US releases Global Fragility Act country plans

More than two years after a congressionally mandated deadline, the United States government finally sent lawmakers the 10-year country plans for implementation of the Global Fragility Act, a law meant to overhaul the U.S. approach to conflict and instability. On Friday, it also publicly released summary documents which outline “objectives” for each of the four countries and one region selected last year by the Biden administration, as well as targeted actions the U.S. government will take specific to each context. The plans govern how the Global Fragility Act will be implemented in the locations that will serve as a pilot of the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability. The plans are not public in their entirety due to sensitivities in laying out the current challenges in the selected locations — Haiti, Libya, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, and the region of Coastal West Africa, which includes Ghana, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Guinea. They detail ways the U.S. government has engaged in the places in the past, and how it plans act differently in the future. President Joe Biden has called the plans “a meaningful, long-term commitment by the United States to building the political and economic resilience of partner societies” through investments to address underlying vulnerabilities that can lead to conflict and violence. The documents were developed with “broad-ranging consultations” with U.S. government missions in the priority countries; local governments; civil society, including women and youth; and other donor countries. Central to the plans, released just days before the U.S. is set to host the Summit for Democracy this week, is the role good governance plays in stability. The summary plans note that giving citizens a voice for their concerns and assuring they are heard is key to preventing future conflict. The “heart” of the GFA is to change the way the U.S. government works with partners “to build a more peaceful, inclusive and democratic world,” said Robert Jenkins, assistant to the administrator for the U.S. Agency of International Development’s Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, at a virtual event Monday on the GFA. “That means learning from our mistakes, being strategic, and working holistically across the U.S. government, all of our departments and agencies,” he said. “Defense, diplomacy, and development have to work together and [we] have to plan how we’re going to both address urgent needs and make progress towards shared long-term goals.” The Global Fragility Act, passed in 2019, requires USAID, the State Department, and the Defense Department to better align their efforts in fragile contexts so conflicts can be stopped before they break out. It draws on lessons from failed U.S. engagement in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where decades of foreign entanglement failed to stabilize those countries. It’s difficult to assess how comprehensive the plans truly are because the full documents are not publicly available, said Elizabeth Hume, executive director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and co-chair of the Global Fragility Act Coalition, which advocated for the law’s passage. But she said consultations with outside groups were taken “very seriously” by the administration. “We’ve always been begging them to integrate conflict prevention and here it is, front and center. In that regard, this is huge,” Hume said. “It’s not just about more resources or conflict prevention programming, it’s also really looking at what’s driving conflict dynamics on the ground and then addressing those.” Monitoring, evaluation, and learning is central to the plans, and a core tenet of the GFA is the U.S. government’s ability to not only plan over a 10-year horizon but adapt during that time if a strategy or program is not having the intended effects. “How often does that happen? How often do we see a country where we change policy? We just keep going. And that’s really what this is meant to be, because whatever we’re doing hasn’t really been working. In fact, things have been getting worse,” Hume said. Jenkins said he is “excited” that the summary plans are now public and the agencies can begin implementing them. Since the law was passed in December 2019, the Trump and then Biden administrations have consistently missed deadlines governing steps to implement the new approach. “Prevention to preempt and neutralize potential drivers of conflict is far more strategic because we can do a lot more before conflict breaks out. Once there’s conflict, our ability to help steer events and to help work with partners is limited,” Jenkins said. USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the plans come at a time of “historic levels of conflict-fueled displacement, food insecurity, and humanitarian needs across multiple regions, worsened by climate change.” “These peacebuilding efforts will be driven by our local partners around the world,” Power said in a statement on Saturday. “We know that amplifying marginalized voices and improving governance is essential to promoting stability and prosperity.”