How should state fragility be measured?

There remains no internationally agreed-upon definition of state fragility, but this hasn’t stopped several institutions from attempting to measure it. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which defines a fragile state as a country with “weak capacity to carry out basic governance functions, and lacks the ability to develop mutual constructive relations with society,” uses the “harmonized averages” from the World Bank and the rankings from the Fund for Peace to monitor official development assistance to fragile states. Bilateral donors usually turn to the World Bank assessment, while social science researchers generally cite the Center for Systemic Peace’s index to measure the characteristics of a country’s political regime. While OECD acknowledges that such lists are not used to define fragile states, it does note that measures of fragile states are helpful tools because they monitor countries using specific indicators and flag areas that warrant further research. READ MORE: Are donors living up to their promise to fragile states? Current fragility assessments Since 2006, the World Bank has been assessing countries’ fragility through what it calls its “harmonized list of fragile situations”: If a country either has a harmonized average — a number that takes into account both the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment score and the CPIA score from the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank — equal to or lower than 3.2, or a United Nations or a regional peace-building or peacekeeping mission in the past three years, then it is considered fragile. The Center for Systemic Peace has a different approach. Its State Fragility Index and Matrix, which was introduced in the “Global Report on Conflict, Governance and State Fragility 2007,” scores the effectiveness and legitimacy of countries in security, political, economic and social areas. It then classifies countries into five categories: 0 to 3 (no fragility), 4 to 7 (low fragility), 8 to 15 (medium fragility), 16 to 19 (high fragility) and 20 to 25 (very high fragility). The Fund for Peace, meanwhile, marked the 10th year that it published its Fragile States Index last month. Formerly known as the Failed States Index, the FSI shed its more controversial name because the Fund for Peace found that the index attracted “more conversations about terminology than substance.” Some governments, according to the Fund for Peace, have also conveniently resorted to the term “failed states” to absolve themselves of the responsibility to address the problems that the FSI highlights through 12 indicators: • Demographic pressures. • Refugees and IDPs. • Group grievance. • Human flight. • Uneven development. • Poverty and economic decline. • Legitimacy of the state. • Public services. • Human rights. • Security apparatus. • Factionalized elites. • External intervention. The World Bank’s harmonized list of fragile situations for fiscal year 2014, the Center for Systemic Peace’s SFI 2013, and the Fund for Peace’s FSI 2014 all give a snapshot of state fragility in 2013. A review of these lists shows that Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan are deemed the most fragile states currently. Based on their harmonized averages, Somalia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Zimbabwe and Sudan — with scores ranging from 1.2 to 2.5 — were the five most fragile states in the World Bank’s 2014 list. The SFI 2013 has seven countries with “very high fragility”: Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. Meanwhile, the FSI 2014’s five most fragile countries, all with the “very high alert” assessment, are South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan. ‘Fragile’ measures? At best, lists of fragile states are a handy measure of weak state capacities. But it’s important to remember that these numbers also approximate actual situations. These lists, after all, are “often compiled without input from a state’s leadership or involvement of governmental actors and civil society,” according to the OECD. Fragility measures can also be constrained by how they’re calculated. Merely looking at their harmonized averages in the World Bank list seems to imply that South Sudan, which is facing the threat of a famine, and Zimbabwe — two countries with different situations but both with a 2.2 score — are equally fragile. The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group itself has acknowledged that using the CPIA for determining fragile situations “has proved to be problematic in recent years.” The current method, according to the World Bank, tends “not to capture the nuances, fluid nature and multidimensional complexities of the concepts of state fragility, conflict or instability.” Meanwhile, Bridget Coggins, international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that one of the FSI’s flaws is its equally weighted indicators. For instance, Foreign Policy concluded that North Korea is “less fragile than one might think, as the … ‘human flight’ indicator shows.” At first glance, this assessment seems indisputable: North Korea, after all, also scores low in the “refugees and IDPs” indicator. But a closer look at the underlying indicators that comprise North Korea’s overall score in the FSI shows that this may be a sweeping conclusion. North Korea has some of the worst rankings in four of the 12 FSI indicators: poverty and economic decline, legitimacy of the state, public services and human rights. Its low scores in both the “refugees and IDPs” and “human flight” indicators, meanwhile, may very well be a reflection of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s crackdown on defections — a situation that has led to a swelling prison population in the country. Meanwhile, Vision of Humanity, in its Global Peace Index 2014 report, noted that the CPIA, SFI and FSI are limited when used as predictive tools since these measures tend to capture “realized fragility” instead of “potential fragility.” A different approach While current fragility lists provide a snapshot of countries’ shaky spots, their weaknesses seem to imply that these measures are themselves perhaps also fragile — or at least, less rigid under closer scrutiny. To give a more comprehensive picture of state fragility, some institutions have been working on their own fragility measures. The German Development Institute is developing a tool called the Multidimensional Empirical Typology of state fragility. Instead of arranging countries on a linear scale, the MET will classify fragility into four types: a capacity gap (weak states), legitimacy gap (repressive autocracies), security gap (violence-ridden societies) or a combination of all three gaps (“failing,” often war-torn states). This approach, according to the OECD, could allow for “more context-sensitive policy formulation.” The ADB is likewise working on its own multidimensional index to assess the driving factors behind fragile and conflict-affected states. The index, which will be “comparable across countries and time,” will take into account economic, state, conflict and justice, and security and peace dimensions, as well as environmental sustainability and “world risk,” or a country’s available coping infrastructure for natural hazards. “Fragility is such a complex and multidimensional issue that it is very difficult to be captured in one measure or index,” Guntur Sugiyarto, senior economist at ADB, told Devex. Meanwhile, g7+, a self-identified group of countries that are or have been affected by conflict, is also redefining how state fragility is measured through a “fragility spectrum,” which assesses fragility from their perspective along “peace- and state-building goals.” This addresses the usual lack of “insider perspective” within fragility measures that the OECD has pointed out. Of course, these attempts are no guarantee that there will be more accurate depictions of state fragility. But at the very least, more measures could further refine the way we understand — and perhaps eventually, define — it. Check out more insights and analysis provided to hundreds of Executive Members worldwide, and subscribe to the Development Insider to receive the latest news, trends and policies that influence your organization.