Overview
Clare Lockhart, is another way of managing different perspectives on risk, the speed of response, and long-term engagement with national institutions—by making dual accountability of donor funds explicit.71
Monitoring results To evaluate the success of programs and adapt them when problems arise, national reformers and their international partners in country also need information on overall results in reducing violence, and on citizen confidence in security, justice, and employment goals at regular intervals. For most developing countries, the MDGs and their associated targets and indicators are the dominant international framework. The MDGs have raised the profile of broad-based human development and remain important long-term goals for countries facing fragility and violence. But they have drawbacks in their direct relevance to progress in violence prevention and recovery. They do not cover citizen security and justice. They move slowly, so they do not provide national reformers or their international partners with rapid feedback loops that can demonstrate areas of progress and identify new or remaining risks. A useful supplement to the MDGs would be indicators that more directly measure violence reduction, confidence-building and citizen security and justice (Feature 4). Citizen polling data, glaringly absent in many fragile and conflict-affected countries, could help fill this role.72 Middle- and higherincome countries use polling all the time to provide governments with feedback on progress and risks, but it is little used in low-
income, fragile countries. Direct measurement of security improvements can also show rapid progress, but while data on violent deaths are fairly easy to collect, they are not available for the countries that would benefit most from them: low-income, fragile states. Employment data also need to be upgraded.
Differentiating strategy and programs to country context While there is a basic set of tools emerging from experience, each country needs to assess its circumstances and adapt lessons from others to the local political context. Each country faces different stresses, different institutional challenges, different stakeholders who need to be involved to make a difference, and different types of transition opportunities. The differences are not black and white but occur across a spectrum—each country will have different manifestations of violence, different combinations of internal or external stresses, and different institutional challenges—and these factors will change over time. But all countries face some aspects of this mix. The Report covers some of the most important differences in country circumstances through the simple differentiation shown below. National reformers and their country counterparts need to take two types of decisions in each phase of confidence-building and institutional reform, taking into account the local political context. First is to decide the types of signals—both immediate actions and announcements on early results and longer-term policies—that can help build “inclusive-enough” collaborative coalitions for change. Second is to decide on the design
Spectra of situation-specific challenges and opportunities Types of violence: Civil and/or criminal and/or cross-border and/or sub-national and/or ideological Transition opportunity: Gradual/limited to immediate/major space for change
Key stakeholders: Internal versus external stakeholders; state versus nonstate stakeholders; low-income versus middle-high income stakeholders
Key stresses: Internal versus external stresses; high versus low level of divisions among groups
Institutional challenges: Degree of capacity, accountability, and inclusion
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