What have we learned about crisis/fragile states? Findings of a 5 year research programme.

Cards on the table, confronted with a closely argued 11 page exec sum, I am unlikely to then read the full report. But the short version of Meeting the Challenges of Crisis States, by James Putzel (LSE) and Jonathan Di John (SOAS), is a meal in itself. It summarizes 5 years of DFID-funded research by the Crisis States Research Centre, led by the London School of Economics, and is a great way to take the temperature of academic thinking on ‘states with adjectives’ – fragile, failing, crisis etc etc.

The key question it seeks to answer is why the daily and inevitable tensions of politics and ‘conflict as usual’, which exist in any society, tip some states over into a downward spiral of distintegration, grand theft and violence, while others, even poor ones, prove resilient. Key Findings?

Like most political scientists, Putzel and Di John believe that if you want to understand politics, you have to understand elites. And that means jettisoning preconceptions of ‘good governance’ (aka how much do the institutions resemble an idealized notion of American/European democracy) and thinking instead about the underlying political settlement. How do individuals and groups with different slices of power protect and negotiate over their pieces of the pie?

What leads to fragility? In the rather disturbing language of the report:

‘Factors that are most likely to provoke violence and lead towards state collapse [include] the lack of a basic legitimate monopoly over the means of large-scale violence, the absence of control over taxation, the failure of state organisations to operate in significant territories of the country and the existence of rival rule systems that take precedence over the state’s rules.’

And when we talk about ‘states’ we need to go well beyond presidential palaces and parliaments, especially in thinking about cities:

‘Analysis and policy discussion around fragile states has concentrated almost entirely on the “central state”, failing to see the particular place of cities in state formation historically and the contemporary importance of growing cities as key sites of state building and state erosion. The concentration of high-value economic activity within the cities of fragile states renders them central to state-building processes. Elites capable of challenging the bargains on which political settlements rest are often located in cities, and growing civic conflict and violence threatens to undermine state consolidation.’

There’s a good focus on taxation (as you’d expect from anything authored by Jonathan Di John, who was analyzing taxation long before it became the latest development fad:

‘Taxation is a key indicator for measuring state performance and assessing the extent of fragility or resilience of a state. A state’s taxation capacity can provide an objective means to assess the power, authority and legitimacy the state possesses to mobilise resources and the degree to which it monopolises tax collection. The level, diversity and manner of collection of taxes all provide indications of a state’s position on the fragility to resilience spectrum.’

What drives transitions from fragility towards more resilient states?

‘Possibilities exist for transformative political coalitions to emerge committed to establishing security, particularly in urban environments where a diversity of relatively well organised interest groups can challenge reigning political practices. Reformist politics are most likely to emerge when it is in the collective interests of newly emergent elites who do not have the means enjoyed by traditional elites to finance their security privately.‘

Which sounds to me like polisci speak for ‘it’s the new middle classes, stupid.’

The research has bad news for promoters of the more militarist reading of ‘Responsibility to Protect’. Military intervention seems to resemble chemotherapy in that it destroys existing anti-conflict mechanisms:

‘There is a strong, negative and significant association between military interventions and democracy. Military interventions have tended to destroy a state’s conflict-resolution mechanisms, often unleashed forms of politics incompatible with democracy, upset political settlements and critically weakened state systems in general.’

Rather than direct intervention, outside powers should be trying to ‘go with the grain’ of cycles of war and peace, pitching mediation at the right moment when the incentives of warring parties are aligned.

There are stern words for the deregulatory assault on the state undertaken by Washington Consensus policies over recent decades. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the economic arguments, undermining the state has been disastrous in terms of politics and fragility:

‘Policy makers need to consider the extent to which deregulating an economy across the board will be politically destabilising and actually undermine economic reforms….. policies that contribute to state withdrawal are often evaluated on grounds of efficiency and equity, but almost never for their impact on the institutional resilience of the state. This is a major blind spot which has far-reaching consequences for the ability of states to embark upon or return to a path of institutional consolidation.’

The report is vehement about the need for donors to help build strong states:

‘Aid needs to be channelled through the agencies of the state and it should give due priority to developing the core capacities of the state to govern economic development. Donors need to give due consideration to mechanisms that increase the capacity of states to raise their own finances.’

The case for an ‘activist state’ is particularly strong in regards to natural resource extraction, and here the report’s message is interesting – donors and others need to get in before a country discovers natural resources and ‘consolidate a national development coalition before the exploitation of resources begins.’ (this ought to be known as ‘doing a Botswana’ – Botswana nationalised subsoil mineral rights before it discovered diamonds, and has used the wealth spectacularly well ever since).

This is all targeted at aid’s big hitters – DFID, World Bank etc, and their relationships with governments. But NGOs should pay attention too. Putzel and Di John argue that funding civil society protest when the state is fragile or non-existent can be disastrous:

‘Programmes designed to promote participation and tap the resources of non-state organisations must be cognisant of this dimension of state fragility or they may potentially contribute to provoking or aggravating violent conflict.’

