The concept of ‘early recovery’ has generated attention in policy circles as a potential way of fostering recovery from an early stage of conflict, with governments and aid agencies examining how it might fit into their current ways of responding to conflict.
The focus of this Policy Brief is on conflict settings. The brief provides an overview of early recovery and argues that early recovery has functioned primarily as a way of framing the activities, strategies and approaches that take place in humanitarian and transitional contexts, and that its added value is yet to be consistently proven.
Key findings:
- Early recovery is part of a policy push to improve international responses in conflict settings. Understanding its relationship with other approaches is a conceptual challenge. With its focus on recovery and an initial transition from conflict to peace, early recovery has overlaps with stabilisation, peace-building and state-building. Clarity has been lacking with early recovery, not only because of its different interpretations but also because no realistic vision of recovery can be extricated from these other approaches to promoting stability, peace and an effective state. Early recovery could be understood both as a tool of a broader stabilisation process, in that it seeks to lay the foundations for wider recovery from conflict, and as an element of a peace-building agenda, as part of efforts to strengthen peace and create visible peace dividends. There is a need to move away from conceptual debates about what early recovery is, and who ‘owns’ it. Focus should not be on finding new overarching frameworks, but on understanding opportunities and trade-offs among different approaches (humanitarian, development, peace-building, state-building, stabilisation), and what they can realistically achieve in a given context.
- Early recovery has mainly functioned as a way of framing responses. A preliminary review of experiences in Uganda, Darfur, the Gaza Strip and Colombia suggests that the added value of framing activities and strategies in terms of early recovery has not been overwhelmingly demonstrated, for three main reasons: difficulties in translating early recovery into context-specific action; the limitations of humanitarian mechanisms in promoting recovery; and the fact that strategies and activities crossing programming divides were already taking place.
- Programmes moving beyond traditional humanitarian assistance have been under way for some time, and not necessarily under the banner of early recovery. There is ample opportunity to learn from current and past efforts, including by multi-mandate non-governmental organisations and UN agencies, which effectively implement programmes that are neither strictly humanitarian nor developmental. Some donors and aid agencies may find early recovery a useful way to frame their approaches, but rebranding existing activities in terms of early recovery will not add any notable value to what is already taking place. Moreover, there is a danger that designating activities and strategies as early recovery may contribute to another separation in response modalities, instead of facilitating joined-up approaches. The many and varied instruments and objectives of aid agencies, governments and international organisations pose obstacles to coordinated efforts to foster recovery, both during outright conflict and in the ‘grey area’ between conflict and stability.
