No Development Without Security

" The object of nation-building is to return power to a competent, responsible and representative local government as soon as possible.

In a country like Iraq where the governmental structure has collapsed, the first priority is to establish public security. Second is to begin rebuilding the local structures for governance. Third is to create an environment in which basic commerce can occur - where people can buy and sell goods and services and get paid in a stable currency. Fourth is to promote political reforms, stimulate the growth of civil society, build political parties and a free press, prepare for elections and organize representative government. Fifth, and last, is improving roads, bridges, electricity, water, telephones and the rest.

This last category of spending normally comes last because such projects take a long time to complete and the payoff on investment is very slow. These projects are also very expensive, far more than other objectives. "

James Dobbins ably and briefly explains why the priorities set by the US in Iraq were exactly backwards.

If I have one quibble it is that framing reconstruction through the five categories above might promote a tendency to seperate reconstruction into distict phases, each to be completed before the next is approached. Work in each can in fact be going on simultaneously, though timing and location need to be carefully thought through. However, the underlying process as embodied in those categories is perfectly true. This is the way development agencies and practitioners think. (And of course the quibble only arises because Dobbins has only the space of an op-ed.)

A basic aphorism of development work is: No development can take place without security.

That Iraq continues to be an insecure environment means that none of the ballyhooed projects (schools, clinics, bridges, electrification, etc and whatever), none of the "success stories", can be taken seriously.

Posted by Martial