Technical approaches to fixing Iraq’s accountability gap have essentially ignored the political realities of state capture. A more effective approach could involve ‘connectivity-building’ among reformists in the bureaucracy, legal professionals and members of civil society.
The long history of supporting government bureaucracy and societal accountability mechanisms in Iraq
Acknowledging that tackling corruption is central to building a coherent and stable post-war state, Iraqi reformers and their international partners have devoted substantial attention to improving Iraq’s accountability mechanisms. They have spent considerable amounts of money on such efforts. Programmes have included: (1) building the capacity of civil servants, parliamentarians, lawyers, judges and civil society members who (at least on paper) hold accountability mandates; (2) raising awareness of accountability (for example, teaching legal principles around topics such as anti-corruption measures to members of the bureaucracy and the public); and (3) funding or otherwise encouraging media and civil society watchdog groups.
Looking at empowering the bureaucracy to promote accountability and the rule of law, international programming has targeted several institutions. Iraq’s parliament, the CoR, has been a key focus for international capacity-builders, who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to bolster the institution’s autonomy. For instance, between 2008 and 2011, USAID spent US$42 million on strengthening the institutional power of parliament and developing the capacities of MPs and their staff. However, the programme’s final audit found that ultimately Iraqi parliamentary leaders – driven by the interests of the ruling elite – had evicted the capacity-builders from their offices and reneged on promises made to pursue accountability. Several other initiatives have similarly sought, with minimal success, to build the capacity of parliamentarians over the years.
Another key target of technical capacity-building has been the Iraqi judiciary. International state-builders in Iraq have trained judges and lawyers. In a five-year project entitled the ‘Iraq Access to Justice Program’, USAID spent over $66 million to ‘increase the competence and availability of legal professionals and civil society partners to assist vulnerable and disadvantaged Iraqis’. Between 2008 and 2010, the EU provided funding of $18.3 million to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to implement the ‘Support to the Rule of Law and Justice Project’. This project focused on training, research, public awareness, legal assistance and material inputs to two model courts: one with Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, and another with the MoJ. However, critical aspects of the project were delayed or cancelled due to the security situation, ineffective management, a lack of coordination between UN agencies, and a lack of genuine buy-in from the Iraqi government and the political elite. More recently, UNDP has partnered with the EU to launch a code of conduct for judges and prosecutors across Iraq. In early 2023, Germany and UNDP signed a donor agreement to provide over €825,000 for a project aimed at strengthening Iraq’s criminal justice services and enhancing their ability to conduct effective interviews with suspects in accordance with international human rights commitments.
International attention has also focused on specific tools of accountability which could bring together a host of government institutions. For instance, between 2018 and 2021, the EU spent €15.6 million on a project called ‘Strengthening Public Finance Management Oversight and Accountability Institutions in Iraq’. The goal of the project, which was implemented by the World Bank, was to build the technical capacity of Iraqi civil servants tasked with public finance management across the bureaucracy.
Similarly, foreign support for accountability has promoted or sought to empower a variety of societal mechanisms, such as civil society. UNDP has implemented several projects aimed at strengthening civil society in Iraq. Donors also frequently support a wide range of economic empowerment and educational initiatives, with a view not only to enhancing economic opportunities but to counterbalancing the economic drivers of conflict or elite capture. Among such efforts is a range of private sector and business support currently funded by USAID in Iraq. These initiatives include supporting community-based organizations, promoting civic engagement, and providing capacity-building and technical assistance to local civil society organizations. USAID’s Iraq Community Action Program offers grants and technical assistance to local organizations working on issues such as human rights, governance, advocacy and community development. USAID has also run the Iraq Civil Society Support Program, a $40 million initiative to promote an informed and sustainable civil society.
While some capacity-building programmes may have helped to empower isolated reformist elements or individuals, whether in the government bureaucracy or in society more widely, such investments have not led to a more accountable or coherent Iraqi state overall.
The media has also received international support, for example through efforts to facilitate the reporting and documenting of abuses or corruption and their publicization in the media. For 12 years, BBC Media Action worked with radio stations such as Radio Al Mirbad in Basra and Radio Nawa in Sulaimania on campaigns on these issues.
While some of these capacity-building programmes may have helped to empower isolated reformist elements or individuals, whether in the government bureaucracy or in society more widely, such investments have not led to a more accountable or coherent Iraqi state overall. The failures of international programming have been attributed in part to short project timescales, a lack of awareness of local dynamics and poor donor co-ordination. Crucially, however, these programmes have been ineffective in tackling the issue of elite capture or corruption when seeking to build accountability mechanisms. They have struggled to overcome the lack of political will for genuine reform. As a result, according to Transparency International, for instance, the three institutions where bribery features the highest are the police, the customs authorities and the judiciary – despite repeated efforts to train staff and build these institutions.
