 Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Wonderful to see everyone. Thank you for joining us here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of USIP, and we are very happy to be gathered for this conversation today. Thank you to our World Bank colleagues and partners in this event to look at improving governance to reduce violence. And USIP was founded a little more than 30 years ago by Congress as an independent federal institute dedicated to looking for very practical solutions for preventing and resolving violent conflict. And our work over the years has underscored over and over again that central to this vision, this mission of preventing and resolving violent conflict is having a more functioning state-society relationship and compact that works. The World Development Report for, you know, each year it comes out and it creates a new milestone that pulls forward the conversation and informs both theory and practice. And I'm delighted that we're here today to talk about the most recent report, Governance and the Law. I know from my nearly five years at U.S. Agency for International Development that protecting investments in government, in governance, in democracy is one of the hardest areas of investment to protect, to maintain and protect that kind of investment. And there's a constant call for where's the evidence base that it matters? Show us that this is as important as investments in some of our sectors like health and education. And I think what this report does is take the really landmark work of the 2011 WDR, Nigel is sitting here, and pull it forward and help us create an ever greater evidence base as we are looking at a time in the world where violent conflict is on the rise. So I'm very happy to have our panel here today to talk more about the report, the findings, and how we can bring that forward to our various practices. And appreciate the deep scholarship that went into making this report possible. I would like to now turn it over to Linwood Ham, who's our Director for Global Policy here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Linwood will introduce our distinguished panel and moderate the discussion. Thank you again for joining us. Thank you, Nancy, for your comments. Thank you, everyone, for attending today's event. I've been quite excited to extend our partnership within the bank group, to include a conversation with those who have done the labor of the thinking behind a critical issue that folks in the development community and more broadly are concerned with. So it's my great pleasure to introduce members of the World Bank Group who will do a couple of things. We will have first Frank Busquette, who is the new Senior Director of the Fragility Conflict and Violence Group at the bank, reflect on the work of his unit and why the WDR-17 matters to him, how he and his unit are thinking through this work. Then Deborah Wetzel, Senior Director for Governance, will talk more broadly about how this work is being thought through in terms of implementation within the bank proper. And then finally, Edward Dada will walk us through a brief summary of the report with a special focus on the section on Governance as Security. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Frank. That would be a play in real time that we're switching up. All right. We'll start with Edward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Linwood. And thank you for the UN Institute of Peace to welcome us today. Why security? It is not one of the main goals of the World Bank, which, as you may know, is reducing poverty, extreme poverty, and boosting shared prosperity. Because security is a first order condition for development. We cannot speak of the security of property rights, which is essential for growth, without speaking of the security of people first. So in addition, as both Frank and Debbie will say, we are increasingly engaged in ways to improve the security of countries as a precondition for development even before the end of conflict. So with this, I will begin this presentation on the WDR, Governance and the Law. This is the formal title. The reality is that it's more a report about the foundations of policy effectiveness, what makes policies effective, what makes policies predictable, and generating development outcomes, growth, security, and equity. We started this inquiry by asking questions about why do ineffective policies often persist, such as these energy subsidies that everyone knows are regressive, but keep persisting? Why are technically sound policies often ineffective? And why do we, even though we have the best of intentions and a lot of capacity, we fail to get effective policies in place? And finally, questions like why are second best solutions often more effective than first best ones? So it's really a report about the foundations of what makes the foundations of policy effectiveness and how policies get you security, growth, and equity, which are the three development outcomes we care about. And in answering these questions, we go beyond the easy answers that we've been used to give in the practitioners community, which is that policies fail well because they didn't follow best practice. You need to stick to best practice and have better laws. Or policies fail because of lack of capacity. So let's actually get the best policies and law out there and build capacity to implement them. More policies fail because of lack of political will. I mean, it's not a false answer, but it's an easy one. It's more complex than just losing a champion here or there. It's about more than that. And in making policies for security, growth, and equity more effective, we dig beyond these easy answers. We dig beyond what we call proximate factors, well, the investment climate, the level of education, et cetera, to uncover the underlying determinants of the effectiveness of policies or lack thereof, which have to do with governance. Now by defining governance mainly around people, the interactions of state and non-state actors to adopt and implement policies, the process of that interaction, we go beyond abstract institutions. And so we make it a two-way street, which is an evolution in this definition of governance no longer the exercise of authority only, but actually the process of interaction that happens in what we say is the policy arena where actors bargain and agree. And when they disagree, they have conflicts. And sometimes conflicts turn violence. So what are the main findings of the report up front? We say that key institutional functions matter for policy effectiveness, that institutions need to enable government's credible commitment to citizens and to each other's government parties. They need to enhance coordination among social actors, and policies and institutions need to induce the cooperation of usually citizens with governments. Now these are technical terms derived from game theory and institutional economics, and we have used them to ground this report in the micro foundations of institutions so that we can make an easy link with development outcomes, that link that has eluded us for so many years. But they have much more concrete and practical manifestations on a day-to-day that I'll just be mentioning in a few minutes. Now how is it that sometimes we get effective commitment, coordination, and cooperation, and sometimes not? Well we say that the main predictor of whether you get development outcomes, effective development outcomes or not, is not capacity, it's not best quality laws, it's the relative power of actors in that bargaining arena. To make it simple, the actors that have more power, wealth and resources, get what they want and others have to bound together to push their policies and also get what they want in what is actually a constant bargaining and rebargining and agreement and disagreement. And those power asymmetries stand in the way of policy effectiveness, some manifestation of them are exclusion, capture and clientilism. Now it's not all bleak and changes in the policy arena can change incentives, the incentives of those actors, they can reshape their preference ideologies and beliefs and they can increase the contestability of the decision making process and the actors of that change are elites, citizens and international actors. So we see here the main point that we're making that it's not just about the form that institutions take. You can have a lot of nice looking institutions, perfect laws, very nice anti-corruption agencies, very nice constitutions, very nice laws on paper that do not lead to increased commitment, that do not bind governments to deliver on promises, that do not get citizens cooperation and compliance with governments for a variety of reasons and that do not enhance coordination. And so you get this big gap as you're seeing here between laws on paper and laws in practice and that implementation gap and its sources is one of the key things that we look at. So we say it's not enough to get the best laws possible and to build capacity to implement it because it's not just about capacity and getting the best laws. Sometimes norms get in the way, social norms, sometimes you have a bunch of other laws and legal systems and sometimes the incentives of actors are such that it's not in their interest to comply or they do not want to. So we say that in order for rules on paper to lead to desired outcomes in practice, they have to change people's behavior and it's about that behavior and change. Now people when they bargain in that policy arena which is at the center of our framework, these agreements change behavior, the behavior of these actors and when these agreements are characterized by commitment, by coordination, by cooperation, they lead to these changes. So for example, implementation of policies is an illustration of commitment. A government promises to do something and then follows through, that's commitment. Sticking to a peace agreement and not reneging from a peace agreement is another form of commitment. Cooperation is one of its illustration, its compliance with government, whether by paying taxes, stopping at red lights, but it's also cooperating with each other and reaching peace agreement and here we see trust and the lack of trust as really undermining coordination and cooperation and preventing actors from agreeing with each other such as in Libya or in South Sudan for example. Coordination, it's the same way, it's one of those when all actors find win-win situations and see eye-to-eye with each other, then we achieve better outcomes. Why don't we achieve these? We say that it's because of power asymmetries, it's because of exclusion. When governments make policies, draft laws, make decisions without including the most important actors and the ones that have veto power, well, that stands in the way of development outcome. Lack of exclusion gets you lack of trust, it gets you non-compliance, it even gets you people opting out and saying, well, I'm not going to participate in that process and indeed it gets you to conflict, which gets you to violence. Capture, which is when private sector actors make the policies they want and when you have a bunch of oligarchs, for example, designing policies behind closed doors and actually influencing and buying policies, we see that in many countries of Eastern and Central Europe, especially after the fall of communism and a lot of captured economies around the world. Capture affects growth mainly because of these skewed investments and finally clientelism, a third manifestation of power asymmetries and we call it accountability for sale, it's when the government is accountable to some members of the population and not others on the basis of ethnic, religious and what have you, other ties. So we have, in this illustration of the visual framework of this report, we say that we have been focused maybe a little too much on the outcome game in game theory, which is how policies get you effective development outcomes. We haven't looked so much at the feedback loop, which is how more growth, more security, more equity can get you better governance and we also haven't looked at the underlying process of bargaining and agreements and rules designing and implementing that is the foundational process for these policies. So governance, we say in the end, changes possible, changes in incentives, changes in preferences and beliefs and changes in contestability do lead to better development outcomes. Sometimes actors find it in their interest to tie their own hands and to engage in, accept to lose some powers. They agree to bargain like in South Africa after the apartheid when they incentive changed and as a way of maintaining power, the Heter to a white governing majority accepted to seed power and rebalance it, changes in preferences and beliefs when ideologies change and one gets to better development outcomes such as, say, the movement towards the tolerance of minorities and the diffusion of, say, the free market economy after the 1990s and also when you bring in more actors that are relevant into the bargaining arena. Elite bargains, citizen engagement and international influence are the ways to bring about change and these are our three main drivers and levers of change, bargains between elites, the engagement of citizens through voting through deliberation, through