Whole of government approaches to fragile states

The OECD Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States highlight the fact that successful development in a fragile environment depends, at least in part, on well sequenced and coherent progress across the political, security, economic and administrative domains.

Working effectively across these domains requires donor countries to adopt a ‘whole-of-government’
approach (WGA), involving departments responsible for security, and political and economic affairs, as
well as those responsible for development aid and humanitarian assistance.

This study assesses the existing WGAs, drawing upon the recent experiences of a number of OECD countries in fragile states.

All governments studied identify fragile states as an important international challenge, acknowledging
that fragile states are potential threats to both national and international security, as well as to
development processes. They also recognise that a holistic and integrated approach is needed to effectively address the challenges of fragile states. Yet, of the governments studied, none has developed a policy paper aimed at establishing a whole-of-government approach for dealing with these challenges. The studies for this report suggest a number of reasons for this absence:

• at the conceptual level the fragile states issue is still largely couched in development co-operation terminology, creating hurdles for other actors to become actively involved and assume ownership of the issues at stake;
• the lack of international agreement on a definition of a fragile state. The concept is applied to a wide variety of countries and actors
• labelling states as fragile can cause problems in terms of establishing or maintaining fruitful and equal partnerships
• the perception that the problems of respective fragile states cannot be captured in one, overall strategy

The authors say that the effectiveness of joined-up approaches may be improved by the creation of an overall framework for managing whole-of-government engagement in fragile states. Such a framework would consist of three elements:

• a clear understanding of what fragile states are, which is shared by all relevant government actors
• a joint policy statement explaining the rationale for collaborative working in fragile states, together with the aims and how these will be achieved
• a commitment to establish an effective dialogue between the key actors involved in a WGA, and to work on bridging differences in organisational culture