What programming approaches are used by development actors in crisis-affected areas?

Humanitarian and development programming have often been conceptualised as being delivered in succession, with development relevant in prevention and recovery phases but limited in active crises or conflict. Experience from Cameroon and other conflict contexts shows that development actors often decrease engagement or pull out when risks escalate, while political actors often fail to take early action, getting involved only after a situation becomes violent.^[2] Development actors have sometimes been slow or late to engage in ‘sudden-onset’ situations, where humanitarian actors are typically first on the scene. In Bangladesh, the World Bank became involved in Cox’s Bazar at an early stage compared with its responses in other refugee situations, but nonetheless even earlier engagement might have helped host communities to cope better with the refugee crisis and reduced tensions. Sequencing gaps can also occur as humanitarian assistance declines and if development actors are not sufficiently present to scale up support, as has been seen in northern and eastern Cameroon and in recently stabilised areas of Somalia. Thus, the recent UN−IASC guidance on the nexus^[3] points to the need for a shift from sequential towards simultaneous programming, where diverse actors engage in a complementary fashion over multiple years according to their comparative advantages (see Box 4 for examples). For development actors this means staying engaged during crises or engaging earlier. Development actors increasingly recognise that conflict and other crises are often protracted and recurring and do not follow a linear trajectory, but the shift away from sequential thinking and programming is not fully engrained. Some development actors, such as the World Bank and other MDBs, have evolved from a focus on post-conflict reconstruction to engaging across the full spectrum of fragility, and with this they have also strengthened approaches to assessing and engaging directly to address conflict and fragility.

How are development actors embedding risk and flexibility into the programme cycle?

Development cooperation has a long-term, strategic focus, typically with three- to six-year strategy and planning cycles. Most development actors see their primary role in a crisis to address longer term, structural issues that will, over time, reduce risks of fragility, conflict or disaster, strengthen institutional resilience, and foster lasting peace and recovery. Development partners have a range of tools to assess risks and opportunities and to inform their prioritisation and strategic approach in country, such as the World Bank Risk and Resilience Assessment. While this study does not comprehensively review current practice, the extent to which donor and national development strategies addressed risk and resilience across the three countries appears uneven. For example, in Somalia, resilience to climatic shocks, conflict and political fragility is a major priority and theme in the national development plan and is reflected in donor strategies, while in Bangladesh disaster risk and resilience is an important priority, but other risks are not fully considered. A further issue is that context/risk analyses are usually undertaken upstream, at the start of the planning cycle, and tend to focus on the higher strategic level. When it comes to having capacities and systems to carry out ongoing context analysis, to translate high-level, long-term strategy into programming jointly developed with partners to address risks, and to regularly monitor, review and adapt strategies and plans, some development actors are much more advanced than others.^[7] The ability to do so also depends on the government and other implementing partners, and the process to renegotiate plans with partners can be lengthy.

This can lead to the failure to anticipate or adequately respond to an escalation of conflict or crisis. In Cameroon, many development partners did not recognise the extent of the country’s fragility or prioritise support to mitigate conflict risks in their country strategies, and they were slow to react to the escalation of conflict in the English-speaking regions. Due to a range of factors, Cameroon went from being seen as a relatively stable country to being affected by several concurrent crises within the space of five years. In particular, stalled decentralisation and uneven economic growth, which has benefited the centre but left behind crisis-affected regions, has been an important long-term risk; however, this does not appear to have been a sufficient priority in donor strategies and aid allocations (and in some cases development support may have reinforced unequal development).

Risk management and resilience are integral to disaster risk reduction and climate change adaption programmes across the three countries, and are also sometimes reflected in approaches to fragility and conflict. In Bangladesh, where there are recurring disasters related to seasonal monsoon floods and cyclones, development partners have invested heavily in disaster risk reduction programmes. Resilience to disasters is a secondary, cross-cutting objective in infrastructure, urban planning, education, agriculture and food security programmes, and many other areas. There are some examples of innovative programmes that aim to strengthen resilience at the community level and address the full risk landscape, such as the programmes implemented by the Somalia Resilience Programme and Building Resilient Communities in Somalia (BRCiS) NGO consortia in Somalia, and the Inclusive Economic and Social Recovery Project for Lake Chad (RESILIAC) programme in northern Cameroon.

