Fragility, Aid, and State-building

Understanding Diverse Trajectories

Rachel M Gisselquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367321772
• eBook ISBN: 9781351630320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fragile states pose major development and security challenges. Considerable international resources are therefore devoted to state-building and institutional strengthening in fragile states, with generally mixed results. This volume explores how unpacking the concept of fragility and studying its dimensions and forms can help to build policy-relevant understandings of how states become more resilient and the role of aid therein. It highlights the particular challenges for donors in dealing with 'chronically' (as opposed to 'temporarily') fragile states and those with weak legitimacy, as well as how unpacking fragility can provide traction on how to take 'local context' into account. Three chapters present new analysis from innovative initiatives to study fragility and fragile state transitions in cross-national perspective. Four chapters offer new focused analysis of selected countries, drawing on comparative methods and spotlighting the role of aid versus historical, institutional and other factors. It has become a truism that one-size-fits-all policies do not work in development, whether in fragile or non-fragile states. This is should not be confused with a broader rejection of 'off-the-rack' policy models that can then be further adjusted in particular situations. Systematic thinking about varieties of fragility helps us to develop this range, drawing lessons – appropriately – from past experience.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly, and is available online as an Open Access monograph athttps://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351630337.

Disaggregating state fragility: a method to establish a multidimensional empirical typology

Jörn Grävingholt, Sebastian Ziaja and Merle Kreibaum

This conceptual and methodological article makes the case for a multidimensional empirical typology of state fragility. It presents a framework that defines fragile statehood as deficiencies in one or more of the core functions of the state: authority, capacity and legitimacy. Unlike available indices of state fragility, it suggests a route towards operationalisation that maintains this multidimensionality. The methodology presented should help in future research to identify clusters of countries that exhibit similar constellations of statehood, whereby ‘constellation’ refers to the specific mix of characteristics across the three dimensions. Such an identification of empirical types would fulfil a demand that exists both in academic research and among policy circles for finding a more realistic model of fragility at an intermediate level between single-case analyses and the far-too-broad category of state fragility.

Introduction

The weakness, fragility or failure of states has evolved into one of the major narratives of politics and international relations in the post-cold war era. State fragility is assumed to have a profound impact on how key issues of global concern, such as climate change, poverty and violent conflict, can be addressed.¹

Since as early as the mid-1990s state failure has been a topic of concern in the pages of Third World Quarterly. In a 1996 article Jean-Germain Gros developed a taxonomy of failed states, distinguishing anarchic, phantom, anaemic, captured and aborted states.² This distinction had no lasting effect on the debate, however, and was never fully operationalised. Twelve years on, Charles Call attempted to end the debate about state failure with the conclusion that the terminology was analytically useless and even harmful, because it ‘fuelled a tendency towards single, technocratic formulas for strengthening states, which emphasise coercive capabilities’. Call proposed abandoning the concept of state failure and all related terminologies, not least because of their state-centric implications.³

Yet the policy world began to breathe new life into the debate, diplomatically adopting the slightly less offensive term, ‘fragility’. Major development actors launched initiatives to analyse the character, consequences and policy implications of state fragility from a developmental perspective. As a consequence, state fragility – often coupled with violent conflict – has received high visibility in recent development policy documents, such as the European Report on Development 2009, a 2011 policy guidance paper by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, and the World Development Report 2011.⁴ At the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in November 2011 41 countries and multilateral organisations, including 17 fragile states, adopted a ‘New Deal on Engagement in Fragile States’. The prominent place the document was granted at this international forum underscored the perception of state fragility as a major barrier to achieving development objectives.⁵ Above all, however, these reports demonstrate a significant demand on the part of policy makers in international development for orientation in dealing with fragile states.

