Where are the civilians when we need them?

Our friends at the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (thank you David Harland!) have taken a hard look at a long list of limits to international civilian capacity in an e-discussion conducted by the International Stabilization and Peacebuilding Initiative over the past month (Summary of Responses – e-Discussion – UN Review of Intl Civ Cap):

• difficulties recruiting civilians,
• competition with the private sector,
• slow recruitment times, links among training,
• rostering and recruitment,
• vague work descriptions,
• generalized competencies,
• diversity of organizational cultures, values and visions,
• lagging national (host country) capacity development,
• differences between international and national strategies,
• getting the right people for the right jobs,
• expertise gaps, relevance of training
• and gender balance.

They’ve also looked, less successfully, at planning processes for development of civilian capacities and at bottlenecks that impede deployment:  bureaucratic obstacles, insecurity in conflict zones, lengthy recruitment times and civilian logistics limitations.

Perhaps the most innovative part is on interoperability from the UN perspective, where it is clear that despite the obstacles there is sometimes real benefit to the UN drawing on others’ capacities.  The natural outcome of this discussion is a series of recommendations for more coordination and coordination bodies, a subject that I confess leaves me cold.  I think what all of us need are agreed strategic endstates and frameworks rather than undirected coordination meetings.