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Project Record

This programme, now in its tenth year, is one of the first large research programmes on fragile states in the world. The Centre has focused on three main areas of work:

• Development as State-making
• Cities and fragility
• Global and regional axes of conflict

Background:

The centre aims to examine and provide an understanding of processes of war, state collapse and reconstruction in fragile states and to assess the long-term impact of international interventions in these processes. Through rigorous comparative analysis of a carefully selected set of states and of cities, and sustained analysis of what is called 'global and regional axes of conflict', the programme aims to identify the symptoms of state collapse, why some fragile states collapse while others do not, and the ways that war affects future possibilities of state building; Lessons learned from past experiences of state reconstruction will be distilled to inform current policy thinking and planning.

The research centre is building on the conceptual tools developed during it’s 1st phase (2000-2006), to pursue interdisciplinary and historical institutional analysis of processes of state collapse and reconstruction. Innovative concepts of 'institutional multiplicity', 'competing mechanism of influencing', ‘coalitional analysis' and "Hirschmanian divisibility" will be deployed to understand why conflict is managed peacefully in some cases while degenerating into violence and war in other cases. Methodologically, the research will make a major contribution to comparative political analysis.

Ultimately, it is the purpose to advance understanding of the processes of state collapse that are at the heart of problems of insecurity and poverty in the world today.

The research centre comprises of partner institutions in Colombia, Uganda, South Africa, India, Tanzania and the UK.

Intended Outputs:

Progress and Impact:

This project is now in its tenth and final year. The mid-term review expressed concern that the visibility of the programme was low. The research team argue that this will change as in the final year they are able to pull together findings across the portfolio in a relevant and accessible format. The GCE team is actively working with the Researchers to ensure delivery on this.

The policy impact of this work has yet to be felt.

Project Conclusions:

1. What makes for a resilient state does not necessarily make for a developmental state.

Given some of the broad assumptions about the way that 'security and development go hand in hand' (to quote the Afghan National Development Strategy) and that state fragility can be measured as an aggregate across a state's performance of its functions, this argument is an extremely important one. The CSRC argues that state resilience (the establishment of security, basic revenue functions and the predominance of state institutions) is a function of elite bargains and coalitional politics that bring into the management of the state enough interests to protect against serious threats to state stability. Some states may have achieved resilience at the expense of development. In some states a stabilising coalition may embody a trade-off between resilience and development: the elite bargain may allocate power over resources, property rights and access to rental streams such that there is not a sufficiently strong coalition of interests whose survival and wellbeing depends on structural change and the productivity-enhancing investments that are necessary for development; or a bargain may embody social claims against state resources that inhibit the capital accumulation or labour restructuring necessary for development.

Policy implications:
(1) State capacities are not uniform across functions suggesting caution in interpreting aggregate governance indicators;
(2) Establishing state resilience over time may be a necessary prerequisite to the introduction of destabilising governance and economic reforms;
(3) External interventions need to be based on a prioritisation that reinforces what is working best while parsimoniously choosing specific targets to enhance state consolidation and promote growth and poverty reduction.

2. Establishing rudimentary taxation capacity and coursing aid increasingly through government systems is central to the long-run evolution of a state that enjoys legitimacy and is capable of financing its own operations independent of foreign assistance.

While some donor agencies have recognised the need to develop taxation capacity, many still focus more on mechanisms of state expenditure largely financed by foreign aid. High aid dependency in most fragile states means that incentives to improve domestic revenue generation may be weak while channelling aid resources outside of state systems weakens or pre-empts the creation of both the political processes and administrative capacity of states. The current arrangement in many fragile states, and especially those that have experienced violent political conflict, is that when the government specifies its expenditure needs and calculates what its financing gap is, donors provide aid through a myriad of projects and programmes to make up for revenue shortfalls, slowly introducing budget support when a public financial management capacity is demonstrated. This can:
(a) diminish incentives to raise revenues.
(b) reduce the capacity of the government to identify and assess macro-level expenditure revenue trade-offs as ministers are not forced to prioritise spending based on what revenues they can collect; and instead simply present a wish list; and
(c) create problems for macroeconomic management and planning since actual aid flows that are dispersed are uncertain and volatile;
(d) contribute to the creation of a dual public sector, where important decision points are located outside the state, weakening the political processes of the state and pre-empting the establishment and consolidation of administrative capacity.

