Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: Exploring the Relationship Between Governance, Instability and Violence

‘Fragile and conflict-affected states’ (FCAS) constitute an increasingly important category of aid policy and action. But the category comprises a large and heterogeneous set of countries, problematizing coherent policy response which is often awkwardly split between boilerplate strategy and case-by-case approach. In both respects, efficiency of aid allocations is questionable. There is a need to disaggregate the category into smaller groups of countries, understood according to a more nuanced interpretation of the nature of their fragility. Disaggregation, however, is challenging insofar as it is hard to find a stable reference point internal to the category by which states’ relative performance – and causes of performance – can be determined. An alternative approach is to seek a reference point external to the entire FCAS category – for example a multilateral initiative – which allows us to explore systematic differences between those who sign up and those who do not. This research took the UN’s Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative as such a mechanism. Splitting FCAS into two groups – those who had joined SUN within its initial two-year phase and those who had not – we reviewed a range of social, economic, political, institutional and conflict/instability indicators to identify areas of significant difference. An unexpected finding was that while SUN-joiners performed statistically better on governance, there was no difference between joiners and non-joiners on the level of instability and violence they suffered, suggesting that some countries, even at high levels of conflict disruption, can achieve areas of relatively good governance.