Effective Aid in Fragile States: An Assessment of Australia's Performance — Lessons from Quoda

There is growing consensus within the development community that helping fragile states represents one of the core challenges of global development. Fragile states are countries whose governments face significant challenges asserting their authority, their legitimacy, their ability to deliver the most basic services to their people, or a combination of all three.2 Yet a growing share of the world’s poor live in fragile states and some projections indicate this share will exceed 50 percent within the next five years.
Promoting development is much harder in fragile states than in other countries. The reason for this is straightforward: governments cannot be relied upon to support the development process and in some instances may serve to undermine economic and social progress.3 Importantly, aid delivery tends to be more costly and more complex in fragile settings and good practice aid principles4, though as relevant to fragile states as elsewhere, cannot always be implemented as they can in other countries.