From Post-Conflict to Fragility, a Reversed Depoliticization of Development Assistance?

The transformation of international relations caused by the end of the Cold War inevitably had an impact on development cooperation policy. Forged in the context of ‘low intensity’ conflicts proliferating around the world, the concepts of human security, and of security and development as a nexus, led the traditional ‘donor countries’ to engage public funding (ODA - Official Development Assistance) into the highly political objective of preventing conflicts. Yet, two decades later, most donor countries appear reluctant to engage ODA in conflict prevention, aside for emergency and humanitarian aid. Through its Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is one of the main international organizations mainstreaming development policy. A study of its outputs show that, through the transformation of a ‘post-conflict’ agenda into a strategy targeting ‘fragile’ contexts, the OECD shifted from a technically-shaped political agenda of preventing conflicts, into a focus on public policy performance, thereby rejecting the risk caused by conflict. Based on a long-term embedded research in Belgium’s Ministry for Development Assistance, the article questions the reasons behind such a shift towards what could be seen as a reversed depoliticization of development policy