RJISSF
H-Diplo|RJISSF

Roundtable 10-24 on Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding50 min read

What it takes to forge peace in conflict-affected societies is an enduring source of debate for scholars in peace studies and comparative politics. It is also a source of dispute among peacebuilding organizations, their country offices, and local stakeholders. In Global Governance and Local Peace, Susanna P. Campbell explores this complicated and sometimes contentious relationship, and asks what is required for peacebuilding communities to become genuine learning organizations.

H-Diplo | ISSF Roundtable, Volume X, No. 24 (2019)
issforum.org

Editors: Joshua Rovner and Diane Labrosse
Web/Production Editor: George Fujii

Susanna P. Campbell.  Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018.  ISBN:  9781108418652 (hardback, $99.99).

Published on 25 March 2019

Permalink: https://issforum.org/roundtables/10-24-peacebuilding

PDF URL: https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-10-24.pdf

Contents

© Copyright 2019 The Authors

 

Introduction by Joshua Rovner, American University

What it takes to forge peace in conflict-affected societies is an enduring source of debate for scholars in peace studies and comparative politics. It is also a source of dispute among peacebuilding organizations, their country offices, and local stakeholders. In Global Governance and Local Peace, Susanna P. Campbell explores this complicated and sometimes contentious relationship, and asks what is required for peacebuilding communities to become genuine learning organizations.

Campbell focuses on the country offices that are simultaneously accountable to higher headquarters as well to local actors. A country office is critical in building peace because it is the fulcrum that balances dueling pressures from above and below. How it performs this balancing act determines how much it learns about the requirements for peace.

The participants in this roundtable applaud the book’s clear thesis, novel approach, and relentless research. Campbell does the empirical deep dive: years of fieldwork, extensive archival research, and hundreds of interviews combine to produce a remarkably detailed examination of the interaction among organizations, their field offices, and local actors. This is the stuff of peacebuilding; not an abstract idea about how to bring lasting stability but a close examination of the day-to-day process of resolving conflicts and constructing a new political order. The reviewers agree that Campbell’s practical recommendations will be valuable for anyone involved in such work.

Of particular interest is her argument that some ‘bad behavior’ is a good thing. Campbell warns that paying too much heed to top-down demands from headquarters makes it difficult to adapt to local needs. As Catherine Weaver puts it, sometimes country offices do their best work when they go rogue. But Campbell is not arguing for complete autonomy; a true rogue actor would have no regard for formal guidance. Instead, country offices must grapple with two kinds of accountability, which often act at cross-purposes.

The reviewers raise some other questions. Naazneen Barma notes that the micro-level approach leaves aside the key macro-level issue: Do better country office practices improve the prospects for peace? While Campbell is clear that she is looking for variation in organizational learning, this does beg the question of how important learning is to overall success or failure.

Dan Honig praises Campbell’s framework for examining local relations, which is extremely useful given the field’s past emphasis on top-down accountability. But he finds the discussion of formal accountability unsatisfying and warns that it leads to conclusions that are almost self-evident. Campbell is surely right that international organizations that prioritize peacebuilding over other goals are likely to improve peacebuilding processes, but this is hardly surprising.

Finally, Roger Mac Ginty argues that Campbell’s ‘problem-solving’ approach sets aside deeper questions about the structure of power in post-conflict environments. A “critical” approach might shed light here and open the aperture on the study. That said, the book succeeds on its own terms, and Mac Ginty notes that the lessons therein will resonate with those who deal with the practical problems of peacebuilding. If this is right, it will also inform scholarship on the problem of ending wars in ways that lead to a better peace.

 

Participants:

Susanna P. Campbell is an Assistant Professor at American University’s School of International Service. Prof. Campbell’s research and teaching address war-to-peace transitions, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, international development and humanitarian aid, global governance, IO and INGO behavior, and the micro-dynamics of civil war and peace. She uses mixed-method research designs and has conducted extensive fieldwork in conflict-affected countries, including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste. She has received numerous grants for her research, including from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Swiss Network for International Studies, and the United States Institute of Peace. She is currently finishing her second book, Aiding Peace? Donor Behavior in Conflict-Affected Countries, and has published peer-reviewed articles in International Studies Review, Journal of Global Security Studies, Cambridge Review of International Studies, and International Peacekeeping, among other journals. Prof. Campbell has led evaluations of the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund, United Nations Development Program, and the World Bank and has worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and UNICEF. She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University in 2012 and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and The Graduate Institute in Geneva.

Joshua Rovner is Associate Professor at the School of International Service at American University. He is currently scholar-in-residence at the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

Naazneen H. Barma is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. She is author of The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her work on statebuilding, peacebuilding, and the political economy of development has appeared in journals such as International Peacekeeping, Conflict, Security & Development, and Governance. Her current research includes projects on the dynamics of foreign aid for statebuilding and the evolving global governance landscape. She is co-author of Rents to Riches? The Political Economy of Natural Resource-Led Development (World Bank, 2011), and co-editor of Institutions Taking Root: Building State Capacity in Challenging Contexts (World Bank, 2014). She is a founding member and co-director of Bridging the Gap, an initiative devoted to enhancing the policy impact of contemporary international affairs scholarship.

Dan Honig is an Assistant Professor of International Development at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the author of Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work (Oxford University Press, 2018). His research focuses on the relationship between organizational structure, management practice, and performance in developing country governments and organizations that provide foreign aid. Honig has also held a variety of positions outside the academy. He was special assistant, then advisor, to successive Ministers of Finance (Liberia); ran a local nonprofit focused on helping post-conflict youth realize the power of their own ideas to better their lives and communities through agricultural entrepreneurship (East Timor); and has worked in a wider range of countries (longer stints in India, Israel, Thailand; shorter in Somalia, South Sudan) for international NGOs, local NGOs, aid agencies, and developing country governments.

Roger Mac Ginty is Professor at the School of Government and International Affairs, and the Global Security Institute, at Durham University. He co-edits the journal Peacebuilding and co-directs the Everyday Peace Indicators project.

