Version 1.0
Marco d’Errico, FAO, Economist
Paolo Groppo, PhD, FAO(R) Senior Territorial Development and Land Governance expert
Marco De Gaetano, PhD, FAO Senior Emergency and Rehabilitation Officer
Francisco Carranza, FAO, Land Tenure Officer
Rome, December 2022
Introduction
Humanitarian needs continue to grow as crises are increasingly protracted and largely driven by conflict: Conflict and violence are major drivers of humanitarian needs, forced displacement, extreme poverty, and hunger (IASC, 2020).(1) For the purpose of this article, as already recalled by FAO(2) conflict is broadly defined as irreconcilable or opposing positions by two or more groups. This paper focuses on conflict around access and management of natural resources, which can range from non-violent disputes to intense armed violence between or by organized groups (FAO, 2019). The scope of the paper does not go into detail on the complexities between inter- and intra- state conflict, nor discussion over all categories and different forms of conflict.
The role of land and natural resources in conflict is attracting increased international attention, such as from the United Nations (UN) Peacebuilding Fund, due to the changing nature of armed conflict and because of a variety of longer-term, global trends. Land issues may be included in peace negotiations and agreements and UN peace missions. Often the focus of negotiators is on the broader issues of disarmament, elections and constitution-making and the implementation mechanisms related to land issues are often left rather vague. As a result, experience suggests, land-related clauses may go unimplemented (UN-Habitat, 2012).
FAO land and water units have been working intensively over the last two decades to elaborate, test and implement inclusive approaches(3) in different geo-political contexts, based on internationally agreed set of data. In 2002, FAO published a set of global data on the availability of natural resources, especially land. These somewhat complex tables indicate how land categorized as “suitable” and “very suitable” for agricultural production has reduced over time.
Similar analysis was also made for the availability of water(4), raising concern that was initially not understood. As availability of data increased, grabbing of land (and other natural resources) became more prominent in the world media. This was accompanied by a growing number of disputes and/or conflicts over access and/or use of natural resources, two issues that have gained more space in the international development agenda, i.e., how to analyze local dynamics of conflict and, at a more operational level, what to do when asked to intervene.
These represent two complementary fields of work, with the academia more inclined towards the analysis of local conflict dynamics (how to analyze), and the development agencies more focused on actions and interventions aimed at managing and resolving conflicts (what to do) to build sustainable and durable peace.
The issue of how to analyze conflicts took two separate directions, as Brück et al. (2015) highlight:
“The most common direction has been the use of socio-economic datasets in conflict-affected regions that were not explicitly collected for the analysis of processes or consequences of violent conflict per se, but either contain several variables (often self-reported) that can be used as proxies for human exposure to violent conflict or can be creatively merged with conflict event data. The second direction is based on data specifically collected to identify the causes and functions of violent conflict at the micro-level. This is the ideal approach because it allows researchers to tailor the surveys to directly address important research questions about different aspects of conflict processes, their causes, and their consequences. It is, however, a less common approach due to the high costs of these surveys, the level of resources required, and the ethical and security constraints associated with doing primary research in areas of violence.”
Conversely, in the case of what to do, the appreciation of the centrality of land(5) to understand the essence of conflicts (i.e., Colombia, Sudan, Rwanda, or Israel - Palestine) was clear for quite some time. However, the issue was considered too political and complex for a long time to be addressed at its root by international development partners. In emergency operations, the land and rights issue (almost) never appeared as a priority.
It took several years, and consistent efforts are still far from being considered as conclusive, but an attempt to move the center of interest from the natural resource (land, water etc.) to the actors operating in these contexts has started (FAO, 2016). This important point has been underscored by the FAO Office of Evaluation (OED) contribution to Humanitarian, Development, Peace Nexus (HDPN): “(recommendation n. 5), “FAO needs to promote and incentivize people-centered approaches across its humanitarian and development programmatic work, ensuring that the technical entry points of its interventions are sufficiently supported by conflict-sensitive and sustaining peace related objectives and ways of working” (FAO, 2021). (6)
In fragile and conflict-affected contexts, FAO(7) broadly speaking, intervenes across two programmatic areas:
• Working in conflicts (conflict impacts): developing and implementing interventions to offset the impacts of conflicts on food security, nutrition, agriculture, and natural resources, by saving lives and supporting livelihoods directly impacted by conflict(s).
• Working on conflicts (conflict drivers): identifying ways to minimize, avoid, positively transform, and resolve conflict(s) where food, agriculture or natural resources are (or hold the potential to serve as) conflict drivers, including reducing the potential for a relapse into conflict in the context of strategic post-conflict reconstruction and recovery (FAO, 2020).
