April 2002 | Peceworks No. 43
Robert M. Schoenhaus
Training for Peace and Humanitarian Relief Operations: Advancing Best Practices
Download full PDF report (45 pages)
Executive Summary
While the four communities in peace operations--governmental and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), the military, and international civilian
police--frequently find themselves sharing the same field of operation, their
approaches to and structures for training for that interaction and the articulation of
training needs are quite different. In the past, this has led to confusion, suspicion, and a
diminished capacity for cooperative action among the communities. All sides recognize
the benefits of and need for better coordination and increased operating efficiencies, but
making the kinds of changes that are required will not be easy.
In an ideal world, all the participants in any given humanitarian response effort would
share a common understanding of one another's capabilities and limitations, as well as
their roles and missions. Overlapping efforts would be kept to a minimum while
cooperation in the pursuit of progress and solutions would be instinctive. In the real world,
however, mission analysis is often ad hoc; training is spotty and tends to focus on individual
agency goals, and coordination with other organizations is worked out on the fly. These
were the main conclusions of a two-day symposium on best practices in conflict
management training, sponsored by the U. S. Institute of Peace, June 25-26, 2001.
Another key difficulty civilian elements of the international community face is the trap
of attempting to work "outside the box." The governmental and NGO communities
greatly value flexibility and creativity, often leading to early calls for innovative problem
solving. Unfortunately, this premium on creativity also reflects the communities' tendency
toward "ad hocism" and the problem of having many officials, volunteers, and experts
jump from crisis to crisis without ever learning enough about the details "inside" their
respective boxes.
The communities come at the problems from different directions, sharing good
intentions and a general recognition that somehow their coordination needs to be better. The
difficulty lies in the details of responsibility sharing and the general lack of common
training and preparation. Although the military and the international civilian police operate in
more structured and content-based training environments, the U. S. government and
NGOs come to the task from a process of experience-based learning that is less formal
and better suited to their personnel. The key to better collaboration in the future is not
training uniformity, as some espouse and others fear, but rather developing a method for
regularly blending these disparate groups into training environments that allow them to
learn with and from one another. Yet to do so, there must be an acknowledgment of some
existing constraints.
The nongovernmental community faces some difficult challenges with regard to
formalized training. Foremost among these is its members' need to raise funds to carry out
their missions. This is a constant need, which sometimes shapes the scope and timing of
their interventions while indirectly affecting their ability to conduct internal training.
Training requires money, and training costs increase organizational overhead. In an era
when donors and the media are increasingly focused on the bottom line and tend to rate
humanitarian organizations by what percentage of donations goes to the ultimate
beneficiaries, the need to explain and justify administrative costs is a pressing concern. The
challenge for the near future is to promote an attitude within the NGO and the donor
communities that the right kind of training increases organizational capacity for success
in areas donors and major actors, such as the military, value.
The situation is similar within the myriad organizations of the U. S. government that
routinely or occasionally become involved in "complex emergencies"--humanitarian
relief operations that become more hazardous when warlords or competing factions try to
capitalize on the chaos of a natural or man-made disaster and on the supplies the
international community brings to the host country in an intervention. These organizations
share with the NGO community a preference for experience-based training, and, lacking a
systematic training curriculum on the management of complex emergencies, they tend to
fall back on their personal skills and general knowledge of statecraft, development
assistance, or interagency processes when such emergencies arise. It has been suggested that
the two greatest impediments to collaborative training progress within this community
are the lack of a single, full-time coordinating structure and the lack of a centralized
training facility wherein members of the various organizations could come together to learn
from one another and share a common training experience.
The idea of creating an interagency coordinating structure receives only lukewarm
interest from relevant governmental agencies, which are reluctant to create a separate entity
that would direct field operations from Washington, D. C. However, if the focus of that
entity were confined to coordination, facilitation, and support, while preserving the
agencies' autonomy of action in the field of operations, such an entity's value would be
undeniable, particularly in the initial phases of an operation.
There is a similar reluctance to creating a standing, deployable cadre of trained
individuals to facilitate operations in the field, though this model has proven its worth in joint
military operations. For existing agencies, the perceived need is not for new or collateral
organizations but for the better utilization of existing organizations and better
coordination among them.
One segment of the international community engaged in peace operations that is
steadily gaining acknowledgment and moving toward an improved training posture is
international civilian police (CivPol). With the increased recognition that public security
(that is, the maintenance of law and order in the broad sweep of social institutions) is a
critical element in post-conflict reconstruction, the scope of CivPol engagement is
broadening, and organizations--particularly the United Nations--are paying more attention to
harmonizing international CivPol training. CivPol contingents typically include
volunteers and seconded law enforcement officers from more than seventy countries who come
together in a variety of complex operations, so it is easy to see the need for common
policing standards and practices.