Catherine (Kate) Weaver is Associate Dean for Students and Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. She is a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security & Law, where she is the founding director of Next Generation Scholars Program. Weaver also co-directs (with Drs. Mike Findley and Rachel Wellhausen) Innovations for Peace and Development, an interdisciplinary research lab devoted to alleviating global poverty and peacebuilding. IPD works with the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, Development Gateway, the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund, and the United States Institute for Peace. She also works closely with the Eleanor Crook Foundation, and serves on the Board of Directors of Bread for the World.

 

 

Review by Naazneen H. Barma, Naval Postgraduate School

The question of how to build peace in countries recovering from internal conflict is one of the great normative concerns of our age. It is also one with enormous practical implications, given the extensive resources poured into peacebuilding by global organizations over the past three decades. In Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding, Susanna P. Campbell offers a remarkably original and insightful scholarly contribution by focusing on the organizations that engage in the peacebuilding endeavor.

Building upon exhaustive, interview-based fieldwork over 15 years in Burundi and a rigorous and innovative application of organizational theory to the topic of peacebuilding, Campbell elaborates a new typology to understand how the local country offices of international organizations (IOs), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and bilateral aid donors perform in conflict-affected countries. She argues that these country offices must be held accountable in two ways in order for them to learn and thereby have a chance of succeeding at peacebuilding (49-53). They must have headquarters that hold them formally accountable for prioritizing peacebuilding over other aims and activities. In addition, they must build relationships with in-country stakeholders that hold them informally accountable by providing them with local-level input. Together, these two forms of accountability form a double feedback loop that is necessary and sufficient to make country offices “peacebuilding learners,” able to identify the gaps between global peacebuilding aims and local peacebuilding outcomes and to take action to close that gap (23).

The heart of Campbell’s contribution is a granular, actor-centric look at specific organizations undertaking peacebuilding activities, when much of the scholarship rests on macro-level, aggregate measures of peacebuilding outcomes. She skillfully positions her study as follows: “This book does less to dispute the claims of the existing peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and global governance literature than to argue that they have overlooked a critical part of the picture—country-office performance—and are thus omitting important variables that help explain the local peacebuilding performance of global governors.” (16) Focusing on the “operational unit through which peacebuilding takes place” (12) is certainly conceptually important. By using IO, INGO, and bilateral aid agency country offices as a unit of analysis, Campbell also seizes a tremendous empirical opportunity, with fruitful results. The peacebuilding scholarship has gone a long way toward identifying the conditions under which particular types of intervention are more or less likely to be successful in any given context.[1] But such studies are hard pressed to explain why some peacebuilding organizations are more successful than others in the same context. Campbell identifies and uses this variation creatively, relying on her extensive research on five different organizations working on peacebuilding in Burundi over six distinct time periods from 1999–2014 to generate 28 observations for comparative analysis across organizations and over time. (25)[2] She marries this empirical strategy with a sophisticated typological theory of country-office “peacebuilding performance” (53–57) that is built on impressive knowledge of the organizational theory and global governance literatures.

Campbell is careful to define and defend the scope of her argument. She notes that in focusing on the outcome of organizational learning she is using a minimal measure of country performance. She also frames her argument as being about the necessary conditions for country offices to have an impact on peacebuilding outcomes—and acknowledges that this is by no means sufficient for ensuring positive change in war-torn countries. I will have more to say about the latter below, but this is nonetheless an important finding, especially if framed as follows: if either form of accountability is lacking, then country offices will not learn—instead they will focus too much on either global or local preferences without intermediating between them or, worst of all, become irrelevant by responding to neither (23). In short, if country offices do not learn and take action on the basis of that learning, they cannot be part of effecting meaningful change in post-conflict countries.

The book’s focus on local-level organizational units—the country offices—delivers a noteworthy contribution to the literature on global governance, where scholarship is more typically preoccupied with headquarters and their norms, cultures, and ability to solve global challenges.[3] Through her novel comparison of the country office performance of three different types of global organization, Campbell finds that it is the country offices of INGOs over those of IOs and bilateral agencies that are most likely to be peacebuilding learners and therefore perform well. The diluted formal accountability to their global governors that have led scholars to interpret INGOs as weak performers enables them, paradoxically, to be more adept at building informal local accountability and benefit from the double-loop learning that comes when both forms of accountability co-exist.

Global Governance and Local Peace is about what gives peacebuilding organizations the chance of being successful. It is not, however, a book about the peacebuilding outcomes those would-be peacebuilders do or do not actually achieve. By focusing on the former, Campbell follows in the path charted by Lise Morjé Howard and Séverine Autesserre, among others.[4] But their seminal works also systematically made the latter connection of tying organizational arguments to peacebuilding outcomes, a causal link that Campbell does not explore. She pays due homage to these works while arguing that they do not explain variation in country office performance across the range of organizations she studies in a single conflict-affected context. The ultimate significance of this research lies in one’s appraisal of whether the micro-level variation on which she focuses helps explain macro-level outcomes. Unfortunately, we have no real way of evaluating the claim, however plausible, that “Country offices that learn are thus more likely to achieve their peacebuilding aims that those that do not learn” (7).[5]

Empirically, too, the parsimonious application of the theoretical framework sacrifices texture in terms of peacebuilding outcomes in Burundi. The case studies exhaustively demonstrate the range of country office behavior over the six phases of Burundi’s war-to-peace transition.[6] This could equally have been the place for drawing further links between micro-organizational performance and macro-level results. The discussion of the Burundi Leadership Training Program’s ability to contribute to transformed mindsets in the leadership of Burundi’s armed forces is an example of where this connection is drawn very well (101–105). Overall, however, the empirical focus is heavily on organizational behavior, to the point of sometimes reading too much like the impact evaluations for which some of Campbell’s extensive research was first conducted. The empirical chapters, even that on the overarching Burundian context, are oddly disconnected from the (admittedly limited) political science scholarship on Burundi’s conflict and peacebuilding attempts with which Campbell is undoubtedly familiar.[7] The rich case studies would have been an ideal place to develop causal arguments about how country offices interact with local stakeholders to produce peacebuilding success or failure, a task that a number of other works undertake at the macro level.[8] Building deeper analytical connections between process and results would have enabled Campbell to demonstrate more richly how country offices respond to the changes in their environment that they themselves play a role in shaping.[9]

Practitioners will undoubtedly want to read this valuable book and will find much of tangible import—especially salient because Campbell’s own field-based operational experience on these matters reinforces her scholarly expertise. In particular, Campbell’s conclusion crystallizes what it means to build the “local ownership” of foreign aid programs, a mandate so firmly a part of the international aid lingo and so woefully under-achieved in practice. Yet the same practitioners may also find that the scholarly treatment of formal and informal accountability mechanisms is too black and white for practice that has, in reality, evolved a great deal on the ground over the past decade at least. Even at IOs—on the face of it the most hierarchical, centralized, and formally constrained of the organizations Campbell studies (142)—there are numerous formal incentives for managers at country offices to build informal accountability mechanisms with local stakeholders.

