The OECD’s Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD) has produced Fragile States reports since 2005. These reports explore trends and financial resource flows in fragile and conflict-affected countries and economies. They respond to increasing concerns about the implications of fragility for stability and development, especially in the context of Agenda 2030 and the international promise to “leave no one behind”. The OECD remains one of only a handful of sources of aggregate data and analysis for fragile contexts as a group. In line with the new, multidimensional concept of fragility that began with the 2015 report, the OECD’s annual publications are now referred to as States of Fragility.

Fragility poses a major global threat to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In 2016, more countries experienced some form of violent conflict than at any time in the past 30 years. Close to 26 000 people died from terrorist attacks and 560 000 people lost their lives because of violence. The number of displaced people in the world is the highest since the end of the Second World War. Last year, the world faced four concurrent famines.

States of Fragility 2018 demonstrates the need to invest in more ambitious results. The report is published at a time when the collective ambitions of Agenda 2030 – a call to action for people, planet, prosperity and peace – are three years into delivery. Yet delivery of results is already in jeopardy. The 58 contexts classified as fragile in the OECD’s 2018 fragility framework are stark reminders that fragility, in all its multiple manifestations, has the potential to spoil the realisation of this collective ambition, and leave people living in these places far behind.

This opening chapter provides an overview of 12 key trends shaping the fragility landscape in 2018. The first trend sets the stage by summarising the current conceptual understanding of fragility and its evolution over time. The chapter’s discussion of this and the additional 11 trends further demonstrates the breadth of issues that affect, and are affected by, fragility. Taken together, these 12 trends show the importance of addressing fragility across its many facets. They also show the importance of striking a balance between two needs, recognising fragility’s complexity and translating this complex concept into practical policies and action.

This chapter provides a snapshot of fragility in the world today. It introduces the 2018 OECD fragility framework and the 58 fragile contexts included in it. It looks at how levels of fragility have changed since the States of Fragility 2016 report, reviewing areas of improvement and deterioration across the five dimensions of fragility for a selection of contexts. It also examines the two contexts that moved out of the framework and the four contexts that moved into the framework. Building on the multidimensional approach to fragility introduced in the 2016 report, this chapter offers an aggregate picture of fragility and explains a cluster analysis to assess levels of economic, environmental, political, security and societal fragility.

Chapter 3 presents initial progress made by fragile contexts towards the Sustainable Development Goals and other development indicators, stressing as well the unique challenges fragile contexts face in meeting global development ambitions. It addresses some of the challenges of collecting data and measuring progress on sustainable development in fragile contexts and then compares the 58 fragile contexts in the fragility framework against a range of issues associated with sustainable development. Among the issues considered are projected population growth, the growing concentration of global poverty in vulnerable settings and the impact of violence in fragile contexts. This chapter also looks at the issue of governance and fragility, in particular performance in delivery of basic services and public goods such as education and health, and discusses the challenges of inequality in fragile contexts.

This chapter provides an overview of official development assistance (ODA) to fragile contexts, looks at who is providing it, where it is spent and how it is spent. It examines the mounting significance of humanitarian assistance in fragile contexts, especially extremely fragile contexts, and how it affects the development finance landscape. The chapter also looks at the distribution of aid among different fragile contexts and among sectors, highlighting the concentration of ODA in a limited number of aid darlings. It concludes with a review of donor engagement in fragile contexts by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and by non-DAC members and the channels of delivery for aid to fragile and extremely fragile contexts.

Chapter 5 presents different ways to measure aid flows for preventing fragility, conflict and violence and for sustaining peace. Noting that no agreed international system for measuring and tracking peace and security spending exists, this chapter looks at aid to fragile contexts through the lenses of conflict prevention, peacebuilding, the New Deal Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals, and the arenas of contestation introduced in the 2018 UN-World Bank Pathways for Peace study. The approach in this chapter, then, helps to provide a baseline for translating policy commitments on prevention and sustaining peace into financial and programmatic action. It also identifies trends and gaps in financing since 2010, arguing overall for the urgent prioritisation of the financing of conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

Chapter 6 summarises sources of external development finance available to fragile contexts other than official development assistance, such as remittances and foreign direct investment. It also looks at the reach and potential of private philanthropy within these flows and provides an updated overview of what the relatively new instruments of blended finance may mean for increasing development finance in fragile contexts. The chapter looks at the breakdown of the different flows to fragile contexts and how each can most effectively address fragility.

This chapter considers internal financial resources available to the 58 contexts considered fragile in the 2018 fragility framework, in recognition that the Addis Ababa Action Agenda identifies domestic resources as a critical source of financing for development. It discusses the particular challenges facing fragile contexts in mobilising domestic revenues, particularly tax revenues, and in budgeting for addressing fragility across sectors. This chapter reviews opportunities and challenges presented by natural resource wealth, and the informal economy in fragile contexts, including the latter’s implications for strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises. It concludes by emphasising ways in which the donor community can better support mobilisation of domestic revenue in fragile economies.

Chapter 8 analyses external financial flows to fragile and non-fragile contexts that are eligible for official development assistance (ODA), using the multidimensional fragility lens introduced in Chapter 2. It begins with an overview of aid flows to extremely fragile, other fragile and non-fragile contexts across the five dimensions of the fragility framework. It then demonstrates how a clustering technique provides a more fine-grained look at the ways ODA, foreign direct investment and remittances play out across the economic, environmental, political, societal and security dimensions. The chapter pays particular attention to whether these international flows are sufficiently calibrated to the specific needs of fragile contexts and the severity of their fragility.

This chapter looks at ways to improve both domestic and international development financing in fragile contexts. It discusses the importance of increasing the coherence and complementarity of all financial flows and making sure that each finance strategy is tailored to the unique requirements of each fragile context. The chapter goes on to discuss which financial tools are appropriate in different cases, the impact of sequencing and timing of different financial flows, and best practices to ensure these flows provide the right incentives for stability and sustained peace.

States of Fragility 2018 concludes by reaffirming the urgent need to more vigorously address fragility now. This final chapter warns that fragility stands in the way of the world reaching the critical goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the sustaining peace agenda. The chapter builds on the report’s main findings about the state of fragility today to set out ways for the development community to more effectively and proactively analyse, programme for, finance and deliver sustainable results that address fragility and build resilience.

The OECD fragility framework considers fragility to be multidimensional, measurable on a spectrum of intensity and expressed in different ways across five dimensions. It uses robust quantitative approaches to measure the magnitude of fragility, and it compares and contrasts different types of fragility descriptively. This mixed approach allows the analysis to extract the best value from the quantitative methods while also addressing the limitations of these methods through qualitative descriptions.