1The political turmoil and the excesses of violence that hit Timor-Leste in August and September 1999, before and after its population had voted with great majority for independence, had a grave impact on the political, social and economic development of the country. The subsequent pull-out of the official Indonesian authorities left the country without any legitimate representative of the Timorese people or a governmental bureaucracy. An elected Timorese government or even an interim bureaucratic rump body to facilitate the transition to an independent, sovereign country was virtually not available. Consequently, the regular government functions came to a standstill when the Indonesians left21.

2In many circumstances after bloodshed, civil war or political turmoil have been ended, often thanks to an international military intervention, the international humanitarian community conducts needs assessment missions to assess the ground conditions and to provide the planning basis for the social, economic and political recovery of the country, to overcome consequences of conflict and to shape the shortterm and potentially mid-term recovery priorities including financial implications. Such missions are generally led by multilateral organizations with a strong focus on humanitarian aspects as well as subsequent reconstruction and rehabilitation. When the international community conducted the needs assessment in Timor-Leste in 1999, the situation was extremely challenging. I want to emphasize three points in this respect:

3Firstly, the decision for independence triggered a calamity: Indonesian militias orchestrated widespread violence among the population, in addition private and public assets were destroyed on a large scale (70%). As a result of this violence, 75% of the Timorese population was displaced internally or across the border (with Indonesia)22. This entailed a very difficult access to the Timorese population, but also made travel arrangements to the country side quite complicated.

4Secondly, the mandate and access of international actors was very limited.

5At the time of the outbreak of violence the UN had deployed the United Nations Mission to East Timor (UNAMET) only focusing on the popular consultation of the future status of Timor-Leste, but not mandated to intervene in the upcoming conflict situation. Other international actors such as the World Bank, international NGOs and bilateral agencies did not have access to evaluate the situation via a national branch. This also implicated logistical obstacles e.g. entering Timor-Leste and staying in Timor-Leste in a situation of institutional vacuum, social anomy and standstill.

6Thirdly, there was no legitimate representative of the government in Timor-Leste. With the sudden withdrawal of all Indonesian legitimate government members, there was no representative government available to lead or at least assist the needs assessment process. Consequently the needs assessment team did not have a governmental counterpart besides the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT), which had been operating as underground organization from Australia as well as members from the Timorese Diaspora and civil society.

7My point in this article is that if we want to understand the difficulties in state formation in Timor-Leste, we need to look at the origins of this process. One element of this was the international needs assessment mission. I will argue that the international needs assessment mission conducted in Timor-Leste in 1999 followed an approach to ensure basic needs, but left the question of state formation underexplored. The post-conflict needs assessments and the derived implications for implementation intended to target the political dimension related to the conflict, including state-building. The actual support to state-building, however, had been insufficient and was seriously underestimated by all stakeholders comprising international and national actors. The needs assessment mission was not based on a broad consensus of all national stakeholders and did not consider the question in how far “the state” was actually negotiated in the very process of needs assessment, in particular as the state was literally dissolved in Timor-Leste in 1999.

8I will illustrate these ambivalences in the needs assessment mission and how they impacted on negotiating statehood through an analysis of interviews that I conducted with former members of the needs assessment mission and other key informants. The paper thereby proceeds as follows: first, I will reflect more broadly on the role of needs assessment in the political dimension of peace-building and then introduce the framework of negotiating statehood as a theoretical setup for analysis. Subsequently, I will define focal repertoires relevant for state-building: institutional reform, capacity building and service delivery along the classical state sectors welfare/wellbeing, justice, security and analyze the processes of needs assessment therein.

1-Needs assessment missions as part of a peace-building strategy

9In the context of more complex wars and disasters, the demand for quick and comprehensive third party intervention has increased. Needs assessment missions in the context of conflict and crisis are one assessment tool to get an overview of the situation and thus to develop a strategy to overcome these implications. Ideally the actual stakeholders of development, the national actors of the state and civil society should be the leading force for a needs assessment mission; nevertheless, the reality might often appear differently23. Especially in the context of crisis and conflict the functioning of the state as one or the most important leading force for the development of the country as well as an active civil society claiming ownership for the development of the country is, most often, missing. Thus, international actors appear on the scene in order to relieve the state from its responsibility, but often also to encompass an own vision and mission on how to redress the crisis24.

