Institutions for Fragile States (IFS)
World Bank president Robert Zoellick has called the problem of building better governance in fragile states “the toughest development challenge of our era.” “This is not security as usual, or development as usual,” he warned. “Legitimacy in fragile situations is not just achieved through elections or agreements that share power among factions…Legitimacy must be achieved through performance. It needs to be earned by delivering basic services, especially visible ones. Clean up the garbage.”
Since 2007, the Bobst Center and the Woodrow Wilson School have teamed up to address this challenge. A main part of their work focuses on how to build effective and accountable institutions in parts of the world where decision makers have little ability to supervise the work of agencies very carefully, for want of information and resources, and where the risk of instability is high.
Two years after its inception, this project has conducted close to 600 oral history interviews with reform leaders in countries including Timor-Leste, Burundi, South Africa, Haiti, Sierra Leone Liberia, Bangladesh, Albania, Nepal, Bosnia, Kosovo, El Salvador, Tanzania,and Uganda. These have become the basis for detailed comparative institutional analysis as well as a series of shorter memoranda for policy makers.
In December 2009, the project received a $500,000 grant to extend its scope. The award facilitates conversations among senior reform leaders in low income countries about ways to elude the “governance traps” that often sabotage economic and political turnarounds. These recently attracted note in economist Paul Collier’s best-seller, The Bottom Billion. IFS has launched a series of extended conversations with senior leaders about “the high politics of reform,” including constituency building, management of competitive processes in divided societies, ways to cabin or harness demands for patronage, and a variety of related issues. Under the terms of the Smith Richardson award, the program will produce a short book that draws attention to the kinds of issues and solutions that are especially important.
For more details, please see the IFS website and press stories on its work