While, as opposed to a weak state, these different institutions might not be in direct conflict, they do offer strong competing narratives that hamper the progress of good governance.
To address the challenge of these countries falling behind, the international spotlight must be kept on countries where the Millennium Development Goals are hardest to achieve, using common principles for action; making the international aid architecture more rational; improving the organisational response of the wide range of actors involved (including "the 3Ds": diplomacy, defense and development); and measuring results.
Low capacity and low-income states of the Global South are thought to pose direct threats not only to their own populations, but by extension also to their neighboring Western countries.
Following this logic, fragile states are in need of development in order to be able to provide security and basic services to its citizens, decreasing vulnerability and increasing resilience to internal and external shocks.
Two main criticisms of this notion exist: I) the potential of abuse of the category of state fragility, legitimising external intervention at the expense of the local agency; II) the analytical utility of the categorization effort itself is disputed, with the state-centric grouping together of a wide range of diverse countries leading to highly standardised development responses that cannot take into account often highly divergent political, economic and social conditions.
He traced this disparity to the lack of social control by the government - “the actual ability to make the operative rules of the game for people in the society.
Migdal stated the expansion of European economy and world trade in the 19th century led to drastic changes in people's strategies of survival in countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
[13] State policies enforced by Europeans, including land tenure laws, taxation and new modes of transportation, changed people's life situation and needs in these countries rapidly and deeply.
However, unlike western Europe in the earlier centuries, these countries did not establish a new concentration of social control as the base of a strong and capable state.
[15] In fragile states service delivery may be impacted by financial constraints, limited expertise and a lack of information[15] Long and protracted violence leads to the neglect and subsequent decay of the infrastructure required for provision.
[15] Such violence can be political, including conflict and terrorism, but can also be social or criminal, leading to a broad combination of security-based obstacles to effective service provision.
[16] Education, health, access to water and adequate sanitation are important not only for survival, but are also recognised human rights whose provision is demonstrated to be necessary for a transition away from conflict.
[15] Furthermore, the delivery of some of these services can be seen as more neutral, such as immunisation, and can lead to conflicting groups uniting on specific issues and further result in increased legitimacy.
Research into the gaps in provision, delivery and access of basic services has queried whether social protection interventions have contributed to state-building processes.
It is widely believed that multilateral intervention can interrupt the conflict trap of fragile states and set countries on a path toward postwar economic and political development.
Responding to the failure of governance in fragile states, scholars have proposed new models of intervention, including neo-trusteeship and shared sovereignty.
They support developing agreements that authorize international intervention whereby the costs of third-party peacekeeping and state-building would increasingly be borne by the state being reconstructed.
[20] Another kind of opinion has been the autonomous recovery - fragile states can recover from a conflict in the absence of intervention and may be able to develop effective institutions of government out of warfare.
Examples of Uganda, Eritrea, and Somalia support the theory of autonomous recovery, where these weak states successfully achieved a lasting peace, a systematic reduction in violence, and post-war political and economic development in the absence of international intervention.
In order to design interventions aimed at promoting inclusive institutions when the status quo witnesses prevalently weak state structures, tractability of theoretically analyzing regime transitions is critical.
[26] According to Larry Diamond, in many of the fragile states promoting democracy is difficult simply because they lack the classic facilitating conditions for democracy—more developed levels of per capita income, civil society, independent mass media, political parties, mass democratic attitudes and values, and so on—but because they lack as well the more basic conditions of a viable political order.
Individuals in fragile states often rely on non-state actors such as chiefs, tribal elders, secret societies, gangs, militias, insurgents, community or religious leaders to meet their justice and security needs.
The interlinkage of PSD on state society relations therefore definitely remain an area for further exploration and should receive greater attention in academic circles and among practitioners in respective publications.
If a state cannot tax reasonably or spend responsibly a key element of statehood is missing, claim researchers at the Overseas Development Institute and World Bank.
Blattman and Annan conducted a study on how employment reduced risk of returning to violence for high-risk men after the Second Liberian Civil War.
[32] The study was on a program that provided agricultural training and capital inputs to the ex-fighters who still own rubber plantations or participated in illicit mining for precious minerals or logging.
They found that the men responded well to agricultural training, reduced their illicit extraction of materials by roughly 20%, and about a quarter were less likely to be willing to fight in the election crisis in Côte d'Ivoire.
[33] The report finds that in fragile regions, where inequality persists and the government is unable to respond to stresses, the impacts of climate change on water, food and land will multiply existing pressures.