8.1: Introduction

The international donor community has committed itself to assist in “building effective, legitimate and resilient state institutions, capable of engaging productively with their people to promote sustained development” and human security (OECD-DAC, 2007, Preamble). The Paris Declaration of March 2005 in particular addresses the need to deliver effective aid in fragile states and declares as the “long-term vision for international engagement in fragile states (…) to build legitimate, effective and resilient state and other country institutions” (OECD, 2005, point 37).^[1] State-building is seen by major donors as a central dimension of development assistance, and functioning, effective and legitimate state and society institutions are seen as a prerequisite for sustainable development.

In this context, practical policies and assistance have very much focussed on capacity and institution-building as a means for generating political effectiveness. In comparison, legitimacy, which many would argue is a prerequisite for capacity and effectiveness has been relegated to a somewhat secondary position. The underlying assumption is that legitimacy somehow automatically result from effectiveness. Only recently, have issues of legitimacy gained more prominence in their own right. Importantly, the OECD-DAC’s Fragile States Group State Building Task Team has given legitimacy prominence in its deliberations and initial findings on state-building. This provides an excellent starting point for further conceptual and practical work on this topic in the context of the necessities of state formation under conditions of fragility.

My proposition in this chapter is that external actors working in fragile post-colonial environments need to focus much more attention on legitimacy issues than has been the case so far and to do so they have to widen their understanding of legitimacy considerably. The hypothesis underlying this paper, is that legal-rational legitimacy as found in the developed Western OECD states is only one type of legitimacy applicable to fragile states and situations, and it is important to engage with other types of legitimacy in order to help build effective, resilient and sustainable states in fragile situations. The chapter argues that it is important to blend/hybridise rational legal sources of legitimacy with traditional and charismatic legitimacy, and the processes and the contexts that constitute their sources. This is the only way of ensuring higher levels of support for state institutions and is critical to the promotion of human security. In fragile situations traditional (and to a lesser extent, charismatic) legitimacy matter and have to be taken into account in state-building endeavours in relation to state formation, peace-building and development. This is not to say that this is an easy task, quite the contrary. It is extraordinarily challenging to understand exactly what legitimacy is in fragile situations and even more difficult to design internal and external intervention strategies capable of generating higher levels of political legitimacy that support state-building, peace-building and development. It is complicated because there is often confusion about the different types of legitimacy and their relation and interaction, and about what legitimacy resides in the state as a set of legislative, executive and judicial institutions and what legitimacy resides in particular governments or regimes. They are mutually reinforcing. Legitimate state institutions are conducive to the emergence of legitimate regimes and governments and vice versa. But sometimes there are odious regimes in legitimate states and states which lack legitimacy hosting quite positive regimes. My focus is on the legitimacy of state institutions and their interaction with non-state societal institutions and actors who enjoy legitimacy, not on the legitimacy of specific governments or regimes. In the context of state-building in fragile situations in the developing world, it is the institutions of states that are modelled along the Western Weberian template (which is the OECD model state) that have legitimacy problems; it is the state institutions as such, and not only specific governments, that have had to struggle with the lack of legitimacy.