The problem of a technical focus to capacity-building
The disconnect between the high level of international attention to capacity-building and investment and Iraq’s poor standing on all accountability and corruption metrics reveals a fundamental problem in donor programming. The most significant challenge to pursuing accountability is the often short-term nature and technical focus of programming, which then becomes vulnerable to elite manipulation. As this paper has argued, elite capture of much of Iraq’s accountability mechanisms has impeded their independence and, as such, their capacity to perform their function of providing checks on elite power. In a political landscape in which members of the elite control key nodes within the bureaucracy and are effectively able to silence civil society dissent through the unregulated use of coercive force (for example, via connections to paramilitary groups or government security forces), it is easy for the elite who should, in theory, be policed by such laws or mechanisms to limit any reform programming.
No technical reform effort, regardless of how generously funded, well-designed or long-term in approach, can withstand the resistance of an empowered elite. Even the direct positioning of donor-appointed external advisers within key institutions to monitor and resist elite interference does not always work, leaving state structures as ‘empty shells’ that serve the elite but undermine the legitimacy of institutions with local populations. And, as the multi-level accountability structure laid out in the next section makes clear, reform in these areas is necessarily political and Iraq-specific. Donors may see technical capacity-building for the bureaucracy as a neutral, apolitical exercise, but the Iraqi elite can see this as a direct threat to its power and freedom of action.
No technical reform effort, regardless of how generously funded, well-designed or long-term in approach, can withstand the resistance of an empowered elite.
The same issue comes out in anti-corruption and accountability programming, which has often taken a deliberately apolitical approach and as such – paradoxically – often ignores corruption. In other words, the goals of such initiatives are often to tick technical boxes without upsetting political sensitivities. A USAID review of its anti-corruption programming in Iraq from 2007 to 2013 found that ‘the majority of calls did not discuss corruption at all or limited their requirements to a brief discussion of corruption as it may affect the project’s activities’. Even though the key goal of USAID’s programming in this case was to reduce corruption, its specific anti-corruption elements were sidelined.
In another example, USAID administered the National Capacity Development Project (Tatweer) between 2006 and 2011. The objective of this project was ‘to assist the government to strengthen the management capability of executive branch institutions, increase transparency, improve communication and decrease corruption in the public sector’. The budget for this was US$339.5 million. However, by the project’s end, the Iraqi bureaucracy remained weak and was still perceived by many analysts and institutions such as Transparency International as being susceptible to elite capture. An internal memo concluded: ‘While Tatweer measured its anticorruption activities outcomes through the number of trained personnel and number of administrative systems or procedures implemented, it did not measure the impact of these outputs on corruption.’
This paradox, the existence of anti-corruption programming that avoids actually addressing corruption, stems from the need for donors to prove success and their theory of change, but in a short timeline and with minimal risk. As such, success in a technical process is far easier to achieve and report back to a home government than genuine progress in reducing corruption, which will undoubtedly take much longer to achieve and which will follow a more precarious path.
A networked approach: why connectivity is as important as capacity-building for accountability mechanisms
This paper has described the imbalance in state–society relations in Iraq, which results in a bureaucracy that does not function as an independent institutional check on the elite, and in a public that is unable to constrain members of the elite or compel the bureaucracy to fulfil its role. The ruling elite has largely been able to bypass formal checks and balances, and to capture the coercive functions of the bureaucracy. In this context, reform efforts that seek to build the capacity of the bureaucracy without first removing the distortions introduced by elite capture risk failure at best. At worst, they risk strengthening the very abusive forces they are intended to constrain.
It is important to be clear about the critique being made. It is not that institutional oversight measures – such as the Inspector General Offices, financial accountability laws, or capacity-building advisers within government institutions – are bad investments per se. Undoubtedly such mechanisms are an important part of building functioning, accountable and responsive institutions. If these mechanisms were deployed in the context of a healthy power balance between state and society, they might well enhance accountability and keep powerful actors in check. In the current environment in Iraq, however, they will simply be short-circuited or undercut.
In policy terms, the response therefore cannot be to continue with futile institutional strengthening and the false neutrality of capacity-building. Instead, policy must first be framed around disentangling the elite from bureaucratic functions and restraining its influence. Any strategy must be predicated on helping civil society, along with those relatively neutral and functioning parts of the bureaucracy that remain, to protect, strengthen and use the powers that they have.
Networks of reformists
This study has documented the ways in which elite groups have undermined power balances and subverted Iraqi institutions through a networked strategy of influence and coercion. The response should be to try to identify and strengthen networks of reformists in turn. Research has revealed that there remain individuals in Iraq who are still able to influence the behaviour of members of the elite – and that these individuals are often able to intercede to protect fellow reformers or important civil society interests, or to limit damage. However, most such individuals are isolated, dispersed and at risk, and their impact is therefore limited overall.
