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Executive Summary

Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, the United States and other Western donors have provided over one billion dollars¹ in politically oriented assistance to local councils in opposition-held areas.² These programs, often described as civilian stabilization or local governance, represented a significant component of broader U.S. efforts to advance its policy objectives in Syria. At least initially, they aimed to enable better local governance to take root in the period immediately after the envisioned departure of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.³

This paper asks two primary questions: How did these local programs integrate into the United States’ higher-level strategy for Syria over the years?⁴ And how did these programs relate to the broader political and security trajectories of the war?

The central argument of this paper is that, as the years passed, the objectives and assumptions of local political assistance in Syria diverged further and further from U.S. high-level policy decisions. Further, as the conflict wore on, local stabilization programs became increasingly obviated by the political-military realities of the war.

In the early years of the conflict (2011 to mid-2013), stabilization programs largely aligned with the United States’ stated, optimistic high-level Syria policy and with local political will. The programs also were consistent with the presumed trajectory of the conflict. However, unsurprisingly given the context, implementation challenges abounded.

In the middle years of the war (mid-2013 to 2016), the objectives and underlying assumptions of local political assistance increasingly diverged from higher-level policy decisions made by U.S. officials and from the overall political-military trajectory of the war. Particularly after 2014, stabilization programs foundered on confusion over two aspects of U.S. high-level Syria policy. First, it was unclear whether local council programs were still advancing a policy that prioritized the defeat of Assad or if, instead, they were meant to support the new objective of countering the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Second, and related, it was unclear whether stabilization assistance was still intended to help prepare local councils for a regime change outcome—which would entail rebuilding the Syrian state after Assad’s ouster—or for a regime restructuring outcome, in which the Assad regime would devolve power to local councils through a negotiated framework for decentralization.

In the most recent years of the conflict (2017 to the present), the political-security context has marginalized the previous hopeful aspirations and assumptions of local council programs. Three recent trends have exacerbated the disconnect between stabilization assistance and higher-level conflict realities: mass civilian displacement; the enactment of so-called reconciliation agreements as the foreign-backed Assad regime forcibly retakes territory; and armed extremist group ascendancy in areas currently still under opposition control.

Next, this paper examines why the United States and other Western donors continued to support stabilization programs, even as they grew increasingly incongruent with U.S. high-level Syria policy decisions and increasingly marginal to Syria’s political-military realities. First, even as the political objectives of stabilization projects became untenable, they were perpetuated by pragmatic, humanitarian, and normative considerations. Local programs had become adept at critical service delivery and donors viewed their participatory processes as worthwhile in their own right. Second, bureaucratic and organizational factors preserved the programs. Senior policymakers and legislators viewed the policy-program contradictions as less problematic than practitioners did, fragmentation undermined overall assessments, and different agencies competed to maintain their programmatic capacity. Third, perception biases fueled undue optimism: policymakers and practitioners focused disproportionately on successful local political projects and invested stakeholders perpetually saw potential for Syria (or Syria policy) to “turn a corner.”

Finally, this paper identifies lessons the international community can learn for stabilization assistance in future conflicts. In Syria, local assistance programs were engulfed by a dramatically deteriorating broader policy and conflict environment. But Syria will almost certainly not be the last time this happens. A key lesson is that stabilization assistance can only succeed when it coheres clearly and closely with high-level strategy. As U.S. policy in Syria became increasingly marked by tensions and ambivalence over the years, stabilization practitioners were forced to translate the evolving policy environment into operational programs. Second, stabilization efforts can only succeed when they pursue objectives that are viable within the broader political-military context: despite practitioners’ painstaking refinement of programmatic “theories of change” over the years, local programs ended up hostage to high-level conflict dynamics. Third, the international community must think more deeply about how it conceives of “progress” and “success” in dynamic stabilization environments—and reconsider how it measures them.

Although stabilization assistance was not part of the Syrian political transformation initially envisioned, it did help cultivate expectations and processes for more inclusive, capable governance. A key question will be what endures into the future—within select geographic enclaves, within any new national political bargain, and within the vast Syrian diaspora.

