• Donor assessments

Donor assessments

This report reviews current debates and central dilemmas in relation to fragile situations. It looks in particular at the challenges and dilemmas that characterise fragility and support to fragile situations.The report takes the perspective of development research and thinking, such as, a concern with poverty-reduction, emphasis on the linkages between the local, national and global levels, and a political-economy framework for analysis.

The report defines fragility as: institutional instability undermining the predictability, transparency and accountability of public decision-making processes and the provision of security and social services to the population.

The report makes several recommendations with respect to the guiding principles for the engagement in fragile situations, including:

• the guiding principles should be based on a conceptual understanding of fragility and should provide a general framework within which specific fragile situations can be analysed and addressed
• the guiding principles should adopt a terminology that is shared with most, if not all actors in identifying fragility, and should acknowledge that, in understanding fragility and finding solutions to it, the focus should include the state, but also go beyond it
• the guiding principles should conceptualise fragile situations in terms of: social tensions and violent conflicts; policy formulation and implementation capacity; and policy agreement between governments and the international community
• to enable analyses of concrete fragile situations to capture the variety of factors that form and influence fragility, the guiding principles should recognise issues including: authority and legitimacy in state-society relations; economic decline and poverty; and global structures
• ·he guiding principles should reflect the fact that fragility is a relative concept and that particular situations can be more or less fragile
• the principles should promote a pragmatic approach that accepts context-specific, second-best responses to the dilemmas, trade-offs and compromises that characterise fragility
• the guiding principles should emphasise the need for simple and robust coordination frameworks at the country level, based on a common in-depth understanding of the country situation
• the guiding principles should promote a politically sensitive, risk-robust, flexible and goal-oriented approach to external engagement in fragile situations
• the guiding principles should emphasise the need to strengthen multilateral agencies to permit effective and development-focussed external engagement in fragile situations

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