Which leads in practice to the kind of convening and brokering approach I’ve talked about on this blog ad nauseam.

Overall, there’s something offputting about the fixation on political elites, almost revelling in an apparently amoral approach of thepolitical sciences – ‘we are trying to understand power and politics, not pass judgement’. I’ve felt the same sense of academic machismo emananating from the ‘decent chap-ists’ of the Africa Power and Politics Programme over at ODI. I suspect there are other things going on behind it – the frustration of disillusioned lefties who feel let down by the past failures of popular movements, or the natural tendency when trying to understand a complex system to steer towards the simplest and most brutal concentration of power. But that’s enough amateur psychotherapy: the research is solid, and the findings fascinating, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow the occasional jarring tone.

How can INGOs improve their work in fragile and conflict states?

There’s nothing like the impending threat of giving a talk to make you mug up on an issue, usually the morning before. Today’s exercise in skating on thin ice (the secret? Keep moving. Fast as possible) was a recent talk to some Indiana University students studying the developmental role of the state while enjoying our splendid British summer (ahem).

I gave them the standard FP2P spiel on Active Citizens and Effective States (powerpoint here - just keep clicking), but then got into the different roles INGOs play in countries with different types of state. The big distinction is between stable and unstable states, but there are lots of subcategories (middle v low income; democratic v autocratic; willing (nice) v unwilling (nasty); centralized v decentralized; aid dependent or not). But my recent crash-and-burn experience of trying to come up with a typology was salutary, and I won’t try and repeat the exercise.

Stable states are in many ways the easy ones: we can help with civil society strengthening, some state-building at local level (especially in decentralized states), or play a convening role to help bring state, civil society and other non-state actors together to find solutions. Even in stable states, change is often a cycle of conflict and cooperation (see diagram), something we struggle to navigate. See this post for more findings from some interesting research on what works by John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee.

But the more substantial bit of my talk was on Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FRACAS – my best acronym in ages). These, if you believe the new numbers from the ODI, are where the majority of poor people will live in 15 years time and that’s a real headache for aid agencies and NGOs: without a well-functioning state, everything gets more difficult. For starters, you need to send your best, most politically astute staff there, but FRACAS are not always the most desirable place to live, raise a family etc, so recruitment can be a ‘challenge’.

As prep for my session, I read two recent Oxfam papers: Programming in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries: A Learning Companion (June 2011) and Within and Without the State (Research Report, February 2012). According to these, some of the key features of working in FRACAS are:

With a weak/absent state, more power lies in the hands of multiple non-state actors, including faith-based organizations, private sector (think money lenders in Somalia), traditional authorities, and (increasingly) well organized, educated and funded Diaspora networks. INGOs have to learn how to engage with all of these in rapidly mutating coalitions.

With the state not delivering, there is always a temptation to start building parallel systems to provide health, education etc. But in the long term these can actually get in the way of building a viable state (see my critique of Paul Collier’s Independent Service Authorities). The trick is to ensure that service delivery work also builds long-term state capacity.

Even in apparently dysfunctional states, there may be ‘pockets of functionality’ with which INGOs can engage, (the papers point to education in the DRC). This both delivers services now, and can act as a nucleus for longer term state-building.

In FRACAS, the situation is always likely to be complex, unpredictable and messy. As aid agencies increasingly concentrate their operations there, there is going to be a fascinating conflict with the rising demand for tangible, measurable and attributable impact.

And what of future directions for INGOs in FRACAS? Within and Without the State makes some tantalisingly general, but interesting suggestions. Some should be familiar to regular readers of this blog, e.g. learn to work better with non state actors such as faith groups, and to respond better to shocks. Others are less familiar:

Focus on building legitimacy/trust/social contract between citizens and state (accountability comes later). In FRACAS, the standard INGO repertoire of supporting demands for greater accountability may be premature: the state may simply lack the capacity to deliver, rather than the will, while citizens may have had such a negative previous experience of the state that all they want is to be left alone. So the first priority is to help build the social contract in terms of trust and supply (capacity), before moving on to demand.

Civil society organizations are often atomised and inexperienced in engaging outside their sector or locality. Helping to convene ‘local to national’ conversations for them with national players (both state and non state) is one possible niche for INGOs.

Promote ‘community conversations’: in the chaotic unpredictability of FRACAS, the usual pieties about not trying to impose blueprints are even truer than ever. There is no substitute for having ‘embedded’ conversations, without a prior agenda, with as many people as possible. Only that way will you detect new currents of power and thinking, and react promptly to such changes.

Any other advice to INGOers working in FRACAS?

