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The world is getting more violent, and violence is occurring in surprising places. Over the past 15 years, 3.34 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population, have been affected by violence. The number of violent conflicts is decreasing, but conflicts are killing more people: conflict-related deaths have tripled since 2003. Violent extremism and terrorism are also on the rise. The economic cost of violence is rising too: the global economic impact of violence is a staggering USD 13.6 trillion, equivalent to 13.3% of Global GDP. And civilians, especially children and women, are most at risk.
States of Fragility 2016: Understanding Violence takes a long hard look at violence in the world – and what we should do about it. The report showcases emerging thinking about violence, presents a new risk-based approach to monitoring various dimensions of fragility, and looks at financial flows in support of fragile contexts. Understanding Violence finds that development, peace and security efforts in the developing world have not kept pace with the new reality of violence. We need to dedicate more resources and attention to violence. And to be effective, we need to put people – especially youth – at the centre of our efforts.
Three years into the 2030 Agenda it is already apparent that those living in fragile contexts are the furthest behind. Not all forms of fragility make it to the public’s eye: fragility is an intricate beast, sometimes exposed, often lurking underneath, but always holding progress back. Conflict, forced displacement, violent extremism, famine etc. are all causes and consequences of fragility. Hence the need to better understand, anticipate and respond to fragility.
States of Fragility 2018 exposes the critical challenge posed by fragility in achieving the aspirations of the 2030 Agenda, sustainable development and peace. It highlights twelve key aspects of fragility, defying common assumptions and simplistic categorisation. It documents progress made in fragile situations on attaining sustainable development, unveiling exit doors from the fragility trap. It then illustrates the current state of financing to address fragility and suggests more effective approaches, accounting for its multidimensionality.
Above all, the report aims to strike a balance between fragility's inherent complexity and the degree of simplicity that is required for efficient policy and decision making, namely through systems-based thinking; longer-term, consistent aid plans; the financing of peace; and a persistent focus on human beings.
States of Fragility 2020 sets a policy agenda for fragility at a critical turning point: the final countdown on Agenda 2030 is at hand, and the pandemic has reversed hard-fought gains. This report examines fragility as a story in two parts: the global state of fragility that existed before COVID-19, and the dramatic impact the pandemic is having on that landscape. It acknowledges the severe reality of fragility in its multidimensionality and complexity. It explores thinking and practice on fragility to propose new ideas on human capital analysis and conflict prevention in order to adapt policy for more resilient outcomes. With a thematic emphasis on peace in fragile contexts, it highlights the important role of peacebuilders, diplomats, and security actors for peace, and builds the case for enhanced complementarity and coherence across the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus. It concludes by reconciling theory with practice to explore what it means to work effectively in fragile contexts. Focusing on fragility will be imperative to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies that leave no one behind.
States of Fragility 2022 arrives during an ‘age of crises’, where multiple, concurring crises are disproportionately affecting the 60 fragile contexts identified in this year’s report. Chief among these crises are COVID-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change, with the root causes of multidimensional fragility playing a central role in shaping their scale and severity. The report outlines the state of fragility in 2022, reviews current responses to it, and presents options to guide better policies for better lives in fragile contexts. At the halfway point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is more critical than ever for development partners to focus on the furthest behind: the 1.9 billion people in fragile contexts that account for 24% of the world’s population but 73% of the world’s extreme poor.
This book features the results of a stocktaking exercise of business integrity and anti-bribery policies for 20 countries in Africa. It is the result of a collaborative initative between OECD and the African Development Bank. Countries covered include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
The principles of sustainable development play an integral role in making development assistance work at the level of policies, plans and programmes. In response to the Paris Declaration call to “… develop and apply common approaches for ‘Strategic Environmental Assessment’ at sector and national levels” among donors and partners, the Guidance on Applying Strategic Environmental Assessment was endorsed in 2006 by members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, representatives of developing countries receiving aid, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and many other agencies. Since then, a growing number of countries at all levels of development have legislation or regulations prescribing the application of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and many more are introducing it as part of their policy tools. This is creating unique opportunities for better policy making and planning by incorporating environmental considerations into high-level decision-making and opening new mechanisms to build consensus on development priorities within governments themselves and between governments and societies.
Many development co-operation agencies and their partners are already making good progress in applying SEA. This publication presents the nine most interesting case studies of SEA in progress, selected from a total 100. These nine cases highlight that SEA can:
• Safeguard environmental assets for sustainable poverty reduction and development;
• Build public engagement in decision making;
• Prevent costly mistakes by alerting decision-makers to potentially unsustainable development options at an early stage in the decision-making process;
• Speed up implementation of projects and programmes;
• Facilitate co-operation around shared environmental resources and contribute to conflict prevention.
