How can countries emerging from a conflict be supported on their path towards peace and democracy? Although this question has been the focus of recent attention, it remains unclear exactly what factors are critical to the success of external engagement in fragile states. To this end, this study aims to learn from the relatively successful case of Nepal.
In Nepal, the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement in 2006 ended a decade-long civil war and provided the basis for a more inclusive democracy. Since then, the international community has tried to support Nepal’s peace and democratisation process in various ways.
The analysis takes the political process in Nepal as its starting point and traces donor engagement through four critical junctures. Critical junctures are defined as decisive political events that have a powerful impact on the overall peace and democratisation process. The main argument behind this approach is that donors can claim to have impacted the overall process (which is nonetheless predominantly domestically driven) only if they have contributed to such decisive events. The analysis of each juncture consists of a number of steps: tracing the impact on the overall process, identifying the decisions, actors and institutions that characterise the juncture, attributing donor support to these and, finally, explaining either why donors were able to impact the juncture in certain way or why they failed to do so.
Key findings:
- The Nepalese case sheds light on a number of general issues related to international support in post-conflict situations. This paper concentrates on three propositions (or hypotheses) commonly postulated in academic literature by those seeking to ascertain why support is either more or less successful. According to the first hypothesis, strong donor support for democracy can help destabilise a country’s peace process. The findings do not support this notion. On the contrary, we found that donors paid insufficient attention to the detrimental long-term consequences of a peace process that failed to institutionalise democracy beyond the initial provisions of the 2006 peace agreement.
- Second, a vast amount of literature on foreign aid supports the idea that a high level of donor coordination is required for development cooperation to be effective. While our findings suggest there are fewer grounds for enthusiasm about the overall level of coordination in Nepal than we initially expected, they do support the notion that better coordination yielded more positive results.
- Finally, our third hypothesis states that the success of donor engagement in Nepal also depends on how effectively donors take account of India, Nepal’s southern neighbour, as a major regional player. Here, our findings support the hypothesis, albeit with two qualifications. First, hard evidence of India’s crucial role in the peace and democratisation process is in short supply. Second, Nepal’s other big neighbour, China, is playing an increasingly important role. A factor that proved particularly challenging for donors in Nepal is the issue of ownership, more specifically the question of whether donors should adhere to domestic interests or uphold their own positions. This highlights disagreement between domestic and international actors on the course of action to be followed, but also points to the problem of defining ownership too narrowly, thereby adhering only to elite interests.
Overall, the analysis paints a mixed picture. The strongest positive impact was in relation to the CA elections, and donors were also able to make a significant positive contribution in disbanding the PLA. At the local level and in the constitution-making process, donor engagement remained below its potential, at times even reinforcing weaknesses. The analysis identified a number of critical success factors for international engagement: good coordination through domestic institutions, focusing donor activities on a common primary goal, taking account of the long-term effects on democratic institutions and gaining the support of key regional actors.
