A new take on fragility in Africa

The High-Level Panel on Fragile States

Africa is changing at a dizzying speed. From the growth of megacities through the discovery of new mineral resources to a rapidly changing climate, the continent is going through a period of wrenching social, economic and environmental change. Change is of course at the heart of the development process – inevitable and in many respects desirable. But it can also be painful and disruptive, heightening the risk of conflict.

Yesterday, at a launch in Addis Ababa, the High Level Panel on Fragile States in Africa set out an agenda for making Africa more resilient in the face of change. The Panel was commissioned by the African Development Bank’s President Kaberuka, under the leadership of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (very much the go-to lady for high-level panels). It was tasked with helping the Bank rethink its own role in responding to conflict and fragility. But it was also asked to scan the horizon, identify drivers of fragility for the coming decades and sketch out a broad policy agenda for how African countries and their international partners should respond. Agulhas provided research and drafting support.

The Panel’s report, Ending conflict and building peace in Africa: A call to action, marks an interesting departure from past thinking on fragile states in Africa, in several ways.

To begin with, it changes the emphasis from fragility to resilience. ‘Fragility’ has for many years been one of the more difficult terms in the development lexicon. ‘Fragile state’ is a convenient category for aid bureaucrats, allowing them to lump together all those awkward countries where ‘development as usual’ is not possible. But its essence is remarkably hard to pin down. It is very hard to identify the common element that unites Zimbabwe, South Sudan and Egypt – states as diverse as any in the world. Attempts to do so involve broad and rather pejorative generalisations, or else fragment into too many categories and sub-categories to be useful.

Focusing instead on resilience – the opposite of or solution to fragility – is immediately more productive. The Panel explores changes underway across Africa that are placing African societies under strain, such as the spread of slums, youth unemployment, growing inequality, climate pressure and new resource rents. Fragility comes about where those pressures are too great for countries to manage within their national institutions, creating a risk that conflict spills over into violence. In the most severe cases, conflict undermines institutional capacity, creating a vicious circle that can be very difficult to escape. Fragility in Africa therefore has two dimensions: disruptive change, and a lack of institutions resilient enough to manage it. The Panel’s policy agenda is therefore twofold: managing change and building resilience.

This approach to the topic enables the Panel to dispense altogether with ‘fragile states’ – a category that has surely had its day. Fragility is not a category of states, but a risk inherent in the development process itself. The policy priority is to manage conflict risk, wherever it occurs. With change accelerating across Africa, conflict will take diverse forms, whether armed conflict, political extremism, civil disturbance, organised crime or interpersonal violence. It can appear anywhere – even in states that have never been characterised as fragile. Indeed, Africa’s leading performers may become increasingly vulnerable, as rapid growth generates new forms of inequality and exclusion. The Panel therefore advocates bringing a fragility and resilience ‘lens’ to development policy right across the continent.

The Panel also makes it clear that fragility does not take a specifically African form. If more than half of the world’s fragile states are located in Africa (20 out of 36, according to one reckoning), this is because Africa is changing too fast for its young institutions and political processes to manage. Africa’s challenges are acute, but they are not fundamentally different to those facing other continents.

For the past decade, the main policy paradigm for engaging with fragility has been ‘state-building’ – that is, creating durable political settlements and legitimate national institutions capable of delivering to citizens. The Panel acknowledges the importance of state-building and endorses the New Deal, which has state-building at its core. But it also offers an important – if sotto voce – challenge to conventional thinking on the subject.

First, it seeks to resolve one of the core problems with the state-building paradigm, which is the tension often seen in post-conflict environments between the policy goal of rebuilding state legitimacy through state delivery of goods and services, and the reality that they may be more effectively delivered through other channels. In countries such as South Sudan, for example, building state capacity to deliver is a long-term goal; in the short term, it may come at the expense of more pragmatic ways of helping the population.

The Panel observes that even the most war-torn African societies are remarkably resilient. In the midst of conflict, households continue to pursue their livelihoods, and communities continue to govern their affairs. The private sector is able to prosper, even in apparently chaotic environments. Civil society moves quickly to fill the vacuum left by a retreating state.

If the goal is to reduce fragility, the Panel asks, why not build on these existing wellsprings of resilience? We should recognise the reality that, in weak states, goods and services are in fact delivered through a diverse range of institutional forms. It is entirely unrealistic to expect to move in the space of a few years to a state monopoly over the funding and delivery of public services – a model that took decades or centuries to emerge in other contexts. 

Instead, the Panel argues, we should see resilience as a partnership between states and societies, recognising that the improvised and hybrid institutions that emerge in conflict-affected environments are a source of strength, not of weakness. It encourages development partners to embrace plurality and to support the delivery of services through partnerships among government agencies, private firms, civil society organisations and local communities, according to whichever is better placed to deliver in each local context. Services can of course still be badged as belonging to the state, if that is a political priority, but the delivery can take multiple forms.

A second key idea from the Panel on state-building is that fragile national institutions need to be buttressed by regional structures. Many of the threats to Africa’s stability are of course cross-border in nature, from illicit trade in arms and conflict minerals to the movement of armed groups and refugees. Furthermore, the disruptive effects of climate change rarely match up with national boundaries; they require regional cooperation on the management of lakes, river basins, forests and other shared resources. The greater the density of regional and intergovernmental mechanisms and processes to manage these practical challenges, the more resilient African states become. Of course, development partners such as the African Development Bank have long attached a high priority to regional economic integration, but it has not necessarily been recognised as part of the solution to conflict and fragility.

Thus, the Panel neatly conceptualises resilience in terms of partnerships: building states that are effective because they draw on the resilience found in society, and because they are anchored in shared structures and processes at the regional level.

The Panel’s report is by no means the final word on any of these issues. It has relatively little to say on hard security and the challenges of intervening in on-going conflict. With its report corresponding with escalating conflict in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, this may be seen as a significant omission. But the Panel has chosen to take a longer view on conflict and fragility, coming up with an agenda that is pro-active and preventative. If the Panel has read its audience correctly, it is an agenda that African countries should be much more ready to embrace.

Marcus Cox