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Key Text Service Delivery in Fragile Situations: Key Concepts, Findings and Lessons

Author: OECD
Date: 2008
Size: 56 pages (726 KB)

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Summary

How can service delivery be strengthened in the context of a fragile state? This report from the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reviews evidence on the impact of state fragility on service delivery. Donors should tailor interventions to context, maintain a long-term focus on governance and state-building and manage transition and hand-back sensitively. Efforts at national government level need to be balanced with programmes linked to local authorities and communities.

The quality and availability of essential services, such as health care and primary education, are key measures of governance. Inadequate service delivery therefore is a clear symptom of state fragility. Fragile states also suffer from other deficits of governance, such as political instability and lack of territorial integrity. These deficits hinder efforts to establish the accountability mechanisms between state and citizens that are necessary for effective service delivery.

Efforts to improve service delivery within fragile states face challenges specific to this context. In particular, the socio-political environment may not be conducive to usual foreign assistance initiatives owing to social fragmentation, governments lacking capacity and legitimacy, and poor relations between citizens and state. Some particular challenges that arise in this situation are:

Recognising path dependencies: Interventions will create path dependencies and must be designed with the specific local context in mind.
Building accountable governance: While this is common in any context, within fragile states external aid can sometimes have the negative effect of further alienating the state from its citizens and undermining its ability to build capacity organically.
Understanding access constraints: Social fragmentation can leave many groups marginalised, particularly the poor. Understanding these constraints is necessary in designing appropriate interventions.
Improving women’s wellbeing and opportunities: Women play an important role in promoting social cohesion and reducing conflict. They must be provided with sufficient opportunities and security to participate fully in society.

In facing these challenges, donors must make strategic choices in determining their engagement with fragile states on service delivery. Specifically, they must decide on their method of delivering the aid, the instruments they intend to use, and the priorities they will focus on given limited resources. These choices and the context in which they are made have several policy implications for donors:

Tailoring interventions to context: Donors should do contextual analyses and mapping of service realities to acquaint themselves with the country situation and to design more robust indicators for monitoring short- and long-term progress. In selecting their means and degrees of engagement, donors should seek to strike an appropriate balance, based on risk/benefit analyses of the political realities of different service sectors.
Long-term focus on governance and state-building: Donors face an ethical challenge in fragile states between achieving short-term improvements in service delivery and establishing the foundation for long-term improvement in governance. To attain both of these goals, donors must be engaged at multiple levels of government within a fragile state, working to promote a mixture of community-driven and nationally organised programs.
Managing transition and hand-back: Different fragile state settings require different transition strategies. In stabilising or post-conflict settings, donors should work with government to accelerate the transition of service provision from external and non-state actors back to state mechanisms. Deteriorating settings necessitate a decision on whether or not to engage with the government. If not, a strategy focused on community and locally-led service delivery may be most effective.

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Source: OECD DAC, 2008, 'Service Delivery in Fragile Situations: Key Concepts, Findings and Lessons', Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Paris
Organisation: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), http://www.oecd.org/dac/