Introduction
Since the re-engagement of donors after 10 years of absence (1990–2001), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been engaged in an ambitious process of reconstruction. Relations with donors were normalised during the war, following the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his replacement by his son Joseph in January 2001. This placed the Congo on the path of the Highly Indebted Poor Country initiative (HIPC), Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and structural reforms. Meanwhile, facilitated by negotiations between the warring parties, a triple transition towards peace, liberalisation and democratisation was initiated. The transition process constituted the backdrop against which a wide range of reforms were launched – whether in public finances, the civil service, the security sector or natural-resource management. Donors have been deeply involved in furthering reform, many of which were adopted at their behest. The present contribution is devoted to an examination of scholarly appraisals pertaining to the process of state reform. Specifically, it seeks to challenge recent interpretations which have depicted state reforms as unequivocal failures (Trefon 2009, 2011), by stressing the patterns of mutual accommodation between the Congolese authorities and its external partners which the reform process has enabled.
The manifold obstacles that have confronted various reforms – whether in decentralisation, justice-sector reform, or in the armed forces – have been amply documented by existing research (see contributions in Trefon 2009). Nominally complied with, reforms in practice have been marked by painfully slow progress, and stalling or sidetracking has been common. Overall, this indicates the process of reform has resulted in failure (de Villers 2009b, p. 234). Theodore Trefon has pursued this line of reasoning further, depicting reform failure as the outcome of a process whereby strategies characterised by hypocrisy and the ‘art of the unsaid’ dominate, as much on the side of Congolese political elites as among the Congo's development partners. In what he refers to as the ‘Congo masquerade’, a climate of corruption and impunity reigns, and the frail perspective of success is nullified by the divergent objectives of the various parties, which is only amplified by the misunderstanding and powerlessness of donors (Trefon 2011).
The stumbling blocks of current governance reforms are indeed formidable. Among those, one may note the emaciated nature of the administration; the institutional fragmentation of the government (particularly so prior to the 2011 elections); and the no less fragmented aid mechanisms and procedures where a multitude of actors share the task of restructuring and reconstruction in tandem with the authorities. Additionally, the landscape of state reforms has been subjected to the vagaries of politics, from the transitional government (2003–06), to the modifications of the political field in the aftermath of the 2006 elections. The reluctance the authorities have shown in practice towards reforms, as well as the often-externalised procedures through which they have been promoted by donors, help explain the lack of progress achieved in those. The government has supplied very little financial support to reform activities (which is hardly surprising as even the army or the administration are chronically fund-starved). Reforms are therefore kept afloat by an influx of donor funding and support. Despite nominal compliance to donor-promoted initiatives by the national authorities, reforms have been severely impaired by the lack of governmental support they have occasioned and the political strategies they have accommodated. In short, the verdict of reform failure in the DRC appears prima facie justified.
The aim of this paper is to propose a different interpretation of the state reform process than has been offered by previous scholarship, rather than take direct issue with the material such research has brought to the fore. Particularly, the validity of current appraisals premised on the binary success/failure should be questioned, as the assessment of projects is often amenable to discretion, and not always according to objective criteria. For example, the leeway available to donors in project evaluation which enables them to justify interventions is a good case in point. Additionally, as will be argued here, to speak only of reform failure captures a partial understanding of the underlying dynamics at play, and leaves unaddressed the accommodative characteristics and partial functionality of these processes. On the one hand, insofar as reforms could have jeopardised power centralisation, the faltering of reforms has helped the presidency maintain its position. On the other, donors have uneasily yet tacitly tolerated this state of affairs, while sustaining their engagement with the Congolese government. Thus, problematic reform implementation, albeit unpalatable to donors, has neither profoundly changed aid practices, nor endangered the compromises reached between Congo's development partners and the authorities. This paper proposes one such interpretation of Congolese reform processes, firstly by providing a cursory overview of a few governance reforms, and secondly by revealing their implications in terms of the donor–recipient relationship.
Patterns of reform failure: security-sector reform
The landscape of state reforms in Congo is singularly variegated and complex, and the division of tasks is shared between a large array of institutions, organisms and agencies, both bilateral and multilateral. For the purposes of this paper, emphasis will be placed on governance reforms through the examples of security-sector reform (SSR), on the one hand; and civil service/administrative reform and decentralisation, on the other.