This publication provides policy guidance on good practice in developing and implementing strategies for sustainable development. While it focuses on the experience of developing countries, many of the issues covered and lessons drawn are of equal relevance to developed countries. It draws from international experience over the past two decades in both developed and developing countries as well as from a process of multi-stakeholders dialogue in Bolivia, Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Tanzania and Thailand, to assess their experience of country-level strategies for sustainable development.
The DAC Guidelines on Strategies for Sustainable Development aim to provide guidance for development co-operation agencies in their efforts to assist developing countries towards sustainable development. They should also be of value to policy-makers, planners and development practitioners, as well as to academics, students and development analysts in all countries.
This guidance provides a tool governments and development co-operation can draw on in their efforts to strengthen the resilience of human and natural systems to the impacts of climate change. It highlights three aspirations to consider when planning and implementing action to build climate resilience (country ownership; inclusiveness; and environmental and social sustainability). The guidance also outlines four mechanisms (governance; sector-level approaches; finance; and monitoring, evaluation and learning) and three enablers (data and information; capacity; and technologies) in support of climate resilience, proposing concrete actions in the form of checklists.
Many Emerging Asian countries have been refining macroprudential policies, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis. For instance, they have developed policies targeting housing markets and broadly transposed the Basel III requirements into their national legislation. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers now need to identify emerging vulnerabilities and their associated financial stability risks and respond with the appropriate macroprudential tools.
This publication provides a detailed overview of the current macroprudential policy situation in Emerging Asian countries and explores how the macroprudential policy toolkit has evolved. The report discusses some of the most pressing challenges to financial stability, including the interaction of macroprudential policy with other policies. It also devotes special attention to macroprudential policies for emerging priorities, such as achieving green goals and updating regulatory frameworks to reflect ongoing Fintech developments. Climate change will indeed create new challenges in financial markets, while Fintech developments bring about many economic opportunities and deepen financial systems, but present a variety of novel risks requiring rapid policy responses.
More than 8 000 large multi-purpose water infrastructures (MPWIs) around the world contribute to economic development, as well as water, food and energy security, encompassing all human-made water systems including dams, dykes, reservoirs and associated irrigation canals and water supply networks. Focused on the specific case of the Shardara MPWI located in Low Syr-Darya Basin, South Kazakhstan and Kyzyl-Orda oblasts (provinces) of Kazakhstan, this report looks at the choice and design of MPWI investment strategies that ensure a high economic return on investments and potential bankability, based on application of a computer model and lessons learned from 15 international MPWI case studies.
Developing countries want to join in the globalisation process. However, the increasing complexity of global markets, the new challenges of the multilateral trading system and the competing demands of regional, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements confront developing countries with an expanding array of competitiveness and policy challenges. And, in many cases, they lack the institutional and human resource capacity to meet these challenges.
The DAC Guidelines on Strengthening Trade Capacity for Development have been prepared on the basis of an emerging international consensus and understanding of how the international community can work together more effectively. They intend to help developing countries enhance their capacity to trade and participate more effectively in the international rule-making and institutional mechanisms that shape the global trading system. They also provide a common reference point for the trade, aid and finance communities, putting trade capacity building in the context of comprehensive approaches to development and poverty reduction.
Over the period 2006 to 2010 capacity development was treated as a special topic in a total of 19 peer reviews in recognition of its increasing importance in development co-operation. In addition, how DAC members work to support capacity development in their partner countries has been discussed in many other peer reviews under the heading of aid effectiveness. This booklet draws out some common themes or lessons regarding capacity development from these peer reviews, including technical co-operation which is one of the main forms of DAC members’ assistance to partner countries. The lessons are focused on how DAC members can reform their technical co-operation and other practices to better support partners to develop their own capacity. The booklet includes examples of DAC members’ practices and experiences, and sketches out the challenges donors still face as they move towards better support for capacity development.
Functioning states are essential for reducing poverty, sustaining peace and achieving agreed development goals. Despite receiving growing international attention in recent years, fragile states are falling behind other low-income countries in human development. Fragility – and its negative consequences – can destabilise entire regions and have global repercussions. Tackling the challenges associated with fragility requires a concerted international effort to support sustainable statebuilding processes, based on robust state-society relations.