Campbell references several times the irony embedded in her argument that “Good country office performance, thus, requires seemingly “bad behavior” by individual staff members who break or bend rules to create informal local accountability.” (4) This formulation runs the risk of inaccurately juxtaposing formal with informal accountability, when, in practice, global governors have increasingly come to recognize that enabling innovative and locally grounded flexibility at the local level is precisely what enables country offices to deliver on their formal mandates. It is not truly rule-breaking or bad behavior that is required when, in building local partnerships, country offices are doing what their principals want. To some extent, these organizations have already started to internalize Campbell’s conclusion that “effective global governance … require[s] increased local governance of global actors.” (27)

The central argument of Global Governance and Local Peace is most certainly generalizable to a range of IOs, INGOs, bilateral agencies and their country offices in different countries and different fields of operation. Here, too, the significance of the argument is more about the behavior of the organizations themselves and less about their ability to effect desired outcomes per se. Nevertheless, Campbell has delivered on her stated analytical aim of understanding variation in the local performance potential of global governors and, in so doing, she has delivered a significant contribution to the scholarship on global governance. Importantly, she has also charted an expanded research agenda for those interested in delving more into the causal connection between the behavior of peacebuilders and whether and how they contribute to effecting change for the better in post-conflict countries.

 

 

Review by Dan Honig, Johns Hopkins SAIS

Susanna Campbell’s Global Governance and Local Peace: Accountability and Performance in International Peacebuilding pushes the frontier of knowledge forward on both international efforts at peacebuilding, and the internal functioning of bureaucracies in international organizations. In 28 (!) case studies spread across organizations and over time, Campbell explores the impact of “local accountability” and “formal peacebuilding accountability” on the observed peacebuilding learning of the organization, which she measures by “country office acts to reduce the gap between its peacebuilding aims and outcomes” (6). The two key explanatory variables interact, forming a 2-by-2 typology of country office types.

The contribution begins in the research design, where Campbell is refreshingly broad when it comes to organizational form. She examines country offices of multilaterals (e.g. the United National Development Program), international non-governmental organizations (e.g. CARE International), and bilateral donors (e.g. the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development) in their attempts to foster local peace in Burundi. She also closely traces within-organization variation over time, which allows her to examine how changes in country and organizational circumstances (like changes in funding, or organizational priority) affect her outcomes of interest.

This volume provides rich new insight regarding the nuanced differences in the constraints under which different types of organizations labor. Campbell manages to challenge some of the mainstream assumptions of scholars of global governance and international organizations regarding the limitations and advantages of these organizational forms. In part, her fresh insights stem from her merging of an approach more common in the study of public administration—a focus on implementation, organizational structure, and bureaucratic incentives and practices—with a subject area that has traditionally been the purview of international relations scholars. Campbell admirably follows the spirit of James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy in beginning her examination where the ‘rubber meets the road’; the field offices where organizational staff must actually deliver on their mandates, missions, and/or projects.[10]

Campbell finds that effective peacebuilding learning and accomplishment of peacebuilding goals requires country offices to delegate real authority to local stakeholders. With this authority, local stakeholders are able to hold country offices accountable and give offices meaningful performance feedback—which allows agencies to learn and adapt in a constantly changing environment. In the absence of these local accountability mechanisms, organizations are likely to be at best “sovereignty reinforcers,” a designation in Campbell’s typology indicating that an organization merely parrots the preferences of the host government—even in circumstances where those preferences are not in the interests of long-term peace.

Campbell argues that “Global governors succeed at peacebuilding only when well-placed country-office staff take the risk of grounding the organization’s global peacebuilding priorities in the local reality” (5). Key in this telling is risk. Headquarters are, at best, unaware of the actions of country offices to establish local accountability. Indeed, sometimes establishing local accountability routines requires field staff to bend or break the organization’s rules. This “bad behavior” (4), as Campbell puts it, comes about largely because field staff believe it important. Local accountability comes about, in Campbell’s telling, not in consonance but rather in conflict with the career-concerned course of action we might expect from field staff.

The other half of Campbell’s explanatory schema—“formal peacebuilding accountability”—felt somewhat less compelling. In the absence of an organization’s prioritization of peacebuilding and formal accountability for same, Campbell finds, organizations either engage in very little learning (“stagnant players” in Campbell’s schema) or engage in learning only at a very small scale that does not challenge the broader institutional conflict dynamics (“micro-adaptors,” 22-23). In my view, the concerns regarding “formal peacebuilding accountability” are largely in the construction. Campbell’s move away from directly examining peacebuilding success to focusing on organizational learning as the key outcome variable in the study is prudent: assessing ‘success’ objectively is particularly difficult in the context of peacebuilding efforts, which may take substantial time to pay off. But this also means that the key outcome variable—organizational learning—is defined in terms instrumental to a given organization’s goals—its “peacebuilding aims” are inherently the anchor around which learning occurs.

Campbell determines the levels of formal peacebuilding accountability based primarily on “whether communications… between headquarters and the country office prioritized peacebuilding above other potential aims” (31). When operationalized in the case studies, formal peacebuilding accountability sometimes seemed to collapse in practice to the possibly self-evident conclusion that organizations that prioritize peacebuilding are more likely to work to improve their performance at peacebuilding.  That said, this analysis is more than worth the ink spent if this volume influences even a single organization involved in peacebuilding to prioritize this important work in order to improve learning and ultimately peacebuilding performance. In addition, the interaction effect – that the benefits of agents’ “bad behavior” in fostering informal local accountability is enhanced by, rather than undermined by, a formal focus on peacebuilding—is indeed intriguing, and counter to what many scholars and practitioners might have expected.

