By Baroness Falkner - 6th October 2011
Baroness Falkner of Margravine argues that a new ministerial post should be established to be accountable for overseas strategy.
One of the perverse effects of the creation of a separate Department for International Development under Labour was that interdepartmental coordination between the FCO, DfID and MoD became more difficult at a time when the connections between diplomacy, aid and conflict were becoming more evident.
The establishment of a National Security Council with a broad remit was the appropriate response to this fragmentation but what it has lacked has been a strategic framework underpinned by a coordinated analysis to inform government as to the nature and gravity of threats to peace and stability. The Building Stability Overseas Strategy seeks to address some of these shortcomings by pulling together the strands that currently inform policy into a formal structure through the Building Stability Overseas Board, which with representation from all three departments will take responsibility for the £1.125bn budget.
The strategy will rest on a three-pillar approach towards fragile and conflict-prone states: invest upstream to prevent conflict – in my mind the most important aspect, as well as creating an early warning system, complemented by a rapid response capability. Overall, the response will still comprise the reactive – when things go wrong and all we can do is to try and sort things out – but we will also take a longer-term approach through the upstream prevention strand.
All this is to be welcomed but there are still grey areas, which is why I have called this debate: the most important is the lack of 'ownership' of the strategy, and hence the programmes undertaken. While I am the first to welcome cross-departmental initiatives, I think Parliament and the public will be better served if there is a clearly identified minister who is accountable for what is an influential body with a sizeable pool of expenditure under its wings, and I shall be pressing for this.
It will also be interesting to see how the difficult aims of securing or maintaining stability in conflict-prone states squares with the aim of pursuing democracy and human rights in those same situations. It is counter-intuitive for a Liberal to express doubts about this, but I was at the Commonwealth when the UK government made two significant strategic mistakes in Pakistan and Zimbabwe, pressing for purist democratic solutions. In doing so, we lost leverage, with the consequence that both countries saw greater loss of life subsequently.
Finally, I will also raise my perennial complaint that the strategy seems to take little account of women's involvement in reconciliation and peace building – we all know that women are terribly affected by the upheaval of conflict yet still wear blinders when it comes to recognising their role in preventing and mitigating it. Perhaps my future 'accountable' minister should be a woman.
Kishwer Falkner is a former Liberal Democrat director of international affairs (1993-99) and policy (1997-98). She was raised to the peerage in 2004 and currently sits as co-chairperson on the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs Parliamentary Committee.
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