and stability objectives. Most importantly, the large donors with major stability investments in Jordan noticed that many municipal elections were determined by bloc voting along tribal lines. Mayoral candidates are often selected in an internal tribal election after which all tribe members vote for the candidate, or candidates may negotiate an alliance of tribes for the election. In turn, the tribal supporters expect family members will receive positions in the municipality. As a result, personnel costs dominate municipal budgets, averaging 60-65% of their budgets to the detriment of capital costs (for institutions providing road building and sanitation services), leading to dependence on overseas aid (UNDP, 2014). Most workers had not completed high school (Ibid). Mayors complain that they cannot accomplish objectives due to demands from their councils to hire relatives [Janine Clark]. Municipal leaders prioritized visiting local elites and resolving disputes over advertising their service provision. This evidence suggested that patronage and tribal identification were more important to municipal legitimacy-making than process (elections) or performance.
Secondly, they became aware that municipalities had severe capacity problems prior to the crisis, such as intermittent transfers from the central government, budgets overinvested in payroll rather than capital, and over division into municipalities too small to function (particularly in Lebanon). The actual reduction in municipal capacity caused by the refugees may have been overstated given the low baseline of service provision (USAID, 2016).
Thirdly, in Jordan elite-populace conflicts shifted away from refugee issues toward disputes over the amount and distribution of patronage among Jordanians. Protests in 2019 occurred more in low-refugee cities and participants did not cite host refugee issues, according to interviewees. In Lebanon host-refugee issues remained important in municipal politics, although informally donors in the security cluster doubted that capacity enhancement influenced municipal policy toward refugees[1].
All of these observations suggested that enhancing municipal capacity was unlikely to legitimate them. Firstly, they did not rely heavily on performance legitimacy so did not heavily advertise their services. Secondly, the incentives created by the patronage system could direct funding toward ghost jobs and away from actual service provision. One optimistic report noted in Lebanon that the expectations for municipal service provision were low enough that any services would be a pleasant surprise (Mourad, 2016).
Policymakers at larger agencies with leadership roles in governance cogently described the issues with block voting and differing incentives. The UK’s CSSF had commissioned a series of reports on legitimacy making and service provision in municipalities in both Jordan and Lebanon. CSSF hired a research agency to conduct in-depth studies in addition to commissioning regular surveys. USAID’s democracy and governance office kept a close eye on these problems through regular reports from implementing partners and occasional field visits. One agency went so far as to survey attendants at town-hall meetings (described below) for the demographics of participants. The results of these studies and the donors collected statements broadly agree with independent academic work on Jordanian and Lebanese municipal politics (Municipal politics in Jordan and morocco).
As a result of these concerns, donors now rarely site only the services-legitimacy connection to justify large projects for municipalities. They usually add one or more of the following methods: teaching new methods of legitimacy-making to local leaders, increasing public participation in government, and increasing participation of vulnerable groups. The subsequent sections (posts) explore these interventions in greater detail.
What I need from you, dear readers!
Thanks for reading this opening sections. In you comments, tell me to what extent you understand the issues presented.
- Were any conclusions unsupported?
- Were all sections necessary?
I struggled to combine data from both Jordan and Lebanon due different due to their different political systems. Did this interfere with comprehension?
This was one of the most interesting titles I’ve seen on a LW post in a while. I look forward to reading further posts in the series.
There were a lot of places where I wondered about the process which produced some model. For instance:
Did this model come from talking to people and asking how government processes work? If so, how many people, how were they sampled, who collected these reports, how much interpretation/simplification of the narrative went into it? Or, if the model is coming from some data, how much data and where did it come from—e.g. if mayoral candidates are “often” selected in an internal tribe election after which “all” tribe members vote for the candidate, what kind of numbers are those really, and where do those numbers come from? Or when you say “personnel costs average 60-65% of budgets”, what cities are we talking about, and during what time period?
In short: you’ve said what we think we know, but I’m unsure how we think we know it.
This doesn’t necessarily need to be a book-length description of the methodology of every cited study, but at least I’d like to know things like “<people> collected election data on <N> cities in Jordan and found <numbers>, which they interpreted to mean <...>” or “<people> surveyed <N> citizens in the city of <blah> in a free-form fashion to understand how the processes of government are understood locally; the following model is their summary...”. I’m not looking for rigorous statistics or anything, just a qualitative idea of where the information came from. For instance, the sentence “Mayors complain that they cannot accomplish objectives due to demands from their councils to hire relatives [Janine Clark]” is perfect—it tells me exactly where the information came from.
I’m greatfull for your helpful comments. I will surely add more citations (I have to do that anyway for the academics).
I need you to tell me if the structure of the argument works rhetorically. My struggle is in arranging the order of points, paragraphs and sentences such that the reader can connect each of them to my broader thesis. Historically, I tend to throw knowledge at the reader. The reader is left thinking “why did I learn this fact? how do they fit together? what was the point again”. If you assume I have a good citation for each sentence, would you actually understand the conclusion?
I think you’re fine on that front, or at least plenty good enough for me.