The Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE) uses a citizen-centered perspective to rethink the fundamentals of the relationship between citizens, the state and the market in the context of globalization. Stability and prosperity in our interdependent world demand a new global compact to ensure that the billions of people currently excluded become stakeholders in the emerging political and economic order.

Today between 40 and 60 states, home to close to two billion people, suffer from a "sovereignty gap": they are not able to perform the functions expected of a state in the 21st century.

The world’s worst problems—terrorism, drug and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, and genocide—originate in such states. The international community has devoted billions of dollars and significant military resources in efforts to mitigate this problem, but in large part this effort has not succeeded.

Stability and prosperity in our interdependent world demand a new compact to ensure that the billions of people currently excluded from globalization become stakeholders in the emerging political and economic order through creating binding ties between citizen, the state and the market. Despite decades of painful experience, the international community has not yet formulated or agreed upon a coherent strategy nor a set of coordinated interventions for supporting this approach in the most fragile states.

Given the scale, complexity and urgency of this problem, and with the real challenges in Afghanistan and similar contexts at the forefront of their thinking, the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE) was founded to create an integrated system for state- and market-building which tackles the root causes of instability. The team has developed a unique approach to the relationship between citizens, the state and the market which informs ISE’s advice to countries, international organizations and corporations, and a range of tools which include a multi-functional framework for defining a state-building approach.

A CITIZEN CENTERED APPROACH

The ISE approach distills conceptual thinking, historical analysis and first-hand field experience with dialogue across networks of individuals and organizations in the realms of civil society, government, business, technology and academia. The Institute has developed critical tools and frameworks that allow us to combine contextualized analysis with comparative perspective to provide actionable policy advice.

ISE provides practical country-level support to state-building processes, offers concrete advice to policy-makers, provides practical tools including tailored metrics of success and failure, brings together networks and organizations to further refine thinking on issues of state effectiveness and supports training for managers and leaders of state transitions. ISE searches for innovative approaches that have practical relevance for donors and national governments, and is uniquely placed to translate these approaches across country contexts.

Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World Fixing Failed States addresses one of the central issues of our times: the proliferation of failed states across the world and our inability to stabilize them. In this widely acclaimed book the authors diagnose the causes of state failure, and offer a framework for building states informed by the realities of our fully globalized world. [read more]