Donor Love Will Tear Us Apart: How Complexity and Learning Marginalize Accountability in Peacebuilding Interventions

Abstract

Complexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to “improve” peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this claim with an analysis of professional peacebuilding discourse. Drawing on an extensive corpus of operational guidance, policy documents, and interview material, I situate the emerging uses of concepts of complexity in peacebuilding against the backdrop of the power struggles of its actors and institutions. Against the introduction of measures of managerial control, professional peacebuilding discourse has cast its interventions as exceptional and in need of different methods. Thus, learning replaces donors’ standardized measures of accountability. However, the peculiar conflation of accountability as learning that emerges from these struggles legitimizes self-referential expert rule and learning, and marginalizes debates on peacebuilders’ accountability. Rather than “de-colonizing” or making peacebuilding more inclusive, the way complexity concepts have emerged in peacebuilding discourse reproduces—rather than questions—the power structures of international interventions, and denies the people targeted by interventions the status of subjects to be accountable to.

Harnessing Complexity for Better Outcomes in Public and Non-profit Services

“…First, it could be that complexity helps the unscrupulous and opportunistic to avoid blame and scrutiny. Bächtold (2021) argues that complexity can shield actors against legitimate demands for accountability and reduce the public's ability to question powerful budget-holders. The bagginess of the term complexity might see problems which are merely complicated or politically contested but ultimately simple, be shepherded into the 'complex' domain in order to excuse inaction.…”

Kompleksisuusajattelun hyödyntäminen politiikkaa ja hallintoa käsittelevässä tutkimuksessa

“…Toisaalta tutkimuksissa on myös varoiteltu arvioinnin kompleksisuusansasta. Tästä on kysymys esimerkiksi silloin, kun politiikkatoimesta vastaavat pyrkivät irti tilivelvollisuudesta kuvaamalla toimintaa mahdottomaksi arvioida panos-tuotos-vaikutus -mittareilla (Bächtold 2021).…”

Flipping the Power Dynamics in Measurement and Evaluation: International Aid and the Potential for a Grounded Accountability Model

“…We build on other scholarship examining institutional knowledge creation processes in M&E between donors and implementing organizations to demonstrate that technocratically led, deductive, and static measurement systems are exclusive and limit localization (Fast and Neufeldt 2005; Neufeldt 2011; Denskus 2012; Pearson d'Estree 2020; Bächtold 2021). Although arguments for a greater emphasis on qualitative and ethnographic M&E in peacebuilding resonate (Denskus 2012; Millar 2018), we also recognize the time and capacity limitations of donors and implementers.…”