10Needs assessment as a planning instrument can look back at some changes: while they were first introduced by humanitarian agencies focusing on the assessment of basic needs, the identification of deficits in the fulfilment of these needs (based on standards, and considering vulnerability, risks and capacities), and the assessment of required external assistance to close these deficits, recent approaches entangle a more holistic approach. Needs assessments for recovery and developmental purposes take a broader view of needs, including institutional, policy and infrastructure issues25. Needs assessment becomes linked with peace building. According to the UNDP, “peacebuilding aims to build and enable durable peace and sustainable development in post-conflict situations”26. Immediately after conflict, peace-building focuses on economic recovery, the removal of small arms from the community, the rebuilding of governance institutions, the launching of reconciliation processes, the releasing of land for agricultural purposes, and the rebuilding of social capital27.

11In the case of Timor-Leste, the needs assessment comprised two processes, firstly, the Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) led by the UN and the Joint Assessment Mission (JAM), led by the World Bank Group. It involved a division of labor by the organizations: while the CAP, led by the UN (including UN line agencies like UNCHR, UNDP, FAO) focused on immediate short-term relief and state-building, the JAM led by the World Bank and joined inter alia by the UN, the Asian Development Bank and bilateral donors, focused on short and mid-term planning for reconstruction and thereby providing a basis for financial requirements.

2-Theoretical framework: Negotiating statehood

12In a setup similar to what Timor-Leste encountered after September 1999–formally still as a province of Indonesia, but an independent stateto-be after the referendum-there is much room for negotiating statehood. The national actors were not established nor did they have any legitimate designation. The structure of the state was undefined and the humanitarian crisis worsened, since displacement and food shortage ran rampant. Thus the needs assessment mission, which dealt with the social, economic, but also political dimension of the development, was the adequate place for negotiating the future of the newly-born country.

13The analytical framework I will present assumes that statehood is not a firm setup, but in a condition of being constantly negotiated. Emphasis is laid upon the actors and their roles and how they deal with these roles in order to negotiate state-owned tasks. But what is the understanding of the state, who are the main actors and what is their division of labor in negotiating statehood?

14Migdal and Schlichte (2005) essentially differentiate between perceptions of the state and actions by actors. All respective actors, be they state actors or non-state actors, see the state in their way, mainly related to their function in the setup of statehood and perceive a socalled image of the state. On the other hand, all actors also “do the state” and rely thereby on certain practices, formalised and non-formalized patterns of actions related to their power. Every actor carries out a certain function (teachers educate in schools, tax officers track down revenues etc.). Practices provide thus a vital constituent in “doing the state”, which are derived from the interactions and tension between a certain image of the state and accompanying practices.

15Hagmann/Peclard (2007) have refined Schlichte’s dynamic conception of the statehood in their paper “Negotiating statehood in Africa; propositions for an alternative approach to state and political authority” and have derived propositions towards “negotiating statehood”28.

16In their vein the group of actors covers a wide array of different types. It ranges from national NGOs to civil society to donors. These interest groups have different resources. Resources can comprise of various elements, which are at the disposal of interest groups: it covers the material basis including bureaucratic capacities, organizational skills, finances, technical expertise, and control over physical violence, international networks, political alliances and access to state related resources. These resources are shared unequally among the actor groups. Arenas of negotiation refer to the locations in their spatial, social and temporal dimension. The guiding questions are: where is the arena of negotiation located? Who has access to these arenas of negotiations? And: over what time periods are negotiations taking place? Thus a group of actors situated in an arena of negotiation bargains about material resources while following their agendas or repertoires. These repertoires can be understood as conceptual approaches such as “good governance” or “democracy”. In this context I understand repertoires as elements relevant for the state-building process.

17In the case of Timor-Leste I will elaborate on the main international actors deriving from multilateral, bilateral and international NGO backgrounds. These actors have met in the context of the needs assessment mission to negotiate the first steps for the state reconstruction and state formation. Thus the context of the needs assessment mission will be treated in this paper as the arena of negotiation. I will then focus on selected repertoires relevant for the state formation process. In this paper I will refer to the following repertoires: (1) institutional reform, (2) capacity building and (3) service delivery as part of the state-building process.

Figure 1 displays the setup of negotiating statehood in Timor-Leste represented by the example of the needs assessment mission in 1999 and related state-building efforts. In the arena of negotiations, the needs assessment mission actors on the national and international actors bargain about the state-building interventions. These comprise the steps institutional reform, capacity building and service delivery.