Horizon 2025: the future of aid (and a potentially epic nerdwar on poverty numbers)

I’ve been starting to feel like an unpaid publicist for the Overseas Development Institute recently. It’s not my fault – ODI keeps publishing really interesting stuff (and anyway, I’m not always nice about it). You’re likely to hear a lot about their latest paper, Horizon 2025: Creative Destruction in the Aid Industry, by Homi Kharas (Brookings Institution) and Andrew Rogerson (ODI), so I urge you to read it, rather than just winging it based on this blog (not that you would dream of it, of course).

The paper first takes the ‘MICs v LICs’ discussion on where poor people actually live, which Andy Sumner has been leading for the last couple of years, and projects it forward to 2025. Futures work usually offers several scenarios because the future is so difficult to predict, but Horizon 2025 opts for a single ‘base level 2025 scenario’, extrapolating recent trends as follows:

• High per capita income growth and falling population growth in large, dynamic, middle income countries (MICs) shrink the global poverty pool drastically.
• Income stagnation and high fertility rates in selected low-income and fragile countries re-establish them as the main locations of global poverty.
• Growth in emerging economies dominates global growth and they account for most new trade and foreign capital flows to poor countries, along with sizable increases in aid-like flows, competing for influence with traditional aid donors.
• Availability of public and private resources for development, coupled with the fall in global poverty, imply that dramatically more funding is potentially available for each poor person.

This is all good stuff but is arguably skating on fairly thin ice as the ‘baseline’ is at the optimistic end of possible scenarios. It uses IMF growth projections and average expenditure per person from GDP data (known as the national accounts), rather than the now burgeoning amount of household poverty survey data, and assumes that inequality remains constant as countries grow (when it often rises). That means that the 2025 baseline effectively maximises per capita income and minimises poverty, compared to other estimates such as that by Karver, Kenny and Sumner for CGD (here) and Andy for IDS (here).

Andy’s now ubiquitous killer fact is that three quarters of the world’s poor – well, 79% or 2 billion poor people (by $2 poverty) – now live in MICs. You hear this quoted everywhere, with the implication that internal politics and distributive struggles (rather than aid) hold the key to future development. Kharas and Rogerson argue that the MIC thing is actually a blip (OK, a twenty year blip, but still). By 2025, growth in most MICs will have lifted almost all their poor citizens above the $2 a day poverty line (I said they were optimists). Instead, the vast majority of the world’s remaining poor will live in FRACAS – fragile and conflict affected states (see chart 1): the long-term dividing line will between between fragile v stable states, rather than LICs v MICs, which chimes nicely with my own work on effective states. They will also largely live in Africa, which should please Paul Collier, as it endorses his Africanist ‘Bottom Billion’ thesis.

Using a different source of data – household poverty surveys and multiple scenarios – Andy Sumner finds a quite different pattern. Across a range of scenarios, there is a 50/50 LIC/MIC split in poverty in 2020 and 2030. Given that some of today’s LICs will be MICs by then, it’s possible that just one-third of the world’s poor will be in the remaining LICs. Meanwhile, estimates for total global $2-a-day poverty by Andy’s method in his paper with Charles Kenny and Jonathan Karver at CGD (see here) run from as low as 600m to as high as 1.6bn (there’s also multiple scenario data for other poverty measures such as malnutrition there too).

All in all, I’d say that Horizon 2025 is not the last word: there’s plenty of room for doubt and arcane methodological debate over the numbers, with significant consequences for the way we think about the future of development. I see a nerd war approaching – wonderful!
But whatever the final outcome of that war, it seems to me that Horizon 2025 is really onto something. In terms of reducing poverty, the focus in most MICs will be domestic policy, not aid. Donors and INGOs may play a minor supporting role in those domestic struggles, but the core aid business is likely to retreat to fragile states, (where, incidentally, we will witness a titanic clash between the chaotic, unpredictable nature of fragile states and the increasing demands for measurable, attributable impact).

Where Andy and Kharas and Rogerson do agree is on the affordability of ending poverty. Andy provides a set of estimates that suggests the costs of ending poverty might well be affordable (as a percentage of GDP) for most MICs by 2020 and certainly by 2030, leaving just 16-28 LICs in 2030 needing foreign aid to end poverty.

Kharas and Rogerson calculate the costs of eradicating poverty in a similar rump of fragile states, assuming a certain amount comes from domestic sources and the rest from aid. Their argument is that by 2025, mobile phone-based banking will be ubiquitous so it really will be possible to deliver cash direct to the poor, however dysfunctional the state. As poverty falls and GDP grows, a tech-based $2-a-day safety net becomes increasingly affordable, accounting for just a fraction of 1% of global GDP (see chart 2).