participation and international influence as well through standards and we say that all are important and they all work together, not just one on their own. So to zero in a little bit on how violence and conflict factor into that situation, we start by saying that violence is actually, well, that security is a precondition for development and that violence, which is the absence of security, it's either actual or threatened violence, inflicts a high cost on development and we document that a little bit further and we associate violent conflict with a reduction in GDP per capita. We say that growth requires security as a prerequisite and you'll see quickly on that graph on the left, these are five different income groups and the lower income groups manifests many more violent instances of changes in power than others. So all of these dots that are much more important for the lower income groups are instances of violent transfer of power and you get much less of them the more you move along the income category. We use a unifying model of violence so we measure the way to measure violence is not just the death from conflicts but also the death from crime and homicides and here you see that countries like Colombia and Venezuela are at least as violent per 100,000 people than countries like South Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Syria, which actually tells you that you have violence in some parts of South Africa and Latin America that are equivalent to civil war situation and so we also differentiate between conflict and violence and this is one of the main evolutions with respect to WDR 2011, which Nigel will hear tell us a little bit about in the flesh. We say that development is conflictual, that some people want something, some people want change, some people want status quo, some people want to push for this, others want to push for that. They disagree. If this agreement is protracted here you have a conflict, a lack of agreement in the policy arena. It's not necessarily violent and it's not and but people usually have conflicts defined as protracted disagreements about identity, about resources, whether they're scarce or abundant, about economics and other shocks, climate change, global crisis and about the development process itself, which redistributes power and resources. Some get more budget here, others get the decision to build a school in this village or that village given scarce resources, well it gets you into conflict because it's redistributing resources. So the development process is itself conflictual and some countries are better than others at managing conflict without recourse to violence and conflict is everywhere and it's prevalent but in some countries you have the governance institutions that allow you to discuss that these disagreements on budget, on resources in a nonviolent and peaceful way, in others, well guns get out and people fight over resources and stuff like that. So this is one of the main differences. So we say that actually conflict leads to violence when governance breaks down and it's not a report about conflict but it's a report about how governance affects conflict and is impacted by it and so regardless of what factors like these or combination of factors cause conflict, the failure of governance to resolve conflict gets you violence and three types of failures can lead to violence, three types of governance breakdowns. The unconstrained power of individuals, groups and governments say when a dictator does whatever he wants and has absolute power and uses it against against his citizens, failed agreements between participants in the bargaining arena, the settlement breaks down, Sudan, Libya, as of lack of commitment, lack of trust, lack of cooperation between actors and the exclusion of relevant individuals and groups from this arena. So I'm trying to visualize them a little bit on that over here. Unconstrained power, failed agreements and the exclusion of important actors who would otherwise because they've been excluded resort to violence to get their voices heard. We say on the positive side that four types of governance institutions can prevent conflict from being violent and they can also limit and end violence after it has erupted. These are sanctions and deterrents, power sharing institutions, redistribution of wealth and dispute resolutions. The four group of governance institutions, the four buckets that help us get to more stable and secure outcomes. Sanctions and deterrents such as the whole gamut of you know going from fines to prison sentences, they change, they change, reduce violence by changing incentives and preferences. There's a sanction, you do this, you go to jail, well maybe you'll think twice about using violence next time. Power sharing reduces violence by changing incentives, by giving the parties in a conflict incentives to cooperate. Well I give you that seat, you renounce violence or I give you a seat in government, a cabinet minister, you become an ally from photo friend and cooperation between parties that reduce violence is more likely if it's preceded by commitment in that case. Sometimes redistributing resources and wealth reduce violence by changing incentives. So for example social cash transfers, public service delivery in areas like Afghanistan and Iraq it's been shown to reduce the level of violence even the civil service by offering people employment, guaranteed employment. You get less tensions and less violence as in these two examples from Tunisia and Egypt show immediately after the Arab Spring you have a huge spike in employment mostly to maintain social peace and to buy off people, to buy peace that would have otherwise resulted in these fractions being disgruntled and use violence. Finally dispute settlement including alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, build trust and improve communication and understanding among parties and change preferences. All of that is in the long is in the short term, change incentives. In the long term dealing with conflicts in a peaceful way becomes part of the norms and becomes ingrained in people's behavior so norms change, violence recedes over time and I'll leave you with that final graph to the right where violence has homicide rates in Europe have declined dramatically over the last 800 years. It's a long-term haul but it actually goes to show you that you know Romeo and Juliet and duels and you know avenging your honor with with with blood is not part of how you deal with things today and so it's it's the notion that with changed incentives in the long term more change in norms and of behavior and mostly a change in the contestability through power sharing resource redistribution gets you a better development outcome and I'll leave you with the final messages of that area conflict is inherent to the policy arena. It's part of it governance can address conflicting interests and policy preferences without the recourse to violence that's what differentiates countries that are prosperous from the countries that are not they have that way of resolving things peacefully sanctions and deterrence power sharing the redistribution of wealth and dispute settlement are four government are form four forms of governance that matter for security outcome however they only succeed in preventing in reducing and in ending violence when they constrain the power of ruling elites when they achieve and sustain agreements among actors and when they do not exclude relevant individuals and groups other regardless of their actual form and whether they look nice on paper and thank you very much thank you Edward that was a it was a tremendous summary of a of a long labor of love for you and members of the bank and so now I will turn it over to Frank Buscat who reflect on the WDR from his purge and the fragility unit many thanks and yes thank you Joe thank you Nancy I would like actually to recognize this report I think it's outstanding so congrats Edward congrats to Debbie I think this is an amazing piece of work and obviously joining the fragility group for the past 10 days I can tell you that we are going to work very closely with our colleagues to operationalize it so let me ask I've been working in the Middle East North Africa region which is not the most stable region in the world and before I was working for eight years in in some fragile states living in Congo and Chad so I'm going to bring you to be the perspective of those countries and let you and also trying to show why this report is important how does that change our approach and also moving forward especially with a new commitment you may have heard about the AIDA 18 which is going to go scaling up our resource in fragile states from 7 to 14 billion dollars over the next three years what does that mean are we going to do business as usual or are we are going to look at some of those recommendations focusing on prevention and what does that mean and obviously the bank is one actor and we have many more actors and the whole nexus with the UN PBS so DPA the security peace building but also human rights is crucial if you really want to walk the talk on this issue of prevention it's not only about the World Bank it's about all of us so very happy to be at the Institute of Peace many thanks Nancy for that so why this report is so important well first I think we have been following a lot with a focus on violent conflict and we have been looking more about following the conflicts rather than the drivers and looking less at the grievances and I think that's reported really putting the emphasis on especially as a development actors let's look at what are the key issues why it's so important because the the type of conflict that we have seen over the past decades has also changed we are moving from interstate conflicts to more interstate conflicts with some actors Boko Haram Daesh ISIS and Abdullah is here I will tell you his experience on this one that are playing a key role in a number of conflicts that we have in MENA in Africa and one of the key issue is actually a lack of proper development the fact that you don't have real equalities the lack of focus on lagging regions the lack of dialogue between the state and the citizens the lack of accountability the lack of citizen engagements that makes people regardless of their income from Tunisia to say you know I'm tempted in another type of engagement so I think it helps us to rethink how the way that development especially in fragile states should be focusing not necessarily on building institutions where actually you can put more oil in the fire but actually looking at having more people centric approach having more political analysis length that we don't necessarily have and trying to understand the dynamics and that's how I was saying it's so important for the World Bank and other actors to partner together because we don't have necessarily at least for the bank but I'm sure it may be the same case for your institutes the expertise in different fields which whether it is on security peace building or human rights and therefore it's important to partners with those organizations that before conflict become violence can actually join our development approach to better understand and that obviously is linked to the whole focus on violent extremism I can tell you that moving forward we're going to really try to focus through the development length on this topic and we'll be engaging I'm sure with you in the coming month and other actors on this one so why is it so important for the bank the bank is actually for the past 10 days we have moving into a new AIDA 18 replenishment you may have heard 75 billion dollars it's a record and out of this amount we are going to have about 14 billion dollars in fragile states which is more or less doubling the resource that used to be allocated in fragile states don't start to tell me what is a fragile state I come from MENA we have many countries that have don't do not have the CPIA requirement I'm looking at Nigel of 3.2 that are middle income countries and that are fragile so that would be another topic for tomorrow but many countries today that are fragile beyond the list of fragile states are going to receive a significant resource and the whole discussion is let's make sure that we are just pushing the money but we are really ensuring that we are doing the right things so let me tell you about a few new instruments but also a new approach completely building on this report which again is is resonating extremely well the first is that we are going to focus with specific windows on the risk mitigation regime so some countries like Guinea Nepal Niger Tajikistan where risk have been identified through different risk assessments are going to receive additional support quite significant focusing on those drivers of fragility to ensure that we can actually provide support not in terms of reconstruction like in Syria but before conflict becomes violence and trying to really focus on those inequalities social inequalities or geographical inequalities but also any other type of grievances so I think it's a new type of approach never we had a window in the World Bank Aida that was really focusing on the grievances and the risk mitigations rather than just strengthening the fragile country the second point we our DNA is actually quite changing we have a