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Government Responses to Crisis pp 111–127Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

When Is Top-Down State-Building Appropriate?

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Abstract

The state has a key role to play in facilitating reconstruction of failed states under certain conditions, such as when there is a breakdown of self-governance and when there are economies of scale in public goods provision, such as with roads and security. Since failed states lack implementation capacity, the donor community has a potentially key role in supporting the state in its efforts to respond to crises. Much like any government intervention, donor responses are subject to information and incentive problems. To increase the chances that donor-assisted state-building works, it is necessary that there are mechanisms to elicit information about the strength and limitations of self-governance at the local level.

We thank Virgil Henry Storr and Stefanie Haeffele, and the participants in the Hayek Program Responding to Crisis Symposium at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, for exceptionally useful comments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Edwards (2002) provides a compelling account of the link between the community government and the rise of the Afghan Taliban.

  2. 2.

    Depending on the source, Afghanistan has between 20,000 and 40,000 villages, most with no more than a few hundred people. The total population is less than 25 million.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Jennifer Murtazashvili & Ilia Murtazashvili

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  1. Jennifer Murtazashvili
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  2. Ilia Murtazashvili
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Correspondence to Jennifer Murtazashvili .

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  1. F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Stefanie Haeffele

  2. F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Virgil Henry Storr

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Murtazashvili, J., Murtazashvili, I. (2020). When Is Top-Down State-Building Appropriate?. In: Haeffele, S., Storr, V. (eds) Government Responses to Crisis. Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39309-0_7

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