Next, the authors think through a further set of issues on the future role of aid. They look at three intriguing and believable ‘disruptors’ to the traditional aid system:

1. New channels for aid via philanthropy or ‘disintermediated’ direct giving
2. The rise in South-South cooperation, and with it, the blurring of distinctions between aid and cooperation based on mutual interest
3. Climate change and the rise of climate finance (both for mitigation and adaptation) either in parallel to, or as a competitor to, poverty-focused aid

Going into any detail would be too much for an already overl-long blogpost (you really should read the paper), but they run a stress test against existing aid agencies to see who is best/worst prepared for this 2025 world. On the resulting ‘traffic light’ bar chart (below), red is the worst prepared. Bad news for Spain, but Canada (for once) is deemed to have got it right, and they’ll be dancing in the corridors of GAVI and the Global Fund.

I suspect this may not be the last post on this.

An optimistic take on fragile states

Nice to see some upbeat–but-expert thinking on fragile states, which are all well on their way to becoming the biggestheadache/impossible problem in development. By the way, has anyone realized that the acronym for Fragile and Conflict Affected States is …… FRACAS? If not, remember you read it here first……

Anyway, back to the optimism. This is from a new paper by Laurence Chandy of the Brookings Institution, Ten Years of Fragile States: What Have We Learned?

Chandy reflects on what has changed since the World Bank established a taskforce to examine how to deal with what were then called LICUS (Low-Income Countries Under Stress). They don’t call them that any more, not least because many of them (Pakistan, Yemen) are middle income. But this group of countries suffers from name changes and constantly evolving typologies more than any other. (Another aside, DFID at one point created a ‘poor performers’ team, and then wondered why no-one wanted to work for it…..). That matters because it affects aid flows, which are twice as volatile for FRACAS as aid flows to stable countries.

And here’s his optimistic conclusions:

“Today, there is mounting evidence that aid to fragile states can work. Furthermore, with less than a dozen stable low-income countries left, donors no longer have the same excuse for overlooking the needs of the 30 or more fragile states. These needs loom ever larger. Over just the past six years, the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is estimated to have doubled from 20 to 40 percent. No fragile state has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.

Nevertheless, donors still face a difficult decision in determining whether to aid fragile states, and if so, by how much. Achieving results in these settings almost certainly requires greater expertise and time, which translate into higher cost and risk. A successful start to the second decade of fragile states policy would see donors redesign their resource allocation models to capture this reality. New models should:

•             Recognize that fragility does not end with graduation to middle-income status. Where donors make special allocations to low-income fragile states compared to low-income stable countries, an equivalent policy should be employed to distinguish allocations between fragile and stable middle-income countries.

•             Allow for more stable financing to fragile states. Donors should avoid trying to pin a trajectory on each partner country and instead concentrate on mitigating the instability inherent to fragile states by providing stable aid flows, supported by improved approaches to risk management. Aid commitments should be embedded in country compacts, which can serve as a useful tool for stabilizing flows.

•             Reassess the cost-effectiveness of aiding fragile states. There is an enormous potential for aid to help fragile states if it is properly designed and managed. This potential needs to be weighed up against an accurate sense of the costs of aid delivery. The effectiveness of aid flows to fragile states could be enhanced further by establishing a more systematic approach to documenting and learning from development interventions. This effort should be carried out under the supervision of the g7+ and focus on interventions with significant scope and scale.”

The g7+, by the way, is a group of 19 FRACAS that has organized itself to lobby for improved aid – a big improvement on donors and others speaking for such states in their absence. Check out its website, which houses this  slightly weird 3 minute youtube pitch to the recent Busan aid conference. And here’s the Broker’s scorecard of how Busan performed on FRACAS – not great, it seems.

How to work in fragile states – some thoughts from Oxfam’s big cheeses

When Oxfam’s big cheeses come together, they have a tendency to issues ‘communiqués’ about their conclusions to

be sent out to what they fondly imagine are battalions of eager staff desperately awaiting their words of wisdom (bosses can be funny that way). Reality is usually rather different but one recent communiqué – on working in fragile states – actually got me quite excited recently, because despite a certain amount of management-speak, I thought it captured some pretty sharp thinking. With big cheese permission, here are some of the less boring bits highlights:

“Whilst each context is different and in any conflict-affected state it is difficult to predict how change will happen, it is unlikely to be through one model of change, is likely to involve both slow incremental change and sudden unpredictable events that can lead to step change ….. change happens in emergent and surprising ways demanding ongoing analysis and checking.

We need to develop our ability to be agile enough to be ready to respond to opportunities for change.  We need to think long-term, act short-term and long-term.  We need to:
· Deepen our understanding of social, religious, cultural dynamics in our power analysis. Such dynamics continue to function in any conflict. We need to recognise and build on what IS working better.
· Develop our capability to convene antagonistic groups that may think very differently. It is critical at all levels to keep dialogue open, develop awareness and deepen understanding and build on joint interests from disparate groups
· Partner with a broader range of organisations that include religious, youth and private sector
· Support, enable and follow innovation in communities
· Encourage and invest in leadership potential, especially of women and young people
· Engage with economic drivers of conflict  – both in terms of positive and negative incentives
· Leverage international pressure, linking up community level engagement with national and international awareness and action.
· Find incentives that challenge the status quo

Programme Design
Programming needs to be designed to reflect the more emergent, non-linear, way change happens.  Our current methodology needs adapting so that we can be more agile, so we can prepare the ground and enable truly effective response when events open up opportunities for change.  Our analysis needs to reflect the root causes of the conflict not just the symptoms. It needs to be more iterative so the normal ‘analyse à plan à review’ cycle moves to a speedier ‘analyse, design, experiment, fast review, then scale up what works or kill off what doesn’t, analyse, redesign etc’ model.

