Introduction
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‘Politics’ dominate governance and resource allocation in every society, if politics are understood as the manner, relations and utilization of rule and power by a selected few in the service of, in the name of, or against the many.[1] Unsurprisingly, this also holds true for the area of development cooperation. Surprisingly, though, it remains a somewhat new insight that was long hidden under the technical jargon of aid delivery. However, development politics are experiencing an extended period of ‘coming out’, much like security did in relation to development about 20 years ago. Today it is commonplace to state that development and security are inextricably linked. Politics and development may yet develop an equally intimate connection.

From this perspective, the case study report analyses how donors currently seek to understand Afghan domestic politics, how they feed such understanding into their development activities – especially those that aim to increase the legitimacy and inclusivity of governance – and what lessons or good practice can be distilled from this.

The inquiry takes the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States as its guiding frame.[2] This political agreement, concluded in 2011 and endorsed by some 50 donors, multilateral development organizations and fragile states, contains a series of mutual commmitments on how development efforts in conflict-affected environments can jointly be improved. Among other things, it proposes a range of peace- and state-building goals (PSGs) that should steer development efforts to enable sustainable exits from fragility. Its first goal (PSG1) focuses on ‘Legitimate Politics – Foster inclusive political settlements and conflict resolution.’ In practice, this has often amounted to efforts to improve political legititmacy and inclusivity in fragile societies. The lagging implementation of this objective provides the starting point for the present study. The salience of PSG1 increased recently as a result of the endorsement by the United Nations of Sustainable Development Goal 16, which builds in part on the New Deal.

Given the limited time available for the inquiry, it has not been possible to develop a context-specific understanding of what inclusive and legitimate politics might amount to in Afghanistan. Instead, the research has focused on how donors seek to understand Afghan domestic politics. The term ‘political settlement’ was used in some interviews and is used in the report as a shorthand reference to the political relations, power sources, rules of political competition and agreements on resource distribution that can be said to make up ‘politics’. In this study, a political setttlement denotes the implicit or explicit understanding between (part of) a country’s elites regarding the division of power between them. This is expressed in the form of a set of (in)formal representation, control and distribution rules that guide governance and resource allocation. Such understandings evolve over time and are grounded in underlying agreements within particular elite groups that enable and constrain the settlements that can be reached between different elite groups.[3] The term ‘donors’ in this analysis refers to donors interviewed for the report (see Annexe 1). The broader group of donors that is brought together in the OECD´s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is referred to as ‘OECD donors’. Donors that are not members of this organization, such as Turkey or China, are excluded from the study.

Section 1 provides a schematic overview of the nature and development of Afghanistan’s political settlement and of the headline effects of donor engagement with Afghan politics. Section 2 subsequently offers a brief analysis of the tools donors use to understand Afghan domestic politics, what internal constraints they face in their efforts to do so, and how they translate political analysis into development programming. Section 3 offers recommendations on how OECD donors could improve their support for inclusive and legitimate politics.

This is a narrower definition with more focus on the ‘body politic’ and the question of for whom power is exercised than, for example, that of Robert Dahl, which suggests that we understand politics as ‘any persistent pattern of human relationships that involves, to a significant extent, control, influence, power, or authority’. This includes political processes in, for example, firms or civil society organizations. Dahl, R., Modern political analysis, 5th edn, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall International, 1991.
For a full overview of the initiative that led to the ‘New Deal’, as well as core documents, see: http://www.pbsbdialogue.org/en/ (accessed 02/12/15). For a recent review of implementation efforts to date, see Hearn, S., Independent review of the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, New York, New York University CIC/IDPS, 2016.
See for example: Parks, T. and W. Cole, Political settlements: Implications for International Development Policy and Practice, Occasional paper no. 2, The Asia Foundation, 2010; Laws, E., Political Settlements, Elite Pacts and Governments of National Unity: A conceptual study, DLP Background Paper 10, 2012; Menocal, A., Inclusive political settlements: Evidence, gaps and challenges of institutional transformation, Birmingham, UK Department for International Development, 2015.
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Dynamics of Afghan politics