3-Evaluation of needs assessment mission and subsequent aid implementation

18In the following sections, I will analyze the process of the needs assessment mission in 1999 as discussed by some of its team members and by other key informants and relate this to the overall process of negotiating statehood. The results are based on a study conducted on behalf of German development cooperation (GTZ) in October and November 2003 during a long term field visit (10/2003–09/2004) and are part of an analytical country study in order to develop a practical guide to multilateral needs assessment by UNDP, UNDG and World Bank based on six country studies, including a policy paper directed to all involved organizations29. 15 semi-structured expert interviews were conducted. Interviewees included national and international mission members, senior management members from multilateral organizations involved in subsequent implementation and members from Timorese civil society. Some of the national and international respondents were still in decision-making positions either in the governmental setup or international organizations at the time of interview. In addition to this interview material, more recent evaluation reports of various organizations as well as side-observations gathered during subsequent consultancy visits in Timor-Leste in December 2004 and in October 2006 increment the analysis.

Main actors

19The UN and the World Bank were the main actors in the Timor-Leste needs assessment. Several NGOs have been included in the subsequent implementation such as Oxfam, Care International as well as bilateral donors and their attached organizations, especially from Portugal, but also Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain. In Timor-Leste itself, on the national level, there was only a fragmented and dispersed civil society, a rather loose network. The most visible actor was the CNRT, the former underground resistance group as well as Diaspora members. Classical representatives of the Timorese state were missing, since the state had to be created after the ballot. Thus the image of the Timorese state was in fact only a symbol comprising different aspirations, hopes and differently weighed values, but not actors, objects and material resources.

20With the resolution 1272, October 25, 1999 the UN received the mandate to form a transitional government setup, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) until independence in May 2002. Positions on the political and administrative level were handed over to international staff, making decisions and developing strategies for the future development of Timor-Leste, while preparing the transition to independence. The UN established a transitional administration and literally ran the state, but could not draw back on a grown state setup. UN thereby created an image of the state, based on an artificial image of “Timor-Leste”.

21The mission of UNTAET focused on several pillars: the first pillar, INTERFET (later called PKF) was supposed to look after security. The second pillar, the Humanitarian Assistance and Emergency Rehabilitation (HAER), as a kind of a starting mission for UNTAET, assured the delivery of humanitarian relief. The humanitarian relief phase ceased in late 2000. The third, most challenging pillar, referred to Governance and Public Administration (GPA). While UNTAET focused its activities on all pillars, the World Bank concentrated on service delivery and to some extent local governance, e.g. the Community Empowerment Project30. The coordination between the acting government represented by the UNTAET and other actors, especially the World Bank, was quite complicated since the UN had a dual role as the United Nations Mission in Timor-Leste and as the Transitional Administration in Timor-Leste: while the former included a UN mission, the latter factually implied a full governmental setup as a government counterpart to UN agencies, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and bilateral organizations. This proved to be difficult in the beginning, but was resolved at a later stage31.

Needs assessment process

22The needs assessment process was already hampered in the beginning: The Timorese population did not take part in the process of collecting and prioritizing needs and developing plans for the future. This partly resulted from the difficult ground conditions since the militia was still active in several spots of the country, houses had been burnt down and the domiciles had temporally been abandoned. Thus, the needs assessment process also encountered difficult logistics: some parts of the country were only accessible by helicopter. Public gatherings were possible to a very limited extent only, mainly on ad-hoc advice. Most of the mission members and experts interviewed considered this to be one of the main obstacles for the outcome of the assessment process. In their view, public participation was rather low and results subsequently lacked inclusiveness. Meetings with villages had rarely taken place; the village mayor (chefe de suco) had mostly not been consulted. As one respondent added, strategic national actors from civil society had not been included and the needs assessment mission concentrated on consultation with donors32.

23Neither had the conflict context received adequate attention during the assessment process. For example, the social cleavages in 1975 or the human rights violations during the Indonesian rule which still influence the Timorese society and have contributed to deepen conflict lines, which were not sufficiently taken into consideration33. Another issue that all Timorese mission members agreed upon was their difficult role during the assessment process. In some teams, like the team on livelihoods and rehabilitation, the Timorese mission members were integrated to some extent and their perspective, view and expertise was included in the mission’s recommendation. This was not the case in most other mission teams, where the Timorese felt that the process was predominantly driven by international experts.

