The challenges facing situations of fragility and conflict are daunting. The 2011 World Development Report (WDR) on Conflict, Security and Development presented a compelling case for urgent and innovative responses to circumstances of fragility and conflict. This note is part of the Bank-wide response to operationalize the central message of the WDR: that effective and legitimate institutions are required in order to provide a secure social, economic and political environment for the broader objective of poverty reduction and job creation.
The World Bank’s 2012 Updated GAC Strategy and Implementation Plan notes that “governance is about what the state can do and how it does it”. What the state can do is determined by its capacity, its legitimacy, and its authority – and how these intertwine. The GAC update defines these three critical governance dimensions as follows:
- Authority is the ability of the state to govern its territory effectively, reach all citizens regardless of their location, gender, or ethnicity, maintain law and order and protect citizens from predation and violence. It is the ability of the laws and rules of the state to trump all other laws and rules.
- Capacity is the ability of the state to procure and deliver goods and services, design and implement policies, build infrastructure, collect revenue, dispense justice, and maintain a conducive environment for the private sector.
- Legitimacy is whether citizens feel the government has the right to govern – and whether they trust the government.
This Guidance Note describes the Toolkit on State-Building in Fragile States. It builds on these three dimensions of governance and adapts them to the context of fragile states. Its purposes are threefold:
- First, to offer a conceptual framework or a „common language? that can help country teams move from a narrow interpretation of state-building as building capacity, towards a more integrated view of state-building which also strengthens the state‘s authority and legitimacy – i.e. changing, over time, the way the state and citizens interact;
- Second, to provide country teams with a structured and guided process through which teams can collectively and systematically assess and record state-building needs in fragile states. The goal is to generate a common team-based experience of analysis, mobilizing and chronicling the team‘s knowledge about strengths and weaknesses of the state. It can help to raise many of the difficult state-building issues that are often under-analysed;
- Third, to offer some suggestions for strategic and operational choices for country teams, that draw on existing literature and experience with state-building in fragile states.
The Conceptual Framework explains the concepts upon which the overall approach is built:
The third part brings together these three core building blocks into a State-Building Assessment Tool that can help donors identify and prioritize interventions for state-building.
As a preparation for the analysis, teams are encouraged to review existing analytical work on the sources of fragility and the social and political context of state-building. The proposed approach suggests three analytical steps:
- Assess the state?s overall authority, capacity and legitimacy and their expected evolution over time.
- Assess how the state‘s authority, capacity and legitimacy play out in each state domain, their expected evolution over time, and their relative priority for external support.
- Identify key institutions and organizations in the prioritized domains and assess their authority, capacity, and legitimacy.
Part four suggests some operational and strategic options to be considered after the analysis is undertaken at a country level. There is a myriad of possible interventions for donors to choose among in order to address the key weaknesses identified or to build on existing areas of strength. At each step of the analysis, teams can consider and record the implications of the assessment for their country programming.