number of tools that are now being fully institutionalized and the bank has changed significantly over the past years where basically we used to have a group and Nigel again I'm referring to you we used to have a group which was trying to put the agenda of fragility on the table whereas today if you look at all the commitment of the bank it has been completely mainstream and institutionalized what does that mean it means that any support from the World Bank in a fragile states has to be to be preconditioned by a risk resilience assessment which is informing our strategy and our financing support to the country what is a risk resilience assessment this is precisely looking at what we have talked about what they were presented what are actually the issue in terms of power sharing what is the what are the issue in terms of inequalities what are the different grievances and that's precisely we will be looking at before implementing any strategy in a fragile states so there are a number of tools but also a number of regime windows financing that are going precisely to focus on the prevention of conflict which I think is extremely important if you look at the forecast we have about 60 percent of the extreme poor that will be in fragile conflict affected countries by 2030 and obviously for the bank it's extremely important because one of our key goal key twin goal is ending extreme poverty well guess what number one priority will be focusing on fragile states so I think this is this is quite essential so I will just stop here just my my key message obviously that we cannot be passive actor we need to treat violent conflict as a constant threat to development very importantly is to have this approach that is not just focusing on the institutions but trying to understand the dynamic of the different groups and I think the examples that they do are provided in MENA in Africa are extremely relevant so we fully share this this approach the key question for all of us will be how to operationalize it so I gave you a little bit of a taste about under the new I-18 program of the World Bank which still involves $14 billion in fragile states how we're going to integrate those key elements but I think it will be requiring the participation of many other actors and I'm thinking about the UN actors so I would like just to end by saying that at the UN General Assembly we are going to present a new report that will be focusing especially on prevention of conflict and we'll be really trying to focus deeper on those type of grievances that Edouard presented but also what does it mean for the bank partnering with the UN and that will be presented by President Kim and UNSG Tonyo Gutierrez at the UN General Assembly and that resonates completely with the key outcome of this report so again many thanks for having me here congratulations again to Debbie and Edouard and very happy to follow up with some of you on these points. Thank you Frank for your comments and finally we'll have Debbie Wetzel talk about how from the from the bank governance unit perspective the theories will be turned into implementation practice and policy. Okay thanks very much we are delighted to be here today to have this conversation with you we are doing lots of work in lots of regions with the institute and so it's really a pleasure to be able to join you and thanks to Edouard for presenting the report it's a really tough job to present in 20 minutes the depth of what's in this report so I urge you to download it to read it there are chapters on lots of specific issues on law on security on equity and each of those three topics you know the series of threes that he alluded to there's a whole set of in-depth looking at those issues and we've been working on it now for quite some time every time I read it every time I look at it it's like you know the wine gets better with age and so as we continue to work with it there's just more and more there so it's hard to present it all in 20 minutes so I urge you to get it take a look at it and get into it in depth so my job is I oversee the governance global practice at the World Bank it's a big group it's about 700 people and I do everything from soup to nuts and governance I do the traditional work that relates to taxation to public spending to legal judicial reform civil service reform we do anti-corruption citizen engagement illicit financial flows transparency freedom of information all sorts of stuff and and in fact I can take zero credit for the report because I've basically inherited the report the world development reports are done out of our research department and it is an opportunity for the teams to step away from the day-to-day challenges that we have in delivering programs on the ground to step back to look at the big picture and think afresh in terms of what we know about particular topics when they do that we launch a report and then it gets handed over to some part of the bank to help think through how to operationalize and implement and effectively that's the job that I am leading with edward and other members of the team and working with all parts of the bank this wdr has gotten a lot of traction it's right now already amongst the top five ever downloaded publications of the world bank we think that's because it it goes to different communities there's a whole bunch of lawyers out there that are reading it there's a lot of security specialists there's a lot of governance specialists so we're seeing lots of interest and lots of take up and it's also because it's a topic that we haven't traditionally dealt with as an institution the joke that we use is that when the world bank talks about power it's typically electricity right it's it's it's not these power balances that that are underlying much of what we do and and much of what makes things happen in countries and so it is we deal day in and day out with political economy issues in our work on the ground but to actually step back and say let's analytically look at balance of power and power dynamics and how that determines what kind of solutions we come up with is quite new and I have to say it's generating interest everywhere both within the bank and outside so today I'm just going to quickly talk about three things I'll echo Frank a little bit about our work on the commitment to fcv fragility conflict and violence that agenda that we're working on then I'm going to say a little bit about how the governance work contributes to this agenda and then I'll talk a little bit about where we see we're getting traction going forward and then we can open up open it up to a few questions so if you're a world bank watcher the thing that has changed in the last couple years that Frank alluded to is that it used to be that we didn't we we knew countries had conflict but we didn't really touch them until someone told us the conflict was over so the UN would signal conflict over we have a political settlement you guys go in and start figuring out what to do the quite radical shift that has occurred over the past few years is this notion it started with Nigel's WDR it was continued with the MENA strategy we really have an obligation to get in and work on the drivers of conflict and the drivers of these things that are creating the conflict before things come to an end because we may be able to play a role so we recently approved in 2016 a Middle East North Africa strategy which has this in spades so dealing with the refugees dealing with reconstruction dealing with resilience we just can't wait till it's over the second signal Frank also alluded to of how the shift is manifesting itself is our partnership with the UN so it used to be UN went in did all the humanitarian stuff and you know don't call us we'll call you then we would step in and what that created was an environment where we got an awful lot of overlapping inconsistent structures and now we are very deeply engaged in what we call the humanitarian development nexus and how to make sure that we are not that the UN and others are not setting up things in the short term that lead us down a wrong path for what's needed for long-term development and institutional capacity building it is a very heavy lift these are two of the biggest bureaucracies known to mankind the UN and the World Bank so figuring out how we work with all our different organizations it's it's not straightforward but frankly my view after being in the World Bank for 30 years is that we are making incredible progress it's hard the the situations are often incredibly difficult but something interesting is happening and it's facilitated by the fact that Gutierrez who was head of HCR is now the general secretary and that makes the differences as well in terms of our relationship finally the signal what counts with the World Bank is do you put your money where your mouth is and Frank alluded to the I-18 where we have doubled our resources for fragile and conflict states from 7 billion to 14 billion so yes we are and that is a huge opportunity it's also an enormous challenge for us so bottom line the bank has stepped up into this space of fragility conflict and violence we're there and we're going to continue to work on it and be dedicated to it Frank has to leave we'll see you later Frank. Second let me say a little bit of a word on how our work in these spaces relates to the work on on governance you've heard quite a bit about the work that the the underlying power relationships capture the exclusion etc on the 2017 WDR it really started with the 2011 WDR where as they thought about how to build trust in relationships thinking through these questions of building trust that that was the beginning of thinking through how we might do a better job at building trust in government and bringing fcd to the center of some of our work I think chapter four in the 2017 WDR is really it takes the core of the cross-cutting issues and and focuses on on measures beyond the technocratic elements of of making governance work and traditionally what we have worked on in the bank are these issues related to the designing the policies and institutions be it tax policies be it spending policies being at civil service reform policies across the gamut what are the models that might work in these environments the WDR that edward has presented brings the underlying drivers which need to be matched and and and brought together with those technical solutions so in the graph can you bring the graph up of the the figure eight so there's the overall environment the context and then there's that in the middle that policy arena so the technical policies that many of us work are the things that are in that middle policy arena you have to have both you need to understand the underlying context and the drivers you can do that but you also need to have effective and successful policies in unpacking these issues edward has laid out quite a few of the things that we're trying to look at in terms of drivers of conflict so exclusion unconstrained power and injustice and failed agreements we're also working on understanding better the factors that increase security and reduce violence so these issues related to power sharing so how does your governance function in terms of processes resource distribution so both nationally and intergovernmentally what to transfer systems do how can they help us do these things dispute resolution how do you solve differences of opinion and all of these issues around sanctions and deterrence so part of the work of operationalization around this report is about unpacking those ideas operationally operationally and and thinking about how we can apply the apply them to the technical work that we're doing we also want to be working on issues the the more positive enabling environment issues and and we're working on these so trust legitimacy social cohesion leadership how do we measure these things how do we understand and work better with how those are developing fundamentally all these issues come down to governance in one form or another so the value of the wdr is that we're taking this and using it as a lens to both our thematic work and our country work so when we're working in a place we step back a little bit and say in addition to the technical solutions what and how can we use these lenses to shape more effectively what we're doing and get more effective policy implementation which in turn leads to growth poverty reduction the development factors that we're looking for we also have some specific pieces that I just want to mention while I'm here we recently completed with the UN a piece of work called securing development it's all about public expenditure reviews in the security sector so in about 20 countries they have asked us to come in and unpack where they where and how they are spending their resources on security that relates to interesting things like weapons it also relates to things like police how police are managed how they're used how they're organized this is a relatively new area we have lots and lots of expertise on public expenditure analysis the UN has lots of expertise on security bringing those two things together has led us to some really interesting findings and we're seeing some interesting take up in that area we have a piece coming out soon on rebuilding public services in post-conflict countries where we're looking at a good number