Originally intended to help mobilise aid flows to ‘fragile states’, the OECD’s 2020 States of Fragility report is the thirteenth edition of a long series first published in 2005.
Its intentions at the outset were arguably laudable. But for years, the backlash against the ‘fragile or failed states’ terminology plagued the report, which was re-named in 2015 to ‘States of Fragility’. Today, the report refers to ‘fragile contexts’ instead of ‘fragile states’ and has usefully reconfigured fragility as ‘global and dynamic’. But it still focuses on a group of now 57 countries, against which multiple odds are simultaneously stacked.
But Covid-19 has exposed deep fragilities in the ‘developed’ world too. Declining institutional and democratic norms suggest interesting parallels between states deemed fragile and those that are not.
So, has the time come for a radical rethink of fragility? In this blog post, three ODI experts share their takes on the future of fragility in the development sector.