What is the nature of state legitimacy in fragile situations? How can legitimacy be fostered in such situations? This report was commissioned by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. It suggests that legitimacy concerns the very basis for how state and society are linked and by which the state’s authority is justified. Interventions in fragile situations must therefore focus on relations between state and society and must be adapted to context. Neither the same type of legitimacy nor the same type of (end-) state can be established everywhere.
State fragility can stem both from lack of financial, technical and human capacity and from lack of legitimacy; a state in a fragile situation is a state with limited ability to govern or rule its society and to develop mutually constructive and reinforcing relations with society. There are three dimensions of state legitimacy: (1) how the state functions (the rules and procedures through which it makes binding decisions;) (2) what the state does (the perceived effectiveness and quality of the services it delivers); and (3) what kinds of beliefs allow people to view the state as the rightful authority and to share a sense of community and identity related to the state.
In fragile states, state institutions co-exist with other institutions, resulting in competing and overlapping forms of rule that often draw upon different sources of legitimacy. If states are to extricate themselves from fragile situations, they need a resilient web of many different sources of legitimacy.
- Sources of legitimacy are effective only to the extent that the relevant constituency considers them to be so.
- The expectations of a fragile state’s citizens often do not correspond with those of international actors. What may be effective and legitimate for domestically-driven state building is not necessarily considered legitimate by the donor community.
- Donor interventions may undermine the state’s domestic legitimacy and increase the gap between international and national legitimacy.
- International recognition is a major source of legitimacy for local groups.
Donors should take into account the specificity of context, abandoning one-size-fits-all approaches in both ‘means’ and ‘ends’. It may not be realistic to aim at establishing states that correspond to the model of statehood reflected both in formal state institutions and in donor policies. Donors’ means of support should be based on knowledge of the local history of state-society relationships, embedded socio-cultural features and existing practices and institutions from which state legitimacy may emerge. Donors also need to:
- Develop flexible approaches, guided by a strong commitment to participatory democracy, the setting of clear end and intermediary goals and evaluation and adjustment.
- Avoid bypassing certain groups or seeking to short-cut state-society interaction.
- Favour constructive engagement between different actors so that the state may be redesigned and its regulations accepted as the main regulation frame.
- Support arenas and mechanisms for dialogue and negotiation between different actors representing different interests and bases of legitimacy.
- Train international and local staff to work with processes rather than standards and with dialogue, negotiation and mediation rather than mere implementation.