of case studies to see how do we go about building public services in a way that the short term needs what we need to happen right away doesn't crowd out and bypass the things that we want the state to do we see that happening a lot the need to get something done urgently may not lay down the best structures for building institutional capacity and making things happen we also have a report which we've done with the UN on core government functions after conflict this is a bit of a diagnostic tool it looks at five different areas center of government local governance public financial management government employment and aid coordination in each of those areas it says what are the questions you need to be asking when you hit the ground in an environment that is either conflictual or violent and and typically we're not starting from scratch we may not always be in a position to be preventing things we may be coming in right in the middle so what are the questions that we ask and what does that mean for what we do and how we go forward finally third part let me just say a word about where we see ourselves the world banks governance practice getting a lot of traction when we look across the work that we're already doing so the first area where we get lots and lots of demand is help us build core functions so when we're coming out of conflict one we need a government so how do we create a government or how do we rebuild the government how do we make sure we can pay these people and how do we make sure that there's some basic treasury functions some basic revenue some of the things are needed to just get government functioning so that you can begin to rebuild the relationship between citizen and the government and start to recreate and restore trust in government to help build legitimacy in the short term right after the conflict ends second big area where we have lots of requests for support and we worked with we work with colleagues across the bank relates to effective delivery of public services that could be something as simple as street lighting it could be something as complicated as you know social cash transfer systems it could be education it could be health it doesn't have to be the government it could be third-party systems but basically trying to get those things that are public goods in order and out to people where they're needed when they're needed is something that we're we get a lot of request for it will differ in every place in every circumstances what's needed and how to take that pathway forward and again these issues related to power balances and who needs what and who controls what is very important it also relates to issues you'll hear a little bit from Abdullah later about reconstruction how do you begin to reconstruct and provide some of the basic infrastructure that's needed we've seen all these pictures in recent days out of Mosul and a few other places which there's an awful lot of work to be done and how do you lead that and put it together finally a third and interesting area where we are consistently asked to come in as a as an institution is providing fiduciary assurance and what that means is how do we make sure the money goes to where it should go and when it should go our classic example of that is the afghan nisten reconstruction trust fund where we the world bank as an institution have worked very closely to to make sure that those resources are used accountably the ones that go through that trust fund we monitor that and then we help to build these fiduciary systems be they financial management be they procurement how do we help strengthen those to again reduce corruption to avoid state capture and to help build confidence between citizens and the government so finally just to close the big challenge for us as an institution is to bring all these different things together so we need to marry the big ideas the underlying drivers understanding where power resides how it is used and how we can help create those critical functions of commitment coordination and cooperation to help prevent the capture exclusion and those type of things that in a big picture way can undermine effective policy how do we marry that with the day today on the ground work of implementing the policies that are needed designing the policies that are needed and the institutional capacity that's needed to get stuff done and to deliver for citizens there's urgency to doing that so we don't always have to have the luxury of stepping back but the work that we're doing is trying to bring these together it's very very exciting we're very very keen to learn from the work that you're doing the perspectives that you bring to help us advance this agenda and take it forward so thanks very much again for having us here today thank you Debbie so we're running into our second panel but I wanted to give the audience an opportunity to to ask maybe a rapid round a couple three questions on on these big you know issues that have been raised here first and foremost the summary of the report and and and then as well as Debbie said you know turning the theory into effective you know practice from the bank's point of view so so I'll take a couple of questions and please ask that you state your name your affiliation and a very brief question yes sir right here at the front please and then here and then in the back thank you first to note a thank to USIP and the panelists my name is Akbar Hwaja I'm a World Bank retiree and also former senator senator Pakistan my questions focus on the parliamentary governance uh does WDR 2017 focuses on the parliamentary governance which is a focus of law policy implementation everything and does World Bank have a new program anything focused on parliamentary governance thank you thank you my name is Lee Yang and thanks for your presentation you mentioned a lot and I just wonder do you actually working on it for instance and we are talking about this war using the money and resources how do you distribute those because if you don't use in the right way cause effective new way and really for the best interest of public interest it will be used in the disservice this opposite the our our function as USIP and World Bank try to do so exactly how are we going to eliminate those corruption and injustice so we have to working on a fairness in every second every minute really so we got to really benefit everybody not just people who grow up the resources and then there's of course all the violence because they have the money they have the resources they got to do something misleading and deceit hello my name is Howie Land I'm the head of the International Stability Operations Association thank you very much for your presentation ISOA we we do a lot of this type work overseas we merge the private sector with the intergovernmental organizations that do work you've probably heard of us I'd like to meet with you more about this but my question really is based on your increased funding what are your budget priorities if you could just kind of you know say a few things on how you plan to spend this this new money thank you very much and so the second and third question is both about you know with the increase in IDA both priorities and the way in which the monies can be used effectively which are being keeping to the WDR's findings and then the first specific question in any way does the WDR treat parliamentary governance and is there a programmatic answer to that so the short answer to your question is yes it is one arena parliaments are one one policy arena you would say the policy arena by excellence where all of this bargaining takes place we apply this bargaining framework to everything from the roman forum to the greek agora to the american town hall to the parliament to the kitchen family table around which you bargain on where you're going to go over the weekend and who gets to have the power and who doesn't and who gets to make the decision and who doesn't and who gets to comply and who doesn't what are the sanctions and the incentives and so again it's it's yes we we deal with it we say however that it is not just about the laws and they're the space that that you make it is about the systems of norms and that that makes people comply with those laws that it's great to get together and produce laws but so parliamentary we do not deal with forms so much so much we say that some of these functions like eliciting participation cooperation from people can be done in various ways not just parliaments but also in non-parliamentary systems you can have that way what we also say is that parliaments are major ways in which power sharing takes place so a voting a proportional voting system is a way that allows power sharing that is a good way in the empirical literature that has generated peace and stability that a system where you have lots of power balances between various actors also helps ensure stable outcomes in the so the short answer is yes we deal with it but not with in analyzing forms of parliamentary governance rather we zero in on the function of legislation making eliciting commitment and eliciting ways of getting various parties to share power with each other whether formally or informally and just to follow on that so we do have an international parliamentary network which ourselves and our communications group lead and we we can we bring them together a couple times a year it with respect to the work that we do with parliaments on the ground it is very much driven by the country circumstances so we do a lot of work around coalition building which often includes parliaments we sometimes have support to parliaments to committees so budget committees strengthening the capacity of certain committees to be able to play their role effectively parliaments are big they're part of our government our partner our counterparts governments so it really depends on the demand and the need that we see on the ground we have a few programs it's not it's not the largest part of what we do there's still some elements of that in in in the governance program writ large but it's driven by country demands the question on the use of resources are we using them cost effectively are we you know you you alluded to Iraq so we have no no illusions that we will eliminate corruption and that we will eliminate injustice in the world we're trying to move in that direction but I think there is a need to be realistic about how we can use the tools that we have to set standards to set incentives to use the information we have in our hands to be able to to do things as effectively as we can we're doing interesting things in places such as Iraq for example we have a program whereby in municipalities as soon as ISIS or Daesh leaves we have groups of people that are going in to help support municipal services in order to be able to fill the vacuum we have begun and our we have preliminary work that we started already Abdullah may talk about this a little bit later about how do we help reconstruct muscle and how do we make sure that those resources are used well we also are looking at how we use mechanisms particularly on this fiduciary side to make sure that our resources are used well that we're can can can feel confident for our shareholders that the bank is keeping a close eye supporting progress going forward and that the resources are not that are are cost effective and and used to greatest effect on the question of how we're going to allocate funding for the IDA 18 resources both in fragile states and otherwise so there are there are a number of key themes to this IDA 18 round so job is one climate change is one gender is one fragility conflict and violence is one and governance institutions are one so those are the key themes around which commitments that are made through the whole IDA process have been programmed however the determination of what happens with those resources again is done on a country basis so we have a 77 countries that are part of IDA 18 our regional departments will be looking through where we have opportunities to do things all those themes that I mentioned will come out and the fragile fragile and conflict states because of the doubling of resources is going to be an enormous part of that so it's a process that we use where we interact with our clients our partners on the ground to figure out and determine what their needs are and how we can get the the best the most progress on reducing poverty alleviating particular issues addressing the given constraints and needs in each country environment we'd be happy to engage with you separately on broader issues related to the report and the work that we're doing going forward on that please help me thank our panelists so we're going to do a quick panel change in place we just bear with us for a couple of minutes Edward will still be here if you have continuing questions about the report he will be moderating our second panel thank you we'll we're starting with a with a second panel and I'll introduce the the panelists and we'll intend to have a lively discussion this time between panelists and with the audience to the right of this table Ina Dion a senior program officer at USIP where she leads the justice and security dialogue project in the Sahel and the Maghreb to my right Dr. Abdullah Dardari the senior advisor on reconstruction in the Middle East and North