Conflicts are most commonly man-made. Managing and/or mitigating a conflict requires involvement of the parties to the conflict and their commitment to transform their relationships. Conflicts are inherently part of human beings and therefore, they cannot be “eliminated.” Our aim is to work to reduce them at a scale that is manageable by concerned actors without external interventions. The approach we propose is based on the principles of Dialogue, Negotiation and Concerted actions (FAO, 2005 and 2016).
This shift puts the attention on motivations, perceptions, interests, and actions of the various parties to the conflict (actors). Understanding the actors’ logic could also allow the scaling up of efforts into higher levels of governance, where most often the decisions on the management are taken.
Shifting the focus from resource-centered approach to people-centered approach requires some methodological adaptation with the support of social sciences to answer to the core question: how to build confidence and credibility to approach increasingly challenging levels of difficulty concerning access to, use and management of natural resources.
In a people-centered approach that considers the power asymmetries and the relationships between actors, its methodological adaptation requires the identification of a set of indicators which help in measuring the trust among the parties and their credibility. While this topic seems to be pertinent to the largest part of actors involved in humanitarian and development interventions, there seems to be a knowledge gap on how to approach institutional and individual credibility. This paper aims to describe the aforementioned indicators.
Credibility
Following Gili (2005), credibility is now considered something recognized by others: a subjective factor and therefore not objective. Credibility is always a relationship between sender and receiver. It represents the quality of a person or of a thing that makes it credible (in the eyes of the beholder). This relational nature explains why it can happen that those who are credible to a part or to the public for a certain reason, may not be credible to other parties for the same reason.
Credibility comes from belief. A person, a group or an institution is credible if they can align over time different trustees’ outcomes. They have a credibility capital built in their history. The emphasis is often placed on the coincidence between words, actions, and outcomes of the actor: a person who says A, acting on B and gets C effect, inevitably sees a drop of their own spendable capital of credibility in the public space.
We work on the credibility to turn it into influence, understood as the art of making things possible, with the help of others (Owen, 2015), with the aim of finding a peaceful modus vivendi between the various interests at stake, compared with limited resources, that is acceptable to all parties.
Measuring credibility is not an easy task. Often credibility is adopted by management studies to explore corporate reputation (Cuomo et al 2014). In fact, the idea of the relevance of credibility (and, as a consequence, of measuring credibility) can also be found in Marshal (1923) when the author mentions that “a producer, a wholesaler dealer, a shopkeeper who has built up a strong connection among purchasers of his goods, has a valuable property”. This paper builds up on the work by Lim and Van Der Heide (2015).
The Credibility Index (CI): initial elements
Credibility is progressively built during the peacebuilding process through the proposed route of dialogue, negotiation,and concerted actions. FAO is increasingly aware of the importance of building peace beyond emergency interventions by supporting the sustainable resolution of local conflicts. In this respect, FAO’s has included “technical diplomacy” in its humanitarian and development agenda.
Two main areas of concern can be identified in FAO’s peacebuilding/conflict resolution process:
A. Credibility of FAO as a possible neutral facilitator of the post-conflict dialogue-negotiation process. The credibility in this case is measured with respect to each party of the process, including government counterparts and it might imply several sub-specific indicators for each main stakeholder.
B. Credibility amongst the (many) parties involved in the conflict and in the peacebuilding process. In this case, the credibility is measured considering a specific additional element, the power asymmetries.
This initial CI is about the first component: credibility of FAO as possible facilitator.
There is no definition of credibility that relates to an institution such as FAO. However, we can build on what exists in literature. Pero and Smith (2008) propose a framework for institutional credibility (and leadership). In their work, institutional credibility is based on people’s perceptions that institutions’ accountability, representation, legitimacy, transparency, fairness, and justice. The authors lay down the theoretical foundation of those six dimensions, building up on existing literature. We otherwise build on Lin and Van Der Heide (2015) identifying three main dimensions of credibility: expertise/competence, trust, and caring/goodwill. In our view and considering the use we aim at making of the credibility index (especially in fragile and conflict areas), we consider expertise and competence as key elements for every work and negotiation in the field.
The above represented conceptual framework can be measured by combining different indicators that can be collected over time in the daily work in the field. A very preliminary and tentative example can be made using the below table of indicators.
Expertise and Competences | · Do you believe FAO will deliver effectively and on time the project they are implementing? · Do you remember if FAO ever withdrew from a project they were implementing in your area? · Do you have any record of evidence of FAO being alleged with charges of fraud or misconduct? · Do you think FAO’s staff has adequate competency for delivering their work? |
Trust | · Do you have any record of evidence of FAO being alleged with charges of fraud or misconduct? Do you have any record of evidence of FAO not having completed what they committed to do? · Do you have evidence of FAO not having behaved impartially? To what extent do you trust FAO? |
Caring and Goodwill | · In your experience, is FAO open to suggestion and listening to local communities? · Do you think the work of FAO is sufficiently contextualized to your area/culture? · . To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “I believe that the personal information I provide to will be kept confidential.” · Can you say that the support provided by FAO and partners was aligned with your household's food security and agriculture priorities? |
Aggregating a credibility index
An initial stage of quantitative methods for measurement involves using a set of analytical tools to translate concepts into numerical form. The question posed here is: “What procedures can be used to define the set of indicators that represent credibility?” Answering this question requires estimating a measure of the credibility of a specific unit at a certain time. Ultimately, an aggregative rule must be adopted to combine different dimensions of the theoretical framework discussed.
