State Fragility, Social Contracts and the Role of Social Protection: Perspectives from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region

Social contracts and state fragility represent two sides of one coin. The former concept highlights that governments need to deliver three “Ps”—protection, provision, and political participation—to be acceptable for societies, whereas the latter argues that states can fail due to lack of authority (inhibiting protection), capacity (inhibiting provision), or legitimacy. Defunct social contracts often lead to popular unrest. Using empirical evidence from the Middle East and North Africa, we demonstrate how different notions of state fragility lead to different kinds of grievances and how they can be remedied by measures of social protection. Social protection is always a key element of government provision and hence a cornerstone of all social contracts. It can most easily counteract grievances that were triggered by decreasing provision (e.g., after subsidy reforms in Iran and Morocco) but also partially substitute for deficient protection (e.g., by the Palestinian National Authority, in pre-2011 Yemen) or participation (information campaign accompanying Moroccan subsidy cut; participatory set-ups for cash-for-work programmes in Jordan). It can even help maintain a minimum of state–society relations in states defunct in all three Ps (e.g., Yemen). Hence, social protection can be a powerful instrument to reduce state fragility and mend social contracts. Yet, to be effective, it needs to address grievances in an inclusive, rule-based, and non-discriminatory way. In addition, to gain legitimacy, governments should assume responsibility over social protection instead of outsourcing it to foreign donors.

Climate Adaptation Finance in World Bank Economic Development Programs: The Challenges of Systemic Transformation via “Scaling Up”

Worldwide only about four percent of the estimated $500 billion-plus in public and private climate finance in 2017 was destined for adaptation. However, institutions like the World Bank are positioning themselves for a transformation in adaptation finance, seeking to provide substantially more adaptation finance as distinct from financial support for greenhouse gas mitigation. This article explores the recent emergence of adaptation as a higher priority and how a longer-term time horizon is necessary if a transformation in climate change governance is to occur which places greater emphasis on sustainable development goals relating to improvement of circumstances of citizens in the most climate-vulnerable nations, mostly in the Global South. The article also considers the important debate in the climate change policy literature over the extent to which funds supporting adaptation are going to lower-income nations or people, as might be anticipated given the view that the poor are more vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Data linking World Bank project funding to climate change adaptation and mitigation, derived from a keyword-matching approach, show that from 2010 to 2018, the share of climate-change-related finance devoted to adaptation in World Bank projects increased considerably. The data indicate that adaptation funding tends to be directed more to more climate-vulnerable nations and those with greater state fragility, but not to low-income countries versus high-income countries. Implications are considered for how this change might be “scaled up” to achieve a transformational status.

Conceptual Perspectives on State Fragility

The article explores scientific discourse on the phenomenon of state fragility and reviews contemporary research that aims to uncover what factors account for the emergence of states that are vulnerable to risks and crises and lack the capacity to deliver a response on their own. In order to achieve this goal, the author analyzes the evolution of the state fragility concept and reviews the literature on its causes. The article finds significant advancement in scientific thought about fragile states, acknowledg ing their continuous and multi-dimensional nature (the 'ALC' and 'OECD' approaches). However, these approaches tend to view fragile states as a deviation from the Europe an nation-state model and focus more on the attributes of fragility (inability to perform core functions of the state or lacking the capacity to cope with risks and crises) while failing to produce a precise explanation for its causes. Hence, there is a need to analyze the process of fragile states formation and its consequences, i.e., to look at the macrohistorical dimension of state fragility. A better understanding of the historical context of state fragility and stricter identification criteria for the subgroup of severely and chronically fragile states allows identifying some structural explanatory factors such as rigidity of pre-independence colonial state borders, heterogeneity of population, and preferences that constraints collective action and small economic size. The literature review presented in the article finds that fragile states often have an insufficient tax base to guarantee the efficient provision of public goods. There are also agency factors that contribute to increased state fragility. This review also finds that imperfect political institutions may produce kleptocratic political regimes detached from the population's interests and irresponsive to them. Consequently, they are likely to deny or limit access to public goods for some population groups. A combination of these factors is likely to create weak and fragile states, with the extent of fragility being context-specific. Recognizing the impact of the factors discussed in the article may help produce better policy responses to various development problems that plague fragile states.

