- Protection of civilians in armed conflict
- Civilian Peacekeeping Capacity: Mobilizing Partners to Match Supply and Demand
- Training in vain? Bottlenecks in Deploying Civilians for UN Peacekeeping
- Preparing and Mobilizing Civilian Capacity for the Future. Recommendations for Implementing the Guéhenno Report
- Conference Proceedings: Mobilizing Civilian Capacity
13.02.09 The United Nations and the Comprehensive Approach
Cophenhagen, Danish Institute for International Studies - DIIS | 40 sider | Order or download free
DIIS Report 2008:14
>> Summary
A review of post-Cold War peacekeeping and peacebuilding actions shows that these operations have experienced significant problems with coherence and coordination, and that this has contributed to the poor rate of sustainability of these operations to date. These challenges need to be understood in the context of an increasingly complex and interdependent international conflict-management system where the scope of the crisis faced by the international community is often of such a scale that no single agency, government or international organization can manage it on its own. In order to address this challenge, various agencies, governments and organizations have started exploring, independently of each other, a range of models and mechanisms aimed at improving the overall coherence, cooperation and coordination of their conflict-management systems. This effort to pursue greater synergy, harmonization and complementarily in the international peacebuilding system has become known as the Comprehensive Approach. In the United Nations (UN) context, it has generated the Integrated Approach and a specific structural arrangement in the context of UN peacekeeping operations, the Integrated Mission.
Integrated Missions refer to a type of UN mission in which there are processes, mechanisms and structures in place that generate and sustain a common strategic objective and a comprehensive operational approach among the political, security, development, human rights, and where appropriate, humanitarian UN actors at country level. The assumption of the Comprehensive Approach in general, and the UN’s Integrated Approach in particular, is that a more coherent system-wide (security, governance and development) effort, will have a more relevant, effective, efficient and sustainable impact on the peace process.
One of the implications of the Integrated Approach on UN peacekeeping operations is that the old bi-polar concept of civil-military coordination no longer adequately captures the new multi-polar coordination challenges facing complex UN peacekeeping operations. In the UN Integrated Missions context, the focus has shifted instead to system-wide coordination across the political, security, development, rule of law, human rights and humanitarian dimensions.
As with any new innovation, the UN’s Integrated Approach has not been without its detractors. Although it is a recent innovation that is still being refined, its application to date has highlighted various technical, administrative, organizational and budgetary challenges that will need to be addressed before the new Integrated Approach can be judged to have made an impact on the coherence and coordination dilemma it is meant to address. One of the most serious and persistent concerns relates to the perceived loss of humanitarian independence and neutrality when the Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) becomes one of the Deputy Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (DSRSG).
Many other concerns and dilemmas have been identified, however, and taken together they represent significant feedback from the field that challenges the policy-level assumption that there is a sufficient level of shared values, principles, goals and objectives among the different agents and dimensions that make up the international peacebuilding system to facilitate system-wide coherence. This does not imply that it is impossible to achieve meaningful coherence and coordination among the different agents and across the various dimensions under a comprehensive approach umbrella, but rather that there may be times and situations where it may not be possible to achieve a common approach. Thus, instead of assuming that there will always be room for a common approach, reality dictates that complex peacebuilding coordination models need to provide room for trade-offs, second-best solutions, compromises and coexistence, as well as recognize that there are certain conditions under which a common approach is not attainable.
The two most critical areas for coherence in the context of the comprehensive approach in general, and in the UN Integrated Approach in particular, are the needs to devise an overall strategic framework and to ensure local ownership.