A rising number of fragility indices that have emerged over the past few years have tried to provide some of this orientation. Examples include the Fragile States Index (formerly ‘Failed States Index’), the Index of State Weakness, the State Fragility Index, the Political Instability Index and many others.⁶ All of them, however, share one weakness: they simplify the complicated reality behind the stability or decay of statehood to such an extent that they are of very limited use for the operational task of crafting policies to counter state fragility. The main issue with these indices is not so much the ever-difficult challenge of measurement but rather their common conceptual assumption that such a multidimensional concept as statehood can be aggregated and projected onto a one-dimensional scale, thereby allowing different dimensions to compensate for each other, without a substantial distortion of information.⁷ As an illustration, such diverse countries as Haiti, Pakistan and Zimbabwe end up in close proximity to each other in the 2014 Fragile States Index, although the respective challenges they face are rather different in nature.⁸

In general the authors of fragility indices are well aware of the limitations innate to their instruments: some of them recommend their index as a crude ‘early-warning’ tool that warrants further analysis of any given case, and they caution against too far-reaching interpretations based on their data. Others emphasise explicitly that ‘some of the weakest states perform poorly across the board, whereas others exhibit weakness in just one or two functions’.⁹ No attempt, however, has yet been made to incorporate the insight that state fragility is inherently multidimensional directly into the mapping exercise itself. Instead, authors only refer to the necessity to supplement their indices with detailed case-by-case analyses, thus de facto giving up on the opportunity to find larger patterns.

Yet policy makers ask for more. They know that individual case studies alone, without the methodological advantage of full comparative analysis, are unable to provide the larger pattern – which is why indices are so popular, despite their obvious limitations. Aid bureaucracies in particular usually develop and prepare their instruments, ie the tools they either finance or implement themselves, not on a case-by-case basis. Instead they develop sets of instruments, or tool boxes, to which they resort when programming individual country assistance strategies. As a result of budget constraints and other bureaucratic incentives, to which aid agencies are subject like most large organisations, it would be unrealistic to expect aid organisations to develop their tool boxes for fragile states in every case as if ‘from scratch’.¹⁰

From an academic point of view strict case-by-case approaches are not desirable either. Every external policy intervention in fragile states is based on assumptions about causes and effects, representing lessons that actors at different levels of the policy-making system draw from other cases which are deemed comparable. Obviously the quality of such learning depends significantly on the degree to which the cases used as points of reference are indeed sufficiently similar to the problem at hand. The very concept of ‘fragile states’ derived its traction from the compelling argument that aid to this group of countries had to be planned and delivered differently from development assistance to other places in the world. While this message was important, sufficient evidence exists today that fragility itself is far too broad a term, and encompasses too broad a range of countries and contexts, to allow for useful generalisations across the full population of this category – almost irrespective of how exactly the term is defined. However, if strict case-by-case decisions are logically not a way out of this conundrum, the inevitable challenge for policy-oriented research is to establish better categories of countries or contexts that allow for more suitable comparisons. This paper contributes to this task by suggesting a methodology for a data-driven typology of state fragility. As the underlying concept of fragility is multidimensional, and the typology would be derived from empirical data (rather than ‘ideal-typical’ theorising), we refer to this approach as a ‘multidimensional empirical typology’ of state fragility. The methodology presented should help in future research to identify clusters of countries exhibiting similar constellations of statehood, where ‘constellation’ refers to the specific mix of characteristics across a set of core dimensions of statehood.

Such a typology can then form the basis for further research into causal mechanisms of state weakness and external development interventions at a level of analysis that unpacks the broad category of fragility without sacrificing the heuristic advantage of comparison across cases. By introducing an ‘intermediate’ level of generalisation between the single case and the broad category of fragility, we do not mean to deny the importance of case-specific analyses. Rather, we assume that farsighted p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Varieties of fragility: implications for aid
• 1. Disaggregating state fragility: a method to establish a multidimensional empirical typology
• 2. Conceptualising state collapse: an institutionalist approach
• 3. Towards a theory of fragile state transitions: evidence from Yemen, Bangladesh and Laos
• 4. Aid and state transition in Ghana and South Korea
• 5. Aid and policy preferences in oil-rich countries: comparing Indonesia and Nigeria
• 6. Development assistance and the lasting legacies of rebellion in Burundi and Rwanda
• 7. Aid, accountability and institution building in Ethiopia: the self-limiting nature of technocratic aid
• Index