Fragility Commission 3rd Evidence Session: Generating effective state capacity

The LSE-Oxford Fragility Commission’s third evidence session took place at the London School of Economics on 11 July 2017 and was focused on the topic of generating effective state capacity.

In fragile situations, governments typically have little capacity. This must be recognised not only as a problem to be addressed but also as a constraint upon what government can effectively do. In designing strategy there has been a tendency to navigate by what is wrong, rather than by what can realistically be delivered. Since so many things are wrong in fragile situations, while capacity is very limited, this has overloaded agendas, making comprehensive failure more likely. In turn, since bureaucracies learn more from success than from failure, widespread failure has impeded the building of capacity. Hence, in fragile environments, providing the public goods that are critical for human development and economic growth raises new challenges for established theory and policy in terms of prioritising and sequencing interventions.

Four witnesses delivered opening remarks and discussed this important topic with the Commissioners.

The video of the session will be available soon.

For more information, please contact Elisabetta Pilati, [email protected].