Whist we may need to meet people’s short-term needs in conflict-affected states, we recognise that this often engages us in only transactional change for poor people.  We need to find ways of balancing or developing such interventions into programmes that will lead to more long-term, transformational change.  We will need to persuade major donors on the shortsightedness of their short-term funding 3-6 month cycles.  We need to be more open to see what structures and processes ARE actually working in conflict-affected environments, e.g. tribal and religious structures or private sector.  We need to develop our organisational capability, the confidence and capacity of staff as convenors of antagonistic actors, to forge shared agendas across conflict gaps.  We can sometimes use our technical competency e.g. water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) as an entry point to bring about dialogue.  This may involve a level of discomfort in working with those with whom we may disagree.  It involves taking risks and being creative and innovative in our design thinking.

People  - How do we recruit and retain high skilled staff that can make skilled judgements in dynamic high-risk environments?
· We need to find new ways to attract staff, e.g. linking to academic institutions dealing with conflict perhaps with internships, secondments etc.  We need to find better ways to assess potential in high-risk environments and not ask for Oxfam experience.

Business systems  - Our planning and budgeting systems seem too rigid – we need a new planning toolkit more like rapid-onset planning (for emergencies like conflict or natural disasters) with minimal, more flexible planning systems that don’t rely on web-based systems – we need to find alternative technical solutions.  We may need to set minimal levels of unrestricted funding, create opportunity funding pots to encourage agility.  We need to develop a Real Time Evaluation equivalent to enable quick decision-making on killing off what isn’t working, and building on what is.

We need to develop a framework to support staff in quickly working through or reviewing legalities and decision-making on the ground.  We may also need a stand back review on terrorist legislation and implications for our work.”

Wish all the internal chatter was this meaty……

P.S. Matt Crook describes an intriguing new initiative – a group of governments in fragile states getting organized to put pressure on aid donors - but frustratingly doesn’t say much about what they are actually asking for

Yemen: Arab Spring meets Fragile State + Resource Constraints

Our regional director for the Middle East, Olga Ghazaryan, recently pointed out just how many development buzzwords are being bloodily explored in her region right now – transition to democracy in Egypt; Responsibility to Protect in Libya, and Yemen is looking like a combination of revolution in a fragile state and a dystopian vision of a resource-constrained future.

So what to read on Yemen? In a way it doesn’t matter: in all the media and academic coverage, one name keeps cropping up – Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani appears to enjoy a complete monopoly on analysis for the outside world. He must be a very busy man. But of the various al-Iryani inspired pieces that I’ve come across, my favourite is a new paper by Sarah Phillips, (based on local field research by Mr Al-Iryani), ‘Yemen: Developmental Dysfunction and Division in a Crisis State.’ It’s part of the excellent ‘developmental leadership program’ research, which I’ve linked to before. It mainly focuses on the political players and institutions involved, but as they are changing so fast, I’ll highlight instead some interesting background on the history and context of the current upheaval:

“Several political and economic structures form the basis for beliefs about what is politically possible, including:

• Historical coincidence. In the 1970s and 80s, north Yemen was largely a remittance-based economy. At the same time as almost one million Yemeni workers were expelled from the Gulf as punishment for Yemen’s stance on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the country’s oil exports began to increase dramatically. The balance of power rapidly switched from a remittance-rich (and therefore relatively autonomous) citizenry and a poor state, to a poor (and relatively economically dependent) citizenry and an oil-rich state. This shift was reflected in the renegotiation of the political settlement, favouring the regime rather than Yemeni social forces.

• Ongoing access to external rent. The implicit message from Western donors and Yemen’s neighbours is that Yemen poses too serious a security threat to be allowed to descend into chaos, and that the regime must be supported politically and economically against that outcome. For example, in 2009, Saudi Arabia made a direct payment of $US2.2 billion to the Yemeni president, and the United Arab Emirates followed suit with a payment of $US700 million. This makes the total known to have been received by the regime in direct support around 70 percent of what Yemen earned from oil exports when revenues peaked in 2008. In this context, the depletion of oil revenues appears far less threatening, and the perceived need for the regime to plan for a post-rentier economy greatly reduced.