The field of SSR encompasses reform of the armed forces, the judicial system and the police. Its underlying objectives include the restoration of state authority throughout the country; ending the sway of armed groups; the provision of salaries, training, equipment and infrastructure to soldiers and policemen; as well as providing mechanisms of accountability to end impunity and human rights abuses. To begin with, the reform of the armed forces constitutes a highly sensitive issue whose strategic nature is hard to overstate as it is intimately tied with the war dynamics in eastern Congo, including links with resources and turbulent patterns of localised conflict (Autesserre 2010). The goal of improving security conditions has proven elusive, however. Programmes of demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration have yielded few results (Hoebeke et al. 2009, p. 119, Willame 2007, p. 154), while difficulties have been exacerbated by the ‘instrumentalised’ uncertainty surrounding the precise number of armed forces (ibid., p. 161). The situation has been compounded further by political leaders' persistence in the use of violence and the maintenance of militias to guarantee their economic and political survival (Hoebeke et al. 2009, p. 120). The sensitivity of army reform has resulted in the adoption of strategies by the Congolese government focused on avoiding external coordination and favouring bilateral approaches (Trefon 2011, p. 66), which has greatly fragmented donor assistance to army reform (Melmot 2009). In 2009, for example, multiple actors were involved in the reform of the armed forces, including Belgium, France, South Africa, the European Union (EU), Angola, MONUC (the UN Mission in DRC), the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Despite the plurality of donor attention to army reform, their initiatives were largely unsuccessful as they worked without an effective coordination structure or a discussion framework with the national authorities (ibid., p. 13). Moreover, competition among actors was rife. Harmonisation between the EU and its member states was not always assured, while the United Nations and the EU each jostled for the lead role in SSR (ibid., p. 16). This lack of coordination has been amplified by the fragmentation and overlap in competences between institutions, including parallel decision-making networks tied to the presidency (such as the president's Maison Militaire, a powerful parallel command structure which enables the presidency to retain control over other security organs while eventually blocking their actions if the need arises). Approached as a technical issue by international actors, army reform is a heavily politicised field, in which national authorities are skilfully exploiting the rifts created by the avoidance of a common front in negotiations.
A similar set of issues can be found in the two other components of SSR. The judicial system is an interesting case, because it was considered in 2008–09 a ‘good student’ among state reforms. An action plan was elaborated in 2007, good working relations existed between the Ministry of Justice, judicial power representatives and donors, and cooperation was coordinated (Vircoulon 2009, pp. 92, 95). Despite this favourable environment, however, reforms to the sector remained trapped by several obstacles. The slow pace of realisation, the blocking of some of its aspects by higher authorities (for instance, the establishment of a truly independent judiciary power), and the direct confrontations arising from clashes with entrenched habits and practices in the justice sector (ibid., p. 93) all beset the task of reform substantially. Reforming the judicial sector in Congo poses a formidable challenge: the judicial administration is self-financed and de facto privatised; many magistrates pursue opportunistic strategies of individual and financial promotion through political channels; and the judicial system's financial, administrative and infrastructural capacity is profoundly incapacitated (ibid., pp. 88, 96). This significantly complicates the task of reform. Moreover, the paucity of domestic sources of funding for the budget of the judicial sector (typically between 0.1 and 0.5% of the budget in recent years) means that all initiatives heavily depend on donor funding (ibid., pp. 94, 97). Given the higher authorities' reluctance towards the reform of the judicial system, and the endless negotiations which ensued, participation from justice-sector actors involves as much financial opportunism as the protection of personal interests or corporatist goals (ibid.). In short, the situation points to a heavily donor-funded process, where nominal compliance is assured but where underlying practice remains resilient to change. The deeper politics of the reform landscape are poorly understood by the initiative's foreign promoters, namely donors, while their engagement is further compromised by their unwillingness to become involved in the ‘low politics’ of the reform which no degree of foreign expertise in conception or implementation can compensate (ibid., p. 100). Above all, despite the strong demand for reform from various stakeholders (practitioners' unions and associations, court users), the government's resistance towards judicial reform suggests that the political logic of power consolidation – which an independent judiciary can potentially threaten – is hardly consonant with the shifts in practice this particular reform is striving to induce.
