The U.S. Should Practice What It Preaches on ‘Good Governance’
By: Rachel George | July 29, 2022
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken delivers a speech on U.S. foreign policy at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 3, 2021. State Department Photo by Ron Przysucha / Public Domain
Three years after its inception, U.S. efforts to implement the Global Fragility Act have been met with fanfare as well as understandable skepticism. The act was passed in 2019 with an aim to supporting stability and preventing violent conflict abroad. Washington’s recent announcement of an initial focus on four countries—Libya, Haiti, Mozambique and Papua New Guinea—alongside a regional strategy for littoral West Africa, is an important first step for turning strategy into action.
While a forward-looking focus on the GFA’s implementation in difficult contexts like Libya is critical, Washington’s emphasis on fragile states will also require enhanced attention to adaptation and learning, as well as institutional modernization at home. Implementing the GFA’s ambitious agenda will require a judicious allocation of its budget with concerted interagency effort and collaboration. This includes a need for a strong partnership between the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, as well as support from the Defense Department. But the coronavirus pandemic and myriad new global challenges have highlighted the importance of addressing the fractures and failures within the U.S. agencies tasked with implementing this new act.
A good place to start is by applying some of the act’s principal components to the United States’ own institutions and programming, particularly when it comes to a learning-based approach to “good governance.” The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 already aims to promote more robust, data-driven approaches to U.S. government programming. These principles align with the GFA’s aim to embed an explicit learning agenda and accountability strategy to lesson-learning and adaptation, alongside Washington’s own promotion of these principles to bolster the resiliency of governments abroad.
A challenge in this effort will be ensuring that Washington’s commitment to evidence moves beyond rhetoric to action. In particular, the U.S. State Department, which is tasked with devising “a plan for the [GFA] initiative, including its organizational structure and goals,” will need to adapt its programming in real time based on obstacles and outcomes experienced in local contexts to effectively manage the program’s goals. This will require better lesson-learning on good practices.
While the State Department and USAID have important expertise in the promotion of so-called good governance abroad, the United States’ own agencies have failed to embed all this learning into their own institutional practices. For example, the GFA’s 2022 prologue promotes a system of lesson-learning and “adaptive management,” principles stemming from development programming and supported by the EU, World Bank and others. In practice, this means promoting continual learning and adjustment to programming, informed by the context of local environments. Put simply, if a selected path is not achieving its intended results, adaptive programming aims to create structures to course-correct.
The State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations has made some headway in committing to models for learning and adaptation in its work, but these strategies require further deepening and institutionalization across the department. Adaptive management approaches have been more firmly embedded in certain areas of USAID programming, while they remain a more nascent principle within the State Department’s working procedures. That could lead to unbalanced expertise in delivering on the GFA’s lofty agenda.
This disconnect between applying good-governance principles at home as cohesively as they are being promoted abroad is all the more glaring, given U.S. expertise on the importance of adaptive management in the effort to enhance global stability and resiliency. U.S. foreign assistance experts have been leaders in calling for greater agility through adaptive lesson-learning in programming abroad, including through the expanded and improved use of data and technology to enhance institutional consolidation.
And yet, the U.S. State Department is drawing on outdated and limited uses of technology and data, reflecting an approach based more on “art” than on “science.” U.S. diplomats still rely heavily on intuition and narrative argumentation, with the result that a rigorous approach to lesson-learning remains the exception rather than the rule when it comes to institutional norms. While these principles are important to combating fragility abroad and to development agendas more generally, they should also apply to diplomacy. If a diplomatic effort is not working, the U.S. requires greater mechanisms to measure and capture these failures, and to correct course as a function of the lessons learned.
Implementation of the GFA will be an important test of Washington’s ability to apply a modern, evidence-based and data-driven approach to a major global challenge. Part of that test will be to embed a stronger learning culture when it comes to knowledge-management within Washington’s diplomatic institutions in order to better bolster and complement U.S. foreign assistance programs. The State Department suffers from an underinvestment in its internal culture of knowledge-management, monitoring and learning, efforts the GFA and other fragility-focused work aim to promote among government institutions abroad. As one State Department official put it in an off-the-record meeting, current U.S. diplomatic practices are “leaving gold bricks on the floor all the time.” Without effective incentive structures to prioritize evidence-based learning and adaptive management among the diplomatic corps in setting the goals, priorities and political pathways for a global fragility agenda, it will be difficult to effectively promote these principles through the GFA abroad.
Though the State Department recently announced its new learning agenda as part of compliance with the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policy Making Act, it needs to match its aspirations with greater resources in order to produce, store and leverage the learning it needs on fragility—and should do so during the implementation phase of the GFA, and not afterward. Neither the State Department nor USAID hosts a Federally Funded Research and Development Center—which puts policymakers in the driver’s seat to set research agendas—as other U.S. federal agencies do, despite the potential benefits of such a center to the fragility agenda, which will require a robust, fit-for-purpose, evidence-based, continual learning environment. By comparison, the Defense Department currently sponsors 10 FFRDCs.
While efforts to improve knowledge-management as well as monitoring and learning work at the State Department have expanded to some degree, on an institution-wide level they have not met expectations. Data analytics, monitoring, evaluation and learning still require greater incentives and institutionalization across the department.
Experts have called for a rebranding of “fragility” efforts worldwide, given the colonial undertones of its current framing. After all, the use of fragility as a terminology to refer to Libya, Haiti and other Global South countries fails to recognize the potential for and existence of institutional and governmental fragility everywhere.
While the U.S. may have missed the moment to rebrand this agenda, it’s not too late to make sure that U.S. government agencies’ internal practices and diplomatic approaches better align with their own principles of good governance on adaptive management, monitoring and learning abroad.