The Foreign Service Journal, June 2006

tual rationale for foreign assistance programs, describe the organization- al changes already undertaken in USAID over the past five years, and discuss the changes yet to be imple- mented during the remaining years of the Bush presidency. The urgency of these changes becomes even more evident given President Bush’s announcement over the past five years of 21 new foreign assistance initiatives. U.S. spending levels show an increase in official development assistance from $10 bil- lion in 2000 to an estimated $27.5 billion in 2005. Modernizing Foreign Assistance Whenever the vital national interests of the country are being redefined, as they have been since the 9/11 attacks, foreign aid goes through a redefinition as well. It is not surprising, then, that the program strategies, fund- ing mechanisms, organizational structure and business systems of USAID have all undergone more change in the past five years than in the past several decades com- bined. The focus has been on realigning the policies and operations of the agency to: match the strategic and developmental challenges facing the developing world in the post-9/11 era; modernize the business systems that carry out the agency’s work; create a new set of nontradi- tional partners; contribute to the administration’s major foreign policy initiatives; and participate more aggressively in the U.S. government’s public diplomacy efforts. Toward these ends, USAID has promulgated more than a dozen new strategies in various sectors, reshap- ing program design, budget decisions and staffing patterns. The most sig- nificant of the strategic documents explaining the new direction are: Foreign Aid in the National Interest ; U.S. Foreign Aid: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century (commonly known as the White Paper ); the Fragile States Strategy ; and the Democracy and Governance Strategy . These four strategy papers represent a historic depar- ture from traditional development practice. The first two address broad questions of development policy and pro- gramming, while the White Paper proposes to move USAID away from sector-based programming (the tradi- tional way in which our country assistance programs have been designed) to a model based on the stage of devel- opment which each country occupies. Specifically, it rec- ognizes the following categories: transformational states that are experiencing rapid rates of growth and progress; countries that are neither collapsing nor progressing (a category added later); strategically important states; frag- ile states under stress; failed states in crisis requiring humanitarian assistance; and transnational challenges such as avian flu and HIV/AIDS. USAID is now redesigning its budgeting and pro- gramming systems to reflect these developmental cate- gories. In Sudan, for example, the reconstruction pro- gram for the south has been redesigned as a fragile-state strategy by focusing the effort on the factors that would most likely lead to a breakdown of the 2005 Compre- hensive Peace Agreement; after all, if the agreement col- lapses and the war starts again, the rest of the recon- struction program becomes irrelevant. The most impor- tant factor, then, in reducing the fragility of Sudan and making sure reconstruction succeeds is ensuring the suc- cess of the CPA. Under the new strategy, early initiatives will be taken in the three most explosive geographic areas covered by the peace agreement to reduce the country’s vulnerability. Two of the new strategy papers address the central F O C U S 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 6 Ambassador Andrew Natsios was administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2006, as well as President Bush’s special coordinator for international disaster assistance and special humanitari- an coordinator for the Sudan. He is now a professor in the practice of diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Previously, Amb. Natsios was director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance from 1989 to 1991 and assistant administrator for the Bureau for Food and Humanitarian Assistance (now the Bureau of Demo- cracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance) from 1991 to 1993. He is the author of numerous articles on foreign policy and humanitarian emergencies, as well as two books: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1997) and The Great North Korean Famine (U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001). Fragile and failed states also represent one of the greatest development challenges of our time.