Africa vice presidency of the World Bank and formerly until 2011 the chief economist and deputy executive secretary of UN Esquad economic and social commission for western Asia and before that Syria's deputy prime minister for economic affairs from 2005 to 2011 my home country to my left Philippe Le Roux Martin director for rule of law justice and security at USIP before that a fellow at the Belfer center at Harvard on the future of diplomacy project and before that the head of the legal department of the international civilian office in Kosovo the organization supervising Koso that supervised Kosovo's access to independence and the head of the public law unit at the office of the high representative in Sarajevo to the extreme left Nigel Roberts in development for about 50 years now most of his time in the field after working for many NGOs he joined the bank in 1981 the World Bank he directed the world development report 2011 on conflict security and development so that's him in the flesh gets as close to a living deity in the bank as it gets and the director for Nepal then Ethiopia the West Bank and Gaza and the Pacific countries at the World Bank I'm going to ask the panelists to give me their reactions for five to seven minutes to the presentation that they have heard and how that world development report helps them in their work understand and engage on infragile and conflict affected situations I will start with you Abdullah and then we after this first round we can take a few questions and then we will go to more pointed questions to each one of the participants so this is a free flowing one for the panelists thank you Edward where were you in 2005 when I was planning the economic reform strategy for Syria had these ideas been implanted in economic reforms in the region before Arab spring maybe we'll have avoided so much bloodshed and so much destruction I am witness to the failure of governance despite the successes in economics and it's clear from that lesson that for the World Bank and for the international community to lead and support the reconstruction efforts in the region the question of governance and the law must be essential and primary in the design of reconstruction strategies it is not a reconstruction of bricks and mortar it's a reconstruction of the social contract it is not rebuilding what was there it is building new it is building what guarantees that we don't fall back into conflict again and only frankly now in the bank we have the tools we have what the report the intellectual tools what Debbie mentioned all these new areas and forays of research and analytical work and that will be translated into practical work on the ground in our field operations we can claim that we will have the intellectual and analytical skills necessary to introduce the question of governance and the law into the reconstruction program we are also and if you allow me to say that as we speak we are designing a new book at the bank called the political economy of reconstruction in manner the idea here is to look to bring these ideas into practice in the reconstruction strategies the idea is to make sure that we understand the roots of the conflicts in themes not just in countries take Mosul today do we understand the urban complexities of Mosul before the conflict and how Mosul got here and do we understand therefore what type of reconstruction Mosul needs in its social relations Mosul as the city of Iraqi industry Mosul as the city of interaction between Sunnis and Shi'as and Arabs and Kurds and Arabs and Saljuqi Kurds Turks and and and Mosul as a very important trading post between Aleppo and Persia and so on we have to look at the political economy of urban relations and urban dynamics in their totality before as we lay down the physical plans for rebuilding schools and hospitals and roads and electricity and power as Debra said I'm sorry I am taking medicine medicine for so it makes my mouth very dry what the region and here again if you allow me to talk as somebody with a bit of experience in managing development in our part of the world the region and its decision makers forgot to focus on a very simple but essential issue which is the individual if you look how this new the formula that Edward put for us in this report the result of the behavior of the capture of the economy of the exclusion in the economic sphere and political sphere the result of all of that that for the ordinary individual it became clear that the marginal utility of accepting the status quo was lower than the marginal possible utility of rebelling we did not understand that simple analysis we did not understand it simply because we did not introduce in the analysis the question of governance the question of capture what does capture mean for the ordinary people and how does it influence their political and economic behavior I think the most important aspect from my point of view of the WDR is that we now have the ability to bring these dynamics this analysis into the design of our reconstruction strategies we will be looking at things like the market and reconstruction now we know that no matter how much donor funding will come to the conflict countries of the Middle East and North Africa it won't be sufficient we are talking about six hundred billion dollars in the next six to ten years no amount of multi if eyes or or donor funding would be sufficient we will have to attract we will have to attract private investment and we will have to reform public spending so do we really have markets in this situation of capture and elite capture of the economic capital of the countries in the region all of those issues will have to come to life as we are planning the the physical infrastructure I think from the point of view of someone who will be advising the bank on the strategic aspects of rebuilding the Middle East and ensure ensuring that the four hours of the main strategy the renewal of the social contract the question of the refugees and their integration in development the question of regional cooperation and the the question of reconstruction are well integrated in one perspective but also build on this tremendous analytical work and which allows us to engage in a serious dialogue with our stakeholders from that perspective and not just how much money we will need to build a school or how much money we will need to build a hospital thank you very much thank you doctor and we'll have the chance to come back to you thank you for this perspective from both a thinker and a practitioner on disentangling the role of governance from and isolating it from other factors that contribute to the absence of which contribute to the problem and the presence of which contributes to a solution let me turn to you Philippe and your reactions to to this presentation and how you think we can use frameworks like this one to understand and better engage in fragile and conflict situations from your perspective as a practitioner in the Balkans and your expertise in formal justice mechanisms thank you it's a pleasure to be here it's a pleasure to be able to share a number of insights that I've gained as I was reading the report we have a very limited amount of times I'll try to be to the point I think what struck me as I was reading the report was on the very positive side is that the the report offers a particularly useful framework to better understand how governance and violence are interrelated so I think as such it is a big accomplishment but I think more importantly the report makes I think a an evidence base and compelling case on how governments can have a positive impact on violence and violent conflict which I think is also excellent at many levels as you've mentioned my my insights on these kinds of things are very much informed from practical experience for almost 10 years working on the legal aspects of institution building in peace processes in Bosnia and also in Kosovo so they should be understood as as such and as I was reading the report a couple of thoughts came and I tried to regroup them in in three the first one was pertain to the notion of incentives and and the incentives based framework that seems to be suggested by the report and I think frameworks like any frameworks are approximation of realities they're very useful but as I was reading the report my sense is that a peacekeeping or a peacebuilding perspective might add additional things to take into account as we try to approach these questions and the issue incentives I find in those frameworks is that it is often based on a number of assumptions the first one is that it assumes a certain level of rationality on the parts of actors who are deeply involved in conflict dynamics and it seems to suggest that decisions to use violence are primarily based on rational cost-benefit analysis from these actors from intimate experience with with these environments my sense is that I think we gain a lot by looking at conflict as a deeply emotional phenomenon and and where issues of identity belonging self-worth and pride on a routine on a routine on a daily basis will overtake or override rational decisions about economic well-being or opportunity another assumption I think for that on which the notions of incentives are based is that it assumes that there are actors in conflict that act with complete accurate knowledge and information about the conflict itself or the complex environment in which they are acting by experience they don't and they always act with imperfect information and actors involved in conflict dynamics will not only change their position but they will tend to learn as they move forward they will their positions will adapt continuously as they move forward in a peace process one particular example that came to mind when I was reading the report was that if you looked at Bosnia the Bosnians served leadership pretty much refused or objected to abide by the text of the dates and peace agreement in 1995 when it was negotiated by 2005 they were insisting on strict adherence to a very literal interpretation of the text agreement so I think that of the dates and agreement that shows you that positions and interests of parties in conflict change over time vis-a-vis a number of power arrangements another assumption I think that that incentives-based frameworks tend to make is that it assumes and maybe not in in their case because your your your chapter was very nuanced chapter four but some of those models tend to assume the existence of it somehow of a central authority that is able and willing to analyze the incentives decides not to use violence versus using violence and then has the capacity to maintain those commitments not to use violence I think the reality is much more nuanced and much more complex much more fluid there is no such thing as a static permanent actor that is able to make those decisions in conflict environments very often political groups that emerge from from from the war are like any other political groups they have factions to deal with they have moderates they have hardliners they have constituencies and so positions that are taken on violence or non-violence are the product of a a power dynamic that is very fluid circumstances change and so decisions and leaderships may change and positions vis-a-vis a number of incentives or the appreciation of incentives may change very drastically very quickly and we could look at Kosovo for example at the very beginning of the oppressive policies by the Milosevic regime in Kosovo the Kosova's reaction and resistance was mainly non-violent under Rugova that changed very dramatically when the KLA decided to mount a violent opposition and an armed struggle against the Milosevic regime in Kosovo another issue that that came to mind as I was reading the report was what I would call the not the tension let's call it attention between aspirational and transitional focus when I was reading the report what struck me is that the report is somewhat very aspirational it makes a very compelling case as to why governance is important vis-a-vis violence but also how it helps to manage conflict so it's extremely good in setting the bar where do we want to go what is the objective and this is what works and this is what we should be working towards I think from a peace building practitioner perspective the focus is necessarily more transitional how do we how do we get there and this is a crucial part of it and the most important part of it I would say and very often when you when you when you hear people talking about the importance of institutions and governance vis-a-vis conflict there seems to be an assumption that institutions exist or established in a parallel space in almost in a vacuum where outsiders prepare institutions a bit like we would build a Walt Disney theme park and then at one point we would open the gates to those institutions and invite partisan conflict to enter this this set of shining institutions and their conflictual dynamics would then by a pure magical phenomena would then become less violent the fact of the matter is when you are working on peace processes is that parties in conflict are not static and and you have to build institutions not separately from conflict but you have to build them amidst conflict and in a way state building or institution buildings becomes or sets the scene for how war morphs