Campbell leaves us with a sense that organizational structure matters, but that it is a starting point rather than the answer to what happens in practice. Much of the interesting puzzle lies in country offices, and in the decisions of field staff regarding the exercise of their agency. For an industry increasingly focused on local adaptation and context-driven solutions, Campbell’s work suggests that empowering country offices may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. Decentralized decision making is common across Campbell’s cases, and may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for good outcomes.

What individual agents want to accomplish, and what they do, matters to organizational outcomes. This resonates with my experience, and, I imagine, with that of many others who have served in roles in the broad constellation of organizations involved in development, humanitarian, or peacebuilding activities. The importance of field staff is perhaps particularly large in peacebuilding work, which tends to occur in settings where it is exceedingly difficult to fully understand environments from distant headquarters (which is often the logic for the creation of country offices in the first place). I could not agree more with Campbell’s suggestion that we ought to focus more on human resources and hiring, and less on top-down controls, to achieve better outcomes. This parallels Jane Mansbridge’s call for more of what she terms “selection-based” rather than “sanctions-based” accountability in the public sector more broadly; a focus less on the carrots and sticks of ex-post accountability and more on the type of agent who populate critical implementation roles.[11] This call deserves to be taken very seriously.

For scholars of global governance and international relations, Campbell’s volume provides a carefully researched and well-evidenced look at the interrelationships between different actors in the system. Donors, for example, are neither uniformly heroes nor villains in this tale; donor pressure sometimes leads to better outcomes, and sometimes worse, depending on the nature of donors’ demands and recipients’ responses.[12] In Campbell’s depiction, those receiving funds are far from passive. They operate with substantial degrees of discretion, and can themselves shape the behavior of donors. Campbell also provides a compelling argument that, despite our desire for all good things to be possible, organizations must ‘pick a horse’; an organization that prioritizes humanitarian response, or long-term development efforts, may be insufficiently focused on peacebuilding to meaningfully learn about and impact conflict dynamics. What is true of priorities is also true of accountability. Upward accountability of an organization to its powerful board members, legislators, or donors, or global accountability to targets like the Sustainable Development Goals, may push organizations away from the local accountability needed to adapt.

In my own work, I have argued that instructions to an organization such as “be more locally adaptive” are no more actionable than “perform better” or “be more successful.”[13] Campbell helps us to see precisely what it takes to actually build appropriately nuanced peacebuilding interventions. Her answer—shifting accountability from those with money, power, and status to those who have none—will not be easy for many organizations, and possibly scholars, to stomach. But shifting real power outside the organization’s boundaries will in fact, in Campbell’s telling, help organizations achieve their peacebuilding goals. Campbell’s work suggests that while granting power to local actors—and thus requiring those at the top to voluntarily reduce their own control—may sound implausible at first blush, the instantiation case has already been made: organizations are already empowering local actors in peacebuilding programs.

A clear-headed focus on results—long a refrain for development and peacebuilding organizations – ought to mean that Campbell’s volume, taken seriously, can form part of the evidence base for real organizational change. The trick is to take what currently happens in the breach—the “bad behavior”—and make it ‘good’ behavior, but without creating organizational routines that suffocate the flame they seek to kindle.

There is much to be said for Campbell’s conclusions. But there is also wisdom worth capturing in how she poses her questions, and the range of potential causes she explores. Scholars and practitioners tend to explore effectiveness as a product of formal program design and technocratic fixes, and how those features interact with local context. Importantly, Campbell highlights the fact that effectiveness is also as a question of how organizational dynamics, internal and external power relations, and the exercise of agency by an organization’s agents interact with context. Were peacebuilding actors to spend more time looking in the mirror at their own ‘industrial organization,’ they might not like what they see; but their work would, as Campbell demonstrates, very likely benefit.

 

 

Review by Roger Mac Ginty, Durham University

The field of Peace and Conflict Studies has reached a maturity unthinkable only a few decades ago. During the Cold War, those with an interest in intra-state conflict were usually area studies specialists, or analysts who saw the world refracted through the strategic competition of the U.S. and USSR. The study of the drivers of conflict linked with development and identity issues, and the study of peace, were very much minority pursuits. Now, however, we can observe a well-tilled field of study and practice. Peace and Conflict Studies has become mainstream and benefits from multi-disciplinary approaches that are ever more nuanced and sophisticated. Central to this, unfortunately, is the continued existence, and increased visibility, of violent conflict.

The past three decades have seen quite remarkable professionalization, projection, and scaling-up by international organizations and international non-governmental organizations charged with responding to conflict. There has been considerable task-expansion too, as traditional approaches to conflict management (mainly interdiction and ceasefire monitoring) have given way to more ambitious tasks associated with peacebuilding and a range of other activities often linked with statebuilding. The maturity of the peacebuilding field has meant that there is now a long and varied evidential trail. There are also ‘pracademics’—like Susanna P. Campbell—who can draw on personal experience as practitioners and academics over the long-term.

Rather than drawing on a single research project, Campbell’s Global Governance and Local Peace benefits from observations on a series of research and peacebuilding projects conducted mainly in Burundi over the 2002-2016 period, during which time international peacebuilding has seen the optimism of its liberal internationalist roots curbed by bitter on-the-ground realities. The experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq (not quite battlefield defeats, but military withdrawals in the face of unsustainable human and financial losses) were important here. But so too has been the apparent realization that cases like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur, and Burundi are never-ending. Many of those involved in peacebuilding now see them as budget, energy, and patience-draining exercises that produce uncertain results, ungrateful and unreformed ‘beneficiaries’, and impatient donors. In short, the jury is out on whether peacebuilding actually works.[14]

One response to the problems of apparently never-ending peacebuilding interventions has been an increased attention on measuring performance, and innovations in how accountability can be captured. This occurred alongside a greater professionalization and standardization of peacebuilding and related operations—something aided by growing technocracy and the mainstreaming of New Public Management, a philosophy that attempts to import business practices into government. Basically, the country director in any organization is now beholden to the finance director in the office next door. The key focus of Susanna Campbell’s work—rather like the recent work of Severine Autesserre[15]—is to look at the “back office” aspects of peacebuilding in Burundi. It is here—in a sense—that much of the real action lies.

