The economics of landmine clearance

Millions of mines are deployed in at least 64 countries around the world. The majority of countries most heavily contaminated with landmines are in the developing world. While landmines are not hard to deploy, their removal is painstakingly slow, dangerous and expensive. The sector of humanitarian and development activity to reduce the impact of landmine and unexploded ordnance contamination is referred to as humanitarian mine action. A mine action program generally consists of three main activities that generate output. These activities are landmine clearance, explosive ordnance disposal and mine risk education. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential role of economic tools in the planning and evaluation of humanitarian mine action programs and related projects, with the intent of maximising efficiency in the allocation of resources. The scope of this thesis is based on using those economic tools that appear to have the most to offer the humanitarian mine action sector in optimising resource allocation. These include cost benefit analysis (CBA), multi-criteria analysis (MCA) linear programming, game theory and risk analysis. The thesis is laid out to examine the interaction between eight main resource allocation questions and a number of tools identified to help address these questions. These questions can be divided in terms of scope between international, national and regional levels. Although the research concentrates on the potential contribution of economics in a mine action context, there are also practical applications for use in other emergency services. In addition, this research makes some small contributions in a more general, methodological context: a. The inclusion of a calculation in MCA that enables candidate options to be ranked on a quantitative basis. b. The development of a method of adjusting the effect of discount rates to take account of intergenerational equity whilst also allowing the recognition of more efficient project implementation techniques. c. The development of MCA to allow the analysis of meta-criteria (resilience and impact) that facilitates the identification of the most appropriate model for intervention. d. This thesis also shows the merit of taking a holistic approach to the employment of analytical tools in the consideration of programs from a resource allocation perspective.