into a non-violent conflict where political parties seek to achieve wartime objectives through political or institutional or administrative means so the the conflictual dynamics move to the institutional building phase and they try to block each other they they will try to gain competencies or access to a specific institution one clear example for this from from my time in Bosnia is that we had worked really hard on establishing the equivalent of the FBI in Bosnia which was a state run and established police agency and and it was seen as a huge success and we we managed to pass the legislation it took us more than two years to secure a rent and find premises just to house that agency because it was they were factions in Bosnia that were so much against seeing this agency succeed that they were doing everything in their power to block the establishment of that agency so it shows how through administrative and political and legal means parties continue to wage conflict through the institution building phase and I think that's important to remember and the transition is as important or even more sometimes more important than the aspiration the third insight or or comment that came to mind when I was reading the report was was one that pertained to the lens by which we looked at conflict versus institution when I was reading the report the report I think does an excellent job at looking at how institutions have an impact on conflict from a peace building or peacekeeping perspective I think it is very interesting to gain additional insights and to see how conflict itself can have an impact on institutions and while it's true that institutions contain conflict what is equally true as I was mentioning earlier is that conflict can also tame institutions it can it can it can de-legitimize it it can it can affect the variability of setting up those institutions one clear example that came from my time in Bosnia was pretending to all the work that we did to establish a state level court with jurisdiction to cover a number of jurisdiction over organized crime and in other areas and as we were we worked extremely hard for several years on establishing the court it was held as a as a success and and the court then and the the the the state prosecutors started investigating a number of financial transactions in a Republic of Sepska which was the Bosnian Serb entity that affected the Bosnian Serb leadership's interest and suddenly what we portrayed as a as a clear success became immediately under attack from the Bosnian Serb leadership and not only under attack but the court itself was immediately labeled as an instrument of one party to try to discipline and intimidate another party in conflict and I think that is a good example of how conflict in itself can also tame institutions in an environment where you parties are are emerging from from violent conflict and to to end very quickly I think from my sense and from my experience at the very beginning of a peace process I would say that when you when people are trying to think about this relationship between conflict institutions a safe assumption might be that conflict may be stronger than institutions at the very beginning of that process and not the other way around and conflict can absorb the legitimize or disempower institutions that that people are I'm sorry trying to build and it requires a lot of humility for outsiders about their capacity to build sustainable institutions and a lot of respect for the fluidity and the resilience of conflict when you start working on institutional building in these environments so those are thoughts that came as I read the the report that was a superb and masterful Philippe way of taking these this framework to the to the test of reality as you very well put it frameworks are as good as they can get as an approximation of of it and I must say indeed that your four points on ration irrationality and norms at as playing a big part on the absence of complete information on the notion of time so the objective versus what it takes you to get there and also these emphasis on dynamism are some of the blind spots in in in this report and you've zeroed in on all four of them in a very effective way this is food for more thought in the discussion hopefully but I personally and I think appreciated it very much let me go to you Nigel and if you can if you can actually get us your reactions to the report specifically from the your the perspective of of WDR 2011 and what you feel this perspective adds or actually subtracts perhaps from the the report that that you have you have written and five years or six years after that that that time yes Edward thank you and first of all I'd like to thank you for your extremely complimentary introduction I'm referring here of course to your description of me as being to the extreme left which I think is a good place to be and particularly today in the United States I think this is a great report and by the way you owe me a copy here's my address you promised it to me so I'm looking forward to it okay that's I'm getting a hard copy now I think this is you're looking at it from the perspective that I I come from which is having done one of these six years ago and having thought a lot about conflict since then including a lot about what we got wrong when we wrote our report this to me is very helpful and makes real progress in taking further some of the things that we tried to talk about back in 2010 2011 one thing which is to some extent an internal piece of bank lexicography but which is nonetheless important is this clear distinction between conflict and violence whereby conflict is inherent and unavoidable and indeed healthy whereas its breakdown into violence is what we're trying to avoid happening it's not that we didn't know that but we were I think less than clear in how we described that that was even hardwired into the institutional and departmental structure of the bank itself at the time where conflict was something that the fragile states unit dealt with and it meant civil war particularly in low-income countries whereas violence had to do with drugs Latin America and policing so even in our own ways of talking about these things we blurred this very important distinction between the two which opens up I think a very constructive analytical pathway into where you took this discussion of institutions we certainly in our analytical model held out institutions legitimate institutions as the goal of a piece of a peace building process and also the best guarantee against relapses into violence but we really didn't have that much to say about what institutions actually consisted of let alone how to build them or how they got built which I think is a better way of talking about it what I think you've done which is really intelligent and useful and functional in an operational sense is to look and focus at the power dimensions of institutional behavior if you like at the processes relationships and the sociology of institutions of how humans act in certain constructed rules in these cooperative or conflictual structures what I think I'd like to do here is very quickly give you an example from my own experience since I left the bank of where I think this analysis is exactly applicable and where the use of this kind of analytical framework can help you figure out how to sort out problems so let me take you for a moment to Somalia where I've worked a lot over the last several years up until a year or so ago I was a member of something called the national financial governance committee which was a hybrid institution consisting of government officials and ministers and also delegates from international financial institutions so I was proposed by the World Bank for this but I didn't work for the World Bank what I ended up doing was reviewing assessing and critiquing concession contracts that were signed between the government of Somalia and various international corporations particularly around petroleum but also around the management of various types of income and resource streams so one of these that I and I inherited a load of fairly horrible contracts which I was asked to review and then see if we could actually knock back in in different ways one of the worst of these was a concession for a container terminal within the main seaport of Somalia now you have to understand that the seaport was and remains the principal source of national revenue in Somalia so it's not a light piece of infrastructure in any sense of the word and this concession for the creation of a container terminal dumped into the middle of this fiscal process something that was completely indigestible now the analysis and the discussions that took place around this I think are a very good illustration of the fact that what was at stake here was not a lack of good practice certainly not a lack of local technical capacity and certainly not a kind of crudely characterized issue of political will what you were looking at were a series of power relations among particular members of the elite who were trading off short term against longer term gains and the calculus was there really wasn't much of a predictable future so that any business opportunities that came around through the rent that arrived with the official recognition of Somalia had to be seized immediately even if they were substandard or or really not sustainable or indeed not particularly profitable the conversation that we had was largely around trading off that notion for taking the risk of getting more money out of a longer term extractive relationship so the discussion wasn't about how you do things legitimately or in a way that's more accountable so much as how one could parlay different visions of personal interest because there was no public accountability at all in the system at that time certainly not among the elites that this particular group were dealing with but the deal that was worked out which was I think an example of a process of cooperation and also one in which not only long-term short-term interests played off against each other but in which international pressures also played their part was that the concessionaires gave up this concession they allowed it to be cancelled in favour of a series of arrangements that improved the management of the port but in return they were allowed to receive a concession for a dry port which essentially is an unpacking area for the the containers that would come into the main port so that they were given a prospective future revenue stream that will be far more profitable than what they had originally agreed to and I think if you use the model that that is described in here both to understand that but also to try and predict your way out of such situations then I think it's extremely useful in many ways this is a not a value-based analysis of what ought to be its basis is an understanding of what actually is I think that's the way in which you can usefully determine the usable balance between the moral trajectory you'd like to take and where you think you can actually go within the circumstances you have available thanks Nigel thank you very much for what is a perfect almost textbook application of that the framework of the report around elite bargains around power dynamics and how these affect outcomes and how they can be used but also for the description of it as actually the report describing the situation the way it is rather than being normative and looking at the way things should be and taking this incremental approach to resolve in it with an example at the level of an agency for the application of this report finally last but not least let me turn to you Ina and with your reactions and thoughts and before turning it to the to the audience thank you very much and I will try to be as brief as possible because I know we're running out of time I'm also coming to this report very much from a practitioner perspective and that is to say as someone who comes to to research like this we a lot of the research from the World Bank in search of practical guidance for action you know and not not just what we're going to do in the project that I'm now managing or working on but at USIP we're also constantly trying to sort of critically reassess how can we do this kind of work better in general and so in reading the report that's a lot of what I had in mind and the thing that really initially struck me was actually a comment in the introduction where they the report authors noted that that we put a lot of energy into learning about what policies or what governance structures might work and a lot less energy into learning about why they work and I think that's very relevant to practitioners because as a practitioner what you're being asked to do daily is to figure out not just what you're what your sort of end line goal state is but exactly how in in this circumstance at this particular time you're going to operationalize that and they're very closely related but I think they're also a bit of two different bodies of knowledge and I would agree with the report that a lot more time and emphasis has been placed on realizing that what that end state is and a lot less in terms of practical guidance of how we should be getting there so my work focuses on what what this report would call maybe this the sanction and deterrence arm of governance