Declining Resources

The most serious short-term threat facing Yemen is that oil production has fallen faster than the government had anticipated and there is no other source of income likely to replace it before oil revenues drop to, or below, subsistence level. The Yemeni economy is in serious trouble: the budget deficit was estimated to be 9.3 percent of GDP for 2010 and the country’s main export (oil) is depleting by around 4 percent per year. In 2010, for example, the government’s operating costs are expected to exceed its income by around 30 percent. The regime now has less money to distribute through its networks. Oil revenue dropped by around 40 percent in 2009, further hamstringing the government’s already strained budget, and the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that Yemen’s real GDP growth for 2011-12 will drop to an average of less than 3 percent, which is less than the country’s annual population growth, and “insufficient to prevent increasing economic hardship”. That 40 percent is not being recouped through gas exports, greater foreign investment, or labour remittances, for reasons that are largely political and are discussed below. While the regime has publicly claimed that the revenue from gas exports would largely replace the income from oil exports, in May 2010 it admitted that the income from gas was less than one-quarter of what had been hoped for 2010. Despite these declines, almost nothing of substance has been done to plan for a post-rentier economy.

Water, Food, and Vulnerability

Like much of the Middle East, Yemen has a large youth bulge, though like most issues of concern, this is particularly pronounced in Yemen. Over 75 percent of Yemen’s population is now under the age of 25, in a country where unofficial estimates usually place unemployment at around 40 percent. Yemen is also one of the most water scare countries in the world and it is widely believed that the capital city of Sana’a could run out of freshwater within 15 years. Finally, Yemen now has one of the most food insecure populations in the world, with 42 percent of children being malnourished. In a recent survey on food security, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported that: “about 6.8 million Yemenis (31.5 percent) are food-insecure and, within this group, 2.5 million people (11.8 percent) were found to be severely food-insecure”. As food prices reach all-time highs in early 2011, these percentages will continue to climb, which will increase pressure on the Yemeni regime to increase economic opportunities for the vulnerable.”

What emerges for me is the kind of question it feels like one shouldn’t even ask: is Yemen a non-viable country? Shrinking and squandered oil; booming population; a patronage system running out of the cash it needs to keep the system together. What are the options – mass aid-funded social protection? A return to the migration that kept things going before the oil started flowing? Any other ideas?

Update: here’s Sarah Phillips’ recent powerpoint on the Yemen

Where have we got to on fragile states and what comes next?

Another week, another conference. This time it’s hosted by the UK development ministry, DFID, which among other things, has an impressive track record of funding research on development issues (declaration of interest – I worked for DFID for a year in 2004, and sometimes advise them on research issues). This week’s gabfest is called ‘The Politics of Poverty: Elites, Citizens and States’, and it is being held to pull together the findings of four large DFID-funded projects over the last ten years. So in terms of epistemic communities, we’re talking political scientists – the conversation so far has been pretty much an economics-free zone.

The synthesis paper of all that research is on DFID’s Research for Development website, along with links to the four research centres involved in the work.  It shows what can be achieved by a sustained research funding on a particular topic and  I’ll try and summarize/pick out highlights at some future date. For now, here are my notes on a great presentation from Tom Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tom’s a guru on democracy and development. Sorry for the long post, but he’s worth it.

First, how did the debates stand ten years ago, when this research project got under way? Tom took note of the ‘huge movement towards ‘politics matters’’ in the development aid community, one that started in the 1990s and gathered considerable steam in this decade. The evolution of the governance debate in the 1990s meant that donors felt that they understood what policies were required to trigger development, but were frustrated by states’ incapacity to implement them. This led to a focus on state-building, but when the first efforts led to technocratic failures, aid donors began to think that political process must hold the answer, sometimes to the extreme that ‘politics became a metaphor for everything we didn’t know – everything that wouldn’t fit in the equation.’

Secondly, the rise in importance of post conflict situations meant that in countries like Mozambique, Angola, Liberia, and Cambodia, politics was ‘hitting them in the face’. Over the course of the decade, this concern with post-conflict morphed into the concept of fragile states. The focus on fragile states gained so much attention that it sometime overshadowed consideration of governance issues in non-fragile states.

Thirdly, there has been a big response to the question ‘Can we prove that good governance leads to better development outcomes?

How far have we got on these three points?

1. We have broken politics apart into more useful/researchable questions:

-         Understanding the incentives of elites and how they shape politics

-         Mapping the different forms of state-society relations

-         Understanding institutions in a political light, eg when do governments introduce progressive or substantial taxation systems?

-         Grasping the role of informal institutions

But Tom saw a deeper question: maybe having an ‘ideal’ for state-citizen evolution is neither necessary nor ideal. Are we getting to a world where we have no template, a ‘deeper anarchism’ in which we don’t know what the end of state-building should be, given that our ‘ideal forms’ seem unrealistic and many non-ideal forms are producing results in some areas?