Introduction

In the seven years since Syria’s civil war began, the United States and other Western donors have provided over one billion dollars in politically oriented assistance to local councils in opposition-held areas.⁵ This aid, often described as civilian stabilization or local governance programs, was intended to foster more democratic, capable, and legitimate subnational structures that would positively contribute to Syrian governance in the presumed “day after” the Assad regime.⁶ From the early years of the conflict, these grassroots civilian initiatives have been a significant component of broader U.S. efforts to advance its policy objectives in Syria.⁷

The United States embraced local political assistance in Syria as part of its own broader move toward bottom-up stabilization initiatives in areas affected by conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has been met with only limited success in interventions that aimed to build governance structures in the midst or wake of conflict. Many observers have criticized the dominant donor approaches for being too top-down, template-driven, and focused on national institutions and elites. As an alternative, the approach of engaging communities alongside complementary local security initiatives began to (re-) emerge. These bottom-up approaches address two dominant critiques of donor conflict interventions: the imperative to undertake more context-specific, locally informed efforts and the need to build upon fragile states’ preexisting capacities and strengths. Western donors, including the United States, have adopted a broadly similar local stabilization approach in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, and Somalia.

In practice, the term “stabilization” has signified a wide range of strategies but, by 2018, the U.S. government had codified its approach in its Stabilization Assistance Framework document.⁸ The framework defines stabilization as “a political endeavor involving an integrated civilian-military process to create conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably manage conflict.” It also states that practitioners must connect local stabilization endeavors to national-level policy objectives.⁹ In Syria, foreshadowing this guidance, U.S. officials emphasized from the start that local council programs were intended to advance these national policy objectives. As one senior State Department official described the strategy in early 2013:

What we’re supporting here are two things. There is the top-down process of the [Syrian Opposition Council (SOC)] getting stronger in Cairo in its ability to support alternative administration in liberated areas, and there’s a bottom-up process of the SOC providing the goods and services and support and training that those at the local level in the political opposition . . . need to demonstrate to the people in their neighborhood, the people in their towns, the people in their villages, that a better day is coming.¹⁰

Despite the heated debates that bedeviled U.S. Syria policy over the years, policymakers and legislators consistently supported the concept of stabilization aid for local councils. Officials viewed the programs as a positive step in laying the foundations for eventual democratic state building and responsive governance, and maintained their support for local political assistance—in some form or in some locations—until mid-2018.¹¹

Given this longstanding support for Syria’s local stabilization programs, this paper evaluates two primary questions: how has the United States integrated these local programs into its higher-level strategy for Syria, and how do these programs relate to the political and security trajectories of the war? It finds that, over time, the objectives and assumptions of local political assistance in Syria increasingly diverged from U.S. high-level policy decisions. Further, the political-military realities of the war in Syria progressively undermined the intended effects of local U.S.-backed stabilization programs. Prompted by this analysis, this paper then examines why the U.S. government continued its stabilization programs in spite of its shifts in Syria policy and despite the fact that the programs were increasingly marginal to Syria’s political-military realities. Explanations include normative, humanitarian, and bureaucratic considerations, as well as information biases and gaps in policymaker decisionmaking.

Finally, this paper charts recommendations for future stabilization endeavors. In Syria, Western donors’ local stabilization objectives ended up captive to a dramatically deteriorating broader policy and conflict environment. But Syria is only the most recent case in which the international community has attempted local political programs under inauspicious conditions. For future stabilization engagements to be more successful, it is essential to consider lessons learned from the Syria experience.

Stabilization and Local Governance Programs: Parameters and Goals

Before looking at the evolution of civilian assistance to opposition local councils in Syria, it is crucial to define the parameters and goals of these programs. It is also important to understand the four interrelated “theories of change” behind the initiatives, which were all intended to support effective, legitimate local governance in Syria in the wake of a high-level political transition.

