Responding to the problem of fragile states – or ‘faltering states’ as David Miliband prefers to call them – has been a priority for the UK and the international community for several years. But is Whitehall’s machinery fit to meet the challenge?
‘Faltering states’ is only the latest in a long succession of competing labels for such states – including ‘weak states’, ‘low-income countries under stress’, ‘difficult environments’, ‘failed and failing states’, and ‘countries at risk of instability’.
Definitions are equally varied and contested. The Department for International Development’s definition – ‘where the government cannot or will not deliver core functions to the majority of its people, including the poor’ – is fairly broad. ‘Core functions’ in this case are security and basic services. Some such states are in conflict; others are not. Some, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, have been seen as a risk to international security but most are a greater risk to the security and development for their own populations. Insecurity, poverty and weak governance mean that many of what Paul Collier calls ‘the bottom billion’ are living in fragile states. In some cases, the term is applied to states such as Burma, Zimbabwe and Pakistan which are, in many ways, far from ‘fragile’.
Whatever the precise definition, concern about the impact of fragile states on security and development have led most large bilateral and multilateral donors – including the UK, US, World Bank, and EU – to devote whole teams and countless hours to producing policy papers on how to deal with fragile states. In the UK, DFID has had a team working on fragile states since 2003. The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit published a comprehensive study of the ‘countries at risk of instability’ in 2005. Internationally, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee has agreed principles on how international actors should work with fragile states, and only last year, fragile states were a priority for the Portuguese presidency of EU.
Much of the policy analysis done on fragile states – including much of that produced on Whitehall – is solid work. The challenge is putting this into practice.
The key, in the long-term, is prevention. Once a crisis erupts, options for action are limited and the damage to lives, livelihoods and prospects for future peace has already been begun. Hence, reports from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the Commission for Africa in 2005 called for far greater investment in prevention. Subsequent government policies – most recently the FCO’s revised strategic priorities – have repeated this call to invest in prevention.
The strategy unit argued that ‘prevention is fundamentally about effective management of risk of instability to reduce the occurrence of crisis’. This requires a multilateral endeavour but the UK, as a major bilateral donor, one of the largest arms exporters in the world and a powerful member of both the UN and EU, will need to ensure it is fit for purpose too. This means ensuring its policies and capacities are aimed at tackling the drivers of fragility: poverty, inequality, economic decline, natural resource dependency and access to the tools of violent conflict such as financing and weapons.
One of the key tools at the UK’s disposal is its aid budget. Adequate and effective aid is essential to reducing poverty and inequality. Fragile states are also often ‘aid orphans’ – receiving far lower levels of funding than their ‘good performing’ counterparts. Increasing aid and other forms of development assistance to them is essential to reducing their vulnerability to crises and making progress towards the millennium development goals.
But aid can have a negative impact on security and governance if it reinforces rather than tackles the root causes of fragility. For example, aid can reinforce unaccountable regimes and increasing inequality or tensions between groups or regions. So, aid needs to be spent very wisely both in fragile states and elsewhere to prevent aid from contributing to failures in governance or violent conflict.
DFID has increased its assistance to fragile states over the past few years. It has also committed itself to using better analysis of governance and the risks of conflict in the countries where it works to help ensure that its assistance does not contribute to fragility. This has begun to happen but progress is slow and there needs to be more discussion and understanding of how DFID’s assistance impacts on security and politics in recipient countries.
DFID needs to become savvier about the politics of its assistance and this means changing its mindset. Development specialists are often reluctant to recognise that development is political. They are also going to have to learn to balance the increasing pressure to spend their growing budget – with less staff – against ensuring managing the risk that it might have a negative impact.
The Foreign Office has two key assets crucial to preventing violent conflict and crises in fragile states: diplomatic skill and the ability to use its network of missions to understand what is happening in the world. Its ability to analyse and understand countries at risk of crisis or conflict is absolutely vital to the UK being able to see problems coming and making the right decisions about how to deploy it other assets such as aid.