Finally, the reform of the police is no exception to the dynamics outlined above. Even though the necessity for police reform is acute and local societal demands for reform are high, the reform process has been partially imposed on the government, and as such constitutes an initiative of donors rather than of the latter (Trefon 2011, p. 65). Moreover, the process of police reform lies at the crossroads between several ministerial authorities, apart from the Ministry of Interior, which is the key institution; however, tensions and fragmentation between the ministries and authorities involved are recurrent (Justaert 2010). This fragmentation also extends to international actors involved in the process, with a wide array of bilateral actors operating alongside the EU's police reform operation (EUPOL RD CONGO, active since 2007), and the existence of multiple coordination structures (ibid.). In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that scholars examining SSR predict little promise (Melmot 2009). A glimpse at administrative reform and decentralisation underscores similar preoccupations.
Patterns of reform failure: administrative reform and decentralisation
Administrative reform was introduced at the earliest stages of donor re-engagement in 2001–02 as part of the structural reforms the DRC had to implement (Gons 2004).1 The situation of the administration was in dire need of redress, as the delinquency of the final years of the Mobutu regime and the ravages of the successive wars had further eroded an already emaciated administration whose decline can be traced at least to the mid 1970s. The administration was functioning on a privatised mode, with an unknown number of civil servants, in a setting marked by institutional fragmentation where line ministries had acquired a large degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the still officially centralised civil service (Delta-I-Consulting 2002). This set of reforms envisaged a restructuring of the administration to render it efficient. Its initial components included a revision of the legal framework, a census of the civil service, an audit of payroll procedures to be followed by reorganisation, a retirement programme, and a training programme.2 The reform was premised on strong national leadership; an integrated, global approach tackling issues horizontally across ministries, with the Ministry of Public Service as the lead coordinator; and progressive implementation, moving from a few select pilot ministries to the rest of the administration (Diumasumbu 2008). The endeavour, however, quickly acquired a patchwork character, where the division of labour between donors spiralled into rivalry and competition. Additionally, the timing of the initiative was problematic, as the shift from the power-sharing transitional government to the post-electoral setting hardly facilitated continuity, and in many respects impaired the process. The Ministry of Public Service and its reform structures, given the low priority and lack of support the reform received from the authorities, was marginalised. As a result, the reform initiative sank into inactivity.
Few of the outcomes of that early attempt at administrative and civil service reform (from 2003 to 2008) reached their intended objectives. The global census of civil servants, which began in 2005, has still not been completed, and its results are to a large extent meaningless.3 Meanwhile, ministerial restructuring made little progress. For example, significant funds earmarked for the retirement of civil servants were embezzled in the run-up to the elections in 2005. These poor results led to a relative disengagement of donors active in administrative reform after 2008, with the exception of the World Bank. The latter has currently taken over the process of administrative reform, using a sectoral strategy which proceeds ministry by ministry (thus discarding the previous globally integrated approach that had shown its limits). The challenge of implementing reform, certainly, has been compounded by the emaciated nature of the administration, as in many cases it is simply the requisite capacity which is missing. But in many respects, the original civil-service reform strategy foundered because a series of practices subverted the process of implementation from its intended aims. These practices consisted, for instance, of logics of political expediency during the electoral climate of the transition which led to the embezzlement of retirement funds; the entrenched interests and practices surrounding the wages of state agents; and patterns of recruitment for patronage which greatly complicated the census. The donors involved in administrative reform both poorly understood these practices and were ultimately powerless to address them.
A brief look at the policy of decentralisation, which was enshrined in the new constitution of December 2005 at the strong insistence of donors, helps complete this succinct selection of governance reforms. The main challenge facing decentralisation is not so much the process of implementation – although this poses equally formidable problems – but the recalcitrance of the authorities (and especially the presidential camp) towards it. Several obstacles stand in the way of decentralisation, first of all the incomplete governmental authority over the country's territory (Liegeois 2009, p. 83). There is also the disconnection between the nominal upholding of the principle of decentralisation and a civil service that remains heavily centralised (Trefon 2011, p. 97), a situation compounded by the relative failure of administrative reform. Additionally, the process is caught in a process of pronounced legal ambiguity, with several crucial pieces of legislation still not adopted (Mabi Mulumba 2009, p. 131). The fact that municipal and local elections have been postponed on several instances, resulting in the appointment of non-elected personnel in communes, towns, sectors and chiefdoms, has further diminished the significance of the process.
