• State building & state capacity

State Building & state capacity

This paper contributes to a dialogue about the role of the state in promoting development and about what the international aid community can (and cannot) do to help build stronger, more effective and better-governed states in the developing world. It draws together academic research and recent evidence on the role of the state in developing countries and reviews how the current aid system interacts with states.

A key premise of the paper is that states – and their political economy – matter for social and economic development. The authors suggest that political economy factors and their social underpinnings lie at the heart of why some states function better than others.

The authors say that the situations emerging from the interaction of certain social and political structures in many developing settings are not favourable to development. Such structures – clientelism, patronage and populism, as well as ‘neo-patrimonialism’ and state capture – are not irreversible, but they can be deeply entrenched.

The challenge for the international community is to determine how it can best support reform efforts that interact both directly and indirectly with such structures towards the goal of creating more modern states.

Drawing on the analysis presented in the paper, the authors develop a set of implications regarding how to move forward on supporting more effective and accountable states with a three-pronged agenda:

• bringing politics back in, and translating this into concrete policies and practices
• seriously tackling the limitations of capacity development to date
• building more incentives into the aid system for improving the quality and capacity of governments

The authors conclude with a word of caution and of optimism.

International aid is always only one among many influences affecting politics and states in recipient countries. However, in an increasingly interdependent world, there is an increasing commitment to solving development problems that have been intractable in the past.

A more balanced and analytically informed approach to the state and to the importance of the political sphere is emerging – informed also by lessons from the past – which can help to translate this commitment into more effective support.

[Adapted from the author]

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