Fragile state

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A fragile state is a low income country characterized by weak state capacity and/or weak state legitimacy.

While many countries are making progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a group of 35 to 50 countries (depending on the measure used) is falling behind. It is estimated that one out of the world’s six billion people live in fragile states, but this is where one third of all people surviving on less than 1 $ per day live, half of the world’s children die before the age of five, and one third of all maternal deaths occur.

Not only are they falling behind, but the gap with other developing countries is widening since the 1970s. In 2006, per capita GDP grew only at 2 per cent in fragile states, whereas it reached 6 percent in other low-income countries. Projections (for example, World Bank, 2008) that fragile states will constitute an even larger share of low-income countries in the future given that many better performing low-income countries graduate to middle-income status. The increasing proportion of fragile states will, without a strengthened model for dealing with them, make international engagement and development assistance less effective.

One common measure of state fragility is to use the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessment index (http://go.worldbank.org/7NMQ1P0W10), but more complex indexes, for example including the security dimension, are increasingly being used.

Country contexts vary widely in this group of countries ranging from Haiti to Nepal, from Uzbekistan to Burundi. Some are trapped in a vicious cycle of violent conflict and poverty or suffer from a natural resource ‘curse’; others face a legacy of poor governance; many emerging from crisis cannot deliver even the most basic services to their citizens, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In terms of dynamics, fragile states include (i) post-conflict/crisis or political transition situations; (ii) deteriorating governance environments, (iii) situations of gradual improvement; and (iv)situations of prolonged crisis or impasse.

A fragile state is significantly susceptible to crisis in one or more of its sub-systems. It is a state that is particularly vulnerable to internal and external shocks and domestic and international conflicts. In a fragile state, institutional arrangements embody and perhaps preserve the conditions of crisis: in economic terms, this could be institutions (importantly, property rights) that reinforce stagnation or low growth rates, or embody extreme inequality (in wealth, in access to land, in access to the means to make a living); in social terms institutions may embody extreme inequality or lack of access altogether to health or education; in political terms, institutions may entrench exclusionary coalitions in power (in ethnic, religious, or perhaps regional terms), or extreme factionalism or significantly fragmented security organisations. In fragile states, statutory institutional arrangements are vulnerable to challenges by rival institutional systems be they derived from traditional authorities, devised by communities under conditions of stress that see little of the state (in terms of security, development or welfare), or be they derived from warlords, or other non-state power brokers.

The opposite of a “fragile state” is a “stable state” – one where dominant or statutory institutional arrangements appear able to withstand internal and external shocks and contestation remains within the boundaries of reigning institutional arrangements. With the right conditions, some countries—such as Mozambique and Burundi—have so far demonstrated a remarkable turn-around. To address the challenge of these countries falling behind, the international spotlight must be kept on countries where the Millennium Development Goals are hardest to achieve, using common principles for action; making the international aid architecture more rational; improving the organisational response of the wide range of actors involved (including "the 3Ds": diplomacy, defense and development); and measuring results.

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