Being from a developing country, I was a bit sceptical of the power of government action. The absence of adequate government services made me doubt the possibility of having an impact from the public sector. At the time, my country was going through ten years of political and economic instability. During that period, we had seven presidents, three of which were publicly elected and didn’t finish their constitutional mandate due to popular dissatisfaction. Talking about state capability seemed like a utopia. That feeling is probably not dissimilar to those in other places. In fact, the numbers elsewhere could be even more discouraging.
The State Capability Index 2012 measured the state capacity of 102 countries and the ability to increase their initial capacity in a 16-year period. Only eight countries were classified as having ‘strong’ capability. Twice as many, 17, were considered ‘fragile’ states; and since the population of these fragile states is much bigger, the life of half a billion people is affected by the inefficiencies of these governments. At their current pace of capacity growth, it will take ‘fragile states’ basically ‘forever’ to reach an average capability. But even for those in better conditions, it could take hundreds or even thousands of years to get to an average level of capacity. There is an urgency to act and a need to do things differently.
Improving the capacity of governments to function is not an option but an imperative.
There is no replacement for the state, therefore improving the capacity of governments to function is not an option but an imperative. Even when financial resources are not a constraint, a weak state won’t be able to effectively take advantage of those resources for the wellbeing of the majority of their population. There is sometimes the belief that substituting the ‘inefficient state’ with international organizations, the market or non-profits working in parallel to the government, could be a solution. But even if that proves to be true in the short run, it is not a sustainable solution in the long run. When the patch measures implemented by those non-governmental organizations finish, we are back to zero, with a non-functioning state that is unable to provide services to its citizens.
Haiti is a good illustration of the fact that there is no substitute for the state. Before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and had very weak state capacity. After the shock, close to 6 billion dollars in official aid was disbursed to Haiti. This is almost equivalent to the country’s entire GDP at the time. Half of those contributions were given to NGOs. The government received only one percent of humanitarian aid and between 15 to 21 percent of long-term relief aid. ‘NGOs and private contractors became a parallel state more powerful than the government itself,’ according to a 2012 policy paper by the Center for Global Development. These nongovernmental organizations and contractors provided infrastructure and social services with very limited accountability.
In capital investment, the International Development Bank (IDB) became the major donor after the U.S., with 1.2 billion-dollar grants between 2011 and 2015. In an evaluation of the IDB’s strategy in Haiti, the Office of Evaluation and Oversight at the IDB acknowledges that, just like other international organizations, resources were not systematically programmed in the country’s budget planning process. While it could have been necessary at a certain point, the report suggests that the new five-year country strategy should focus on the country’s structural problems, like building Haiti’s long-term institutional capacity.
There is no other organization that has the capacity of a government to impact the lives of millions of people. When public policies are designed and implemented in a responsible and honest way, the power for transformation is huge. To achieve that, as in any organization, public institutions also require a constant search for efficiency and innovation, and assessment to ensure that objectives and results are achieved. Perhaps it is true that the best way to create successful governments is by solving problems. However, that also requires building the state’s capacity from within, a process of organizational transformation, to sustain the changes in the long run.
A version of this article was also published by IMAGO
Photo credit: Michael Gaida on Pixabay