How peacebuilding activities are organised, directed, executed, audited, and reviewed will have a bearing on how peacebuilding is experienced and regarded at the local level. While peacebuilding and management manuals might be full of neat concepts (like organisational learning), Campbell’s study shows how on-the-ground complications mean that these neat concepts do not always work out as intended. A key contribution of this work is bringing light to the often very real possibility of miscommunication between the various actors involved in peacebuilding – especially between the headquarters of a peacebuilding organisation and its staff on-the-ground.

While New Public Management sets out clear accountability procedures—often linked with finances and almost always concerned with upwards accountability—the notion of accountability to local populations is quite new. Indeed, until recently, the principal role of local populations in areas experiencing peacebuilding was to be grateful. Yet, of course, local “buy-in” is essential for the success of peacebuilding interventions. Without local support, most peacebuilding interventions are destined to be just that: interventions that have only limited and short-term traction with local populations.

Campbell has put together a detailed record of accountability mechanisms for peacebuilding mechanisms in Burundi. Her case studies are the United Nations in Burundi, two International Non-Governmental Organizations (CARE and the Burundi Leadership Training Program), and a bilateral donor—the UK’s Department for International Development. She highlights the tensions between the ambitions of global governance actors (stability, standardisation, financial accountability) and those of local actors that are—unsurprisingly—often concerned with local level and fluid circumstances. A key aspect of the book is the tension between formal and informal accountability mechanisms.

The author is upfront in placing herself in the ‘problem-solving’ rather than ‘critical’ paradigm of Peace and Conflict Studies. That is, according to Robert Cox’s epistemological scheme, the author is interested in practical solutions to on-going problems and less interested in the underlying power dynamics that produce these social conditions.[16] Yet, on reflection, Cox’s binary may require revisiting in terms of Peace and Conflict Studies. There are plenty of scholars—like Campbell herself—who straddle both sides. They are interested in issues of effectiveness in the real world while—at the same time—capable of picking apart the underlying drivers of dysfunction in organisations and structures. Admittedly, Campbell’s critique is tempered and seems incurious about wider issues of power but it is present in aspects the work. More critical scholars would, perhaps, have delved more deeply into the meanings of key terms like local and informal (and the power relations that scaffold them), and wondered about approaches to peacebuilding beyond projects and programmes. Nonetheless, Global Governance and Local Peace is a serious analysis of peacebuilding in a context that has received significant peacebuilding investment over a sustained period of time.

The book’s insights from Burundi will most likely resonate with peacebuilding practitioners and scholars familiar with other contexts. Particularly important is the book’s call for responsive types of accountability that involve a dialogue between the donor or headquarters and those actually implementing peacebuilding work. In this view, monitoring and evaluation, and the building of accountability, is a process rather than event.

 

Review by Catherine Weaver, University of Texas at Austin

Let Them Go Rogue

Evidence-based decision-making and impact evaluation are now largely mainstreamed in international development. Yet clear data on international peacebuilding performance remains scarce. A recent study by 3ie, a major international evaluation firm, reveals the shocking dearth of rigorous research on peacebuilding effectiveness, despite the relative increase in peacebuilding activities by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.[17] So what do we actually know about when, where, and under what conditions peacebuilding works?

In her path-breaking book, Dr. Susanna Campbell delves deep into the organizational side of this question. She draws from extensive qualitative work over 15 years of archival research, over 300 interviews, and participant and non-participant observation in Burundi. Specifically, Campbell focuses on the behavior of five country offices at six crucial turning points in Burundi 1999-2014: the UN Missions, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)—Burundi, CARE International Burundi, the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) Burundi, and Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP). As a whole, this deep scope of work captures the variation between international governmental, non-governmental, and bilateral organizations, as well as within these organizations over time as external conditions and internal leadership and staff shift. The longitudinal element of this study is particularly relevant, insofar as Campbell is able to identify the distinct attributes of organizations that shape the willingness and capacity of organizations to learn from past performance to inform future programs. While limited in its focus on one country, and thus perhaps somewhat constrained in its generalizability, the depth of this work is remarkable and its insights persuasive.

The result of this intensive study is understandably complex and nuanced, and at times confusing in its use of new terminology, such as “micro-adapters” and “sovereignty reinforcers” (23). Yet I would argue that this is what one would reasonably expect from such a thorough and inductive study that unfolded over years in the field. And while the route to her conclusions is sometimes difficult to follow, Campbell’s punchline is clear. She argues that there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for successful peacebuilding: an organization’s embrace of informal local accountability, alongside robust (but non-constraining) formal accountability measures.

In other words, organizations that pursue peacebuilding goals need to be open to working with local actors to define, monitor, and assess these programs. Simultaneously, as agents delegated to carry out peacebuilding tasks, organizations must be responsive to their primary principals in headquarters or funding agencies. Top-down accountability, however, must be carefully bounded. Counter to rational choice theories and expectations, agents endowed with more (not less) autonomy are better able to strike the tenuous balance necessary to achieve accountability to different actors at different levels.

Informal local accountability is particularly important for learning, defined by Campbell as a process of reducing the gap between the objectives of global peacebuilding organizations and local peacebuilding outcomes. Different combinations of informal and formal accountability yield four types of organizations. First, they may be peacebuilding learners, demonstrating an effective balance between formal peacebuilding accountability and informal local accountability that allows for constructive feedback and corresponding changes to underlying assumptions and elements of operations. Second, organizations may be micro-adapters, wherein they show strong informal accountability to local stakeholders, but weak accountability to their formal principals. Third, organization may be sovereignty reinforcers, showing a strong upwards accountability but very little responsiveness and learning from local actors. Fourth, these organizations may be stagnant players, where they lack both formal peacebuilding accountability and informal local accountability (23). In this 2×2 matrix, the optimal outcome for both peacebuilding performance is obviously peacebuilding learning, whereas the worst outcome is stagnant player.

