Foreign aid as intervention in Yemen: how assistance to weak states prioritises feasibility over legitimacy

This column by Steven A. Zyck is part of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century: Legality, Legitimacy and Feasibility', edited by David Held and Kyle McNally. Contributions from academics and practitioners will be serialised on Global Policy until the e-book’s release in the summer of 2014. Find out more here or join the debate on Twitter #GPintervention.

In 2013, the United Nations peacekeeping budget of $7.23 billion was dwarfed by $18 billion in global humanitarian aid and $133 billion in development assistance. Given its sheer volume, one might presume that foreign aid has serious political ramifications – and trade-offs between legality, feasibility and legitimacy – that extend beyond its technical or charitable exterior.

This overseas assistance of course supports not only bread and butter issues such as food, water, shelter, health and education but also security sector reform, transitional justice, policy-making at the global, national and subnational levels. It affects not only what states do but also what their citizens expect of them. That is, it comprises an invasive intervention with implications for governance and stability.

Yet despite its very powerful interventionist nature, humanitarian and development assistance has not been subject to the same types of questions as military intervention, particularly those related to legality, feasibility and legitimacy. This short contribution aims to raise these questions and demonstrates their relevance to Yemen through a series of examples which, it must be recognised, cannot be taken as fully representative of the entire, complex international presence there.

Brief examples from Yemen

OECD data concerning aid to fragile and conflict-affected countries has increasingly demonstrated the concentration of assistance in some of the world’s most challenging contexts. What this means is that those public institutions with the least ability to monitor, track or audit international activities are increasingly subject to the broadest international interventions. Consider Yemen, which during the Arab spring, witnessed an uprising in major cities – eventually leading to the ouster of the country’s long-standing president – and an Islamist-led conflict in one of its southern provinces. These incidents emerged alongside an on-again-off-again conflict in the North against the Houthi rebels and a long-simmering (but escalating) southern secessionist movement.

During this time development assistance grew to more than US$800 million. On top of this amount, UN humanitarian appeals for Yemen increased from US$121 million in 2010 to US$716 million by 2013. Given that humanitarian assistance particularly tends to bypass state institutions, this means that an unprecedented amount of foreign resources – not to mention less monitored flows from Iran and the Arab Gulf states – were entering the country when its ability to regulate this aid was at its lowest point in at least three decades.

While such an escalation in foreign support was intended to support the Yemeni people during a tumultuous time, during which point tens of thousands had been displaced, it also led to activities that the country’s elected officials – had they been aware of them – would have found objectionable. These include, to provide one example, rapid, UN-led progress on transitional justice, an issue that the country’s National Dialogue Committee was vigorously debating (and deeply divided over).

Similarly, international stakeholders launched nation-wide consultations with communities, civil society organisations, activist groups and others concerning their hopes from the government, their development priorities and this broader vision for the country’s future. Government officials aware of such activities found them deeply troubling and worried that they were inadvertently raising expectations for the National Dialogue – a process intended to generate a new political system and address long-standing conflicts – and the government at a time when it was ill-equipped to deliver. Yet, being supported by dozens of international agencies – who were registered with one ministry and overseen by several others – it was not clear who in the government might be able to regulate such activities, even if they had the ability to do so.

At the same time there was an evident lack of “meat-and-potatoes” development programming from the international community related to livelihoods, productive infrastructure and basic services. As of late 2012 and early-to-mid-2013, many in the government and international community were united in their concern about the proliferation of aid activities which brought little direct improvement in employment, incomes, agricultural yields, water supply and so on.

Discussion: legality, feasibility and legitimacy

The examples above are simply a spattering of snapshots. However, they do offer insights for the intersection of legality, feasibility and legitimacy which this edited collection seeks to interrogate.

Firstly, it remains to be seen whether weak, crisis-affected states can genuinely regulate and, hence, legally authorise the massive aid flows that they receive during and after conflicts and disasters. Hence, many aid activities such as those being implemented in Yemen fell into something of a legal grey zone (periodically seeming to in fact run afoul of the country’s 1991 law on political parties). This is not to say that aid should be withheld until a state is able – often years or decades later – to authorise individual projects and humanitarian or development efforts. However, international stakeholders have a responsibility to operate in a relatively conservative manner with regards to politically sensitive or un-regulated areas, particularly though not exclusively those related to governance and justice.

Secondly, those projects which operate in a legal grey zone are also the most feasible (i.e., easy to implement without active resistance). Projects are particularly feasible if they are multi-faceted, crossing multiple sectors or involving activities for which there is no particular regulatory framework or authority (e.g., community-level consultations on priorities and expectations of the state). Accordingly, so-called “soft” project components – those related to community mobilisation, empowerment, civil society capacity building, conflict resolution and so on – tend to be most feasible. Hence, feasibility in fact promotes these sorts of activities and discourages, on some level, more straightforward and materially measurable projects related to livelihoods, economic growth, basic services and so on.

Thirdly, turning to legitimacy, it is apparent that aid is legitimised – in the eyes of beneficiaries – based on its responsiveness to local priorities. The international presence in Yemen was, in recent years, seen as somewhat de-legitimised – or at least lacking in credibility – because it focused on an “soft, governance-related agenda while the population was primarily concerned about with long-standing livelihood issues and gaps in basic services. Hence, one could say that the more feasible an aid agenda, the less legitimacy it is likely to attain. While certainly an over-simplification, one could see this reduced legitimacy in the increase in attacks on aid workers; recent and yet-unpublished NGO research speaks to a significant rise in attacks on their staffs and medical facilities by armed groups and community members alike.

Likewise, these failings among the international community detracted from the legitimacy of the nascent Yemeni state, which appeared unable to ensure that international actors delivered a simpler and more tangible development agenda. If the international community was unaware of the broader citizenry’s priorities, many Yemenis appear to have concluded that the government was similarly ill-informed.

Ultimately, those activities which were easiest for aid agencies to implement – soft, civil society-related and quasi-political projects – were: (a) legally contestable or operating outside of meaningful regulation, (b) less likely to have a measurable impact on development conditions and (c) least likely to contribute to the legitimacy of the international presence or host government. This incentive structure appears off kilter and in need of substantial reform.

While these observations are intended to spark a broader discussion, they do speak to one recommendation. Simply put, international actors would be advised, at least in the interest of legality and legitimacy, to turn back to simpler and more tangible project designs rather than the sorts of increasingly complex, governance-tinged activities that some have adopted in “transitional” contexts such as Yemen. These may be, in some cases, less feasible given that they are easier for governments to regulate (or capture or impede) and often encounter substantial challenges (e.g., a security situation not hospitable for livelihoods or economic growth). However, sacrificing a degree of feasibility in the interest of legality and legitimacy would seem to be not only responsible but also beneficial for governance (perhaps more so than traditional governance activities pursued by development agencies).

Of course, this article has provided a somewhat lopsided characterisation of the foreign aid agenda in Yemen. Many agencies, particularly humanitarian organisations, are involved in straightforward relief programming and measurable, locally-credible development efforts. However, the foreign aid community as a whole would find itself more welcome – and perhaps less subject to threats and violence attacks – if particular development actors paid more attention to the issues of legality, effectiveness and legitimacy noted here.

Steven A. Zyck is a Research Fellow with the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute. He is also co-editor of Stability: International Journal of Security & Development and a Senior Associate with the Centre for Security Governance. Steven has worked and consulted with UN agencies, NGOs, the World Bank, NATO and several governments in, most notably, the Middle East and Central Asia.