Sri Lanka after two years end of war, de-mining, restteling, rehabiltating, reconstruction, re-development, democratizing, reconciling and returning to normalcy faster than any other post-conflict nation. In short it is booming with prosperity just after two years. The process of rebuilding a war torned countries is complicated. Paul Collier suggests three principles: continued from part 1
It would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where, when we got to a post-conflict situation, there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties. So that's idea one. Recognize interdependence. And now let me turn to the second approach, which is complimentary. And that is to focus on a few critical objectives. Typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities. And indeed, unfortunately, if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda. Because in these situations, needs are everywhere. But the capacity to implement change is very limited. So we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical.
And I want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situtation three things are critical. One is jobs. One is improvements in basic services. Especially health, which is a disaster during conflict. So jobs, health, and clean government. Those are the three critical priorities. So I'm going to talk a little about each of them.
Jobs. What is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations? And why are jobs so important? Jobs for whom? Especially jobs for young men. In post-conflict situations, the reason that they so often revert to conflict, is not because elderly women get upset. It's because young men get upset. And why are they upset? Because they have nothing to do. And so we need a process of generating jobs, for ordinary young men, fast. Now, that is difficult. Governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service. That is not a good idea. It's not sustainable. In fact, you're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service. But getting the private sector to expand is also difficult. Because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation. These are not environments where you can build export manufacturing.
There's one sector which isn't exposed to international trade, and which can generate a lot of jobs. And which is, in any case, a sensible sector to expand, post-conflict. And that is the construction sector. The construction sector has a vital role, obviously, in reconstruction. But typically that sector has whithered away during conflict. During conflict people are doing destruction. There isn't any construction going on. And so the sector shrivels away. And then when you try and expand it, because it's shriveled away, you encounter a lot of bottlenecks. Basically, prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector. But it doesn't generate any jobs. And so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector.
What might the bottlenecks be? Just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure, using a lot of labor. First you need access to land. Often the legal system is broken down so you can't even get access to land. Secondly you need skills, the mundane skills of the construction sector. In post-conflict situations we don't just need doctors without borders, we need bricklayers without borders, to rebuild the skill set. We need firms. The firms have gone away. So we need to encourage the growth of local firms. If we do that, we not only get the jobs, we get the improvements in public infrastructure, the restoration of public infrastructure.... read more....
SOURCE http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_s_new_rules_for_rebuilding_a_broken_nat...
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Two Sri Lankan Womenby petersanderstead10,204 views
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