It is often confusing to follow the empirical logic that led Campbell to determine what box an agency found itself in at specific points in time. Such is the risk of trying to compartmentalize the complexity of the real world into a neat Weberian typology. Yet I had no trouble agreeing with the most interesting and counterintuitive claim of Campbell’s study: “[g]ood country-office performance….requires seemingly ‘bad behavior’ by individual staff members who break or bend the rules to create informal local accountability” (4).

In pragmatic terms, this challenges the most basic insight of most rationalist and principal-agent theories. These theories attribute better organizational performance to the ability of principals (such as the UK parliament) to exercise oversight and control vis-à-vis self-interested agents (such as DFID), who are themselves seeking to maximize their independence with regard to the interpretation and implementation of their mandates.[18] This logic does not hold up to empirical analysis, at least in the evaluation of peacebuilding. Rather, according to Campbell, to enable or incentivize good performance by peacebuilding agencies, principals must loosen upwards accountability and permit organizational autonomy or “agency slack” to make space for country-level management and staff to empower local accountability (50).

Agency slack is directly and positively correlated to organizational learning. Campbell distinguishes two kinds of learning: “When an organization engages in single-loop learning, it simply adjusts the way that it implements an activity without questioning the relevance of the activity to the context…. Double-loop learning means that the organization alters its overall aim and approach to make both its aims and its activities more relevant to the context in which the organization in operating” (42). Double-loop learning may be constrained if organizations on the ground are bound too tight to their original mandates, rules, standard operating procedures, and organizational cultures that focus more on outputs and deliverables that outcomes and impact. Such constrained learning is evident, as Campbell finds, in the case of the United Nations Development Programme. Tied too tightly to its development mandate, the organization’s mission in Burundi found it difficult over time to carve out a clear set of peacebuilding goals that considered the preferences and met the needs of local stakeholders.

In the case of Burundi over 15 years, Campbell concludes that of all the organizational types, INGOs may be especially well positioned to become peacebuilding learners or microadapters and thus best poised to achieve peacebuilding success. This is arguably due to weaker formal upward accountability to principals, which empowers their country offices to develop informal local accountability routines more easily than IOs or bilateral donors. This itself is a counterintuitive finding with respect to other studies of INGO behavior, which find INGOs to be overly sensitive to the political preferences of key funders in choosing their causes and modes of operation.[19] Campbell demonstrates this in two of her cases: CARE International and the Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP). While formal accountability to donors still matters, innovative INGO country-office staff have relatively more room to maneuver than their governmental counterparts. In turn, these staff members can often influence donor preferences, leading to the revision of formal accountability routines to the benefit of peacebuilding performance.

In comparison, Campbell finds that international governmental organizations like the UN Development Programme tend to be more constrained by formal accountability and less likely to pursue informal local solutions, however promising. Nonetheless, she finds variation over time within these organizations, showing that “…. bureaucratic pathologies, organizational culture, and the preferences of principals play a role in country-office behavior but do not determine it. Instead, the behavior of IO country offices is explained by the interaction between the accountability routines created by their principals and headquarters-level bureaucrats, and the way in which IO country-office staff navigate, interpret, and circumvent these routines.” (147). These cases emphasize the role that senior mission leadership can play in exploiting the ambiguity in operational mandates and helping staff circumvent bureaucratic barriers to establishing informal local accountability (172-173).[20]

Not surprisingly, Campbell finds that bilateral donors face the highest barriers to balancing formal accountability with informal local accountability. Bilateral agencies are indelibly driven by largely home country interests and have fewer opportunities, in principal-agent parlance, to carve our autonomy or play multiple principals against one another. In the case of DFID in Burundi, pressure from headquarters to focus on the Millennium Development Goals, and to uphold standard operating procedures regarding the delegation of project implementation, limited the ability of local DFID leaders to pursue local peacebuilding goals. This, Campbell argues, ultimately undermined the local relevance and effectiveness of DFID peacebuilding projects (228).

Campbell’s findings provide valuable lessons on how major international powers and their agencies might approach peacebuilding reforms. These conclusions can be summarized by two major observations. First, more authority needs to be delegated to local actors in defining and implementing peacebuilding activities. This requires more, not less, autonomy for IGO, INGO, and bilateral agency management and staff at the country level. Second, in order to empower diverse stakeholders on the ground, country-level management and staff need to be incentivized and socialized to the importance of local informal accountability—a deeper cultural change that is not easily mandated from above.[21] To this end, while one might assume that the allocation of more resources may be a good answer to enabling such change, shifts in organizational culture must avoid compliance-focused accountability that may only inhibit productive organizational learning and change. In both instances, the implication for both IO scholars and policymakers is quite clear: if we want effective peacebuilding in the world today, we must create the space for peacebuilding agencies to go rogue.

 

 

Author’s Response by Susanna P. Campbell, American University

Global Governance and Local Peace argues that in order for international actors to help build peace in war-torn contexts, they have to be locally accountable. To do so, however, individual staff may need to break or bend rules that were established to make their organizations accountable to global, not local, stakeholders. Local accountability is also likely to be important for international security actors who seek to prevent violent extremism, win hearts and minds, or reduce terrorism.[22] Like peacebuilding, these security interventions aim to alter local power dynamics in highly complex societies. In fact, operational guidance for preventing violent extremism and counter-terrorism emphasizes the importance of real local knowledge and buy-in, although it does not explain how intervening organizations can create the necessary local accountability.[23] Likewise, development scholars and practitioners agree that local ownership and adaptation are necessary for sustainable development but do not explain how globally-accountable aid organizations can also make themselves locally accountable.[24]

Naazneen Barma, Dan Honig, Roger Mac Ginty, and Catherine Weaver bring a breadth of knowledge of these diverse interventions to bear on their fascinating reviews of my book. I am a real admirer of each of these scholars and am grateful to them for taking the time to read my book and offer such shrewd commentary and discussion of its potential extensions. I am also grateful to Joshua Rovner for organizing this excellent roundtable and for writing such an astute introduction.