Some development partners, notably the World Bank, increasingly recognise the need to balance a long-term strategy with the ability to flexibly respond to shorter term pressures, shocks and needs in fragile situations. For the World Bank, greater flexibility has been enabled by special allocation mechanisms that supplement its longer term country partnership frameworks (see the ‘Financing’ section below), as well as programmatic models and operational policies and procedures that are tailored to fragile, conflict and crisis settings. For example, the World Bank played a key role in Somalia, with a project funded by the Crisis Response Window to respond to the 2017 drought. It supported both the immediate needs of drought-affected people and medium-term recovery through the restoration of agricultural and pastoral production, and has been credited with helping to avert a famine. In 2019, the World Bank also played a part in the response to the locust and flooding crisis. Regional development banks (e.g. the African Development Bank (AfDB) and AsDB) also operate in fragile settings, and more recently have scaled up their involvement in disaster risk reduction and disaster response. This has included developing contingent financing facilities to address these risks and further developing tailored approaches to fragility, such as the AfDB’s Transition Support Facility. Regional development banks were working in all three countries but were not focusing directly in (or were relatively new to operating in) protection environments alongside humanitarian actors. The only country where this occurred was Bangladesh, where AsDB engaged for the first time in a forced displacement context, approving grant funding within eight weeks of receiving a request for support from the government. This was used to improve severely strained infrastructure and construct facilities to make refugee camps and host communities safer.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought home the need for shock-responsive programming for many development partners. There is a growing recognition of the need for national safety net and social protection systems that can cope with spikes in need. For example, in Bangladesh national safety net programmes were set up to target only the poorest and most vulnerable populations, and development partners worked to adapt them to handle a rapid increase in case load as huge numbers of informal workers lost their livelihoods.

There have also been advances in adaptive programming and management models, which stress ongoing analysis, learning and feedback loops, rather than a typical linear programme cycle. In particular, the UK’s former Department for International Development (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and the United States Agency for International Development have been prominent adopters of adaptive management ideas and approaches. There are many examples of adaptive approaches in smaller scale projects, especially community-based programmes implemented by NGOs such as the RESILAC programme in northern Cameroon and the BRCiS programme in Somalia (see Box 5). But adaptive approaches are much more challenging to scale: most large development institutions have stringent governance, management and accountability requirements, and programmes with larger budgets, larger teams and complex partnership arrangements and contractual agreements are more challenging to change.

• How can HDP actors strengthen synergies in specific areas of programming such as those described above? Jointly developing policy and programmatic guidance that provides a common language and toolbox could be a first step. Multi-mandated organisations, which have been grappling with these questions for some time, could play a key role. To take this forward, it will be important to review the existing division of labour, formalise partnerships and develop a common approach that brings together the full spectrum of activities, bridging both immediate assistance and long-term approaches.
• Working effectively in protracted crisis contexts requires ongoing context analysis that covers the full spectrum of risks (e.g. economic, environmental, political, conflict, security and societal)^[10]. How can development actors ensure the right internal capacity and systems to carry out regular analysis and review and adapt their strategies to changes in the context, including identifying preventative actions? While systems for identifying and responding to disaster risks have developed over the years, there is a need to invest further in mechanisms to anticipate and respond to conflict risks. Drawing on the expertise of humanitarian and peace actors at the country level could help in this regard.
• Protracted crisis contexts call for flexible and responsive programming, yet in the case study countries adaptive programming and management approaches remain small-scale. How can development actors scale these up drawing on learning, best practice and existing initiatives including the Global Learning and Adaptive Management initiative?^[11] In particular, scaling up effective project-based pilot approaches for building resilience by embedding them into national frameworks (e.g. on safety nets, local governance and shock-responsive social protection) could enable greater reach and impact.