10 - The Challenge of Sustaining Conditionality

Summary

In both Colombia and Rio, conditional approaches were surprisingly successful in quickly reducing cartel–state conflict; ironically, this success contributes to the difficulty of sustaining conditionality over time. Rapid expansion of conditional programs, often into dissimilar and more challenging settings, can outstrip logistical and institutional capacity, leading to an erosion of program principles and the conditionality of repression in practice. Politically, the very same reframing of objectives that favors policy reform in the first place can create self-undermining dynamics later. Once leaders adopt violence reduction as the primary objective of anti-narcotics policy, thus “owning peace,” the political optics of cartel violence change. Under an unconditional crackdown policy of “frontal combat,” even extreme cartel violence can be interpreted as a positive sign that cartels are desperate or “in their last throes.” In contrast, even sporadic violence calls into question the raison d’être of a conditional approach. Episodes of corruption can be similarly detrimental, particularly if leaders have suggested that a conditional approach will reduce corruption.

The previous chapter argued that political cohesion, room for trial-and-error policy experimentation, and effective reframing of the problem were important factors in overcoming logistical and acceptability constraints, ultimately helping pro-conditional reform efforts to succeed. Unfortunately, neither logistical nor acceptability constraints disappear once conditional repression is implemented, even when it proves effective at reducing violence. Indeed, conditional approaches appear to generate self-undermining dynamics that can lead to their erosion over time. For one thing, they can be—ironically—victims of their own success: precisely because conditionality produces sharp decreases in violence, conditional pilot programs can come to be seen as silver bullets, and hence are hastily replicated and deployed to problem areas. Three problems arise: first, the replicated versions of the original program may be imperfect copies, lacking key elements such as proper training, committed leadership, or buy-in and participation from civil society. Second, whereas pilot programs are generally developed in smaller, relatively controlled environments, repli- cations can frequently get deployed in crisis areas whose characteristics make them far more challenging. Finally, conditional repression is generally more resource-intensive than unconditional repression, and expanding conditional programs from pilot areas to crisis areas further raises this cost differential.