Over the last 10 years, the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project (CIFP) at Carleton under the direction of principal investigator Professor David Carment, a Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Fellow, has resulted in numerous published papers and garnered awards. Most recently, Carment and CIFP research associate Assistant Professor Teddy Samy received a Faculty of Public Affairs Research Excellence Award for research on failed and fragile states. The purpose of the award is to support CIFP’s ongoing research in understanding how resources are being allocated to failed and fragile states and how this allocation can be improved to respond more effectively.
With around 14 per cent of the world’s population living in states that qualify as fragile—and depending on the definition used, there are between 30 to 50 such states—there is a need to identify the causes of state fragility and to provide a framework that can enable policy makers and development practitioners to engage in fragile environments.
Over the past two years, Samy, Carment, MA/87, and several graduate student researchers have examined fragility using CIFP’s framework of three fundamental properties that states need to function effectively: authority, legitimacy and capacity. They have conducted extensive statistical analysis to identify the main determinants of state fragility and examined the effects of state fragility on aid allocation—and have several journal articles, book chapters and working papers on the subject.
They hypothesize that policy makers must be sensitive to fragile states’ environments when making decisions on aid allocation, but warn that aid allocation that focuses on only certain characteristics of stateness may be counterproductive. Their research shows that legitimacy, a key factor in determining long-term state stability, is generally underemphasized in aid allocation decisions.
Carment and Samy have also extended their research to an examination of fragility in small island developing states (SIDS), countries with specific and individual vulnerabilities related to their economic conditions, governance and international linkage. Their research has shown that SIDS could also benefit from specific and targeted policies.
With the Research Excellence Award, Carment and Samy will continue to enhance CIFP’s research to improve their understanding of the causes of state fragility, its impact on democracy and governance, and how donor countries can be more effective in their policy responses.
For more information about the project on fragile states and democracy and governance processes, including recent work supported by the Canadian government, see http://carleton.ca/cifp.
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