The Foreign Office launched its new Strategic Framework yesterday. It seems rather a grand title for a leaflet that stretches to two pages of A4, but perhaps that means we can hope for a fuller exposition in due course. Here’s your cut-out-and-keep guide to how it’s different from the old strategic framework:
Stuff that was in before and is still in now: WMD, terrorism, conflict prevention, the EU, a high growth economy including support for UK business, energy security, climate change, human rights & good governance, migration, consular stuff, overseas territories.
Stuff that was in before but has disappeared: Organised crime (“reducing the harm to the UK from international crime, including drug trafficking, people smuggling and money laundering”); sustainable development.
Stuff that has appeared for the first time: More emphasis on conflict resolution (“including through an integrated civil-military approach to peacekeeping, stabilisation and sustained post-conflict peacebuilding”); an explicit reference to the Millennium Development Goals [happy faces over at DFID, no doubt]; and a reference to the international system in its own right [rather than just in the context of conflict prevention, as under Margaret Beckett].
FCO say that they’ve shrunk the list of priorities from ten priorities to four policy goals (counter-terrorism and weapons proliferation; prevent and resolve conflict; low-carbon, high-growth global economy; effective international institutions) and three essential services (support British economy; support British nationals abroad; support managed migration to Britain). But given that there are three distinct sub-points under each policy goal, and that 95% of the content of the old priorites is still in there, I’m politely sceptical.
Still, let’s offer up a small prayer of thanks for David Miliband’s special gift to us all: the defenestration of sustainable development, the world’s leading all-things-to-all-people concept. On the other hand, it’s a bit worrying that resource scarcity has effectively disappeared as a result, especially on the food and water front. A missed trick there (especially since Miliband really pioneered the concept of ‘one planet living’ hard while he was at Defra); it could have fitted in nicely alongside the energy security stuff.
So what happens now? David Miliband’s statement to Parliament on the new framework says a little about what it all means in practice:
We will be increasing substantially the overall level of resources the FCO puts into counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation; climate change; Afghanistan and other conflict regions; and key international institutions. All these areas will receive additional staff and money.
We have also decided that we should adapt the FCO’s overseas network of posts to align it more closely with our own priorities and those of HMG as a whole. So we will be shifting a proportion of our diplomatic staff from Europe and the Americas to Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world, while continuing to sustain our global flexibility and reach…
In order to put more resources into these new priority areas and to sharpen our strategic focus, it is necessary to reduce the resources the FCO puts into certain other issues, notably where other Whitehall Departments in London are better placed to direct HMG’s international priorities, in particular in the areas of sustainable development, science and innovation, and crime and drugs.
Miliband also said that “we will be taking forward the detailed planning and implementation over the next few months, inside the FCO and with other Government Departments”. As that process gets underway, it would be good to hear more about FCO’s strategy in two particular areas:
1. Its role on policy synthesis. As David and I set out in our paper last April on Fixing the Foreign Office, one of the core problems in UK foreign policy is that with domestic departments all leading internationally on their little bit of foreign policy (Defra on climate, BERR on energy and so on), we have a problem with policy coherence arising from the fact that all of these organisational silos emphatically do not add up to a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts. Traditionally, overcoming this would have been a Cabinet Office job. But today, the Cabinet Office just doesn’t have the resources for such a complex task. So does FCO have a special role in effecting a strategic policy synthesis and in joining up the dots? And if so, how does it work?
2. Its theory of influence. Miliband is already clear that the new empowerment of non-state actors in foreign policy is a Big Deal (c.f. his idea of the ‘civilian surge’). But if diplomats’ work now extends far beyond just talking to other diplomats, does the FCO have a clear approach towards leveraging influence in this new context? (This is the question that David and I will be tackling in our forthcoming Demos pamphlet on The New Public Diplomacy.) And if so, how does it work?