More importantly, the issue of decentralisation has been the result of a political compromise harking back to the constitution-writing process. This contentious issue has pitted advocates of a federal system against the Joseph Kabila camp who favour a more centralised entity. With the political demise of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) in the 2006 elections – the staunchest partisans of federalism – the balance of power tilted towards Joseph Kabila's side, which engaged in the stalling of decentralisation given the various threats it posed, financial and political (Tull 2010, p. 654). Although decentralisation has been heavily sustained by donors, the risks posed by financial decentralisation have been widely noted even by donor agencies. According to the World Bank, for example, large transfers to the provinces should be limited pending the building of adequate local capacity. Such arguments to limit decentralisation have been seized upon by Kinshasa as a technical-administrative justification to delay or even possibly revise the political issue of decentralisation (ibid., p. 655). This is visible in the non-application of the system of retrocession whereby 40% of resources generated in the provinces should return therein, which the government has been effectively avoiding (International Crisis Group 2010, p. 14). Thus, the central government, preoccupied with the capture and consolidation of power, has turned the externally brokered compromise of decentralisation it was confronted with, to its advantage (Englebert 2012).
The aim of the above overview is not to provide an exhaustive overview of SSR, administrative reform and decentralisation in the DR Congo, but to highlight some of the shared characteristics of reform processes, three of which stand out in particular. First, despite a broad national consensus for the necessity of reform, the process is kept afloat by donor support and funding, and government resistance towards reform suggests that the rationale behind it is not shared by the authorities. Second, this highlights both the lack of understanding by the international backers of the reforms of the politics unfolding behind the scenes, as well as their powerlessness to affect these. Third, the sidetracking of reform processes suggests that reforms run counter to established patterns of interest or threaten objectives of power preservation and consolidation by the central authorities.
Beyond reform failure
Two key issues arise out of the above considerations. First, rather than pointing towards failure, patterns of reform can equally be conceptualised as partially functional for the presidency, and at least accommodative to donors – however great their displeasure may be – for whom inconclusive outcomes of the reform process are the price paid for the compromise arising out of engagement with the Congo. In other words, problematic reform outcomes may reflect not so much a sense of failure, but rather a marriage of convenience between the Congolese authorities and donors, albeit for different reasons. Indeed, political evolutions in Congo have been both shaped by international involvement (conditionality, various forms of diplomatic pressure) and transformed through Congolese political participation. The democratisation process during the transition, for instance, promoted by the Congo's development partners, did very little to address the climate of impunity, corruption and spoil politics that was effectively tolerated in order to safeguard the transition process (Willame 2007, Omasombo and Obotela 2006, Kodi 2008). Second, if problematic reform implementation has not affected aid practice substantially, the reasons behind this continuous engagement by Congo's development partners call for explanation. The remainder of this paper will point towards some possible answers.
Regarding patterns of mutual accommodation between donors and the Congolese authorities, some inferences can be drawn from the failure of administrative reform. The poor support it has received from the authorities, on the one hand, can be perceived as a conscious strategy on the part of ruling elites – and particularly the presidency – aimed at preserving control over dynamics inimical to its own endeavour of power consolidation, which an invigorated independent public sector might constitute. The stakes represented by the ability to cater for recruitment and public-sector wages in times of elections are far from negligible. On the other hand, the position of donors has remained ambiguous towards such processes. Of course, the absence of governmental commitment – much to aid agencies' dismay – towards administrative reform is bemoaned by donors. This effective bypassing of the administration – which nevertheless remains unavoidable for both association to and implementation of projects and programmes – has not significantly hampered donor funds from flowing, however. Needless to say, this configuration proves impairing in practice. It increases the administrative costs of parallel implementation units for projects; it often leads Congolese state officials' participation to be proportionate to funding; and of course does not address the issue of aid diversion and embezzlement. And yet it is effectively tolerated. The absence of organisational and administrative redress, following the relative failure of civil service/administrative reform initiatives from 2003 to 2008, may thus have been accommodating to the higher spheres of government, and ultimately somewhat irrelevant for practices of aid delivery and state reforms.