One solution can be that we let the various parts separate. This means credibility must be considered a function of several dimensions (D) or characteristics that can be context and time specific. In other words, credibility is a multidimensional concept (Lim and Van Der Heide, 2015). The selection of the individual dimensions should be informed by empirical work and theory.
An alternative might be that we can represent credibility as clusters of indicators and look at each of the n clusters separately. Thus, if we relax the multidimensionality assumption and consider just a sub-set m of the n clusters, it is possible to hypothesize a measure of credibility which includes 1 to m (where m<n) clusters. Under the extreme assumption of the mono-dimensionality of resilience, it is therefore possible to estimate resilience directly. However, this dramatically reduces the scope of a credibility analysis.
Alternatively, we could aggregate the various dimensions of credibility into one single index. There are advantages to using an index to represent a complex multidimensional construct: it allows for more concise description, and it may facilitate comparability, ranking, targeting and aggregation across settings. An index is also easily incorporated into other modelling procedures.
If credibility is to be conceived as a multidimensional index, an aggregative procedure should be defined. There are two broad categories of aggregative procedures: those that seek to explain the role of each variable when defining the final index, and those that do not. The most commonly used procedures in the former group are multivariate models; the latter typically adopt a moment-based approach.
For the credibility index we will employ factor analysis. Factor analysis is used to estimate a construct not directly observed (Bollen, 2002). It reduces a set of observed variables used as proxy indicators for the latent variable into a single variable, the component of interest. The data reduction mechanism relies on finding cross-correlations between the observed variables, identifying the number of (unobservable) factors reflected in the correlations, and predicting the latent outcome as a linear combination of underlying factors. If all the variables defining the latent variable are closely correlated, they may be represented by a single factor. When variables cluster into a few groups of closely related variables, they can be represented by more than one factor. The number of factors should be chosen so that at least 90 percent of the total variability is explained. More formally, and building up on other similar approaches (see d’Errico et al 2020), we can write:
Where a credibility index for the _____ i at time t is a function of K components (where k=1,…,K) for the ____ i at time t, plus the error term.
Conclusion
Conflicts, largely, are man-made; they are part of the human being. The role and work of international agencies on conflict spans from conflict mitigation to reduction to post-conflict assistance. Especially if referred to conflicts linked to natural resources, management and mitigation policies largely depend on the involvement of the actors and their commitment to transform their relationships. To play an active role, therefore, international agencies need to expand or invest on their credibility.
This calls for the identification of a credible analytical framework that can be adopted for assessing the credibility of an international agency. There is no such a framework, to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, this paper builds on an already existing and well adopted analytical framework developed by Lim and Van Der Heide (2015). Expanding what has been proposed by the authors, this paper presented an approach at measuring the credibility of an international agency to play a leading role in conflict mitigation. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to establish a credibility index.
While we recognize the limitation of our proposal, we think this is a credible first step toward the understanding of an important pre-condition: is an international agency invested of enough credibility to act effectively in a conflict or post-conflict situation? Knowing if an actor is credible is key to coordinating the efforts of the UN in fragile contexts.
Further avenues of research stem from this paper, in particular with reference to case studies, fine-tuning of the indicators adopted, and framing the relationships with national governments into the credibility index.
Notes
(1) General Assembly of UN. Disarmament and International Security (First Committee), https://www.un.org/en/ga/first/index.shtml; General Assembly of UN. Social, Humanitarian & Cultural Issues (Third Committee), https://www.un.org/en/ga/third/index.shtml
(2) Corporate Framework to support sustainable peace in the context of Agenda 2030, https://www.fao.org/3/I9311EN/i9311en.pdf
(4) FAO http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/water_res/index.stm
(5) Intended here as a proxy of natural resources
(6) Visualizing the P in the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU45k07s70I&t=1s
(7) Case studies where FAO has worked on analysis of conflict over natural resources: Burkina Faso, https://www.fao.org/3/cb6023en/cb6023en.pdf; Liptako-Gourma countries (Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger), https://www.fao.org/3/cb7446fr/cb7446fr.pdf; Mali, https://www.fao.org/3/cb6061en/cb6061en.pdf ; Niger, https://www.fao.org/3/cb6845fr/cb6845fr.pdf
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