Policy implications:
(1) Donors could provide incentives to increase domestic tax efforts by entering into multi-year compacts with fragile state governments to provide matching funds linking increases in aid, and especially budget support, to improvements in domestic revenue collection This could tighten the link between revenue raising and increasing expenditure, provide greater certainty to facilitate building stronger cash-flow skills in the treasury, and reduce the time spent by ministers in pursuing donors and persuading them to turn promises of aid into disbursements. Such an approach provides incentives to power holders to undertake reforms that can contribute to state-building and capacity creation.
(2) Donors should increasingly course their assistance through trust funds co-managed by state officials and donor agencies, which could provide long-term credible commitments of aid that increase incentives for revenue raising, while meeting fiduciary requirements of donors while building state capacity for public financial management;
(3) Ensure that funds going to projects and programmes are fully reported to central treasury managers so that they can be reported in, and taken account of by, the national budget and subjected to political scrutiny;
(4) Favour aid delivery through sector wide programmes and other mechanisms that involve state managers, to increasingly create at least a "virtual public sector" that avoids the politically and administratively debilitating consequences of a "dual public sector" and eventually prepares the way for expanding the proportion of aid directed to budget support and in the long term reduces the amounts of aid required.

3. Far more attention needs to be paid to the development of productive capacities rather than simply promoting the welfare activities of states and hoping for elusive foreign direct investment or domestic entrepreneurship to materialise.

State building needs to focus more centrally on wealth creation in order to achieve poverty reduction, which is central both to getting “elite buy-in” and to ensuring popular allegiance to the state. Raising agricultural productivity is a strategic issue in most fragile states. Blockages to investment in agriculture need to be a major focus of attention. Among these, the absence of clear property rights in most fragile states (reflecting the limited reach of the state throughout its territory – an important characteristic of state fragility) coupled with extreme inequality in access to land triggers patterns of permanent contestation and violence. The international community has retreated from providing assistance directly to the development of production activities in fragile states. Foreign assistance to agriculture, which made up 12.3% of all bilateral aid in the mid 1980s, now is at 3.1% of all aid and often less in some fragile states. Most aid agencies have drastically reduced their in-house knowledge of agriculture and other productive activities, while assistance to states has focused almost entirely on macroeconomic management and governance reforms. Assistance to manufacturing has all but disappeared, while even bilateral aid to economic infrastructure has declined. UNCTAD's Least Developed Countries Report 2006 indicates that the provision of electricity is the single most important element in improving light manufacturing exports in LDCs. Because many fragile states are landlocked, the provision of regional infrastructure projects should be given priority so that farmers and other producers can be linked up with the nearest ports.

Policy implications:
(1) Donors must channel more resources to develop capacity within state organisations to directly assist the expansion of basic production activities (CSRC comparative research has suggested that state assisted programmes to promote agricultural development and private investment in Rwanda stand out as a model in conditions of state fragility);
(2) Most fragile states need radical improvement in agricultural productivity with investments in credit programmes, extension services and infrastructure improvement;
(3) Given patterns of contestation over poorly defined property rights and unequal access to land redistributive land reform must remain on the development agenda;
(4) Study of, and policy debates about, industrialisation in the poorest countries, need to be put back on the agenda.

4. The political organisation of elite bargains is central to understanding the prospects of achieving state resilience.

Our research into the economic bases of state building has led us to focus our attention on what we call the "elite bargain" that underpins the state at any given point in time. Leaving major economic elites out of the bargains on which a state is built, while leaving in tact their sources of economic power and the institutional systems that justify their social position, can greatly weaken the state. This is what happened historically in Uganda under Idi Amin when he excluded economically (and socially) powerful Baganda interests and Asian traders. Similar patterns characterised elite ruptures in Rwanda and the DRC. Economically strong elites have exit options, due to the command of resources and possibilities of external linkages, which can undermine stability and even finance armed challenges to the state. Elites based on region or ethnicity can have alternative institutional systems to that of the state (situations of what CSRC calls 'institutional multiplicity'), legitimising their actions in terms of traditional rules and norms, something that seems to have characterised conflict in Zaire/DRC. On-going research in the DRC suggests that the exclusion of important regionally based elites from the elite bargain behind the state has played a major part in continuing conflicts. Research in Rwanda, by contrast, suggests deepening involvement of all major economic elites in the bargain that underpins the state, which has facilitated the consolidation of security throughout the territory as well as the articulation of a development strategy. Conscious policies to avoid divisive rent allocations in Zambia and Tanzania go a long way in explaining why these states could survive even while presiding over economic crises and deeply rooted poverty. The inclusive elite bargains that have underpinned state resilience in Tanzania and Zambia have been organised through political parties, which provided the arena for all elite competition and a set of rules that ensured relative equal sharing of the benefits of rents and welfare and the costs of economic decline and poverty. Inclusive parties actively marginalised alternative institutional bases of organisation, like tribe or region, and incorporated a set of checks and balances to ensure against abusive action by executive authorities of the state.

