Foreword

Negotiating just and inclusive peace agreements after violent intrastate territorial conflicts, in which there are often multiple parties and myriads of impacts, typically involves long and difficult processes. However, as the title of an edited volume published in 2007 asserts, it is the implementation of such agreements that is ‘the real challenge to intrastate peace’.¹ Indeed, on the cover of the book we read the claim that: ‘[m]ost intrastate peace agreements are implemented inadequately or not at all. This leads to renewed tensions and often to resumption of armed conflict.’ The factors involved in the poor record of peace agreement implementation include:

• limited capacity for implementation in both national and subnational political and administrative structures
• resistance by state authorities
• the pressures and demands involved in the need to build entirely new, or fundamentally reformed, post-conflict, subnational government institutions.

Failure in peace agreement implementation is, undoubtedly, one of the reasons why the most recent global analysis of the recurrence of intrastate conflicts showed that around 60 per cent of such conflicts since the Second World War have resumed within five years of the signing of a peace agreement.²

This book by my friend and colleague Gordon Peake sheds light on the difficulties involved in implementing peace agreements. He recounts, and reflects upon, his own involvement as an external adviser assisting with the implementation of a significant peace agreement – namely, the Bougainville Peace Agreement (the Peace Agreement).

The signing of the long and detailed Peace Agreement in August 2001 concluded a four-year process that ended the nine-year Bougainville conflict (1988–97). It was a complex and violent conflict, involving both a secessionist element – separation of Bougainville from Papua New Guinea (PNG) – and deeply divisive intra-Bougainville violence. The Peace Agreement is regarded by many observers as one of the best and most inclusive of the many peace agreements seeking to resolve territorial intrastate conflicts to have been entered into since the Second World War. That has been the view, for example, of United Nations (UN) officials who were involved, the UN having played a significant role in the negotiation of the Peace Agreement – although not in its implementation.

Gordon was advising on, and seeking to assist in, the development of ‘capacity’ in the administrative arm of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG): the Bougainville Public Service (since 2014). The ABG was a new subnational government, unique in PNG, established under the Peace Agreement through Bougainville-wide elections held in mid-2005. Gordon’s role involved supporting the ABG in the implementation of critically important aspects of the arrangements under the Peace Agreement. These aimed at the ABG gradually achieving a high level of autonomy. This outcome was pursued through a range of measures in the Peace Agreement, many of which had been fully implemented long before Gordon became involved. These measures centred on:

• the enactment of extensive amendments to the PNG Constitution to give effect to the Peace Agreement (completed in March 2002)
• the establishment of the ABG through elections under its own subnational constitution, enacted by a representative Bougainville constituent assembly in accordance with choices made in a long public-consultation process (completed in June 2005)
• protection of ABG autonomy from ‘interference’ by the PNG government, a goal achieved through elaborate safeguards agreed to in the Peace Agreement and provided for in subsequent amendments to the PNG Constitution and the provisions of the Bougainville Constitution (completed in stages from August 2001 to June 2005).

It was only after the ABG had been established in mid-2005 that efforts could begin with what has been, in retrospect, the most difficult aspect of implementation of the agreed autonomy arrangements. This has involved efforts to add significantly to Bougainville’s autonomy through the gradual transfer of an extensive array of functions and powers, many of them significant, from PNG to the ABG. The process became known, during negotiation of the Peace Agreement, as the ‘drawdown’ of functions and powers. The requirements of the process were spelt out in quite complex arrangements in both the Peace Agreement and PNG constitutional law.

In practice, transfer of the 59 functions and powers enumerated in the PNG Constitution as ‘available’ for transfer had to be made to a Bougainville public administration that, before the conflict, had met high standards, but which had seen its composition, capacity, morale and accountability standards devastated by the conflict and its aftermath. To complicate matters, the ‘drawdown’ of particular functions and powers required cooperation from, and joint action with, PNG government agencies. They, too, have demonstrated serious capacity problems, as well as (in some, but not all, cases) resistance to being involved in the process at all.

As a result, the implementation of the autonomy set out in the Peace Agreement has been largely incomplete. Early in 2021, ABG leaders were estimating that only 11 of the 59 ‘available’ functions and powers had been transferred. While, in the Bougainville case, the failure to fully implement autonomy has not resulted in renewed conflict, it has not been without consequence that, from 2005 to 2019, autonomy arrangements did not meet the high expectations held by Bougainvilleans when the Peace Agreement was signed. Undoubtedly, this played a role in the emphatic rejection of the option of ‘higher autonomy’ offered in the Bougainville independence referendum, held under the terms of the Peace Agreement and the implementing provisions of the PNG Constitution in November–December 2019.³ In the referendum, 87.4 per cent of enrolled Bougainvilleans cast a vote, and 97.7 per cent of these chose independence, in a ballot in which (unusually for PNG) the electoral roll was remarkably accurate.

Frustration about the continued slow progress of drawdown has not decreased since Gordon finished working in Bougainville at the end of 2019. The drawdown has been a strong focus of the ABG under President Ishmael Toroama, who was elected in September 2020. In May 2021, he signed, jointly with the PNG government, the Sharp Agreement on the Dispensation of Constitutional Requirements Relating to the Process of Transfer of Functions and Powers. The proposal for this agreement was initiated by the ABG, with the central aim of the ABG doing away with most of the constitutional requirements for the process of transfer. The intention was that the transfer of all functions and powers that had not yet been transferred could be achieved by the end of 2022. In fact, progress since the signing of the Sharp Agreement has been much slower than had been hoped, due, at least in part, to ongoing problems of capacity and focus in both the Bougainville Public Service and the responsible PNG agencies, as illustrated by Gordon’s account.

Gordon was part of an ABG-requested, donor-funded effort to implement the ‘drawdown’ arrangements that were undoubtedly critical to the expected high level of autonomy being achieved, and to develop the capacity of Bougainville Public Service officers to implement these arrangements themselves. When he became involved, the transfer process had already been underway for over 10 years. Gordon had been preceded by at least one other adviser in much the same role, who had struggled to have any impact on the implementation of the drawdown arrangements. Many of those in the ABG and the Bougainville Public Service, who were expected to be key actors in the process, saw little reason to change the status quo.

Gordon’s account illustrates the nature of the problems facing an external adviser, and the extent of the difficulty, day to day, of working to implement the wide range of autonomy arrangements commonly found in agreements designed to resolve territorial intrastate conflicts. Such advisers are asked to operate in post-conflict situations, where the capacity of the local state has often been severely undermined by divisive internal conflict, and where the political, historical and cultural contexts can be quite opaque to even the best-read and most engaged external advisers. His account also points to the practical obstacles in the way of external advisers generally (and not just in post-conflict situations) in undertaking activities directed at ‘capacity building’.

This is a highly personalised account, quite different from the burgeoning range of analyses of peace agreement implementation written by academics and practitioners. Nevertheless, it sheds real light on the issues discussed in such analyses. Gordon introduces us to some of the wide range of participants in Bougainville’s post-conflict rebuilding efforts and seeks to understand why progress in the implementation of key aspects of the Peace Agreement autonomy arrangements has been so limited. His honesty and irony are sometimes confronting, but always illuminating in the light of the realities and challenges involved in trying to ensure that even the best (in terms of content and coverage) peace agreements bear fruit in practice. That can only occur if the challenges of implementing peace agreements are well understood.

Anthony J. Regan

Associate Professor

Department of Pacific Affairs

Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs

ANU College of Asia and the Pacific

The Australian National University

Canberra

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