Plenary Summary: From Failing States To Development—A Giant Leap

Today, most of the world’s poor live in middle-income or fragile countries, turning the transition from fragile state to fully-functioning state into one of the most crucial points in development. Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council, spoke to InterAction’s Forum about transitioning states just hours after having returned from the Horn of Africa. She pointed out that the most successful transitions can take up to 30 years, and that the international community needs to start including development work from the beginning of the relief phase in order to make them successful.

Following Smith’s address, a panel of experts discussed the topic: Nancy Lindborg, USAID’s assistant administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance; George Rupp, president & CEO of the International Rescue Committee; and Sarah Cliffe, director and special representative of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011. The session was moderated by Joel Charny, InterAction’s vice president for humanitarian affairs.

Lindborg emphasized that transition processes must be locally-driven and focus on the relationships between the recipient country’s citizens and its institutions. Cliffe highlighted some of the findings from the World Development Report 2011, including the need to build confidence in national institutions and the need to focus on security, justice and unemployment. Rupp pointed out that the international aid architecture has become siloed between relief and development, and pointed out that NGOs funded by both the relief and development branches of an institution—for example, by UNHCR and UNDP—have the opportunity to integrate relief and development in a way that the grantmaker is fundamentally unable to do.

The panel sparked an in-depth discussion on questions from the audience, and closed with a challenge from Charny: “Let’s get it right in South Sudan.” He said that if the new nation’s transition cannot be done correctly with all of the current global political support, we may never get another opportunity to demonstrate how the process should go.

By Tawana Jacobs, associate director of public relations at InterAction