Towards Effective and Legitimate Governance: States Emerging From Hybrid Political Orders

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Background

However, apart from arguing for greater policy coherence and better governance and insisting on the importance of all states satisfying a set of basic functions, there has been little shared understanding of why various states are fragile and how to go about counteracting state fragility. Likewise there is a need for a clearer understanding of what factors actually contribute to 'building' effective states across different regions.

A major aim of Australia's overseas aid program is to assist neighbouring countries in the Pacific region to build functioning and effective state systems. We posit, however, that the fragile states discourse and the state-building approach have certain blind spots.They predominantly focus on government institutions, pay relatively little attention to issues of citizenship and legitimacy and they draw on a model of the state that is too closely tied to today's OECD states. Particularly in the Pacific region, governance is a complex mix of liberal institutional and customary mechanisms. So-called fragile states might be re-conceptualised as hybrid political orders - an approach which seeks to identify and support positive mutual accommodation between modern state institutions, customary local institutions and civil society institutions, and takes legitimacy and citizenship into account.

This novel approach to fragile states issues is currently tested by means of case studies on Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, Solomon Islands, Tonga and East Timor. Relations between state and non-state governance functions are explored in terms of substitution, complementarity and incompatibility. This allows for the formulation of recommendations on strengthening the analysis of state effectiveness in a more contextualised manner. The results of the case studies and the ensuing recommendations will be presented in policy papers.

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