Public Group on Fragility and Crisis Situations

Topic overview

SUMMARY

• Promoting resilience in situations of conflict and fragility means factoring in the state’s incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions, and the looming shadow of armed conflict.
• The added value of the resilience approach resides in (i) addressing not only the symptoms of the crisis but also its root causes; and (ii) synergising across policy communities. This approach holds great promise in situations of conflict and fragility.
• Both the symptoms and the root causes of a crisis need to be addressed — this is particularly important in situations of conflict and fragility, where history tends to repeat itself.
• When identifying the causes of crisis and how they interact, process matters. It is also useful to identify areas of both risk and resilience.
• Mapping ongoing and planned interventions will help to identify gaps, contradictions overlaps, and areas for greater synergy, as well as consider their sustainability.
• Designing a resilience programme, or more generally applying the resilience approach, entails learning from past experience, addressing both emergency needs and longer-term resilience building, and factoring in risk.
• Implementing a resilience approach requires special attention to coordination mechanisms; thinking about peacebuilding and state-building issues from Day 1, even if they are long-term issues; and engaging with national counterparts according to context.

Definitions. Resilience is defined as ‘the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, to adapt, and to quickly recover from stresses and shocks’ (2012 Communication). Fragile situations are those ‘where the social contract is broken due to the State’s incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions’ (2007 Communication). In practice, the two concepts largely overlap: with only a few exceptions, all countries deemed ‘highly vulnerable’ (see vulnerability and crisis assessment indicators) are in a conflict or fragile situation. Promoting resilience in situations of conflict and fragility means factoring in a weak or unaccountable state, and the looming shadow of armed conflict (past, present or probable).

The value of the resilience approach resides in (i) addressing not only the symptoms of a crisis (which can be sudden or slow onset) but also its causes and (ii) synergising across policy communities. This approach holds the greatest promise in situations of conflict and fragility, where poor government performance, a history of social exclusion and the legacy of armed conflict tend to linger — and history tends to repeat itself (one in two countries reverts to conflict within five years of a peace agreement). These are also situations where synergy across policy communities is essential to avoid doing harm and achieve lasting impact. In particular, the short-term response to emergency needs must also be designed so as not to undermine longer-term development prospects.

A crisis can be human-made or natural, but in fragile contexts, it always combines many dimensions and makes the population (or part of the population) acutely and chronically vulnerable.

• When a human-made crisis occurs in a context of fragility, it is often because the features of fragility combine to explode into a crisis, often triggered by one event, or a series of events — for example in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (2010–11). Then, the crisis leaves a legacy that makes fragility and conflict chronic. The resurgence of conflict in the Central African Republic and South Sudan end-2013 are cases in point, with 1 000 casualties and thousands displaced in a matter of months.
• When a natural disaster occurs in a context of fragility, the features of fragility (‘state incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions’, social exclusion or armed conflict) also make vulnerability acute and chronic. For example:
  • Graph 1 shows the correlation between political instability and food insecurity in Yemen;
  • Somalia, a country rife with conflict and without an effective government since 1991, has not surprisingly suffered the brunt of the 2011 food crisis in the Horn of Africa;
  • the 2010 Haiti earthquake was much more deadly than the Chile earthquake, and quickly combined with pre-existing conditions (limited state responsiveness, extreme poverty and social exclusion) and other crises (cholera).

The 2013–2020 Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis-Prone Countries notes this heightened vulnerability: fragile settings are ‘more vulnerable to internal or external shocks such as economic crises, conflicts or natural disasters’ than other contexts. Indeed, ‘in fragile and conflict affected states, household vulnerability and the lack of sustainable development are closely linked to state fragility and conflict’.

In cases of both natural and human-made crises, not only the symptoms of the crisis but also its causes need to be addressed to avoid history repeating itself. In a situation of conflict or fragility — i.e. where there is ‘state incapacity or unwillingness to deal with its basic functions’, social exclusion or armed conflict — addressing the causes of crisis entails including peacebuilding and state-building as part of the intervention package. This is not without challenges, as peacebuilding and state-building can be outside the remit of humanitarian actors (not to mention the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence), and only partially within the remit of development actors. However, the Action Plan emphasises the need, in fragile states, to ‘secure stability and meet basic needs for populations in the short term while at the same time strengthening governance, capacity and economic growth, keeping state-building as a central element’.

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