institutions and better ways that we as international actors can support nations that are trying to improve those institutions reducing violence as as the report notes by increasing the costs of committing criminal acts so disincentivizing criminal behavior and eventually this becoming a behavioral norm and this report gives very clear recommendations as I said for the ideal arrangements for governance that you might want to realize in the end state at the end of the line of your your work and just two of those examples that were particularly relevant to my work is that it noted that the one of the the most empirically supported governance structures to reduce violence is to have enough non-abusive police present who operationalize a state monopoly on coercive power or on violent power and I think that's something that maybe we can all agree for for many or most countries would be something that you'd want to put a lot of work into achieving but what kept coming to mind in reading this again was was the disciplines between this ideal and state and what I had been thinking of it as a sort of interim arrangement arrangements or what Philippe ended up calling this sort of transitional arrangements where we actually spend most if not all of their time doing our work and I'll just give one brief example to illustrate what I mean by this so one of the project countries where I work is Burkina Faso and the situation there is that there is a still fairly new still fairly weak transitional government that is faced with a very strong set of vigilante group groups that have taken on a lot of the functions that ideally might rest with the state criminal justice system and these groups rose to power in the sort of vacuum of security provision that followed the end of 27 years of authoritarian rule and what the state really wanted to achieve and made a strong effort to try and achieve was this this ideal and line state that was you know that's what's been recommended to them as what they should be aiming for and so they did in a sort of a straight line and that was that they wanted to number one effectively provide their citizens with security so to hold up their end of what was a very new social contract and try and start building legitimacy with people that for a long time had felt very disconnected from and not well served by their state and at the same time reassert that monopoly on the use of violence or coercive power by the state which is something that again is recommended to them as something that's really at the very core of what it means to be any kind of a functioning state now unfortunately and I think Burkina Faso is quite typical in of many states where where we do this kind of work in this respect it is at this point and likely for the foreseeable future far too poor and far too weak to achieve these things particularly both at once so were they to actually try to regain that monopoly over coercive force while providing security what in fact it would do is is plunged the state into action greater violence greater criminality and greater chaos which could end up threatening the existence of what's a very weak but promising state and this is for a few reasons these groups currently enjoy a certain amount of privilege a certain amount of power by acting outside the state system this is something that they have proven very unwilling to give up they came very close to reaching a negotiated agreement with the state or and they would give up only the very very worst of some very bad practices and hand over certain functions of the criminal justice system back to the state but that's fallen apart state security services should they choose to try and forcibly stop this are are by far too weak in fact many when you talk to them will admit that they're actually afraid of these groups particularly afraid of what the end result would be or they to enter into direct conflict on a large scale and even if they could stop these groups from engaging in these activities there's no possible way that they could themselves fill that security vacuum they could on the other hand simply turn their backs on this or turn a blind eye and let it continue but then the government is actually guaranteeing that this activity will continue unregulated in a new manner that continues to undermine the legitimacy of the state and this is a very very bad position to be in as I noted earlier they've essentially given up on that monopoly on coercive power which is a defining aspect of a functioning state and in certain ways it's an extremely hard position to defend when you're saying that you'll allow these groups to continue their practices would amount to torture they hand down punishments based on trials of their own conducting including death and this is the state where this is the situation where we as practitioners as international actors are coming in and saying that we want to support this so on its own these these sort of end line recommendations don't give a lot of practical guidance you know maybe at best they would give us something to aim for but that's been tried and in the short term that's definitely not going to succeed so without how to achieve this or or without even why this has worked in other places along with a number of other things sequencing where we can make compromises and where that will actually lead to disaster it's not on its own of a lot of help and this is something you know that might be taken as a criticism of the report but I also think it's it's only fair to give a lot of credit to the report because I do think it's something that that the report did engage with or at least started to engage with in a meaningful way and in a particularly meaningful way given that it's what coming from where it's coming from the world bank in admitting at several places in the report that that best practices often fail you know that governance dynamics often the best or most stable governance dynamics are in fact homegrown governance dynamics that may emerge without you know the assistance of this empirical evidence base which can on the surface of it seem like a bit of attention you're on one hand saying it's very important that we understand what an ideal end state is based on a body of empirical research and on the other hand saying yes but when you actually get into the situation often this is not the thing that you're going to want to aim for in the beginning it's maybe both a criticism but as I said as well it's also I think a very important thing that I very much appreciate about the report because this in from my perspective reflects two very important strains in thought in the fields of rule of law justice and security development sort of two concurrent streams of work by which we've been attempting over the course of many many years to try and improve the effectiveness of our practice and this is on one hand the need for our work to be empirically grounded better studied evidence based you know to engage in very rigorous monitoring for success and impact and to make better use of these comparative examples better use of these lessons learned from past success or failure but on the other hand the need to be very very tailored and cognizant of the particular context where you're working and not only to be tailored to this context at the outset but to work with the flexibility and capability to adapt to information as it emerges and you know this this as well has encompasses a lot of other things being politically smart about the way you work being locally owned and locally driven and these are things that on a day-to-day basis well I think you know can be reconciled you have to struggle as a practitioner to kind of find that that middle balance and so it's a fairly simple point that I'm making here but I do think it's often lost and that point is that that having institutions like the World Bank who are so well grounded and so so well known for this kind of empirical research acknowledge that and engage with the complexity of working in the field of governance of engaging with power dynamics is an important thing because I think we do still too often see programs put on by institutions like our own and in some cases probably our own where having this more certain feeling and point in mind actually blinds us to very very important realities in the context where we're working and can lead in in the case of the Burkina example had it come through to some very very serious missteps and it's only by acknowledging in a in a more meaningful way and working within this tension that I think we're going to find a better and more consistent explanation of the why this might work in some cases and how we can actually replicate that. Thank you very much for the again the practical test of the usefulness of of this approach but also the constructive critique of and very very very well taken indeed that of these transitional arrangements do not are what matter and and and that indeed having outlined how things work does and given the ingredients doesn't necessarily go all the way to giving the recipe which is the mix of ingredients and the sequencing and how they interact together and which is as you said context specific and so for outlining that tension again between the need to be empirical and evidence and diagnostics based and the need to confront the reality on a day-to-day basis and how dynamic it is and then again also for outlining how far we an institution like ours has come in in that in in making bridging that that gap since WDR 2011 so I let me turn it to the to the to the audience in the nine minutes that that we have left and I would urge you to make to ask your questions to the practitioners not just the thinkers that we that we have around around the table to make this as practical and focused a discussion as possible all our panelists are both thinkers and practitioners I was particularly interested by the the practitioner angle they brought to all this very conceptual discussion today and please keep your question brief so that we can have as many of them as possible and just come up with them firehead hi I'm Suzanne Abadian and I'm at the State Department and the question I had is I'm interested in the informal institutions that undergird the more formal ones I think you talked about the beliefs and norms and values and the importance of that and I just you know I know I think we so was the one that said that in the end the laws that are written in the hearts of man are the ones that are critical and I wondered how does the World Bank propose to address this the change in values and beliefs and norms that that are pretty central to what we're talking about here right sir if you could also tell us who among the panelists you would like your question addressed to or whether it's a general question my name is will Owens I'm with all in for development and my question is a bit more general a lot of what we've been talking about is having a good contextual analysis so that when an implementer or a donor of some kind comes into a context that they have a really clear understanding from the local perspective and in the previous panel we talked a lot about the increase in funding in funding for fragile states and an emphasis on doing good analysis so I was wondering have you thought much about how to operationalize that good analysis and make sure that it's not just helping you at the beginning or the intervention but throughout that intervention as well thanks all right a couple more please ma'am thank you for the panel when we are talking about research we are usually thinking about the data you get from somewhere I just wonder if you have verified that data is correct or not whether the data is used in the proper manner or the very resources to benefit a few and so and then I just wonder you know in this world right and wrong is very confusing a lot of unjust manipulation obstruction or influence and the subtle unjust propaganda so if you can have allow to have a set up a system that allow people to speak and really maintain and correct record and what I mean is not allow record to be destroyed or manipulated and so you will be able to achieve your goal of justice thank you yes thank you ma'am Patricia Fagan Georgetown University I really appreciated this discussion very very much it brings up a lot of issues that I think were let drop at the time when there was a lively discussion about post conflict reconstruction within the rural bank in the 90s and that was a terrifically important initiative but it was kind of it was sidelined to some in my experience I wonder if you could in this in you start the panel started off with talking about the first panel institutional strengthening which is obviously an important critical component of the whole picture how do you see the financial institutions in fragile areas in fragile countries in a fragile very fragile areas of newly post conflict countries being integrated into a kind of in the field process of dealing with the issues that you've all brought up all right so we have four questions I'll try to pass them to each one of the panelists Ina if you would take the one on informal institutions and how these can affect the role of the how what the role of informal institutions is in guaranteeing peace and conflict and security with the reference to Rousseau and especially from a