Stimulating progressive developmental results through the provision of aid is challenging at the best of times, that is, even when there is a capable government in place, with its eye on key matters of national development, supported by a constructive civil society and adequate, as well as coordinated, external support, numerous interventions are likely to fail. At least two factors are at play. First, developmental interventions are highly political in the sense that they create winners and losers. This means they will also create resistance and pushback – and it is on the rocks of vested interests and entrenched power structures that many interventions founder. Second, achieving socio-political and economic modernisation also demands well-developed cultural, strategic and operational capabilities for change that are often in short supply – including in higher-income countries.

Against this backdrop, realising results through the provision of aid in situations of conflict is challenging in the extreme. Obviously, none of the benign conditions outlined above are even remotely present. Instead, development interventions are faced with additional problems of polarised narratives, mutually exclusive identity images, reduced access, security threats, and nepotistic and corrupt practices that arise out of years of rule by the gun and war. Moreover, many donors are woefully underequipped to understand the situation in which they operate and to translate political insights into programming.[1] It is, in a sense, a miracle that any developmental results are achieved in such settings. Expectations should be extremely modest.

To their credit, aid organisations have come up with innovative and pragmatic ways to carry out and monitor their activities nonetheless. The purpose of this short study is to map key practices of how donors monitor the implementation of activities funded by their aid under conditions of conflict. The study is exploratory in nature and based on a mix of literature review, in-house expertise in Clingendael’s Conflict Research Unit and key informant interviews focusing on Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia as case studies.[2] The study develops a basic yardstick that donors can use to assess the monitoring designs of projects to be implemented in situations of conflict when they are making funding decisions. Specifically, the study explores how monitoring can help ensure that aid funds are correctly spent, that is, how monitoring takes account of the fiduciary and accountability risks of programme engagement in conflict settings and identifies response mechanisms for when such risks arise.[3] This is not the same as exploring whether aid funds are effectively or meaningfully spent, which will need to be the topic of other reports.

Section 2 of this report presents a short overview of the nature of modern conflict to outline the contextual challenges to aid delivery and remote monitoring in conflict settings. Section 3 then presents an overview of the main risks affecting programme implementation and monitoring in conflict situations. Section 4 presents the key options for donors in monitoring programme risks in conflict settings, with a specific focus on fiduciary and accountability risks – including an overview of how they can best respond when irregularities occur. Finally, Section 5 presents a basic assessment framework that outlines analytical, organisational and procedural elements that donors need to have in place to enable adequate monitoring in situations of conflict.