Good development support in fragile, at-risk and crisis affected contexts, by Cyprien FABRE

Today again, as she has done every day for the last 10 years, Rose will wake up early and walk several kilometres to sell the few tomatoes and bell peppers she’s grown in the small parcel of land she shares with a group of women in the semi-urban neighbourhood she landed in several years ago. She left her village after many years of drought, no harvest, no income and a large debt to cope with. She was forced to sell her land and go, adding herself to the millions of urban poor crowding the city’s outskirts. 

The State Power and Its Restraints, by Yongmei Zhou

The Sustainable Development Goals recognize the need to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies with effective rule of law and transparent, effective and accountable institutions. These goals are not only important in their own right but are also relevant for the achievement of economic and social development goals. Given how distant this vision may seem to people living in countries facing civil conflict, high inequality and stagnant growth, two questions are worth asking: 1) given a governance context, sometimes highly imperfect, what does it take to make development progress; and 2) what can drive successful governance reforms. These are the questions taken on by the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law (the WDR).

SDG16 and a new era for civil society, by Richard YOUNGS

While SDG Goal 16 is an important step forward for the global development agenda, its meaning is inevitably imprecise. It opens a Pandora’s box of unresolved questions about what kind of political arrangements best guarantee ‘inclusive’ and ‘accountable’ societies.

Thinking and working politically: A way forward on SDG 16, by Debra Ladner

SDG 16 recognizes that peace, justice and accountable institutions are critical to sustainable, transformative and inclusive development.It sets out ambitious targets on a range of issues from reducing violence and corruption, to combatting trafficking and organized crime, to ensuring legal identity for all.  In doing so, SDG 16 provides a long-awaited and powerful mandate for donors and implementing organizations to develop a coherent focus on these critically important issues. By placing governance problems front and center in the international community’s efforts to end poverty, SDG 16 represents a high-water mark for a trend that has been building steam for years.   This means that issues such as politics, power and institutions cannot be left by donors or their implementing partners for someone else to ‘sort out’.  While this is a positive and welcomed development, we have to acknowledge that achieving significant, transformative results on SDG 16 by 2030 is a tall order.  The mixed track-record of past donor-supported governance and rule of law projects is a sobering reminder of this. Despite their best intentions, historically many grand state-building and institutional strengthening projects have fallen short of their intended goals. If we are to make real progress on SDG 16, this naturally leads us to ask two questions: Why is it so difficult to bring about meaningful change on the issues SDG 16 covers? And, what can we do it about?

Beyond the Limits: Can we Think and Work Politically to achieve the SDGs?, by Heather Marquette

So just as we embark on the most ambitious global development project yet in the form of the new Sustainable Development Goals, some hefty questions are being asked about development assistance. And the answer we keep hearing – in one form or another – is the need for development actors to begin to ‘think and work politically’ (TWP). How realistic is this, though? 

The Limits of the ‘Thinking and Working Politically’ Agenda, by Seth Kaplan

There is an assumption in international aid just now that if only we can build a better donor, every sustainable development goal will be achievable and every program transformational.

Sustainable Development Goal 16: No More Business as Usual, by Alan Whaites

SDG 16 Blog Series: No 1: Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 16 – Supporting Institutions for Inclusive and Peaceful Societies

SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

The international development community rightly saw the agreement of Sustainable Development Goal 16 as a significant break-through, a recognition that institutions matter to development outcomes, that inclusive state-society relations are important, and that fundamentally peace is core to human well-being.   The celebration of the agreement of the Goal has, however, started to fade and now stakeholders are waking up to the morning after the party, perhaps with a few sore heads as the challenges of actually achieving the Goal become clear.  

Small is beautiful, but fragile in the Pacific by, Patrick Safran

The presence of violent conflict in a country is often a major red flag for the development community. One good example is Afghanistan that appears in four clusters (violence, justice, resilience, and economics foundations) in the OECD States of Fragility 2015 report. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has very well learned its lesson on the need to apply a conflict-sensitive approach to operations in Afghanistan by using risk assessments, security measures, special financing policies, and flexible procedures in development programs and projects.

Modelling fragility: Stepping towards universality, by Thomas Wheeler

The universal focus and more nuanced conceptualisation of the OECD’s new states of fragility model is to be welcomed, says Thomas Wheeler. But we should remember improved aid flows are only one part of the solution to highly complex problems

Measuring subnational conflict to achieve SDG16, by Cyrel SAN GABRIEL

Economic and political stability of a country can be measured by how peaceful it is as a whole. Subnational conflict, however, takes place in certain remote areas and is often overlooked by the development community’s peace filters and fragility assessments. But failing to adjust the peace lens to a subnational level may hamper efforts toward meeting Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) on achieving just, peaceful and inclusive societies.