Policy implications:
(1) Promotion of systemic political reforms should be mindful of the role that political organisation of elite bargains plays in maintaining stability;
(2) Promotion of competitive electoral politics in contexts where power brokers who do not play by state rules have alternative institutional bases may lead to instability and violence;
(3) External actors should take account of long-standing patterns of inclusion and exclusion to understand how particular interventions may have an impact on the state.

5. Security assistance to fragile states needs to be prioritised, while existing priorities, like the international prohibitionist policy on illicit drugs, need to be radically reconsidered.

Building an effective and accountable national armed force that is organised around a unified chain of command (whether as an army or gendarmerie) remains a crucial step in state-building and failing to do so undermines possibilities for the promotion of democratic forms of government or economic development. Security Sector Reform can only be pursued where there has already been established a monopoly by the state over large-scale means of violence and then must be guided by an overarching democratic vision of security and involve a multiplicity of actors: parliamentary committees, political parties, the media and civil society organisations anchored in different social strata. DDR programmes are often undertaken on the basis of unsound economic analysis and fail when precipitous demobilisation is pursued in the context where former armed combatants have no possibilities to secure a stable livelihood. There has been a general neglect of parliamentary involvement in SSR programmes. Except where only one external actor is involved, military assistance to fragile states and developing countries more generally has been provided in a piecemeal fashion with little or no coherence in doctrine, training or equipment, with major consequences in post-war states where consolidating basic security is still on the agenda. Our research and that of others demonstrates that the continued prohibitionist strategy of the international community towards the trade in illicit drugs, which puts accent on providing military assistance to attack the supply sites for the drug trade is wholly misguided and provides one of the major sources of finance (and patterns of economic incentives) for non-state armed organisations to raise violent challenges to states and feeds a wide range of criminal activity reinforcing patterns of fragility and underdevelopment.

Policy implications:
(1) Donors need to consider supporting alternatives to demobilisation, which involve armed forces in socially constructive work until reintegration possibilities are more viable;
(2) While there is a strong emphasis on democratic norms and principles in donor supported SSR programmes, efforts to translate these into operational methods and procedures have been insufficient;
(3) Donors need to be attentive to the participation of parliamentary bodies in security sector reform programmes even where they remain weak;
(4) Legalisation and regulation of the trade in illicit drugs could, at a single stroke, remove important sources of state fragility and transform perverse patterns of economic incentives that have negative developmental consequences in fragile states.

6. Current aggregate indices of state fragility suffer serious definitional, categorisation and measurement flaws, which make them poor tools to guide policy discussions and interventions.

CSRC research has undertaken a major review of the literature on state fragility and the most significant indices and databases employed by the academic and policy communities to identify and assess state fragility (what we call the "state performance indices"), including the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, the Fund for Peace's Failed States Index, the Central Intelligence Agency's State Failure Task Force and Carleton University's Indicators for Foreign Policy. State performance indices suffer at least from the following problems:
(a) lack of identification of different types of uncertainty (related to critically poor data or to the intrinsic fuzziness of the definition), which produces poor coding;
(b) lack of identification of order issues, which produces poor rankings;
(c) poor link between the operationalisation and the concepts, which produces poor categorization. We have sought to establish the foundations for cross national quantitative research on state fragility that is both compatible with the main thrust of our research (qualitative case studies and small N comparison), and that is tractable (it can be expressed formally to capture aggregate trends and associations). By replacing scales by intervals and 'fuzzifying' formalism we have developed a classificatory tool and created a new database and methodology for assessing conditions of fragility. We have applied our new formalism to research on the impact of military interventions and are now applying it to wider issues of state fragility yielding the following results, so far:
a. Big scale military interventions can cripple for a long period the conflict resolution capacity of a state (this result has not appeared in the existing literature, because lumping together all interventionary events, be they three day hot pursuits or major operations, loses the effects of the latter);
b. There is also a high probability that military interventions produce an authoritarian backlash;
c. There are several categories of state poor performance (failure), associated to different variables. It is essential to tailor policies to 'types of state breakdown';
d. Separability. Presently, the overwhelming majority of indicators (and of related recommendations) separate well poor and rich, respectively weak and strong, states, but not states that are poor and relatively weak but fail and those that do not.

Policy implications:
(1) While critical of past efforts to measure fragility, our work builds on them to offer an alternative knowledge base and interactive tool to the policy community for examining comparatively problems of state fragility, which should be able to inform policy makers' practice;
(2) There is strong empirical evidence that large scale military interventions reinforce state fragility and exacerbate long-term instability and conflict while inhibiting democratic development;
(3)There is strong empirical evidence for tailoring policies to"types of state poor performance";
(4) existing indicators are not able to distinguish between states that are weak and poor, which breakdown, and those that do not.

General Notes:

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