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.

Setting off on the right track for Goal 16, by Sarah LISTER

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, I was standing on a rooftop in Central London. Like many others, I made some personal resolutions, hoping that setting some goals would help me be healthier and happier in the coming year.  However, as the bells chimed and the fireworks exploded, this year I also raised a glass to the ‘peaceful, inclusive and strong institutions’ of Sustainable Development Goal 16, as the 2030 Agenda came into force. But if the pathway to achieving personal goals is sometimes tough, how much more daunting is the achievement of the vision laid out in SDG 16? The seemingly endless and increasing violence, hatred and exclusion we see in the world around us and the size and complexity of the task inevitably make us question those moments of hope and visionary optimism when we have committed ourselves to better things. Yet, just as there are ways to keep our personal resolutions on track, so I think that there are concrete ways to ensure that, in this first critical year of the 2030 Agenda, good foundations are laid for the progressive achievement of Goal 16. 

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.

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.

Fragility of Societies: Putting Societal Dynamics at the centre of the Analysis, by Benjamin PETRINI

The multidimensional approach to fragility in the OECD States of Fragility 2015 report is a welcome step forward towards a more nuanced understanding of the causes and dynamics of fragility itself. It brings us one step closer to devising better policies to minimize the toll that fragility exacts on institutions, economies and societies at large. By singling out five discrete “lenses” of fragility (i.e. levels of violence, access to justice, the quality and functioning of institutions, economic foundations, and resilience to shocks), the new model is able to better identify those diverse dimensions of fragility and categorize countries according to the challenges they face – rather than simply dividing the world into fragile and non-fragile countries.

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”.

Welcome to new thinking in governance and beyond, by Frauke de Weijer

Welcome, to the Governance Practitioners Notebook! Incredibly, this group of scholars, with their diverse backgrounds, interpretations, language, and ways of making sense of the challenges of improving governance are arguing for the same thing. Problem-driven, with the problem locally defined. Iterative and adaptive, with flexibility and learning built into programme design. With less reliance on technical solutions, and more eye for the political nature of all change processes. With more humility and less ego. This is the new school of thought that is emerging, currently still under the banner of ‘Alternative Ideas and Approaches’, but moving fast into the mainstream. I am thrilled.

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.

Bringing us back to the larger questions; why do we need a revised model for assessing fragility and what would it need to look like?, by Frauke de Weijer

In an earlier blog I wrote about my discomfort around the indicators used in the proposed new model for assessing fragility. In hindsight I feel that this was the easy way out, as these are much easier to comment on than the larger questions surrounding this report. Now that a series of consultations are planned, I would like to take us back to these bigger questions. Do we need a revised model for assessing fragility, and what would it need to look like?

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.

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

Four paradoxes of the long-distance governance advisor, by Graham TESKEY

Starting out in a new job in a new organisation is a daunting task for most people. There is just so much stuff to learn: rules and regulations, systems and structures, people and processes. And usually before you have had time to settle down and understand how things really work (rather than how the operational manual describes it) you actually are given real work to do. This is the situation that Lucy, the heroine of this Governance Practitioner’s Notebook, finds herself; she is told she has to get on a ‘plane and fly off and actually advise.  She feels it’s almost a test – the aim of which is to find her out, to prove that it’s true: “aha, you really don’t know anything about the real world, do you?”

An OECD recommendation for integrity in aid?, by Elizabeth HART

In April, Oskar Karnebäck previewed in this space an initiative by the OECD, partnering with the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, to gather information toward developing a comprehensive recommendation for integrity in aid. The goal of that effort was to bring together the many strands of policy and practice that constitute a comprehensive approach to controlling corruption risks in development agencies. The report, co-funded by U4, has now been issued, and we found strong support and good material for developing a Recommendation proposal.