Defining the Programs

Throughout the Syrian conflict, donors used various terms to describe the civilian assistance projects supporting opposition local councils. Such terms include political transition, local governance, or stabilization.¹² Reflecting the fluidity of programs operating in the wartime Syrian context and the inconsistency in donor terminology, this paper uses “stabilization programs,” “local governance programs,” and “local political programs” interchangeably, while acknowledging that specific programs varied in their approach, and that these types of program would differ in more stable environments.¹³ It focuses on U.S. high-level Syria policy and U.S. local-level Syria programs, though it references UK and European local council programs in cases where they paralleled U.S. initiatives.¹⁴ Non-Western actors, such as the Gulf nations, Turkey, and private individuals, also engaged heavily with opposition local councils. This paper does not focus on these efforts but notes their existence as part of the complexity of delivering local political assistance.

Defining the Goals

From the outset, U.S. officials consistently stressed that providing local assistance served their higher-level policy objectives for Syria. These higher aims were first articulated in August 2011, when France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States issued coordinated official statements calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside. These declarations were repeated in the 2012 Geneva Communique.¹⁵ The imperative for political negotiation and transition in Syria was further codified in 2015 in United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, which set out a road map for a peace process, although Russian objections prevented the resolution from calling for Assad to be removed from office.¹⁶ This objective remained official U.S. policy until at least early 2018, despite the increased geopolitical and policy complexities that emerged in Syria over the subsequent years.¹⁷

To address the question of how these local political programs would support the United States’ broader policy aims for Syria, U.S. policymakers and practitioners articulated several distinct yet ostensibly compatible objectives: (1) democracy and participation objectives, (2) legitimacy and popular support objectives, (3) capacity and administration objectives, and (4) political state-building objectives, aimed at connecting disparate opposition councils to a larger, more cohesive opposition political body. When describing the rationale for their initiatives, donor officials frequently merged these goals, reflecting their belief that “all good things go together” in paving the path for high-level political transition. However, analytically, one must disaggregate the four donor objectives, and their associated theories of change, in order to understand how the programs were intended to promote overarching policy aims.¹⁸

Democracy and participation objectives.

Western officials believed that programs that fostered local councils’ consultative decisionmaking processes and accountability mechanisms would increase Syrians’ familiarity with and support for a participatory, inclusive local political order. These objectives attempted to shift local norms and practices away from the historically centralized, authoritarian Syrian state in preparation for a more democratic post-Assad era. They also reflected donors’ belief in the potential of “building demand” for better governance and local democracy. In the ideal outcome of this approach, short-term participation in community-driven development programs will lead to longer-term transformation of local power structures. Participation-oriented programs often also delivered much-needed services to communities, but with the complementary objective of promoting good governance.

Legitimacy and popular support objectives.

An additional theory viewed stabilization programs as a way for opposition local councils to deliver services to their constituencies. The popular support they earned from successful service delivery, in turn, would encourage the public to regard the councils as a legitimate, capable alternative to the Assad regime. As one implementer noted, this approach rested on the assumption that “legitimacy of a governance was based in part on the provision of public provision of services”; it also assumed that the services provided were visible and timely enough to attract notice.¹⁹ These assumptions mirrored dominant practice in liberal state-building models and “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency theories, where effective service delivery is seen as key to securing popular support and legitimacy.²⁰

Capacity and administration objectives.

Donors also sought to address the capacity deficit that Syria’s emergent local governments faced after decades of administration by the highly centralized state. First, programs intended to develop the burgeoning array of local councils as codified administrative structures that could ultimately evolve into the bureaucratic subnational building blocks for a post-Assad Syria. Further, individual local council members would be supported in building technical skills so they could perform governance functions within that new state. The initial wave of donor programs around 2011—which initially were not framed as stabilization projects—involved courses on “civil resistance, media production, promoting anti-sectarian thought, and avoiding communications monitoring.”²¹ After opposition local councils began to hold territory in 2011 and 2012, these projects grew to include capacity-building sessions on local governance skills such as planning, consultation, and management.

Political state-building objectives.

