A year ago, I blogged about the launch of a big UN review of how the organization deploys civilian experts to post-conflict countries. As I said then, this mattered:
“Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!” But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent justice experts and other civilian specialists to deploy to post-conflict countries. Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.
Now the Civilian Capacities Review has reported, underlining the scale of the problem:
As communities emerge from conflict, they often face a critical shortage of capacities needed to secure a sustainable peace. Yet the United Nations struggles both to recruit and deploy the range of expertise required, and to transfer skills and knowledge to national actors.
The report will make uncomfortable reading for a lot of long-time UN staffers. It argues that the organization relies too much on a stock cast of “international civilian servants”: generalists who deploy from mission to mission and imagine that they can somehow apply the same state-building techniques to places as diverse as Haiti and the Congo:
As well as being slow, the recruitment system lacks the ability to fill highly specialized needs. It has been described as a “wholesale” mechanism — designed to sift through bulk applications for general purposes. Increasingly, however, the contextual nature of conflict produces specialized peacebuilding demands (for example, natural resource management in Liberia, combating drugs and organized crime in Guinea-Bissau or land management in Darfur). The system is unable to meet these demands.
Ouch. The whole report is similarly unsparing of the UN’s sensitivities, and comes with a bundle of concrete recommendations to shake things up. These include creating a far more flexible staffing system for post-conflict missions by which (to simplify) the UN could pull together expert secondees from governments and NGOs to respond to specific problems, rather than just fall back on the usual suspects. It’s good to see a honest assessment of the UN’s problems in this area – as I’ve said before, the EU should do a similar self-analysis – and the recommendations are serious and sound. That’s bad news for quite a few peacekeeping bureaucrats out there…
