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Background
Institutions for Fragile States is part of a larger, global effort to develop understanding of how best to make services work for the world’s poorest people. In cross-national regressions, institutions stand out for their influence on a range of outcomes we care about, from growth to conflict. Statistical associations do not tell us much about the particular aspects of design, personnel, or management that make a difference, however. The causal relationships are little understood, and without a better grasp of the specific mechanisms that shape service delivery or other outputs we care about, policy makers will have to rely on their own best guesses about what to do. This challenge is especially acute where violence may have altered social and political relationships in the recent past.
In the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People, the World Bank took some first steps to focus attention on these intellectual challenges. It harnessed the language of industrial organization, a sub-field of economics, as well as the political-agent analysis common in political economy research today. The empirics behind the report are only now undergoing development, most notably by a consortium of economists at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. Nonetheless, the report closely approaches the kind of practically important, theoretically grounded, context-sensitive research agenda that lies at the center of our program. Through our participation in the “Institutions for Growth” initiative, based at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, we are part of a collaboration of research centers that share related ambitions.
Freetown, Sierra Leone (A. Boutellis, 2008)
The program hosts a portfolio of research projects and launches two to three themes per year. The specific focal points develop and change as the program moves forward. However, some examples drawn from our early workshops and meetings help illuminate the subject matter.
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One of the core functions of a state is to ensure “the peace of the realm”—in other words, to provide security. In the area of civilian policing one question is whether some recruitment practices are better than others at selecting “good types” and rejecting “bad types” in contexts where there are many opportunities for predation and few sources of information about the individuals who seek employment. Why does deputizing villagers to aid in law enforcement appear to produce vigilantism and predation in some settings but not in others? Why do “community policing” strategies appear effective in reducing crime in some settings but ineffective in others?
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Building a more capable civil service is a high priority in most fragile states. In 2007, the Bobst Center hosted a meeting of practitioners from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and other organizations to ask what we had learned about making bureaucracy function effectively. Those who participated observed that pay-for-performance schemes often breed envy and organizational collapse in fragile states. Some of the “softer” strategies—promoting professional norms, providing models, building an esprit de corps—show some greater signs of success. Can we parse out what makes some of these “softer” approaches work, in theory, and test whether they really do make a difference?
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Some key areas of service provision, especially garbage collection and road construction, are prone to corruption in many societies. What do we know about the usefulness of alternative strategies for corruption control, including central audits, heightened levels of community information, treble damage awards in corruption cases that come to courts, etc.?
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In theory, elections and legislative representation are supposed to generate more accountable government. However, distinguished policy makers have argued that violence increases the probability that people will turn inward and vote only for members of their own cultural or religious group. Are the policy makers right? What are the policy implications of these findings?
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Western-style elections stress the budgets of poor countries. What do we know about the effects of various devices for rendering them less expensive? In particular, how do these devices influence voter attitudes, information levels, and candidate behavior?
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Poor countries with mineral resources are prone to a number of syndromes that fall under the rubric of “the resource curse.” The challenges are complex and require both international and local action. The Kimberly Process, designed to regulate conflict diamonds, is prone to leakage at several points close to the beginning of the production and marketing chain. Can we think of clever ways to reduce or eliminate diversion of stones to unlicensed buyers at these low levels?
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Property rights systems are in a period of flux in many fragile states. In some cases, conflict has chased traditional landholders off their plots and squatters have moved in. In others, resentment toward acquisition of private entitlements by newcomers has generated conflict. Changes in national law often have over-ridden community arrangements for dampening conflict over land rights, such as share tenancies. The question is whether home-grown practices or theory-driven innovations can at once encourage investment in improvements, as individual private property rights usually do, while reducing the short-term costs to host societies or to the less wealthy and powerful.
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Recent experience suggests that community boards set up to scrutinize and manage mineral royalties often diminish in effectiveness with time. Why? Are some community board systems more likely to sustain their oversight roles than others?
Ministry of Public Service, Kampala, Uganda (A. Schalkwyk, 2008)