Working Papers The Check Is in the Mail: Improving the Delivery and Coordination of Post-Conflict Assistance By Stewart Patrick Research Associate Center on International Cooperation New York University December 1998 During the 1990s the international donor community pledged more than sixty billion dollars in aid to assist the recovery of three-dozen war-torn countries. From Cambodia to Bosnia, Rwanda to Guatemala, and Tajikistan to Liberia, multilateral and bilateral donors have supported post-conflict peace building with generous packages of grants, concessional loans, debt forgiveness and technical assistance. Providing a bridge between emergency humanitarian relief and long-term development, these financial, material and human resources are designed to ease the transitions from war to peace and from endemic poverty to sustainable economic growth. The outcome of these efforts will shape the fates of long-suffering peoples and the future of international peace and security. It is thus disturbing to discover that in many situations a significant proportion of the promised reconstruction aid either never materializes or does so only very slowly. Despite ostensible good intentions, too often aid pledged is not committed, aid committed is not delivered, and aid delivered arrives too late. Moreover, the planning and implementation of mobilized resources frequently suffers from inadequate preparation, poor coordination and lack of perseverance. In some instances the precise amounts, sources and contents of pledged aid remain vague, as do the specific conditions attached. At a minimum, these deficits encourage skepticism on the part of donors, recipients, and their publics about the ultimate value of the vast amounts purportedly committed to reconstruct war-torn societies. Both donors and recipients share responsibility for shortcomings in the design, delivery and implementation of aid. While recognizing this shared culpability, this paper focuses on procedural and institutional failures within the donor community, which tend to be consistent, rather than on the (often idiosyncratic) weaknesses of particular war-torn states. CONTENTS The challenge of post-conflict recovery Slow Disbursement of Pledged Funds Problems with the Pledging Process Inadequate Systems for Tracking Aid Flows Donor Inconsistency Over Conditionality Difficulties Linking Relief and Development Grouping Towards Coordination: New Actors, New Instruments Conclusion Download a PDF of the entire paper