Publication: Fragile States : Securing Development
Abstract
Fragile states are the toughest development challenge of our era. But we ignore them at our peril: about one billion people live in fragile states, including a disproportionate number of the world's extreme poor, and they account for most of today's wars. These situations require a different framework of building security, legitimacy, governance, and the economy. Only by securing development - bringing security and development together to smooth the transition from conflict to peace and then to embed stability so that development can take hold - can we put down roots deep enough to break the cycle of fragility and violence. Currently, we face critical gaps in our international capabilities to secure development. We need to better integrate military, political, legal, developmental, financial and technical tools with a variety of actors, from states to international organisations, civil society, and the private sector. Beyond assistance, we need new networked relationships between peacekeeping forces and development practitioners, and a new approach to security, to help the people in fragile states shift from being victims to principal agents of recovery.
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Publication Fragile States(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-09-12)Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank, discussed the following priorities: (i) understanding fragile states; (ii) building legitimacy of the state; (iii) security; (iv) rule of law and the legal order; (v) local and national ownership; (vi) economic stability, as a foundation for growth and opportunity; (vii) political economy; (viii) the private sector; (ix) coordination across institutions and actors; (x) the regional context; and (xi) long-term commitment. He concluded by talking about the strategic challenges that World Bank Group faces in modernizing multilateralism.Publication A Worldwide Pact for Security and Accountability in Fragile "Bottom Billion" States(World Bank, 2009-10-01)If security and accountability are critical public goods for development, and if the countries of the bottom billion are structurally unable to supply them internally, then some form of international supply is necessary.Publication Securing Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-01-08)Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank, remarked that the traumas of fragile states and the interconnections of globalization require our generation to recognize anew the nexus among economics, governance, and security. Most wars are now conflicts within states, and fragile states account for most of them. The "R" in IBRD has a new meaning: reconstructing Afghanistan, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, the Palestinian territories, the Solomon Islands, Southern Sudan, Timor-Leste, and other lands of conflict. One billion people live in fragile states. Zoellick provided ten priorities toward fragile states: 1) first, focus on building legitimacy of the state; 2) provide security; 3) building rule of law and legal order; 4) bolster local and national ownership; 5) ensure economic stability – as a foundation for growth and opportunity; 6) pay attention to the political economy; 7) crowd in the private sector; 8) coordinate across institutions and actors; 9) consider the regional context; 10) recognize the long-term commitment. He reviewed these principles in practice for Afghanistan, Haiti, and Liberia.Publication Peacekeeping and Development in Fragile States(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)Using surveys and administrative data from post-war Liberia, the hypothesis that peacekeeping deployments build peace "from the bottom up" through contributions to local security and local economic and social vitality was tested. The hypothesis reflects official thinking about how peacekeeping works via "peacebuilding." A quasi-experiment was created by applying coarsened exact matching to administrative data used in mission planning, identifying sets of communities that were similarly likely to receive peacekeeping bases. The analysis finds nothing to support claims that deployments increase local security and finds only modest effects on economic or social vitality. Nongovernmental organizations tend to work in areas where deployments are not present, contrary to the hypothesis. Thus, it is less likely that peacekeepers build peace from the bottom up, leaving mechanisms such as signaling and deterrence at the level of leaders as worthy of more attention. For policy, peacekeeping missions should reevaluate their methods for providing local security.Publication Aid That Works : Successful Development in Fragile States(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007)Presented in this study are nine development initiatives in six less developed countries - Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste and Uganda. The cases show that development initiatives, which engage local communities and local level governments, are often able to have significant impact. However, for more substantial improvements to take places, localized gains need to be scaled up either horizontally (other localities) or vertically (to higher levels). Given the advantages of working at the local level and the difficulty of working through mainstream bureaucratic agencies at higher levels in these countries, donors often prefer to create 'parallel-agencies' to reach out to larger numbers of beneficiaries. However, this may in the long run weaken the legitimacy of mainstream government institutions, and donor agencies may therefore choose to work as closely as possible with government officials from the beginning to build trust and demonstrating that new initiatives are non-threatening and help prepare the eventual mainstreaming of parallel agencies.
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