4-Needs assessment as element of negotiating statehood

24In order to analyze processes of negotiating statehood during and after the needs assessment process, I will differentiate among three types of repertoires: (1) institutional reform, (2) capacity building and (3) service delivery. Along repertoires I will focus on three sectors and then determine their objects of negotiations. These sectors represent three classical state functions: welfare, security and justice.

25The repertoire of institutional reform had been the hardest part of the whole state-building process General trends that have been listed in the table above: institutional reform has hardly happened, since it had not been prioritized (welfare/wellbeing) and it was, in addition, very difficult to tackle (sectors of justice and security). Likewise, capacity building had been neglected since international staff were quickly available, could act rapidly, and were more coordinated due to experience in the humanitarian relief sector, whereas few Timorese experts acquainted with the expectations of international aid agencies were available in Timor-Leste or abroad. Moreover, among themselves, international staff could easily converse and share information as they were all fluent in English and acquainted with the basic international concepts and language of humanitarianism, but through communicating in this humanitarianism discourse, they indirectly excluded and sidelined Timorese staff members who often were not that fluent in English and did not speak the international language of humanitarianism.

26Timorese mission members also observed that international staff did not prove as a solid pool of human resources: many experts came and left after short time periods. A significant number of them were beginners in their job, “often graduates from high-ranking universities”, but without field experience or an understanding of practical issues of development or regional knowledge of Timor-Leste. Few of them spoke even one of the languages spoken in Timor-Leste (either Tetum, Bahasa Indonesia or Portuguese). These “adventurers”, as they have also been named, were largely in the driver’s seat and remained in their international communication island that effectively foreclosed a direct encounter with Timorese staff and the Timorese population.

27In the repertoire of service delivery, international actors often took over main responsibilities and implementation tasks and thereby sidelined Timorese actors who were often weak in delivery. In the interviews conducted, both international and Timorese respondents agreed that capacity building was severely neglected and policies for institutional reform not implemented. This created a serious gap at the moment when humanitarian relief phased out and national structures were not prepared to take over their functions of the state and for development. One can observe this process to differing degrees in the three sectors of welfare, justice and security.

28In the sector of welfare/wellbeing, the focus of international actors had been on service delivery, mainly taken over by international NGOs, while capacity building most often played a minor role only. Institutional reform has hardly been tackled. The health sector showed a rather positive development in the arena of capacity building and service delivery due to the following factors: Timorese staff had taken over responsibility in an early stage and the process of “Timorisation” started early in the Ministry of Health. Moreover, coordination mechanisms with all involved organizational bodies assured smooth service delivery. However, with regard to service delivery NGOs often stepped in when the state sector was weak to tackle bottlenecks experienced by donors. In some cases, UNTAET asked NGOs to remain present as service deliverers and exit strategies were delayed. In the agricultural sector, the situation was quite different: Timorese felt pressured by international experts to introduce a market-orientated agriculture. The Timorese interviewees argued that the ministry was not structured at that time to deal with such an organizational development. Interviewees from various fields representing international actors complained about the perception that the government’s role was to provide handouts to farmers.

29In the justice sector the institutional reform had a difficult start: the legal systems from Indonesia, Portugal and the transitional administration made jurisdiction very exigent. The “Brahimi Report” precisely names these challenges for transitional administration faced by the UN in particular, the question of the “applicable law”34. Since jurisdiction did not follow a clearly-established judicial scheme, it opened a gap for all repertoires of state-building: Capacity building was hardly possible since three jurisdictions were too difficult to convey to new staff and moreover, to be applied by more experienced staff. Moreover, the formation period to become a qualified judge takes about ten years as one respondent pointed out35. Hence, the required time for capacity building was far too time-consuming in order to keep a system of jurisdiction and subsequent conviction running. This had also an impact on service delivery in the sector of justice: while national qualified staff were lacking, international staff did not encompass such a diverse knowledge in valid judiciary.