The elite’s focus on managing and shaping public opinion, documented above, through control of much of the media, think-tanks, opinion leaders and public discourse, is also a tacit admission of its own vulnerability to public opinion. This suggests that networks of reformists could still gain traction by engaging with influential figures in the media and civil society to communicate and amplify reform messaging. This could help to reinforce the internal efforts of reform-minded officials acting within the bureaucracy. Moreover, while the survey conducted as part of the research for this paper indicated little public confidence in the ability of civil society to combat corruption, to a degree this merely indicates the challenges which reformists currently face; a networked approach to mobilizing reform efforts, where successful, could start to counter these perceptions.
The example of Haider al-Zaidi’s release after being convicted for tweeting against the late PMF leader Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis offers a glimmer of evidence of the potential power of such a networked approach. The PMF’s chairman, Falih al-Fayadh, withdrew the case because of the mobilization efforts of MPs, journalists, civil society, lawyers, legal professionals and senior civil servants, all of whom worked together on a coherent strategy that demanded al-Zaidi’s release in a case which they believed was unjust. Public pressure still mattered and was successfully mobilized. Connecting reformists across the public, bureaucracy and – eventually, perhaps – among some members of the elite in a more concerted and strategic way has the potential to enable the scaling up of the networks that mobilized to free al-Zaidi.
Building reformist networks
Reframing efforts to buttress accountability in Iraq by complementing technical capacity-building with a network approach rooted in enabling active reformists from the bureaucracy and society would need to be carefully tested. An initial pilot phase could be designed to develop the idea of building an accountability-focused network. This approach would draw on lessons from previous Chatham House research by building connections between isolated reformists across the civil service, the judiciary, the media and civil society, acknowledging the factors and risks highlighted below:
- First, a specific sector or topic would need to be selected for the pilot phase. This could be a sector in which corruption is causing everyday harms for Iraqis, such as healthcare, electricity or water. If a topic is selected, it should be one on which Iraqis across the country are calling for improved governance, such as the need for an access-to-information law or a budget monitor.
- Researchers could identify key players in the sector or for the topic chosen. Such key players could include: relevant officials; senior reformist members of Iraq’s judiciary, civil service and security structures; and influential figures in the media and civil society.
- A local Iraqi organization could facilitate and link these individuals into the working group and support the development of a specific strategy for reform that each could pursue with the relevant stakeholders. This organization could either be formed from scratch or could be an existing local organization, potentially one that currently operates under the radar and convenes informally.
- The reform strategy should identify and elaborate how the different members of the working group could act on a specific chosen topic in mutually reinforcing ways, to facilitate progress and ensure political protection for those involved (in addition to physical safety – see below). This could involve, for example, providing high-level legal or political ‘cover’ for reform, or leveraging media coverage or public opinion to draw attention to resistance or spoiling tactics by members of the elite.
- The nature of engagement would likely depend on working group members’ positions in the bureaucracy or society: members drawn from civil society could use the media and mobilize the public; civil servants could work inside their respective ministries and government to pursue reform; judicial representatives could educate other members of the working group on the relevant aspects of law associated with combating corruption and improving accountability.
- If these efforts are successful, and result in enhanced public service provision or more effective anti-corruption measures, the pilot project could then form the core of further outreach, public diplomacy and network-building to extend the scope and appeal of reform.
- The key to such an initiative is safety – both in a physical sense and in terms of legal and political support. When the results start to threaten elite interests, what will protect members of this network or guarantee the sustainability of their work? A plan to mitigate the risks associated with exposing corruption will need to be part of the initiative’s design, both in the pilot phase and if rolled out more widely.
In essence, the idea of the above strategy would be to identify, link and leverage complementarity between the currently dispersed nodes of civil society and institutional resilience that exist in Iraq, to oppose elite pushback and reset Iraq’s accountability structures.
The role of external actors
The role of external actors in this process would need to be carefully considered. It would be important to allow the proposed reform network to grow organically and domestically, with participants identifying their own needs and defining their own strategies for strengthening accountability. It would be up to these Iraqi reformers to determine how outside donors might best support them. Ill-considered, overt or controlling interventions by external actors could lead to reformers being mischaracterized by opponents as proxies for external powers, which could undermine public acceptance and support for the new network.
In a focus group conducted in 2023 by Chatham House in Iraq, participants debated the merits of international support for such a network, reflecting on the experiences of 20 years of international development programming. While views from across the spectrum – both pro- and anti-international support – were expressed, the group ultimately agreed that the current strategies were not working. Instead, participants concluded that only certain targeted external support strategies can enhance the development and activities of such a network over time. This could include an external actor offering financial support discreetly to an Iraqi organization that could then facilitate networking and strategic follow-up. Or it could include helping find international expertise or success stories on selected reform areas from other contexts globally.
