The paper explains how implementing actors resist coordination in delivering SSR assistance due to inter-agency competition, organisational mandates, and entrenched delivery networks, demonstrating that these dynamics undermine coordination efforts in the new aid effectiveness agenda under the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Drawing on collective action theory and critiques of the development-security nexus, and using empirical evidence from South Sudan, the analysis shows that the assumptions about coordination drivers in the new aid effectiveness framework: donor proliferation, shared understanding of coordination objectives, the demand for coordination, and credible commitment to coordination instruments, are challenged by operational practices and embedded incentive structures within the SSR assistance field. By emphasising donor-side operational practices, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of coordination failures in SSR assistance beyond the politics of aid argument. It illustrates how operational practices create structural conditions in which coordination mechanisms falter and openings for aid misuse by aid recipients emerge.
Vesna Bojičić-Dželilović (Tue,) studied this question.