A key driver of Liberia'sre-emergence from utter destruction, between 2004 and 2008,was the willingness of international actors to accept theresponsibility and risks associated with stabilization. Thiswas accomplished by confronting these risks directly, evenat the cost of temporarily filling institutional voids andsharing sovereignty with the Liberian transitionalauthorities. The main international diplomaticrepresentations and aid agencies on the ground came toaccept from their varying perspectives that peace in Liberiawas fragile and that the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement(ACPA) of September 2003 was only the beginning of aprotracted stabilization effort. The domestic market forconsultants and goods did not exist, requiring the WorldBank to innovate with new modes of delivering assistance.Thus, peace consolidation compelled international partnersto simultaneously (i) prevent full state capture by corruptelites in advance of elections and (ii) secure a peacedividend to vulnerable groups which could most directlythreaten peace (young ex-combatants and refugees). Buildingon a solid UN-World Bank partnership, the internationalcommunity found the internal consensus to address each ofthe two complementary peace consolidation challenges,adopting two highly innovative instruments: (i) ananti-corruption scheme labeled Governance and EconomicManagement Assistance Program (GEMAP), involving such robustmeasures as expatriate co-signing authority, and (ii) ashort-term employment-generation scheme now known asroads-with- United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL),centered on a rare direct collaboration between the Bank andthe engineering units of the UN's military peacekeepingforce on the ground. This paper examines these twoinstruments more closely, in their successes and failures aswell as from the perspective of temporary shared sovereigntyand co-production.
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