Labor unions and institutional corruption: The case of Kazakhstan

In this study, we used the institutional corruption framework to analyze the evolution of labor unions in Kazakhstan. As a research method, we conducted a case study by combining document analysis with survey data covering (n)1,200 respondents across all 14 regions of the country. Our findings suggest that external and internal influences weakened labor unions and diverted from fulfilling their primary purpose of promoting interests of their members. External influences, represented by restrictive regulatory framework and state intervention, create conditions of limited independence of labor unions leaving them extremely narrow scope to operate in. Internal influences are represented by disagreements and conflicts between national-level labor unions. This article stipulates that dysfunctional and institutionally corrupt labor unions in Kazakhstan serve as an indicator of state fragility. The findings confirmed that institutional corruption of labor unions has an adverse impact on public trust, while a frequent occurrence of labor conflicts might impact political risk factors, contributing to increased state fragility.

Electoral Violence and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria: Issues and Challenges

The study examined the effects of electoral violence on the democratization efforts and democratic consolidation in Nigeria since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1999. The nation’s elections, at all levels of governance, are characterized by violence. Violence mar as high as 70 percent of Nigerian elections resulting in deaths, destruction of properties, maiming, etc. Successive governments have made frantic efforts to institutionalize and consolidate democracy in the country, embarking on various electoral reforms with little or no result with respect to curbing electoral violence. Thus, the main objective of this study is to show that the high rate of electoral violence witnessed over the years has weakened and discredited the democratic consolidation drive of the Nigerian state. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is the “State Fragility Theory”. However, the author’s modified version of “State Compromise Theory” was used to analyze the nature, character and reasons for electoral violence in Nigeria and its effects on the institutionalization of democracy in the country. The study used both primary and secondary data. The primary data were mainly drawn from mainly the authors’ observations during elections, over the years, while secondary data were drawn from existing literature on the subject matter. The study revealed that the pervasive violence at different elections has greatly discredited and emasculated democratic governance in the country. Violence has become both physical and cathartic. It manifests in form of wanton shooting by political thugs to intimidate voters and electoral officials, so as to snatch election materials, disruption of voting, vote suppression, cancellation and annulment of elections in opposition strongholds, etc. The paper concluded that, to ensure the consolidation of democracy in Nigeria, election management bodies must adopt an electoral system that drastically reduces congregation of people at a voting point(s) so as to reduce violence. Some of the recommendations are that election management bodies should deploy appropriate technology to reduce congregation of people at a voting point, transmission of results should be done electronically to minimize human involvement, contacts error and manipulations.

Social Security Enrollment as an Indicator of State Fragility and Legitimacy: A Field Experiment in Maghreb Countries

State legitimacy and effectiveness can be observed in the state’s approach to delivering welfare to citizens, thus mitigating social grievances and avoiding conflicts. Social security systems in the Maghreb countries are relatively similar in their architecture and aim to provide social insurance to all the workers in the labor market. However, they suffer from the same main problem: a low rate of enrollment of workers. Many workers (employees and self-employed) work informally without any social security coverage. The issue of whether informal jobs are chosen voluntarily by workers or as a strategy of last resort is controversial. Many authors recognize that the informal sector is heterogeneous and assume that it is made up of (1) workers who voluntarily choose it, and (2) others who are pushed into it because of entry barriers to the formal sector. The former assumption tells us much about state legitimacy/attractiveness, and the latter is used to inform state effectiveness in delivering welfare. Using the Sahwa survey and discrete choice models, this article confirms the heterogeneity of the informal labor market in three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Furthermore, this article highlights the profiles of workers who voluntarily choose informality, an aspect that is missing from previous studies. Finally, this article proposes policy recommendations in order to extend social security to informal workers and to include them in the formal labor market.

Peace, Intervention, and State Fragility

This chapter explores the relationship between discourses of state fragility and peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions. The chapter covers two different (yet compatible) discourses of state fragility and intervention. The first one is grounded in the modern episteme, based on a dichotomy between strong and weak states through state rankings and fragile states listings that legitimize intervention in these weak states. The second one is an emerging discourse on risk and resilience, with more fluid understandings of fragility that go beyond the dichotomy of strong versus weak states, but also opens up new interventionary possibilities for international actors. The chapter takes stock of these discourses, emphasizing commonalities and divergences between them, as well as the repercussions for the peacebuilding and statebuilding practice and academic literature.

Deals and development in fragile and conflict-affected states: Framework and policy guidebook

This framework utilizes business interests and the distribution of political power to understand the episodic nature of economic growth in fragile and conflict-affected states. Conflict, state capacity, and legitimacy are analysed alongside the business environment and structural transformation to explain when growth episodes arise and when those growth episodes have positive, or negative, feedback on the country’s political economy and state fragility. The guidebook is designed to help advisers working with development agencies to analyse country context and design interventions with the goal of enabling positive growth episodes that reduce fragility.