2. Violence: three areas of progress

-         we have to understand ‘political settlements’ as the glue that keeps states together

-         there are certain core elements of the first stage of state-building: security, revenue collection etc

-         the importance of inclusion and inequality as drivers of conflict

3. He finds the question of the evidence about the value of good governance for development ‘surprisingly unsettled’, although he sees a ‘rich vein of argument and discussion’. It has been easier to prove impact at micro level, but proof at the national level has been very elusive. ‘It is impossible to explain why some regions do well without good governance, or that if good governance is introduced, it leads to growth’. That’s a pretty big hole.

Has all this research been translated into practice? Citing a recent article by Sue Unsworth in the Journal of International Development as a rich source of analysis on this question, and drawing on his own experiences, Tom pointed to DFID’s research on ‘drivers of change’ in Nigeria, where what is now called ‘political economy analysis’ helped DFID make some basic changes in its work to reflect a new understanding of the importance of coalitions as potential agents of change in a context where the entrenched elites show no incentive for developmental reforms. So yes, it has had an influence, but only on some governments and projects. Why has it been so hard to introduce political thinking more generally into donor behaviour?

-         Aid organizations have a huge historical investment in technocratic approaches – that is very hard to change

-         This knowledge (on complex political interactions between states and citizens) is hard to know what to do with as an outsider. Research always stresses ‘there is no recipe’, because of complexity and context – not much help for policy makers.

-         It involves acceptance of much more limited goals for development actors – a very difficult lesson for the development industry.

More heretically, he thinks there may be a fundamental conflict between the Paris and Accra principles on aid effectiveness and taking politics seriously, which requires ‘infiltrating aid much more intensively in local political realities.’

Finally, he stood back and gave us the really big picture: these discussions are rooted in a post-Cold War interregnum characterized by a ‘certain benignness in international relations’. That assumed

-         we knew the direction of history and economic policy

-         the international community was involved in mopping up old Cold War conflicts

-         donors could get more involved in politics as governments around the world accepted the benefits of higher levels of pooled sovereignty.

But in the period that we’ve been trying to understand the political dimensions of development, these assumptions have become invalid, as part of a larger international shift away from the post-Cold War period into something different. There is much less confidence on what constitutes ‘sound economic policy’; it has become clear that conflicts are metastasizing and multiplying – Thailand, Mexico, Kyrgyzstan are not cold war hangovers. Finally, there is a ‘huge backlash’ against political intervention by outsiders, especially aid donors

So although we’ve moved far, the international context, and therefore the research questions we’re asking are changing underneath our feet. What new questions should we be asking?

And there frustratingly, hemmed in by his 20 minute limit, he left it. What are the equivalent questions on the politics of development for the next decade? Given what we now know, what political or other interventions in fragile states can an economically ailing West realistically undertake, with a decent chance of success? Answers, as ever, in the comments, please.

Postscript: see here for Foreign Policy magazine’s 2010 ‘fragile states index’, out this week, topped by Somalia, Chad and Sudan, with interactive map.

Should aid support patronage politics?

In this month’s Prospect, Alex de Waal wrestles with the problems posed by state-building in countries where patronage trumps politics. This kind of ‘what do we do about fragile states’ discussion is one of the most intractable issues in development, so don’t expect simple solutions, but Alex (who is one of the most original thinkers on this kind of thing) seems to be arguing for an ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, fund ’em’ strategy of supporting patronage politicians with the rather ill-defined aim of eventually turning them into the kernel of an effective state (pro-poor patronage?).

‘When Nato concedes a draw in Afghanistan, it will be because of its failure to understand the country’s politics. But a deeper failure will lurk in the background. In the past decade the west has launched a huge experiment to build capable states in the world’s most difficult countries. Troops, technical advisers and aid budgets are the tools of choice. The experiment is said to have worked in East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; now Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan are top of the target list. All are failed or fragile states where patronage is paramount and where the political arena is a marketplace, not a debating chamber.

How did we get here? According to the conventional story, countries like Afghanistan are in trouble because they can’t sustain order, manage a budget, or deliver services. So we provide funds to kick-start development, charities to provide services, experts to run departments, and troops to enforce the law. A helpful cocoon emerges in which the state grows stronger. And when this state looks enough like the Czech Republic, we hand over the keys.’

But Alex is sceptical about the whole project:

‘Even in tiny countries such hopes are fatally optimistic. Take East Timor, heralded as one of the UN’s successes. Its 1m people received $565m in support from 2002-05, backed up by Australian troops. But the country was soon back in crisis; in 2008 there was a coup attempt. The model is more unsustainable for larger countries: it would take tens of billions of dollars to similarly support Congo’s 66m people.

Look at statebuilding from another point of view: that of an embattled ruler. To him, all those dollars and foreign troops are a huge boon. The money can buy off some opponents, while foreign soldiers fight the rest. Strong, autonomous government departments, however, are a genuine threat. A chief of staff might launch a sudden coup, or a finance minister may put rival warlords on his payroll. Secret ballots are a problem too: it’s hard to pay off local powerbrokers under the eyes of election monitors. The ruler might speak the language of the rule of law. But the real game is buying loyalty. A well-managed, inclusive patronage system is often the only way of running such countries.’