Modeling Fragility: A Societal and Institutional Approach, by Seth KAPLAN

The OCED is trying to build a model to better analyze fragility. This is admirable, but also risky. Past attempts to model fragility—such as the Fragile States Index (FSI)—have done more harm than good and I wonder whether no model would be better than another model based on misconceptions.The danger of focusing on what’s measurable

Violence and fragility, by Håvard Mokleiv Nygård

Violence and fragility are so closely interlinked that they are essentially two sides of the same coin. Fragile countries see more violence, and violent countries are the most fragile. In any year over the last decade, 25-30 countries in the world have experienced internal armed conflict. These conflicts disproportionally occur in a group of about 50 countries, or in “the bottom billion” population of the world. These 50 countries would appear at the top of any ranking of the world’s most fragile countries.

Actionable insight requires analysis of causes rather than conditions, by Brian GANSON

Measurement, to be useful, must be actionable. The OECD fragility concept and other fragility measures, however, invite donors and development actors to treat symptoms rather than causes. The often poor and even perverse results from international programming to reduce fragility are therefore predictable. Only when our data collection and analysis help us to get a grip on the power relationships and institutional arrangements that reinforce - rather than address - fragility in a particular context will we be able to more dependably help effect positive change.

Media and governance: It’s time for a rethink, by James Deane

The post 2015 Global Goals have been agreed and for the first time in any such agreement, there is a goal focused on improving how societies in the 21^st century are governed. 

It is a major accomplishment and an acknowledgement that the quality of governance will do as much to shape humanity’s prospects as anything else.  A good argument can be made that unless progress is made in this area, investments in the rest of the goals may well be wasted.  This should be an exciting time for those working to support good governance.  That excitement should extend to those, like myself, who have argued for increased support for a free and plural media and to improved public access to information.  The goals include a specific target designed to ensure “public access to information and to protecting fundamental freedoms , in accordance with national legislation and international agreements”.

Managing Risks to Development – Donors agencies and anti-corruption, by Alan Whaites

Donor agencies actively manage numerous risks to programmes (security, political etc), including the mitigation of corruption and fiduciary risks.  The drive towards improvement in managing risks is unsurprising, given very real fears of reputational damage. The desire to be as effective as possible has led to work to identify common learning, potentially leading to new ‘integrity guidelines.’ But the complexity of the problems is often under-appreciated – for donors it is not simply stopping corrupt politicians from pocketing aid funds.  The risks are diverse and the potential for `gaming’ is high.  Addressing corruption is not dissimilar to fighting computer viruses – a cat and mouse game between those evolving mechanisms for fraud, and those working to stop them. 

Going to the source! Identifying a country’s most vulnerable sectors and activities generating IFF, by Manuel Papouschek

Anyone working to detect activities such as corruption, drug trafficking, counterfeit, smuggling and other types of similar activities knows how difficult it is to identify and prove these crimes. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that once a crime is identified, it is usually associated with others hidden further underground: for example, illegal fisheries associated with human trafficking; illicit mining financing criminal groups; corruption associated with money laundering…[1]

Development is inescapably political, by Sue Unsworth

We know much less than we would like to about how development happens: how social, economic and political forces for change interact, and how effective, legitimate political authority can be organised to contain violence, nurture productive investment, and create institutions to support public services. Staff of donor agencies can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed when confronted by urgent human needs and conflicting priorities in contexts where there is little obvious interest or capacity to address them, and few clues about feasible entry points.

At Odds over Ownership, by Tom Carothers

Ownership is one of the mainstream consensus-oriented concepts that have become common in the aid world during recent decades—frequently invoked, widely appealing, hard to disagree with, and applicable to providers and recipients of aid alike. Yet the apparent consensus on ownership masks some deep tensions between aid providers and recipients.

Development responses to Global Bads and Organised Crime, by Lena DIESING

Narcotics, people trafficking and counterfeit medicines: A unique illicit economy sustains and feeds on these global bads that have become the counter-points to our concepts of global public goods.  These global bads also threaten to be major obstacles as the world focuses on the achievement of the new Sustainable Development Goals.  

What are governance advisers missing with ‘Political Economy Analysis’? How can they do better?, by Heather Marquette and David Hudson

What advice would you give to a novice governance advisor working for a bilateral donor going into the field for the first time? Want to know how some of the top governance experts, advisors, researchers and academics would say? Well, wonder no more.

Read this blog on the Oxfam blog site, 'From poverty to power' here