The United States and its donor partners viewed the Syrian opposition’s fragmentation as a major weakness in its potential to emerge as a viable counterstate. Consequently, they devised local projects to build up a more cohesive, broader political opposition body to the Assad regime.²² The scores of local councils that surfaced early in the uprising had clear revolutionary credentials and grassroots energy, but donors believed that these activists needed to cohere into a larger “political mass” to counterbalance the regime.²³ Accordingly, donors focused on umbrella opposition bodies, based largely in Turkey, such as the Syria Opposition Council (later the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces), the nominal exiled deliberative body, and its Assistance Coordination Unit (SOC/ACU). Later, they also supported the opposition’s ostensible executive body, the Syrian Interim Government, and its sectoral directorates. Donors often coordinated local council assistance through the nominally higher-level exiled opposition political bodies, in hopes this would help the local councils gain legitimacy in the eyes of the war-ravaged population. Programs also aimed to knit together the disparate local councils into more cohesive provincial- and regional- level units, to encourage these councils to communicate more with higher-level bodies, and ultimately to help the opposition leverage this cohesion at high-level political negotiations.²⁴

To act on these four objectives, local stabilization programs entailed a wide range of activities. Projects included capacity building on project prioritization, planning cycles, consultative engagement, and beneficiary list preparation; civil documentation provision; emergency supply distribution; and assistance to local councils in providing services such as water, sanitation, waste removal, bakery operation, and power generation. Alongside these politically oriented programs, Western donors provided tens of billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance in opposition Syria, often also working through local councils. On the ground, the differences between humanitarian assistance and stabilization or local governance projects often blurred. For simplicity of analysis, this paper reflects donors’ stated characterization of a program as political (i.e., intended to bolster local governance in opposition-held or post-Assad Syria) or humanitarian (i.e., distributed according to humanitarian assistance principles).²⁵

The Evolving Relationship Between Local Political Assistance and Higher-Level Conflict

As the high-level security and political dynamics of the Syrian conflict evolved between 2011 and the present, U.S. policy also shifted. The changing security and policy contexts shaped three distinct periods of local stabilization programs: first, the aspirational early years between 2011 and mid-2013; second, the years of increasing complexity from mid-2013 to 2016; and finally, the years of fragmentation from 2017 to the present. Admittedly, this delineation oversimplifies the complexity of the conflict and the multitude of actors—neither the conflict nor the policy changed abruptly at each demarcation—but it is a useful framework for structuring an analysis of the political shifts inside and outside Syria. As the conflict wore on, the objectives and underlying assumptions of local-level programs continued to diverge from the broader trajectory of the conflict. At the same time, deep contradictions emerged between stabilization programs’ assumptions and objectives on one hand, and U.S. policy decisions on the other.

Aspirational yet Coherent Objectives: 2011 to Early 2013

The Syrian war began in 2011 as a mostly peaceful civic uprising against Assad. The Assad regime soon escalated violence against protesters and Syrian citizens picked up weapons in response, largely under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. By August 2011, the United States and allied nations stated the coordinated position that Assad should “step aside.”²⁶ By mid-2012, the uprising had transitioned into a civil conflict between the Assad regime and the geographically disparate opposition forces.  Meanwhile, the events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, as well as the opposition’s military gains, fueled many Western policymakers’ assumption that Syria’s “day after” Assad was coming—perhaps soon.²⁷ According to analyst Mona Yacoubian, “Informed by this fundamental miscalculation, the focus inside the US government was less on strategies to ensure Assad’s exit and more on managing the day after to prevent a chaotic transition.”²⁸ Western powers levied financial sanctions on the regime but, despite wide debate, chose to limit their military assistance to the opposition. Meanwhile, Arab Gulf states and individuals provided increasing security aid to the local opposition proxies in a largely uncoordinated, and often competitive, fashion.²⁹

Against this backdrop of optimism, the earliest local political assistance programs were aspirational but aligned with the United States’ high-level policies toward Syria.³⁰ They seemed consistent with the presumed trajectory of the conflict, which most, though not all, U.S. policymakers viewed as headed toward Assad’s departure. Yet the implementation challenges of the wartime context, unsurprisingly, undermined the effectiveness of many of these early programs.

