Maintaining Basic State Functions and Service Delivery During Escalating Crises

This rapid literature review explores how to maintain essential state functions and basic service delivery during escalating conflict situations. It draws on literature and ideas from various overlapping agendas including development and humanitarian nexus; development, humanitarian and peacebuilding nexus (the “triple nexus”); fragile states; state-building; conflict sensitivity; resilience; and conflict prevention and early warning. There has been an extensive exploration of these ideas over the past decades: as the international development agenda has increasingly focussed on the needs of fragile and conflict-affected contexts (FCAS); as violent conflicts have become more complex and protracted; as the global share of poverty has become increasingly concentrated in FCAS highlighting the need to combine humanitarian crisis strategies with longer-term development strategies; as threats emanating from FCAS increasingly affect countries beyond those states and regions e.g. through serious and organised crime (SOC) networks, migration, terrorism, etc; and as global trends like climate change and demographic shifts create new stresses, opportunities, and risks.