Failing or failed states are among the great challenges of our age, The Financial Times writes according to the World Bank press review Monday.
They contain a large proportion of the worlds poorest people. They spread chaos to their neighbors and beyond. They are actual or potential sources of terrorism, organized crime, drugs, disease and refugees. Their people seem destined for ever greater wretchedness. Something needs to be done. Yet nobody knows quite what, writes the financial daily.
Such states pose the worlds hard-core development challenge. The World Bank focuses on 30 “low-income countries under stress” (LICUS), while the UKs Department for International Development puts 46 countries in a broader list of “fragile countries”, with 900 million inhabitants or 14 percent of the worlds population.
Its definition of fragile states “covers those where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people, including the poor”.
Between 1990 and 2002 their incomes per head were stagnant; those of other developing countries grew at 1,2 percent a year. Nearly half of all children who die before the age of five are born in these states. Child mortality is almost 2 1/2 times higher than in other poor countries.
A high proportion of fragile states are marred, or have been marred, by conflict, usually internal. LICUS status is persistent and has large negative effects on neighbors. Linda Chauvet and Paul Collier of Oxford University estimate the average cost of a single country falling into LICUS status at 82 billion US dollar.
Thus, the benefits of turning a LICUS into a more typical low-income country exceed the worlds annual aid budget.
The aim of intervention in fragile countries is to stop conflict, accelerate transition to peace and stability, resolve political crises and strengthen institutional capacity. To be effective in these environments, development assistance needs to be combined with a range of other interventions, including security guarantees and monitoring of human rights.
Already, in the weakest states, a new planning framework has brought together the security, development and diplomatic aspects of the transition from conflict. This model has been used in East Timor, the Central African Republic and Haiti.
Increasingly, however, the emphasis is on prevention. A new report from the strategy unit of the UK cabinet recommends investing in countries capacity to manage conflict, particularly those dependent on oil and other natural resources; stronger regional organizations to support governments committed to stability, along with sanctions against destabilizing behavior; a global commitment to tackling causes of instability; and, when all else fails, the ability to respond to crises quickly.
The World Bank has also tried a number of innovative approaches to its LICUS: increased transparency of oil revenue management in Angola; building leadership capacity in Sudan; and supporting programs to fight HIV/AIDS in Somalia.
Close co-operation among donors is particularly important in such weak institutional environments. Moreover, in many cases, services have to be provided by non-governmental organizations or the private sector, rather than the state. Yet the dilemma remains.
Development agencies find it hard to operate effectively in these environments. But they cannot avoid doing so, since so many of the poorest people live in fragile states, the daily argues.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
