the deeping crisis of governance and the refugee challenge
TRANSCRIPT
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The Deepening Crisis of Governance and the Refugee
Challenge
Phil Williams University of Pittsburgh
OECD, 8 December 2015
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Bottom Line Up Front
• Currently facing a major crisis of governance – These are current not future risks– They are systemic and profound– They are partly structural but exacerbated by
neoliberalism and misplaced faith in the market – Going to get much worse – result of global
megatrends– Governance itself has become a wicked problem
when it is essential to deal with other wicked problems
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Megatrends
• “Great forces in societal development that will affect all areas - state, market and civil society - for many years to come. Megatrends are the forces that define our present and future worlds, and the interaction between them is as important as each individual megatrend.” (Larsen)
• The space between – negative synergies so exacerbate not ameliorate
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Megatrend: Decline of the State
• Share sovereignty – but great variations among states – some states were never Westphalian
• Only 20-25% of states are strong and effective• Weak states – authority deficits, capacity gaps, limited
public goods and exclusivity, poor economic management, and low legitimacy quotient (LQ)
• Lack of capacity to extract and/or provide– lead to functional holes
• Lack of consensus on procedural and political fundamentals• Exclusive rather than inclusive
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Successful states – balancing acts
• resource extraction and the provision of services• between the state and the society• between the exercise of political power and the
social contract between governors and governed• between top down rule and bottom up expressions
of needs and preferences• between security and welfare• between responsibility and deference• between multiple roles and identities
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So what?
• Balance is difficult to maintain • Relationship between state and society in
disequilibrium• Issue is not failed states but imbalance• Implication – governance is the issue not
simply the state • Can have governance failure without state
failure
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The Crisis of Governance
• The crisis of governance reflects a world of more and more perennially weak, corrupt, captured states that are unable or unwilling:– to meet the needs of their citizens– to provide an inclusive fold of protection and provision – to evoke the continued loyalty of their citizenry; to
maintain the rule of law– to impose and maintain order in their major cities – to control their borders
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• Attractive fictions associated with territorial sovereignty, so scope and nature of the crisis of governance largely unrecognized.
• Neither denial nor avoidance of the issues, however, is an adequate strategy.
• Denial and avoidance - powerful inhibitors to the development of coherent responses.
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• Deviations from the idealized norm are often treated as anomalies
• In fact the effective Westphalian states are the real anomalies
• Most states in the contemporary international system did not have the benefit of the consolidation process that accompanied large inter-state wars that required mobilization of people and resources
• Quasi-states (Robert Jackson)
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• State is often the prize of politics and a source of capital accumulation
• Even many supposedly weak states are often strong states in terms of resource extraction (Chayes)
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The Associated Word Cloud
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Consequences of the Crisis of Governance
• High levels of violence, anomie, and impunity especially in Latin America and Africa
• Transfer of loyalties from the state - Maras• Rise of alternative governance
– transportistas and maras in Central America– ISIS better at governance than Iraqi or Syrian
government – bar not very high• Refugee flows
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The Refugee Crisis
• The 2014 Unaccompanied Minors crisis in the United States
• The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe• Populations move from areas of failed
governance to Westphalian states
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Country of Origin Number of migrants and refugees 2014
Syria 3.88 million
Afghanistan 2.59 million
Somalia 1.11 million
Sudan 666,000
South Sudan 616,200
D.R. Congo 516,800
Myanmar/Burma 479,000
Central African Republic 412,000
Iraq 369,900
Eritrea 363,100
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The Refugee Crisis • The global south is moving north – youth migration as a high
risk asset for ageing countries• Humanitarian considerations v national security – how do
we make the tradeoffs?• Problems of integrating new migrants when
– Existing populations dealing with austerity– Segments of migrant populations reject state authority
• Hostile segments of the population and the resurgence of the extreme right
• Lots of worrying warning signs in Europe France 2005 and France 2015
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Refugee Crisis as a Wicked Problem
• Multi-faceted and typically cross several distinct but ultimately interdependent policy domains.
• Every wicked problem is a symptom of other problems and responding to it has an impact on other problems.
• There are multiple stakeholders, both at the national and international levels, who often find it difficult to achieve a consensus on either the nature of the problem or the most appropriate solutions
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• Not clear if there is an end game• Measures of effectiveness, let alone success,
elusive partly because of the dynamism of the problem and partly because “success” can often have inadvertent a consequences that make the problem even more intractable.
• Wicked problems are dynamic rather than static and constantly evolve and morph, often in ways that make them more resilient
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Some Options to Ponder
• Attack the human traffickers and smugglers• But range of different actors:
– Criminal organizations – comprehensive portfolio but opportunistic
– Specialist organizations– Opportunistic individuals and groups– Fixers and Facilitators– Sympathizers
• Constantly morph and adapt – highly resilient
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The central paradox
• Understand migrant risk acceptance in terms of prospect theory – accept high risks involved in migration when the costs of staying in existing situation are intolerable
• Actions to accommodate the migrants already in Europe are likely to swell the problem by encouraging others
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Key challenges
• Whose problem is the problem?– Greek revenge on the EU– Turkish leverage – the power to take the finger out of the dike– East European and Balkan countries limited capacity
• Harmonizing policies within the EU - think inter-operability rather than standardization – but still 2 problems– Lack of consensus – Different voices – contradictory messages
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• Managing the short term problem with crisis responses
• But what about the long term integration and sustainability?
• And what about the impact on European politics and domestic politics?
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• These are small dress rehearsals for the massive flows of climate change refugees who will come from coastal megacities
• Human smuggling and human trafficking will be the boom businesses of the mid 21st Century
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• Thank you for listening
• Questions, Comments and Criticisms
• Contact: [email protected]• Contact: [email protected]