Rehabilitation after war has rarely been conceptualised coherently from macro to micro level in country context studies. With over fifty countries and 500 million people either in or emerging from war, post-conflict rehabilitation needs more intensive analysis as a topic in its own right.

Recent research by the Institute of Development Studies based on fieldwork in the Greater Horn of Africa and Sri Lanka explored ways in which to articulate a more realistic strategy for post-war rehabilitation with a view to informing policy and practice and further dialogue and research.

When wars end there is never absolute certainty that they will not recur. Rehabilitation, therefore, is beset by challenges, setbacks, problems and is at risk for years. The present short-term, micro or project focused approaches have little chance of success or sustainable impact.

Main findings are:

• Rehabilitation may begin during war but is central in the transition from suspension of open hostility to self-sustaining peace. Enabling households to recover livelihoods, broadening access to basic services, restoring local infrastructure, providing safety nets and ensuring effective participation in governance are all crucial common aims.
• Rehabilitation interacts with reconciliation and reconstruction, is crucial to rebuilding government legitimacy, and cannot be seen as simply restoring the pre-war situation.
• Simple, rapid, participatory dialogue can identify ‘user’ priorities in early stages. Returning home with food security is essential to successful initiation of rehabilitation.
• To keep rehabilitation moving ahead, more complex discourse on programme design and within local governance and civil society will be needed. Shocks such as drought, flood, terms of trade, renewed violence are almost inevitable. Without rapid-response contingency mechanisms these can slow, reverse or even destroy rehabilitation.
• Rehabilitation has the potential for major poverty reduction, GDP, government revenue, food security and export impacts, and should be a core macro-economic priority, backed by major resource allocations and linked to micro-level initiatives.

A number of recommendations stem from these findings:

• Rehabilitation needs to be conceptualised and planned strategically at macro, sectoral, district/provincial and household levels and to be fully accepted as medium term and central not short term and marginal.
• Generalisations, while possible and useful, need to be tested against contextual reality if rehabilitation is to be cost-effective and goals relevant to intended beneficiaries.
• There is a need for national ‘ownership’ of rehabilitation with government strategic planning, leadership and coordination of external as well as domestic actors. Ideally this should be decentralised with substantial participation and accountability.
• Strategic medium term rehabilitation budgeting/planning is crucial to attaining positive results. Flexibility to adapt to impacts of negative shocks must be built into budgets and contingency arrangements made.
• Interim suspension of debt service obligations is in many cases likely to be crucial, and substantial rehabilitation aid must not be hedged with ‘Catch 22’ pre-conditions which can realistically be met only through rehabilitation itself.
• Reconceptualisation of rehabilitation must be complemented with more and deeper case studies, more baseline data - pre and post war - from household to macro levels, more consultations with intended beneficiaries, and more personnel and institutional capacity.

Source(s):
‘Rehabilitation: toward sustainable peace and reconciliation for redevelopment’, COPE Working Paper #39, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and Centre for Development Studies, University of Leeds by R.H. Green, January 2001
‘Rehabilitation: strategic, proactive, flexible, risky?’, Disasters, #24(4) by R.H. Green, 2000

Funded by: UK Department for International Development

id21 Research Highlight: 30 October 2001

Further Information:
Linda Bateman
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: (+44) (0)1273 606261
Contact the contributor: L.Bateman@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

Other related links:
'Running battle - international intervention in post-conflict healthcare'

'How can communities manage conflict? Urban violence and post-war reconciliation'

'Why wait for post-conflict reconstruction?'

Visit the Centre for Conflict Resolution for further research

See also the Department of Peace Studies

Refer to the World Bank Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit

See Eldis for further resources on Conflict