Conflict
and development: Exploring links and assessing impacts
By Jean
Daudelin
Development
and underdevelopment have long been associated with
poorly designed or poorly implemented economic and
social policies, an unfair trade and financial system,
debt, and gender imbalances. With the end of the Cold
War, however, underdevelopment has increasingly been
intertwined with violence and conflict as much of
the South is engulfed in civil wars, rising crime,
and generalized physical insecurity.
Conflict and violence have become primary preoccupations
for researchers and policy-makers because of their
impact on development levels and prospects. In fact,
whether international or civil, conflict and violence
can, in the space of a few months, negate years—and
sometimes decades—of development efforts and
severely compromise direct impact because of their
immediate economic, social, and cultural consequences
and an indirect one because of their destructive consequences
for the resources and institutions societies need
to rebuild and develop.
A new approach
The natural answer has been to add conflict
resolution and prevention to the expanding development
agenda. That approach, however, now appears to be
wanting. Conflict is not just an obstacle to be dealt
with so development work can occur: too often tensions
can result or be aggravated by development policies
and practices themselves. Conflict and violence, in
other words, cannot be confined to one among many
“problem areas” to be addressed by dedicated
programs and projects. They must be brought to the
core of development policy and factored into the very
design of programs and projects to ensure they “do
no harm”and they foster the conditions that lessen
the likelihood conflict will have an impact on people.
A dam, for example, might greatly expand the energy
available in an isolated area; agrarian reform might
increase the competitiveness of a country's agricultural
sector and enhance its exporting capacity; a fellowship
program might create opportunities for a given, perhaps
long marginalized, sector of society.
Yet the benefits of these policies may be erased by
the social and ethnic tensions they generate as indigenous
populations are expelled from traditional lands, as
tightly woven social structures are unraveled by the
liberalization of the land market, or as various groups
react negatively to what they see as inequitable access
to higher education. Conversely, a range of measures
that effectively reduce social and ethnic tensions
might also appear, from a narrower development perspective,
to be utterly ineffective.
Conflict
and violence must be brought to the core of development
policy and factored into the very design of programs
and projects.
Development and conflict management, in other words,
have a distinct logic that is not always contradictory
but is sometimes so. Therefore, it is crucial the
complex links between them be considered and factored
into program designs.
The objective cannot be to avoid conflict at all costs:
democracy, justice, and equity sometimes call for
the use of force. But the civil wars and humanitarian
disasters of the last decade—especially in Africa,
but also in Central America, the Balkans, and Southeast
Asia—have shown that no effort should be spared
to limit the human and economic consequences of conflict.
They also suggest, however, the impact of projects
and policies on conflict must become a central preoccupation
of mainstream development thinking.
This is the theory behind a project recently launched
by The North-South Institute. Building on pioneering
work done at the International Development Research
Centre (IDRC)1, the Institute is coordinating
a study of the impact of agrarian structures and policies
in Latin America. Research teams in Mexico (Chiapas
and Yucatan), El Salvador, and Nicaragua will explore
the rich interplay between the violence and conflicts
that have racked these countries and land distribution
and agricultural policies. These problems remain central
to government policy in many areas and have played
a central role in the recent upheavals in the selected
countries. Moreover, the ways in which agrarian issues
are dealt with in these countries owe much to international
cooperation, financing, pressure, and ideas.
The project should not be construed as a conflict
prevention or conflict resolution endeavour. Although
focusing mainly on cases of extreme violence, it does
not intend to provide a recipe for targeted interventions
in civil wars or ethnic confrontation. Rather, it
is framed squarely in the domain of long-term human
development and seeks to generate insights into the
ways policies foster tensions that can threaten sustainability.
The goal is to integrate the concern with conflict
into the long-term human development agenda rather
than vice versa—bringing development into the
current discussion about acute conflict.
The research team initiated fieldwork in mid-1999,
and preliminary results will be presented at a conference/workshop
next fall. 
1 Kenneth Bush, “A Measure of Peace: Peace
and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA) of Development
Projects in Conflict Zones” (IDRC: The Peacebuilding
and Reconstruction Program Initiative and the Evaluation
Unit, 1998).