CivPol training falls into two basic categories: training received at home before
deployment and training received in the recipient country, including induction and specialized
training. Predeployment training is the responsibility of the countries donating their
police officers to the international mix. Countries approach police operations differently, and
their forces have different standards, levels of skill, and experience; they also have different
views of the world that are based on their specific political cultures and legal traditions.
Induction and specialized training in the host country are largely the responsibility of
those forces already deployed, though the UN has acknowledged that it has a role to play
in helping to standardize this training. Such training should focus on local police
practices, the administrative support structure, working with the local population and local
police, expanding contacts for information on the local situation, reporting and
communication procedures, coordination with other agencies and organizations, and team-
building practices. In short, international civilian police are now being asked to do far
more than simple monitoring. They are afforded great responsibility in unstructured,
dangerous, and highly politicized environments that are often characterized by conflicting
guidance and limited or nonexistent judicial systems. The expressed desire of many
former CivPol officers and others working in peacekeeping missions is that international
civilian police should have a standard training package; common uniforms, rank
structure, and equipment; uniform disciplinary guidelines; a single chain of command; and
more accountability.
The military is the only community that is imbued with a training culture and is given
the resources to conduct significant, if not always adequate, training. Its primary mission
and focus are combat training to fight and win the nation's wars; proficiency training for
this primary mission leaves little room for collateral training in other areas.
For example, the U. S. Army's training system is built on a process of mission analysis,
task identification and assignment, evaluation of current proficiency, and hands-on
training designed to raise proficiency to required levels. Of all the groups involved in peace
operations, it is the only one that has a systematized approach to identifying the skills needed
to accomplish particular tasks. It highly values experience in the form of lessons learned,
but it is largely devoted to content-based instruction that provides uniform skill training
throughout the force.
Training for specific skills and tasks does not appear to have diminished the military's
capacity for innovation or its agility in responding to changing and uncertain
circumstances. Rather, it broadens the core competencies of its members so that necessary
adjustments new challenges pose can be made without much disruption. It also enables the
military to reach out to other peace operation actors more easily and to see the synergy
that can be achieved by active coordination. The natural reluctance of governmental and
nongovernmental agencies to be seen as working with the military in complex
emergencies has diminished in recent years, and NGOs in particular are finding that a
collaboration can benefit all parties.
To be sure, the two days of the symposium elicited some "best practices" for the
conduct of training in peace operations. Yet, as was the case with the first symposium the U. S.
Institute of Peace sponsored on "best practices," more often the presentations and
discussions defined areas where improvement was needed and possible.* The presenters offered
a great deal of information and some surprising recommendations, and, as always,
discussion from the floor was spirited and insightful.
The discussions clearly identified individual and collective areas for future
improvement. Collectively, the symposium's attendees suggested that regular participants in
humanitarian and crisis intervention would benefit from increased peacetime interaction
and communication, as well as from an ongoing synergistic process of building a
common understanding of mutual strengths, weaknesses, and responsibilities in the field. In
recent years, there has been some movement toward common training in joint exercises,
seminars, and planning forums, but this effort has been largely hit-and-miss; what
progress there has been must be institutionalized and the experience broadened to
include more potential players in complex humanitarian reliefinterventions.
Equally important, the individual groups represented at the symposium need to
further their efforts toward understanding what their particular roles and missions might
include in a humanitarian crisis and toward developing standardized task training to
present to those most likely to need the information and practice. As might be expected,
the military has taken the lead in this area, using a standard mission-analysis
methodology and developing a task-conditions-standards training package for each mission
requirement. Recognizing the need for uniformity oftraining for its international police
candidates, the United Nations is developing a standardized training curriculum and
materials that it hopes to share with donor countries as a means ofassembling a force that
has experienced some common core training.
Although both the U. S. government agency and NGO communities recognize the need
for common and more efficient training, the lack ofcommitment in terms of
organizational culture, as well as the lack oftime and resources, limits their efforts. Hence, if the
problem is the lack ofbetter integrative processes, one suggested solution would be to
have a department or agency of the U. S. government take the lead in developing core
training requirements and assign responsibilities to various agencies and other
participants that could then be trained at a common-use facility devoted to international
training and response to complex emergencies. Doing this, however, would require significant
resources, as well as a consensus among the agencies and the governments that support
them.
About the Author
Robert M. Schoenhaus is a former program officer in the Training Program at the United States Institute of Peace and acted as principal rapporteur for the symposium.
Of Related Interest
See our complete list of Peaceworks.