Dan Honig focuses much of his review on the role of individual agency in country offices. He is well-placed to make these arguments both because he was a staff person in a United Nations (UN) country office and because his excellent book identifies the importance of enabling country-based staff to use their judgement to navigate complex contexts.[25] This is why Honig’s insight that country-office autonomy is necessary but not sufficient for peacebuilding performance is particularly important. Country offices are also likely to require the judgement of diverse local stakeholders whose institutions and behaviors they aim to help transform.

Catherine Weaver’s expertise in principal-agent theory leads her astutely to argue that my book “challenges the most basic insight of most rationalist and principal-agent theories.”[26] According to Weaver, these theories “attribute better organizational performance to the ability of principals (such as the UK [United Kingdom] Parliament) to exercise oversight and control vis-à-vis self-interested agents (such as DFID, [the United Kingdom Department for International Development]).” Instead, she argues that my book shows that these organizations need to create “the space for peacebuilding agencies to go rogue.”

Naazneen Barma draws on her extensive knowledge of peacebuilding and statebuilding processes to focus on the crucial role that country offices can play in mediating between the preferences of global and local actors.[27] But Barma also questions why Global Governance and Local Peace does not make more of a causal connection between country-office behavior and Burundi’s war-to-peace transition. This is a question to which I gave much thought in the design and implementation of this research project. I chose to focus on a minimal measure of organizational performance—organizational learning—rather than to try and identify how organizational characteristics may lead directly to changes in the country context. I did this for three primary reasons. First, I wanted to compare a diverse set of intervening organizations—International Organizations (IOs), International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), and bilateral donors—and needed a common measure of performance across these seemingly diverse actors and interventions. Second, the changes within the country context are undoubtedly due to factors beyond the control and influence of individual country offices. As the Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP) case shows, intervening organizations may contribute to significant changes in a war-to-peace transition, but are unlikely to be the sole cause of them. Third, and relatedly, there did not seem to be much of a theoretical or empirical basis for a one-to-one relationship between organizational behaviors and changes in the country context. Change in the country context depends at least in part on the readiness and willingness of domestic (i.e., local) actors to implement the desired change. If we were to judge the performance of country offices on the basis of actions taken by domestic actors in the conflict-affected contest, then we would attribute success and failure to factors well beyond the country-office’s control.

Roger Mac Ginty’s review brings his extensive scholarship on peacebuilding to bear, identifying important trends in the peacebuilding field.[28] He argues that, “until recently, the principal role of local populations in areas experiencing peacebuilding was to be grateful. Yet, of course, local ‘buy-in’ is essential for the success of peacebuilding interventions.” Without local ‘buy-in,’ he argues, international peacebuilding efforts will not lead to real changes in local conditions.

Each of the reviews also provides key insights that led me to think through potential future research, which I have outlined below.

Who behaves badly and when is bad behavior necessary?

The potential importance of ‘bad behavior’ for organizational performance raises new questions about different types of rule-breaking behavior and its implications. Clearly, not all rule-breaking or rule-bending behavior is constructive or effective. Not all rule-breaking or rule-bending behavior matters in the same way. There are big rules that can be broken and small rules that can be broken, with potentially different consequences. What is the range of options for rule-breaking, rule-bending, and rule-abiding? And, beyond the creation of informal local accountability, which types of rule-breaking, rule-bending, and rule-abiding really matter for organizational performance?

Furthermore, not all individuals working for global governance organizations are equally likely to innovate or, if necessary, bend or break the rules. What determines whether an individual exhibits rule-breaking and rule-bending behavior? Are there individual personality characteristics that make some staff more likely to innovate, take risks, or break rules than others? Do social networks within the organization facilitate or undermine innovation and rule-breaking behavior? Does the age or seniority of the individual staff person, or his/her boss, matter? Does the gender, race, or nationality of the staff person matter? Is it necessary to have rule-breaking teams, or is one individual sufficient?

How does organizational structure or culture influence rule-breaking, rule-bending, or rule-abiding behavior? How do different organizational forms influence the need, willingness, and ability of staff to break or bend rules? How do these factors vary with the size or governance structure of the organization? How do they vary between the headquarters and country office? What are the implications of the answers to these questions for the likely performance of IOs, bilateral aid donors, INGOs, and even private contractors in conflict-affected countries?

The power of the back-office bureaucracy

To many observers, discussions of bureaucracy, procedures, and accountability seem to be inherently boring and void of political intrigue, power, and influence. I argue, however, that these seemingly banal procedures are one manifestation of global power relations. They mark the line between those who have power in international relations and those who are largely disenfranchised by a Westphalian system of sovereign states. Mac Ginty contends that I seem “incurious about wider issues of power.” But I view the global-local dichotomy as one that is grounded in power. Global governance organizations have power and authority to operate across borders. They are, in turn, accountable to global actors—states, legislatures, and wealthy individuals—who have the authority to set the standards for these organizations and determine whether or not they have met these standards.[29] I use the term ‘local actors,’ in turn, to refer to the broad range of individuals and groups in conflict-affected countries to whom global governance actors are not accountable but whose lives they influence.

From this perspective, Global Governance and Local Peace is not just a study of peacebuilding performance. It is a study of how power is embedded in the structure of IOs, bilateral donors, and INGOs and how individual country-office staff can potentially alter these power dynamics. As Honig notes, “while granting power to local actors—and thus requiring those at the top to voluntarily reduce their own control—may sound implausible at first blush, the instantiation case has already been made [in Campbell’s book]: organizations are already empowering local actors in peacebuilding programs.”

Ironically, it is this delegation of power to local stakeholders—beyond the organization’s boundaries—that enables the organization to achieve its principals’ aims of helping to build peace and create local ownership. Barma asks whether the creation of this informal local accountability can really be considered ‘bad behavior’ if it enables the country office to achieve its principals’ aims. The problem is that formal accountability in IOs, bilateral donors, and INGOs is not structured to achieve peacebuilding aims. Formal accountability systems prioritize spending money and delivering prepackaged programs over the achievement of complex, nuanced local-level change. In other words, country offices’ formal accountability systems, which their principals established, actually undermine their ability to achieve their principals’ peacebuilding aims. To achieve their peacebuilding aims, country-office staff are often left with little choice other than to circumvent or undermine their formal accountability systems.

