Competing for the Future: Propositions of Power and Governance, by Alan Whaites

SDG 16 Blog Series:  No 2 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

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

This series of blogs considers the new ways of working that will be needed to help support the achievement of Goal 16 of the SDGs.  These will include not only improving the impact of aid programming, but also adopting new ideas emerging from the beyond aid agenda, such as Thinking and Working Politically.  But perhaps the most significant area of change will come in addressing the potential spoilers to Goal 16 – complex development problems such as the emergence of Global Bads. 

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.