David Miliband’s new streamlined priorities for the Foreign Office include conflict prevention and he has spoken of the importance of dealing with ‘faltering states’. But to put this into effect he needs to decide whether the Foreign Office set up to deliver on this priority. UK ministers often talk about the need to reform the UN to deal with today’s problems not those of 1945, but the Foreign Office also needs to evolve to meet today’s challenges.
Miliband needs to ask a number of questions about his department. How successful have his diplomats been in predicting crises in the past? Do they have the knowledge which helps them provide the long-term analysis required for both ‘upstream’ prevention and for managing crises once they emerge? Do they understand the warning signs of impending crisis and do they take them seriously and mobilise others in time? Every time there is a major crisis questions are asked about whether the UK saw it coming – so there appears to be some work to do – and now he has his new priorities, the foreign secretary should start doing that.
In addition to aid and diplomacy, it should go without saying that arms exports and military assistance should not be provided to governments that abuse human rights or to countries where they could fuel fragility or violent conflict. The UK’s arms export legislation, changed in 2001, is much better than it used to be but not quite the ‘gold standard’ claimed. There are still loopholes. For example, there are no controls on the re-export of British equipment. As a result, there was nothing to stop two British Islander aircraft being re-exported to Burma from India last year. By contrast, in a separate case, the export of helicopters from India to Burma containing parts and technology from elsewhere in the EU apparently halted because some of those components were originally transferred with restrictions on their re-export.
The UK system needs to be updated to cope with the increasingly globalised nature of the arms industry and to ensure that the government is sure that goods licensed for export are going where they are supposed to go and staying there.
The recent review of the export control act was an opportunity to address these loopholes. The outcome so far has promised to address some but not all. The government needs to use the rest of that review to make sure the legislation is watertight.
At the same time, good policy is worth little if not implemented and this has been a problem in the past. The UK still exports controlled goods to 19 out of the 20 countries that it itself identifies as ‘countries of concern’ for human rights abuses, and breaches of the controls are rarely prosecuted. So the gap between policy and practice needs to be closed.
While individual policies are important, harmonisation of those policies across government around the common objective of reducing the risk of conflict and fragile states is the holy grail. Unfortunately, it seems to be equally elusive.
There have been steps in the right direction. The government has created the conflict prevention pools that bring together the FCO, DFID and MoD people and resources to develop joint approaches to preventing conflict around the world. The Stabilisation Unit (formerly known as the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit) brings together the same departments to coordinate assistance to countries emerging from violent conflict.
The innovative nature of these structures has meant that the UK is seen as well ahead of the game in this area. A comparative study on ‘whole of government’ approaches to fragile states by the International Peace Academy concluded that ‘the UK’s whole of government approach to fragile states is head and shoulders above those of most other donors working in this area’.
However, ‘it remains very much a work in progress.’ The coordination that these structures offer is not all-encompassing. It allows for some coordination in the spending of certain funds among a small section of civil servants but does not force the departments as a whole to consider the coherence of their approach and the impact of their broader policies – such as aid, arms export and other security policies – on violent conflict and fragile states.
Whether the new National Security Committee and its much-anticipated strategy will resolve any of these issues remains to be seen – but it will only succeed if it takes on the addresses the thorny issue of how to make those policies truly coherent.
Unfortunately, one area of coherence across Whitehall is the cuts in administrative costs. Whitehall’s capacity to deal with fragile states depends on its access to sufficient, well-trained human resources – to staff the Foreign Office’s network, DFID’s operations in fragile or vulnerable countries and even arms export licensing, which were under threat of privatisation. Cuts, particularly when aid budgets are increasing, could risk undermining any investment in prevention or coherence.
In conclusion, the challenge of fragile states is a big one and a problem that is not easily solved. The UK cannot do everything. But it can make a start by ensuring its own house is in order.