His conclusion?

‘Today, it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage. This would mean different priorities, like taking control of the drugs market to deny the Taliban its best source of funds. A new patronage system could eventually be made fairer and more inclusive, perhaps allowing institutions to grow around it slowly. But this means thinking like an Afghan politician, not an international peacebuilder. If the west cannot follow this path, it will join the other superpowers humbled in the Hindu Kush. The war in Afghanistan will become more about salvaging Nato than about building a central Asian Denmark. And should Nato withdraw, others—perhaps China—will set the more modest goal of political stability, and pay hard cash to get it.’

What I like about this is Alex’s insistence on looking at politics as it really is, and on understanding the incentive systems and motivations that guide real-life politicians in fragile states (reminiscent of my friend Matthew Lockwood’s great book, ‘The State They’re In’). But his solution rather sticks in the throat.

Firstly, there’s every likelihood that this kind of ‘trickle down politics’ will never become much ‘fairer and more inclusive’. Why should it? Political stability will be bought by sacrificing political and social progress and ordinary people in Afghanistan, DRC or wherever will be left waiting indefinitely for jobs and services (see Oxfam’s recent survey of what 700 ordinary Afghans think are the real causes of their country’s malaise).

Moreover, I fear there has in practice been a lot more buying off of leaders by donors than Alex allows for, partly by turning a blind eye to graft, and willingness to let patronage-style politicians play significant roles. If true, he can’t say that his strategy has not been tried (and found wanting).

What other ideas might help? One might be to focus more on the local state, either at municipal or provincial level. That might mean accepting some patronage politics, but it might also increase the chances of delivering real benefits to local people in terms of services and accountability. Another would be to invest much more in civil society strengthening, rather than just state building, enabling local organizations – social movements, NGO watchdogs, faith groups etc – better to hold the state to account. Any other bright ideas?

If fragile states are your bag, have a look at the inaugural European Report on Development, entitled ‘Overcoming Fragility in Africa’ . The ERD is a long overdue attempt to provide a European counterweight to the avalanche of Washington-based analysis, opinion and proposition, and will be an annual.

Failed States Index 2009, with interactive map

Foreign Policy magazine has teamed up again with the Washington DC-based ‘Fund for Peace’ thinktank to produce an interactive map of state fragility, to illustrate their Failed States Index 2009, covering 177 countries. Most fragile are Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan and DRC. Most stable are (inevitably) the Scandinavians – Norway, followed by Finland and Sweden. Annoyingly, I can’t find anywhere on the site that says which countries have fallen/risen the most over the four years the FSI has been reporting, but you can work it out for yourself by clicking on the league table for each year.

The methodology uses the Fund for Peace’s ‘Conflict Assessment System Tool’ (CAST), an original methodology it has developed and tested over the past decade. This rates 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, which provides snapshots of state vulnerability or risk of violence for one time period each year. The data used in each index are collected from May to December of the preceding year. The CAST software indexed and scanned more than 90,000 open-source articles and reports using Boolean logic, which consists of key phrases designed to capture the variables measured.

Full-text data are electronically gathered from a range of publicly available print, radio, television and Internet sources from all over the world, including international and local media reports, essays, interviews, polling and survey data, government documents, independent studies from think tanks, NGOs and universities, and even corporate financial filings. The software determines the salience of the 12 indicators as well as hundreds of sub-indicators by calculating the number of “hits” as a proportion of the sample for a given time period. Quantitative data is also included, when available. Subject-matter experts then review each score for every country and indicator, as well as consult the original documents, when necessary, to ensure accuracy.

The 12 categories are:

Social Indicators
Mounting Demographic Pressures
Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons creating Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
Legacy of Vengeance-Seeking Group Grievance or Group Paranoia
Chronic and Sustained Human Flight

Economic Indicators
Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines
Sharp and/or Severe Economic Decline

Political Indicators
Criminalization and/or Delegitimization of the State
 Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
 Suspension or Arbitrary Application of the Rule of Law and Widespread 

Violation of Human Rights
Security Apparatus Operates as a “State Within a State”
Rise of Factionalized Elites
Intervention of Other States or External Political Actors

It all feels very odd – a nice tidy clickable map for desk jockeys looking for numbers on the human mayhem and misery of collapsing states. The methodology looks impressive, but obviously reflects the sources on which it is based – is it a reflection of media coverage rather than reality? Hard to say without spending some serious time picking over it – anyone done so?

Fixing Failed States

Just finished the book of this title by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart. It left me with a mixture of excitement and frustration – excitement because it sets out some good ideas on state-building, frustration because it doesn’t quite live up to the title and is sloppily edited, with whole chunks repeated verbatim, wandering narrative etc (shame on you, OUP!). Read More …