This point can be stretched further, as the same kind of reasoning can also be applied to others spheres of reform. The sidetracking of decentralisation due to the aims of capture, preservation and consolidation of power has not brought an end to donors' sustained engagement; nor have the government's divisive tactics employed in army reform, or for that matter the slow progress achieved in the justice sector and other fields. Perhaps regime consolidation and stabilisation concerns by donors led them to disregard the failure of reforms. The turning of imposed reforms to political advantage, the harnessing of those to purposes of pursuit of power, and the use of aid as an additional source of accumulation, albeit perhaps much to the dismay of donors, has not significantly altered the nature of the compromise between donors and government. This raises the question, if state reforms are not pivotal, on what does this compromise rest, and what have been its drivers?
To start with, as Denis Tull puts it, ‘the government is the product of the political engineering process that the international community has organised’ (Tull 2010, p. 658). Because international investment – conceived at large in terms of involvement in the peace process, transformation of policy, and development funding – has been so important, there is a strong sense that the Congo is too important to be allowed to fail (in that respect, echoing the old dynamic of ‘Mobutu or chaos’ during the Cold War). The fragile stability that the Joseph Kabila regime assured, whatever its shortcomings may have been, was perceived as a lesser evil than that of a possibly renewed period of greater troubles. Thus, following Tull, one may point out that for that reason ‘Kabila is keenly aware that donors and assorted outsiders need the government as much, or even more, than the government needs its outside supporters’ (ibid., p. 658, Willame 2007). This state of affairs partly explains the support the country receives, even though this has translated in practice into the toleration of the closure of democratic space for the sake of stability and state consolidation, pursued by the government cloaked in its 2006 electoral legitimacy (Tull 2010, p. 645). This is not to suggest that donor efforts are necessarily consonant with the government's manoeuvring; it simply means that in practice donor initiatives have largely accommodated it.
Moreover, in economic matters the DRC has witnessed a wide-ranging transformation of its legislation, embodied in the marathon of reforms realised in the years prior to the transition (2001–03) and firmly located outside democratic deliberation. For example, international financial institutions seized the ‘window of opportunity’ offered by regime change in 2001 to launch the country onto the HIPC/PRSP path and initiate the adoption of an Investment Code, Mining Code, Labour Code, Forestry Code, and so on, including the launching of structural reforms, drafted through extensive World Bank expertise (Gons 2004). These can be seen as an attempt to embed neoliberal fundamentals at an opportune moment when President Kabila desperately needed an external constituency to make up for the absence of a domestic power base. This fast-paced activism in terms of reform, however, has fallen short of achieving its aims. As Zoë Marriage puts it, even though there are ‘extroverted signs of liberalisation’, the domestic economic situation of Congo suggests low compliance with neoliberal norms (Marriage 2011, p. 1901). Nevertheless, throughout the process, at least until International Monetary Fund (IMF) support was withdrawn on the eve of the elections, the Congo was treated with remarkable leniency (de Villers 2009a, p. 352), pointing towards the peculiar status it was endowed with. This specific treatment is due to several factors including the need to safeguard international investment in a wider sense, particularly the stakes represented by DRC's natural resource wealth, especially mining. The arrival of Chinese investment in the autumn of 2007 has further compounded this situation.
This series of issues raise a set of questions that only further research can address. The contribution of this paper is to bring attention to a different way of comprehending the process of governance reforms, and in so doing, to point towards some relatively unexplored aspects of the aid relationship in the DRC. Policy directions have indeed been outlined by the country's development partners, but the uncharted waters they have been pushed into by the joint interplay of the inextricable nexus of domestic–foreign interaction is better understood through the compromises they have coalesced around, rather than a blank assertion of their failures. It also draws renewed attention to the question of the responsibility of international actors' involvement, given that the latter have proven impotent or unwilling to address the consequences of their actions, even though they have been inclined to tacitly accommodate them.