Evaluating Local Political Programs: Reasonable Approaches Based on Optimistic Assumptions

Viewed in the context of Assad’s presumably imminent departure, local political programs were consistent with overall U.S. policy, the presumed conflict trajectory, and local political will. Western donors’ democracy and participation objectives aligned with the early ethos of the Syrian uprising, a genuinely organic civic movement that encompassed a wide swath of society. As the uprising transitioned from protests organized by “local coordination committees” to direct governance and administration by local councils, donors began to pivot toward community-driven development approaches to respond to conditions in opposition-held areas. Donor programs focused on supporting local consultative processes that aligned with many Syrian citizens’ own demands, which centered on greater accountability, participation, and voice in shaping their local political order. At the same time, some councils faced reports of elite capture or corruption—a phenomenon that would continue throughout the conflict.

Objectives centered on legitimacy and popular support also aligned with facts on the ground. Emergent councils, often made up of the activists who had spearheaded the initial wave of protests, were eager to show that they could deliver for their populations and be a viable governing alternative to the Assad regime. Similarly, donors’ capacity and administration objectives also matched their high-level policy approaches, which assumed almost inevitable regime change. Emergent local councils were seen as the potential building blocks of an eventual transitional governing body; consequently, donors felt that it was most important to simply identify who the local councils were and start some sort of administrative processes within them. However, these local council members generally were not paid, and financial difficulties often constrained who could volunteer their time to serve.

Finally, political state-building objectives intended to build the opposition’s cohesiveness, connections, and popular support also rested on reasonable logic. From the outset, donors correctly noted that the disparate nature of local councils would make it difficult to establish them as a successful counterforce to the Assad regime. (Donors also recognized the disparate nature of the armed opposition as a related key obstacle, but local political programs did not explicitly tackle that challenge.) Moreover, any eventual transitional governing body would require a much stronger overarching structure. To mitigate these concerns and support the (aspirational) higher-level coordinating bodies outside Syria, several aid agencies established their own bureaucratic structures to deliver projects through the SOC and ACU. Donors tried to empower and equip the SOC to distribute goods and services to local councils; in turn, they hoped that the SOC would “accrue credit” in the eyes of Syrian communities.³¹

Reasonable Principles Facing Implementation Challenges

As donors outside Syria scrambled to set up early stabilization programs in a conflict-ravaged, previously opaque environment, they faced significant implementation challenges that negatively affected the impact of their programs. To begin, donors were unfamiliar with local actors and with features of the Syrian environment, which hindered both democracy and participation objectives. The emergence of local councils represented the semi-formalization of new political roles. Although local councils often contained long-standing community notables, donors readily admitted that they were largely unfamiliar with these actors and their roles. The Assad regime had largely restricted previous Western development assistance to apolitical technical sectors, forcing local project staff to interact only with the regime’s decentralized apparatus. As one former official recalled, “Early on there, was a realization that we didn’t know who these people are, and they weren’t the usual suspects. We needed action learning.”³² Compounding the difficulties, donors had to manage their participatory projects remotely from neighboring countries, and so they relied heavily on Syrian intermediaries who could shuttle between the exiled donor hub and local communities inside. International officials openly acknowledged that their unfamiliarity with, and physical distance from, local actors increased the challenge of their work.

In fact, the Syrian environment was a textbook worst-case-scenario for community-driven development. Comparative evidence on participatory development stresses that understanding local context is crucial to ensuring equitable outcomes.³³ Conflict and fragmented settings both diminish effectiveness, especially without a top-down state reinforcing bottom-up participation.³⁴ In conflict-affected contexts, risk for elite capture is exacerbated, and community-driven development programs have a better record at affecting economic outcomes than in generating social cohesion or inclusive governance.³⁵ These limitations were especially pronounced in the Syrian context, where officials acknowledged that they had to rely upon elites or English-speaking, urbane intermediaries rather than more marginalized individuals. As an independent evaluation of one local council program reported, local councils largely comprised “individuals from influential and power wielding entities in the community” rather than people chosen through “genuine public selection.”³⁶ In addition to challenging democracy objectives, these disparities in participation similarly undermined legitimacy and public support objectives. But even with these impediments to broad-based participation, donors viewed the programs as a first foothold. They hoped that over time, as higher-level transition occurred, projects could be shifted to encompass more of local society.³⁷

Capacity and administration projects also faced implementation ch