This publication provides the evidence to help donors understand how to balance risks and opportunities in order to protect the integrity of their institutions while delivering better results to those who need it most.

From the anarchy of Somalia to the relative stability of Nepal, fragile and transitional situations represent a broad spectrum of contexts. However, they share some common features: these are risky environments - for the people who live there, for their governments, for neighbouring countries, and for those who seek to provide assistance. Positive outcomes are hard to achieve and the risk of regression in countries emerging from armed conflict is high. International engagement in these situations presents significant risks for donors and implementing partners, but also holds the potential for.

This book provides an internationally accepted conceptual framework for statebuilding, informed by today’s realities of conflict-affected and fragile situations.

Developing countries want to join in the globalisation process. However, the increasing complexity of global markets, the new challenges of the multilateral trading system and the competing demands of regional, bilateral and multilateral trade agreemen

This book is based on experience and reflections related to international support provided to parliaments and legislative bodies both in selected countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan) and globally. The author intends to provide a critique of parliamentary support, as part of development assistance or foreign aid, for having been conceived in narrow terms of technical assistance and for failing to appreciate that aid effectiveness calls for a sound understanding of a country’s politics, culture, and history. The monograph examines the effectiveness of aid in both stable democracies, and fragile and transition countries. The project is ideal for audiences interested in regional politics, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, and development/democracy studies.

This book addresses a conundrum for the international development community: The law of development cooperation poses major constraints on delivering aid where it is needed most. The existence of a state with an effective government is a basic condition for the transfer of aid, making development cooperation with ‘fragile’ nations particularly challenging. The author explores how international organizations like the World Bank have responded by adopting formal and informal rules to engage specifically with countries with weak or no governments. Von Engelhardt provides a critical analysis of the discourse on fragile states and how it has shaped the policy decision-making of international organizations. By demonstrating how perceptions of fragility can have significant consequences both in practice and in law, the work challenges conventional research that dismisses state fragility as a phenomenon beyond law. It also argues that the legal parameters for effective global policy play a crucial role, and offers a fresh approach to a topic that is central to international security and development.

The guidance presented in this book provides step-by-step guidance on the core steps in planning, carrying out and learning from evaluation, as well as some basic principles on programme design and management.