Competing priorities: a short reflection

Right now, there is a team of us at CEPA working with the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC), a DFID funded research consortium led by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London, on a six year programme looking at three research themes, namely

1.    Legitimacy. What are people’s perceptions, expectations and experiences of the state and of local-level governance? How does the way services are delivered and livelihoods are supported affect people’s views on the legitimacy of the state?

2.    Capacity. How do international actors interact with the state and local-level governance institutions? How successful are international attempts to build state capacity to deliver social protection, basic services and support to livelihoods?

3.    Livelihood trajectories. What do livelihood trajectories in conflict-affected situations tell us about the role of governments, aid agencies, markets and the private sector in enabling people to make a secure living?

Pondering on the first of these themes at a time when the Geneva sessions of the UN Human Rights Council seem to be the major preoccupation of the Sri Lankan government and the media it seems to me to there is a contradiction.   The rationale for this theme derives from the fact that in the international discourse, there is  a focus on state legitimacy, and the donor community's ability to support it, foster it...

for donors, while the steps they can take to influence state legitimacy are few, they do have an interest in developing a clearer understanding of the following: What leads to legitimacy? What, if anything, can they do to strengthen state–society relations? And what might be the (unintended) positive and negative impacts of their programming on state legitimacy if they, for example, route development funding via bodies other than the formal organs of the state? (excerpt from a SLRC report)

But what if there be occasions when some of us (and I don’t mean some donors) do not want to legitimize the state (where the state is not some a-political institution)  and  what about donor actions outside of the development funding sphere (e.g. UNHRC resolutions?) that can have positive or negative consequences (intended and unintended) on state-society relations?    

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