from a rule of law perspective Philip would you like to address the one on contextual analysis and the need for for so Owen's question there specifically on how organisms like ours basically integrate contextual analysis in what is a such a such a rapidly changing field Dr. Deverey if you if you would like to address the question on how financial institutions in fragile countries actually get to the work on the ground in in conflict areas even before the conflict has finished we do some of that in Yemen how we get involved in and walk the talk even before the conflict has has been over and Nigel the question on data in general if if you don't mind and and how do we make use of how is maybe through your your work in the WDR 2011 how have you I mean these are proxy indicators at best and often reliable relying on faulty information and missing information how can we make the best predictions and and assessments possible I'm disentangling myself from answering the questions quite conveniently but it's also an opportunity to to get the panelists to to participate so to you you know sure and I'm not sure I recall exactly the Rousseau quote but I'll give it a shot in regards to the role of informal institutions and what you mentioned about about the sort of disjunctions sometimes between the the official laws or the norms put forward by a body of laws and the norms that are I think it was written in your heart I think the difference there between the informal and the formal institutions fortunately or unfortunately sometimes is that often the informal institutions because of the ways they arise and the ways they're allowed to continue to function are a lot closer to to the norms that that people have really internalized or that people have we can say in their hearts because they often more often grow directly out of that or or sort of people are raised within them and that can be good and that can be bad and what you know if your goal is to strengthen then formal institutions what you might be interested then is is sort of what is the cause of this disjunction between you know this gap in legitimacy between the legitimacy that the informal institutions seem to enjoy and the lack of legitimacy or the lack of correspondence between what people have internalized and what a formal institution is putting forward and in some cases that's because the formal institutions are really not responsive to people's needs they're not responding to what people want they're not reflecting the values of the groups that they're that they're intending to to represent and in that case it's a little clearer what needs to be done in some cases it's because the formal institutions you know have certain principles that they don't want to cross so human rights principles or or you know I'm thinking of corruption you know if you have a in some in certain places you know corruption is a norm corruption is something that people think is is acceptable and a formal institution at least on paper would be very unlikely you know to change their norms to be more reflective of that reality and in that case I do think you know the world development report has a lot to offer in terms of how we change that that because I do think a lot of what it is is about trying to set up those institutions in a way that don't just put forward these norms that are that are a little out of synchronization with what's what's going on in people's heads but they need to actually incentivize at least at first engaging in that behavior that behavior needs to have some kind of positive impact that's tangible for those people and I think in that way if you can actually demonstrate you know that that this change in behavior has a generalized positive impact then slowly over time people may start to internalize that wonderful thank you very much Dr. Dardari public finance management is a very important question and but I'd like to distinguish between two levels here there is the purely technical level of improving institutional capacities and the staff of these institutions and industries of finance and central banks and this is a work that we are already doing and even in Libya we are training technical level staff of actually different political affiliations in Libya the government recognized by the UN and the other technocrats in the country on public finance management we are planning to do the same in Yemen we are already doing that in Iraq so we fully understand the importance of public finance management from a technical point of view in the management of reconstructions large money will have to be spent the question is the legitimacy of those institutions the transparency of those institutions and whether they can function and they can absorb the amounts of resources necessary for reconstruction but there is even a bigger level if I may which is the overall management of national resources and national revenues so even if we improve dramatically the public finance management in any country but that country is using its resources in for example recruiting a disproportionately very large number of civil servants despite all the technical improvements in public finance management if all the oil revenues of Libya or Iraq are going to finance salaries of not very productive civil service that will not achieve the objective and take take Iraq which is now embarking on a very hopefully on a very progressive roads towards reconstruction it will have to change the way it manages its national oil revenues it cannot spend 90% of budget on wages of the civil service so the bank will be engaged on that higher level of what are the strategic options these countries may have in revising their management of national revenues and of course the technical level of public finance management I want to say in both levels this formula should be integrated because in both levels the question of incentives and institutions and this incentives will be crucial and the balance of power and the asymmetry of power in the society will be reflected in this public finance management so I think the report gives us people who will be working on public finance management an excellent tool to ensure that the question of governance and law are part and parcel of this approach Philip sure so to the question on about context I think part of the question I cannot answer because I think the question was how does the World Bank operationalize information about about context what I can say though about this and maybe I can add to what you were getting at my sense and I don't want to be too blunt here about about this but my sense is that you can certainly gather as much information as you can before about a context before you intervene the reality however is that you never know and by experience but also by conviction I don't think you know and I don't think you can pretend to know and if you do pretend to know very accurately what the context is I think you're setting up yourselves for failure that we are we've been from for many years but we're just about to publish a report this September so I invite you to have a look at the report on how to integrate complexity theory and complex systems thinking into how we design implement and monitor and evaluate rule of law interventions in conflict affected environments and one of the main insight from the report is that when we intervene in these kinds of environments what we do essentially is we intervene in complex systems and complex systems are at their core highly unpredictable systems it is impossible for you from the outset to predict how the system will evolve how the system will counteract to your very present to your very presence as an outsider but also to the reform process so to pretend that you can map out everything before you go and I think is dangerous what I think this leads to is as you operationalize the manner in which you seek to gather information about context I think you have to leave space for your institution to learn as it goes along and to be very in a way rigorous about that saying we're so rigorous about the type of environments in which we are that we will not pretend to you as a board or as an organization that we can map this out completely and there are ways I think to operationalize this and so to leave space for you to stop and not commit yourself for a five year plan that is based on a specific understanding of a context at the very beginning but also tapping into and empowering and transferring the power to diagnose from yourself to the very people who are actively involved in a reform process and allow them through an iterative process to generate information as to what the problems are and how is the system reacting to the intervention I think is a way for large institutions to operationalize how they learn and how they generate information about context so that's what we're trying to do here with what Ina is working on and both in our research but also in how we conduct work and so those would be thoughts that I would that would share on that. Very much on point Philippe Dr. Dardari if I may Philippe brought to my attention a very important point as a planner as a national planner the lesson one learned after years of working in this field you don't build a detailed plan every step along the way and expect in your institutions to behave rationally every step of the way the best thing at least my personal experience is try to have an overview vision of where you want to go where does the development program wants to go and let your people the institutions formal and informal public and private interact and be creative in the in the steps forward that produces a much better result than you know centrally ordered detailed steps along the way the question we will be facing now in the reconstruction and I'm sorry to dwell on this area is that reconstruction is the place where there would be capture and you want to avoid it so it's the place where elites would try to take over and you would like to reconstruction to spread across all stakeholders in the society therefore what is the best way to create a vision and empower the people to implement that vision in the in reconstructing those countries and what are the dynamics that will happen and would they protect the the ordinary citizens and their ownership of the reconstruction program or with those dynamics without reform lead to the same outcome of the pre-conflict situation it's a dilemma that we have to face but I need to accept like Philip referred to that we will never have neither a hundred percent information nor a hundred percent control over the interaction of institutions and individuals the best thing is to develop a vision and empower the people and the stakeholders to go down that road perfect Nigel in a minute sure question was how do you use imperfect data to make reasonable assessments and I'm going to echo the tone of Philip here first of all all data is imperfect so that's a false dichotomy in a sense but and I think what exactly what is data and looking at this from a field perspective what is the information that matters and I think it's a combination of two things first of all and most importantly it's the stories that people tell to explain why they do what they do and what drives them what makes them feel the way they do about things and the other source of data is you know international comparative statistical stuff and often I think the best use of information in conflict situations is where you can bring these two things together in ways that can change the perceptions both of those who are involved in the conflict and of the outsiders who try to help them let me just add one thing about world bank contextual analysis I actually think that the the world bank as as have others over the last few years have developed something that's very powerful but is still not properly used which is essentially to try and understand and focus on the drivers of the drivers of conflict drivers of violence the grievances and the opportunities that trigger violence if that's properly used and there are some quite good protocols within the world bank about how you can do this analysis what's not done is to then use that to determine what your program should consist of that's where the rigor drops off because all the different sectors in the institution push forward the programs that perfectly legitimate they they would like to see put in place so the question of what should be done first as opposed to what is important is never really asked but you actually have a tool that you can use for this I wish it was used you know more rigorously than it is all right thank you with this wish we come to a close for this session in discussion today I think we covered a lot of ground in two hours and 15 minutes lots of country experiences Bosnia Burkina Faso many countries in the Middle East and North Africa Kosovo Somalia we also had a good blend of both conceptual brain squeezing and also taking things to the test of of practice a fair deal of nuance that I thought we all speakers were able to incorporate in but also some descriptions of what we have been doing and how we can do things better I am let's give all panelists a round of applause for this discussion today and thank you to our hosts today for hosting us in this beautiful venue and best of luck as you continue thank you bye bye