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Afghanistan.
Bosnia. Haiti. Liberia. Rwanda. Sierra Leone. Southern Sudan, Timor
Leste. Iraq. Although each is different, they have all struggled to
move beyond conflict and fragility to secure development. Paul
Collier’s book The Bottom Billion highlighted their recurrent cycles of
dangers. Not one low income country coping with fragility or conflict
has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.

These countries
stir our shared interests and values. They have called on soldiers and
monies from countries that have then struggled to counter violence that
overflows the borders of fragile states, because conflicts feed on
narcotics, piracy, and gender violence, and leave refugees and broken
infrastructure in their wake. Their territories can become breeding
grounds for far-reaching networks of violent radicals and organized
crime.

Yet as we are now
seeing again in the Middle East and North Africa, violence in the 21st
Century differs from 20th Century patterns of interstate conflict and
methods of addressing them. Stove-piped government agencies have been
ill-suited to cope, even when national interests or values prompt
political leaders to act. To offer some ideas and practical
recommendations, the World Bank Group is releasing a World Development
Report, “Conflict, Security, and Development” that looks across
disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world.

As the Report makes
clear, the old ways won’t work. The overriding objective is to build
legitimate institutions that can provide a sustained level of citizen
security, justice, and jobs. Progress in these core areas, and
coordination among the activities, build a foundation for broader and
better change. At the earliest stages, countries need to restore public
confidence in basic collective action before even rudimentary
institutions can be built or transformed.

A fragile state
cannot restore confidence through government alone. It needs to build
cooperative, “inclusive-enough” coalitions drawing on groups that bring
political legitimacy, financial and technical resources, and which will
continue to press for deeper institutional transformation. These may
include business, labor, women’s or other civil society groups. The
push for inclusion need not include every group. And inclusion needs to
be balanced with efficiency, results, and – where it is important to
signal a break with the past — justice and legitimacy.

Early wins –
actions that can generate quick, tangible results – are critical to
building confidence that will enable the extension of national capacity
over time. In Kosovo, highway security paved the way to increased trade
and consequently jobs. In Liberia, basic improvements in security and
electricity, along with steps against corruption, were central. These
quick successes must be compatible with, rather than undermine,
longer-term efforts to strengthen institutions. If services and public
works are delivered only through well-meaning international partners or
top-down national programs, the country will not build the local
institutions or support that are key to sustaining recovery through
inevitable challenges and changing conditions.

Early wins also
need to be pragmatic “best-fit” reforms that allow for flexibility and
innovation; they need to adapt to local conditions rather than being
technically perfect. In some cases, “best-fit” may entail “second best”
implications. A good example is Lebanon’s decision to rely on small
private sector networks of providers to restore electricity following
the civil war – a tradeoff between using a non-governmental capacity
with high unit costs but getting fast results.

International
agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so
that assistance can be swift enough to provide for early wins and
pragmatic enough to allow for best-fit reforms. Integrated assistance,
especially through multi-donor trust funds, enables countries with weak
capacity to connect help to priorities, reinforce mutual gains across
topics, and build national ownership. Coordinated international help is
vital to counter external stresses that can fuel fragility and
violence, such as trafficking and illicit financial flows, food
insecurity and resource shocks.

We also need to
fill in major structural gaps. There are places where fragile states
can seek help to build an army, but not police forces or corrections
systems (although the UN has had an initial trial). The World Bank
could help by doing more to build civilian justice systems. We also
need to place more emphasis on early projects to create jobs,
especially through the private sector. We need a better “handoff”
between humanitarian and development agencies, too. All these projects
involve risks. If legislatures and inspectors expect only the upside,
and just pillory the failures, institutions will steer away from the
most difficult problems or strangle themselves with procedures and
committees to avoid responsibility.

Lastly, we need to
be realistic: historically, even the fastest transformations have taken
a generation. New technologies may accelerate the timeline, either
through improved service delivery options (such as using cell phones to
deliver payments) or greater transparency and access to information
through social networking (as we have seen most recently in the Middle
East). But we still need to measure progress in terms of decades rather
than years. Even at this pace, the results can make a huge difference.

Robert B. Zoellick is the president of the World Bank Group