SCALING UP IN AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NUTRITION


Going to Scale in Fragile States: Can It Work? Should We Try? LAURENCE CHANDY


Focus 19 • brIeF 19 • June 2012 T


he term fragile state is used to describe a country whose government struggles to perform some of its most basic


functions, due to a lack of either political will or capacity or a combination of the two. In these states one typically observes persistent deficiencies in the government’s authority, legitimacy (as perceived by its citizens), or its provision of services. Depending on the measure used, one can identify between 30 and 40 fragile states, which together contain around a billion people: a diverse group capturing a range of conditions, from postconflict environments to dysfunctional and corrupt regimes. They all present great development challenges, which raises the following question: Is scaling up under such circumstances possible?


Why scale up in fragile states?


According to a World Bank 2002 task force report, “aid does not work well” in fragile states, “may even be counterproductive,” and has historically recorded “a disturbingly high rate of failure.” Given these grim judgments, and the well-documented challenges of moving to scale in any setting, should scaling up even be contemplated in fragile states? The answer is “yes,” for three reasons. First, the development challenges facing fragile states demand


it. In the space of a few years, fragile states have moved from the periphery of the international development agenda to a focus of global aid efforts. To understand why, consider the following three facts: (i) the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is estimated to have doubled, from 20 to 40 percent, since 2005; (ii) no fragile country has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG); and (iii) two-thirds of the world’s remaining low-income countries are fragile. Helping fragile states has thus become inseparable from commitments to fighting poverty, achieving the MDGs, and assisting low-income countries. Overcoming these challenges will not occur through one-time, token interventions. The 2011 World Development Report and the “New Deal” agreed to at the 2011 High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, are signs that the aid community recognizes this fact. Second, there is growing recognition that aid to fragile states


can achieve positive results if donors are willing to adapt their approaches to the environment. For instance, achieving genuine recipient ownership may require looking to the subnational level or to communities if the central government is unable or unwilling to fulfill the kind of leadership role required in recipient-donor relations. Aligning to country systems may require donors to apply greater oversight measures and the use of risk management instruments to ensure aid money is well spent. Approaches like these can likely claim some of the credit for narrowing the gap between the share of World Bank projects recording unsatisfactory performance ratings in fragile countries and the share receiving the same rating in stable settings since the early 1990s. However, the likelihood that this result is also partly explained by projects


becoming less ambitious—and the negative implications of this for scaling up—should not be overlooked. Third, an approach to aid management and delivery that is


supportive of a scaling-up agenda emphasizes many of the issues that are important to working in fragile states. These include using feasible and simple project designs, strengthening institutions alongside interventions, adopting long-term horizons, focusing on sustainability, and supporting endogenous learning.


Can scaling up work in fragile states?


This verdict leads to the core question: Can scaling up work in fragile states? The answer again is positive. There are, in fact, numerous examples of interventions being successfully brought to scale in fragile states, covering a range of different countries and sectors, including rural development and food security. (For two studies that provide a compendium of recent case study evidence, see the publications by Chandy and Linn and by Manor in “For further reading.”) This is not to suggest that scaling up in fragile states is


straightforward. A review of the case studies suggests that executing scaling up in fragile settings is undoubtedly more challenging than in stable environments. Three key challenges are apparent. First, political and social


upheaval can easily thwart attempts to reach scale as donors struggle to shield their interventions from an unstable environment. Second, the weakness of formal institutions in fragile states (combined with low capacity) becomes an increasingly serious constraint as interventions reach greater scale and as the question of achieving sustainability comes into focus. Third, there is anecdotal evidence that donors may have backed away from efforts to move to scale due to the perceived risk of large-scale failure, which would likely be conspicuous and thus draw criticism. At the same time, scaling up occurs more readily in fragile


states than may be expected, with successful approaches from more stable environments often being picked up spontaneously. Donors have had particular success scaling up interventions whose success relies predominantly on identifying technical and logistical solutions and adaptation that play to donors’ strengths.


How can projects be scaled up in these environments?


Successful scaling-up pathways in fragile states depend on donors exercising greater selectivity and scrutiny in determining which interventions should be scaled up, implying a higher threshold for what might constitute a “good candidate” project or program. Scaling-up pathways may also take longer to traverse in fragile states, as interventions are likely to run into more obstacles and take more time to embed. As a consequence, donors would be wise to reassess their project cycles in fragile states: scheduling early evaluations to inform resource allocation decisions and later evaluations to allow sustainability to be


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