30The security sector has achieved the smallest progress, emphasized by the recent crisis in 2006, when a struggle for competencies between the police and the army made the lack of institutional reform most obvious. Unfortunately critical voices from the national setup who expressed their strong concern about the security sector remained unheard as one respondent remarked36. Respondents in the study criticized the lack of solid strategies in the needs assessment document to integrate FALINTIL, veterans, but also the police in the security sector on a sustainable base. Moreover, they criticized the limited involvement by international actors in the security sector reform, in particular the lack of capacity building as well as border security with Indonesia. Also, subsequent attempts to call for more attention on action in the security sector by the presidential commission in 2004 or concerns mentioned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2004 had not been taken up37. Nowadays these areas are discovered by donors and organization as an urgent field of involvement, but much trouble might have been avoided through an earlier engagement. After 1999 the provision of security had been taken over by the Australian-led intervention force (INTERFET) and later by UNTAET. The international actors (UN Civilian Police–CivPol) and the Australian-led forces remained in charge to handle internal and border security, the armed resistance movement FALINTIL remained with a less clear mandate. The Kings College Report commissioned by the CNRT and UNTAET proposed three scenarios and it was decided to create a 3000-strong army consisting of regulars and volunteer reservists (2000). The Security Council Resolution 1338 did support this decision, but only encouraged UNTAET to play a coordinating role, without a clear mandate. This lack of clear support to the Timorese security sector had contributed to a deteriorating security situation in Timor-Leste, especially in Dili.

31The recent report by the International Crises Group highlights the gaps in institutional reform targeting the police and the army. According to the report “the UN failed to lay adequate foundations for the security reform in the form of basic legislative and planning documents, administrative support and mechanisms for democratic control or to develop a national consensus on security policies and structures through consultations”38. Since institutional reform was pending, capacity building and service delivery in the sense of providing security remained mostly unfulfilled and remains until today a responsibility of the international actors. Internal organisation of the police is also a bottleneck. The organic law promulgated in 2004 provided more commotion than clarity: the organisational setup with ten main units plus 13 districts units and some more special offices rather provided room for confusion and is still not operating39.

32Table 1 (next page) summarizes the main observations in the three sectors regarding negotiating Timor’s statehood from scratch after 1999. In the welfare sector, service delivery could be taken over relatively easily by international actors. Therefore, the weakness of statehood and the deficiencies in building up state capacities emerged only after international actors gradually withdrew from direct implementation. In the justice sector, the complicated situation of legal pluralism blocked significant progress from the beginning. Security remained in international hands for a long time and the embryonic Timorese security forces were unable to safeguard public security when international troops withdrew from Timor-Leste.

Conclusions

33In this paper, I have argued that in order to understand the precarious state of the state in Timor-Leste, we need to go back to the origins of its construction: to the early negotiating processes that started with the needs assessment mission after the take-over of the Australian troops in 1999. One of the most devastating criticisms against the UN involvement in Timor-Leste has been leveled by Chopra (2002), who had worked for UNTAET for some time and provided a kind of insider’s account. Chopra describes a process of “establishing a UN statehood” in Timor-Leste: bureaucratic structures and process design of the UN dominated the scene of statehood instead of long-term orientated statehood40.

34While Chopra’s account is quite harsh in its criticism, the question remains in how far the strong involvement of international actors in the process of rebuilding Timor resulted in a statehood constructed along the lines of international rather than Timorese priorities and worldviews. The example given above about disagreements on agricultural sector policies illustrates this tension. While with time, disagreement had been “negotiated”, the picture may change if we consider the question of financial resources: often, ministerial budgets consist of a majority of international aid money which makes the bargaining power of the donors very strong.

35My interviews with both, international and Timorese staff involved in the 1999 international needs assessment mission showed the following patterns: On an operational level the process of the needs assessment mission in Timor-Leste can give a hint how the beginning of the statehood had actually been negotiated: Timorese respondents did not feel in the driver's seat. Hence, one conclusion is that the needs assessment mission itself should be planned with more time being prepared to provide more room for the exchange of ideas as well as to include closer consultation with the population and civil society. On the level of subsequent aid implementation, the main impediment to state formation was a lack of vision with regard to institutional reform and capacity building. This was most apparent in the justice sector and the security sector and to a lesser extent, in the welfare sector. Overall, many international experts deployed for the needs assessment mission and thereafter lacked long-term involvement and language skills. They remained in the communication islands of internationals with little interfaces to their Timorese colleagues or the Timorese population. In this sense, negotiating statehood was initially largely an international affair.

36The case of Timor-Leste indicates that state formation after a crisis starts with an international needs assessment that is more than just a technocratic exercise to identify “needs”. In a situation like Timor-Leste, where a state is to be builtt without any direct precedent, it would be important to define distinct phases for government development with all available counterparts. This would have to include the setup and role of administration, judiciary and security sector, timing and operationalisation of elections as well as timing and elements of nation building (esp. language). Negotiating statehood in this sense is only possible if all involved actors communicate in “the same language”.