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Foreign aid and the fragile consensus on state fragility

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Abstract

Most actors in the field of foreign aid agree with the call for coordinated engagement in fragile states in order to more effectively counter the consequences and origins of state failure. However, despite such demands, governments from OECD countries as well as multilateral agencies engaged in fragile states often continue to act in an uncoordinated manner and fail to reach higher levels of harmonisation. Why is effective coordination so hard to achieve? This article argues that three major challenges explain the persistent problems of donor harmonisation in fragile states: (1) the cognitive challenge of explaining the origins of state fragility and deducing effective instruments and interventions, (2) the political challenge of reconciling divergent political motives for engagement, as well as (3) the bureaucratic challenge related to the organisational logic of competing aid agencies.

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Notes

  1. Desch (1996) and Herbst (1990) show how the ban on interstate war prevents the restructuring of state borders. The responsibility to protect (Evans 2008) is a principle that in effect commits major powers not to tolerate civil war characterised by mass atrocities.

  2. Examples of relevant donor papers include OECD/DAC (2007); OECD (2011b); World Bank (2005); World Bank (2011); BMZ (2005); BMZ (2007); DFID (2005); DFID (2010); USAID (2005); M.A.E. (2007); SIDA (2005).

  3. A telling example is the World Bank’s (2011) World Development Report ‘Conflict, Security, and Development’. For a critical review, which nonetheless concedes that the report constitutes significant progress when compared to ‘the Bank’s standard development practices’, see Zaum (2012).

  4. As early as 2006, Necla Tschirgi observed that ‘[t]he necessity of linking security and development has become a policy mantra’ (Tschirgi 2006: 41).

  5. On the importance official aid organisations attach to the topic of fragile states see, for example United Nations (2004: 15, 2005a: 20–21, 2005b: 8); OECD/DAC (2001: 37, 2008: 11). Among others, North et al. (2009) have recently made an influential scholarly contribution framing the entire development challenge as one of how basic issues of conflict and violence are organised within a society (see also North et al. 2007).

  6. See http://www.pbsbdialogue.org/documentupload/49151944.pdf (accessed 4 November, 2013).

  7. Calls for more donor coordination and harmonisation are empirically backed by evidence showing how the fragmentation of donor agencies in aid-receiving countries negatively affects the quality of public administration and increases the level of corruption (Knack and Rahman 2007; Djankov et al. 2009).

  8. For instance, recent studies on Multi-Donor-Budget-Support show how persistent coordination problems among donors are often linked to their different visions of the instruments’ goal hierarchy: some donors perceive financing poverty alleviation as the primary objective while others attempt to use budget support as leverage for advancing systemic institutional reforms in the field of governance (Faust et al. 2012). Another example relates to democracy promotion, where European and US actors are said to behave differently because of their different underlying concepts of democratisation processes (Magen et al. 2009).

  9. This is shown, for example, in analyses of state fragility indices (Gutiérrez et al. 2011; Ziaja 2012).

  10. We do not aspire in this article to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on causes and consequences of fragility. Rather, our goal is to discuss the policy consequences resulting from some of the main trends in this literature. Some works that investigate the causes and consequences of fragility include Carment et al. (2010), Englehart (2009) and Patrick (2011).

  11. In 2003 the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) established the ‘Fragile States Group’ as a specialised platform to ‘deal with the specific issues and needs of fragile states’ (OECD 2006: 13). The term gained its ultimate international acceptance around 2010, when the ‘g7+’, a group of self-declared fragile states, established itself as an interest group vis-à-vis OECD donor countries and negotiated the ‘New deal for engagement in fragile states’ adopted at the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in November 2012.

  12. For an overview of these indices, see Fabra Mata and Ziaja (2009).

  13. See also Paris (2001) for an account on how research and policy-making on fragile states affect each other.

  14. Traditionally, for instance, the US has pursued foreign aid as a subordinate instrument to security interests, whereas in Germany leftist and conservative coalition governments differed markedly in the extent to which they referred especially to economic interests as a legitimate concern in development cooperation.

  15. For narrative evidence see for instance Browne (2006); for econometric evidence see Thacker (1999), Alesina and Dollar (2000), Dreher and Jensen (2007).

  16. For an overview see Collier et al. (2003: 33–41).

  17. The OSCE’s notion of comprehensive security was laid down in the 1996 ‘Lisbon Declaration on a Common and Comprehensive Security Model for Europe for the Twenty-first Century’. It refers back to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act with its three ‘baskets’ of issues pertaining to security in Europe: Politico-military aspects of security; ‘cooperation in the field of economics, of science and technology and of the environment’; and ‘cooperation in humanitarian and other fields’.

  18. A small selection of critical and affirmative writings on human security includes Paris (2001); Owen (2004); Human Security Centre (2005); Kaldor et al. (2007).

  19. Most references to human security in fragile states strategy papers, however, are rather implicit. For an explicit reference, see BMZ (2007: 9). Bøås and Jennings (2005) propose to base the very concept of state fragility on the concept of human security.

  20. On the issue of the developmental-military interface see Klingebiel and Roehder (2004).

  21. From a principal-agent perspective (e.g., Martens et al. 2002; Gibson et al. 2005: 61–87; Faust 2011), aid agencies’ special interests are particularly problematic because they often have a massive information advantage over their principals – be they taxpayers or their representatives (parliaments) in donor countries or the intended beneficiaries in the developing world. Such a principal agent perspective can also be extended to agencies that deal with both, developmental and security issues such as the European External Action Service (Furness 2013).

  22. Donors have registered their general commitment to coherence, co-ordination and harmonisation in the 2005 Paris Declaration (see High-level Forum 2005).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Stephen Brown, Thomas Fues, Sven Grimm and Imme Scholz as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and useful suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

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Faust, J., Grävingholt, J. & Ziaja, S. Foreign aid and the fragile consensus on state fragility. J Int Relat Dev 18, 407–427 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2013.23

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