Trajectories of International Engagement with State and Local Actors: Evidence from South Sudan

ABSTRACT

External actors have been engaged in what is now South Sudan from the colonial era through to the present day, providing humanitarian and development assistance and exerting political pressure during and since the second civil war that has helped to protect people, legitimize the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), broker the peace agreements leading to independence, and undergird the new state of South Sudan. After the civil war and especially at independence, many international actors approached South Sudan as a tabula rasa, ready for peace and development; since then, engagement has shifted back to large-scale humanitarian efforts and crisis response. This paper investigates how international actors have engaged with the South Sudanese state and local actors in order to improve access to basic services and build state capacity to deliver those services and provide social protection and livelihood support, what the impacts of such engagement have been, and what aid actors can learn from this history. The paper draws on four years of fieldwork by the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC), with a focus on Jonglei State.

KEYWORDS:

• Jonglei
• statebuilding
• humanitarian
• development
• capacity building
• livelihoods
• social protection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel Maxwell is the Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University. [email protected]

Rachel Gordon is an independent consultant. From 2012 to 2016, she was the program manager for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. [email protected]

Leben Moro is the Director of the Center for Peace and Development Studies at the University Of Juba, Juba, South Sudan. [email protected]

Martina Santschi is a senior researcher at swisspeace Foundation, based in Bern Switzerland. [email protected]

Philip Dau is the Director of Monitoring and Evaluation at the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in Juba, South Sudan. [email protected]

Notes

1 Throughout the article, reference to South Sudan’s states is according to the conventions in place at the time of the research.

2 These figures are adjusted on an ongoing basis by the OECD, so they may not remain the same. Those noted here have, in fact, changed slightly since the publication of the SLRC report in May 2016 on which this article is based.

3 Figures reported here for US assistance reflect actual spending, not planned or obligated (which, particularly in 2013, were much higher than actual spending figures).

4 HRPs replaced the CAP in 2014.

5 Some major donors, such as the US, were never part of the Multi-Donor Trust Fund; others quickly began bypassing it in favour of bilateral agreements (Munroe 2012).

6 It should be noted that Jonglei, along with Upper Nile, were almost certainly the least supported states in terms of GRSS revenue reaching the peripheries; other areas have fared better, according to aid representatives who are familiar with other states’ financial processes.

7 See Bradbury et al. (2006) for further discussion and probably the most comprehensive list available of such processes and their conveners, and Ashworth (2014) for an in-depth discussion of the role of the Church during the period up to the CPA.

8 See Maxwell, Santschi and Gordon, et al. (2014). This was primary research conducted in January and February 2013 in northern Jonglei State, and Juba.

9 Respondents were not asked about ‘state legitimacy’ as such, but rather indirectly through questions about general perceptions, confidence, trust, and other descriptors of relationships with governance actors.

10 The information in this section is summarized from Santschi et al. (2014), and from interviews conducted in November 2013.

11 Figures for the data in Table 1 are often unavailable or contradictory. The figures reported here are calculated mainly using publicly available data downloaded from the Creditor Reporting System in the OECD statistical database (see http://wwww.stats.oecd.org).

12 It may also be true that the relative stability and access afforded by the post-CPA period allowed improved needs assessments that offered a more accurate reflection of an ongoing dire situation, rather than there being a situation that has actually been worsening.

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and Irish Aid.