The broader research agenda that these findings point to is one that views these “back office” dynamics as a central place of power, authority, and agency. It asks: a) how do accountability routines, contractual procedures, procurement practices, and evaluation frameworks influence the behavior of country offices? and b) how do individual staff in country offices alter the behavior of these organizations, in part through their mastery of these bureaucratic routines?

Networks of influence and interaction

In Global Governance and Local Peace, I seek to explain variation in the peacebuilding performance of IO, INGO, and bilateral donor country offices. Future research on the effect of international intervention on conflict-affected countries should focus on networks of influence and interaction, rather than only on the behavior of individual country-offices. It should examine how the wide range of state, non-state, international, and domestic actors operating in any single conflict-affected country interact and establish formal or informal support networks. Rather than trying to identify the aggregate effect of all international actors on a country’s war-to-peace transition, future research should take seriously that no international actor exists in isolation from national actors—both state and non-state—operating in that same context. This leads to a series of questions about the nature and influence of international-domestic (or global-local) networks in fluid, conflict-affected contexts.

How should we conceptualize the chain of delegation between principal and agent when it stretches across organizations and countries, for example beginning with the US Congress and then extending to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), then to a private DC-based private contractor, and then to a national NGO? How is the performance of international development, humanitarian, security assistance, and peacebuilding actors in conflict-affected countries determined by their formal contractual agreements with the recipient government? How do informal relations between non-state actors, marginalized communities, and international NGOs influence the success of non-state actors in challenging the authority of the state? The societal upheaval created by civil war and political violence rewires many of the networks and relationships between international, domestic, state, and non-state actors. To better understand the dynamics of war-to-peace transitions, future research should identify the fixed and dynamic aspects of these interactions and how international-domestic networks influence conflictual and cooperative dynamics on the ground.

[1] Influential work in this probabilistic tradition includes: Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Michael W. Doyle and Nicolas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Christoph Zürcher, Carrie Manning, Kristie D. Evenson, Rachel Hayman, Sarah Riese, and Nora Roehner, Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization After War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).

[2] The presentation of the methodology upon which the study is based and the manner in which Campbell catalogs and deploys her empirical material from more than 300 interviews are exemplary.

[3] For example, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Tana Johnson, Organizational Progeny: Why Governments are Losing Control Over the Proliferating Structures of Global Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[4] Lise Morjé Howard, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble With the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[5] The analytical importance of treating a peacebuilding process as distinct from its outcomes and articulating the causal relationship between process and outcomes is articulated in Naazneen H. Barma, Naomi Levy, and Jessica R. Piombo, “Disentangling Aid Dynamics in Statebuilding and Peacebuilding: A Causal Framework,” International Peacekeeping 24:2 (April 2017), 187-211.

[6] A small critique on this front lies in the binary definition of the two accountability mechanisms: it is not prima facie clear how little these accountability mechanisms have to matter in practice to be coded as nil.

[7] For example, Peter Uvin, Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi (London: Zed Books, 2009), René Lemarchand, “Peacebuilding in the Great Lakes Region of Africa,” in Peacebuilding, Power, and Politics in Africa, edited by Devon Curtis and Gwinyayi A. Dzinesa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), and Devon Curtis, “The International Peacebuilding Paradox: Power Sharing and Post-Conflict Governance in Burundi,” African Affairs 112:446 (2013), 72-91; 212-231.

[8] Two recent excellent examples of this approach are Jeni Whalan, How Peace Operations Work: Power, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Jasmine-Kim Westendorf, Why Peace Processes Fail: Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2015).

[9] The bulk of the positivist peacebuilding scholarship views international peacebuilding operations as exogenous treatments to conflict-affected countries, as does Campbell. The analytical value of an endogenous perspective on peacebuilding is articulated in Naazneen H. Barma, The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[10] James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

[11] Jane Mansbridge, “A Contingency Theory of Accountability,” in Mark Bovens, Robert E. Goodin, and Thomas Schillemans, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[12] This conclusion seems to be an emerging consensus. See, for example, Sarah Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[13] See, for example, D. Honig and N. Gulrajani, “Making Good On Donors’ Desire to Do Development Differently,” Third World Quarterly 39:1 (2018): 68-84.

[14] On this, see Pamina Firchow’s excellent recent book Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[15] Severine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014).

[16] Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10:2 (1981): 126-155.

[17] 3ie, “Evidence for Peacebuilding Evidence Gap Map”; http://gapmaps.3ieimpact.org/evidence-maps/evidence-peacebuilding-evidence-gap-map

[18] See, for example, Darren G. Hawkins et al (eds), Delegation Under Anarchy: States, International Organizations, and Principal-Agency Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tamar Gutner and Alexander Thompson (eds), “The Politics of IO Performance,” Special Issue of Review of International Organizations 5:3 (2010).

[19] See Alexander Cooley and James Ron, “The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action,” International Security 27:1 (Summer 2002): 5-39. See also Clifford Bob, Marketing Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[20] On the constructive elements of ambiguity in organizational mandates, see Jacqueline Best, The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

[21] Michael N. Barnett and Martha G. Finnemore 2004. Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Catherine E. Weaver, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[22] Interim Report of the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, Beyond the Homeland: Protecting American from Extremism in Fragile States (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2018).

[23] Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, Department of the Navy, United States Marine Corps, 2006).

[24] Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock, Building State Capability: Evidence. Analysis. Action. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[25] Dan Honig, Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Won’t Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[26] Catherine Weaver, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Daniel Nielson, Michael J. Tierney, and Catherine E Weaver, “Bridging the Rationalist-Constructivist Divide: Re-engineering the Culture of the World Bank,” Journal of International Relations and Development 9:2 (2006): 107-139.

[27] Naazneen Barma, The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

[28] See, for example, Roger Mac Ginty, “Hybrid Peace: The Interaction Between Top-down and Bottom-up Peace,” Security Dialogue 41:4 (2011): 391-412.

[29] Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane, “Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics,” American Political Science Review 99:1 (2005): 29-43.