Supporting Statebuilding in Situations of Conflict and Fragility: Policy Guidance presents new thinking on statebuilding and clear recommendations for better practice. It provides an internationally accepted conceptual framework for statebuilding, informed by today’s realities of conflict-affected and fragile situations. Building on good practices already being successfully applied on the ground, this guidance lays out how developing and developed countries can better facilitate positive statebuilding processes and strengthen the foundations upon which capable and legitimate states are built. The recommendations in this guidance address critical areas for better international engagement from strategy development and programme design and delivery to day-to-day operations in the field and at headquarters.
This report describes the progress achieved to date in implementing the donor community’s commitments to improve foreign aid effectiveness. It has been prepared as a contribution to the Paris High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (28 February - 2 March 2005).
To measure aid effectiveness, 14 countries participated in a ground-breaking survey in 2004 that measured aid harmonisation and alignment. Herein lie the results. Generally encouraging, the results show that developing countries and donors are indeed working together to improve co-ordination and aid effectiveness. Increased efforts are needed, however. This volume provides a snapshot of the state of affairs in 14 developing countries and highlights a number of suggestions for carrying the Rome Agenda forward.
Adopting more sustainable ways of managing the ocean is a global priority: protecting its health will bring benefits to all. Developing countries face specific challenges, as many depend heavily on ocean-based industries and are overly exposed to the consequences of ocean degradation. Enhancing their access to science, policy advice and financing would allow them to tap better into the opportunities of a more sustainable ocean economy, including more decent jobs, cleaner energy, improved food security and enhanced resilience, while contributing to the protection of the world’s ocean.
This report provides policy makers in developing countries, as well as their development co-operation partners with a wealth of fresh evidence on (i) the latest trends in selected ocean-based industries; (ii) policy instruments, including economic incentives, to promote ocean sustainability in various contexts; (iii) the first review of development finance and development co-operation practices in support of more sustainable ocean economies, including a discussion of how development co-operation can help re-orient private finance towards sustainability.
Two-thirds of the world's poor live in Asia. The major objective for the region, therefore, must be to reduce poverty. It has become clear in the wake of the crisis that the public sector can no longer shoulder the burden of financing pro-poor growth alone. At the same time, it is also clear that official aid flows throughout the world, and particularly in Asia, have been declining since the middle of the 1990s. Therefore, the private sector must be encouraged to provide at least part of the financing. This is the major message of the book. Two ways of achieving this are proposed. One is to attract more foreign direct investment and portfolio investment, rather than to rely on borrowing, to reduce financial vulnerability. The other is to promote partnerships between the state and the private sector, rather than simply to privatise the more lucrative branches of publicly owned and operated services. This book, co-edited by the OECD Development Centre and the Asian Development Bank, presents an original and comprehensive approach to the problem of obtaining support for maintaining development projects in the wake of the global financial crisis. The book brings together varied and complementary opinions from participants -- from the worlds of business, finance, government, academia and the media -- in the sixth annual International Forum on Asian Perspectives, held in Paris in July 2000. Sustainable Recovery in Asia: Mobilising Resources for Development constitutes a reference work on Asia and provides an excellent basis for policy advice for governments and policy makers.
For many OECD countries, how to ensure the safe and dignified return to their origin countries of migrants who do not have grounds to remain is a key question. Alongside removal, return and reintegration assistance have become an integral part of the response. Development cooperation is expanding its activity to support the capacity of countries of origin to reintegrate all returning migrants.
Sustainable Reintegration of Returning Migrants: A Better Homecoming reports the results of a multi-country peer review project carried out by the OECD, with support from the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It examines factors that can help improve the sustainability of reintegration at the individual level and at the programme level in countries of destination and origin. The report examines how casework and community-based programmes can increase uptake and improve outcomes. It identifies key elements of an effective individual reintegration programme, including outreach and counselling, case management and referral, and partnerships. The report makes proposals about how to improve programme design, evaluation, and monitoring, indicating areas where countries could co-operate more in implementation of programmes and in coordination with origin countries.
Governments and providers of development co-operation increasingly use Sustainable Development Goal indicators to guide their policies and practices. The close examination of three large recipients of development co-operation: Ethiopia, Kenya and Myanmar across the sectors of Education, Sanitation and Energy reveals four inter-related challenges in using SDG indicators at country level. First, the cost of using specific SDG indicators varies in relation to indicator complexity – complementary investments in country statistical systems may be necessary. Second, providers synchronising their country-level results planning with partner countries find it easier to align to and measure SDG indicators together with the partner country and other providers. Third, reliance on joint monitoring approaches is helping providers reduce the cost of SDG monitoring. Finally, while disaggregating SDG data by gender and by urban-rural dimensions is common, other data disaggregation relevant to ensure that no one is left behind are rare.