Abstract

This report analyses how donors seek to understand Afghan domestic politics, how donors feed such understanding into their development activities and what recommendations can be distilled from the present state of affairs that have relevance for new, more ‘politics-oriented’ strands in the development discourse, such as ‘thinking and working politically’ or ‘doing development differently’. The report focuses specifically on how donors seek to understand and improve the legitimacy and inclusivity of Afghan domestic politics as part of their corresponding commitment under the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States.

Its main conclusion is that donors generally have a modest and one-sided understanding of the nature and dynamics of Afghan domestic politics as expressed through the key premises of its political settlement, a narrow outlook on what type of activities constitute support for the promotion of more legitimate and inclusive politics, and a limited suite of instruments for doing this.

One important aspect of the present state of affairs is that donors display a nearly uniform and strong focus on the central Afghan state and its government, despite a long history of decentralized governance and a fusion of informal and formal power at all levels of rule. Another aspect is that donors focus their efforts to improve political legitimacy and inclusivity on technical and capacity-building initiatives that seek to improve the procedural aspects of electoral democracy, largely ignoring the historic evidence that ‘input-legitimacy’ is not what counts most in Afghanistan.

Acknowledgement

This report was made possible by the German Ministry for Development Cooperation (BMZ) and the German Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), which I gratefully acknowledge.

Moreover, the report could not have been produced without the assistance of some key people who work for these institutions. In particular, Shinta Sander (BMZ/GIZ) provided helpful overall guidance to the study while Benjamin Werner (GIZ) and the staff of the German Risk Management Organization (RMO) in Kabul proved invaluable in enabling a safe field visit to Afghanistan by providing risk alerts, transport, safety assessments and logistical support. Thank you.

In addition, a sizeable number of people – donors, Afghan government officials and civil society representatives alike – graciously freed up about an hour of their time to speak with me while already facing full agendas and on the basis of requests at unreasonably short notice. Fortunately, flexibility is the operative word in Afghanistan. I very much appreciated the willingness to talk, as well as the frankness of these conversations.

Finally, reports tend to greatly improve as their author is challenged in peer-review type processes. For this sort of assistance – on a personal basis – thanks go to Véronique Dudouet (Berghof Foundation), Jort Hemmer (Clingendael), Stephen Ndegwa (World Bank) and Lenny Linke (Afghanistan Analysts Network).

The field work for the report was concluded at the end of November 2015 and its writing at the end of December 2015. It does not reflect developments beyond this date. Naturally, the text, as well as any errors, remain the responsibility of the author.