Current crisis facing governments. Anticipating long term global risks and threats.

1. The Deepening Crisis of
Governance and the Refugee
Challenge
Phil Williams
University of Pittsburgh
OECD, 8 December 2015
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2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. • 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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9. • 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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10. • 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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11. The Associated Word Cloud
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12. 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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13. 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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14. 14
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

15. 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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16. 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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17. • 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. 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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21. • 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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22. • 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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23. • Thank you for listening
• Questions, Comments and Criticisms
• Contact: phil.williams@frontier.com
• Contact: ridgway1@pitt.edu
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