Jonathan Marley is a Policy Analyst in Crises and Fragility at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where he leads the States of Fragility team and their work. Jonathan is a former soldier and academic - he served in the Irish military, was deployed as a peacekeeper, and taught military officers at the Irish Defense Forces Military College. We kick off this episode talking about Jonathan’s career in the military, his life as a peacekeeper in Kosovo at a time of experimentation around ideas in civil-military cooperation, and how he and his fellow soldiers got to try them out in real time. Jonathan then shares with us what it’s like to be a peacekeeper in the Balkans and, spoiler alert, no two days were the same. However, there were some fundamental constants: building relationships with people and building trust. Then the conversation moves on to the differences between peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and development. Jonathan shares his observations about the missing operational middle in development planning, and what can be learned from how the military makes and implements its plans. We also touched on how the war in Ukraine making your morning coffee more expensive is an example of the need for systems thinking and multidimensional analysis. The conversation also explores what should development professionals know about diplomacy, whether we can think about a fragility continuum, and what’s going on with the multiple understandings of fragility among the humanitarian-development-peace actors. And there’s still more! Jonathan’s life experience allowed for a conversation rich in topics and deep in insights. Listen to the episode to hear Jonathan share many more insights into fragility and resilience. The episode was recorded on March 18th, 2022.
Mihaela Carstei, Paul M. Bisca, and Johan Bjurman Bergman co-host F-World: The Fragility Podcast.
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RESOURCES:
OECD States of Fragility Platform: http://www3.compareyourcountry.org/states-of-fragility/about/0/
States of Fragility 2020 Report: https://www.oecd.org/dac/states-of-fragility-fa5a6770-en.htm
The Crises & Fragility team in the Global Partnerships & Policies Division of the Development Cooperation Directorate (DCD) of the OECD. https://www.oecd.org/dac/conflict-fragility-resilience/
Marley, J. and H. Desai (2020), "Fragility and Agenda 2030: Navigating shocks and pressures in fragile contexts", OECD Development Co-operation Working Papers, No. 82, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/65d5cb9c-en.
Marley, J. (2020), "Peacebuilding in fragile contexts", OECD Development Co-operation Working Papers, No. 83, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/d222bc0a-en.
Forsberg, E. and J. Marley (2020), "Diplomacy and peace in fragile contexts", OECD Development Co-operation Working Papers, No. 77, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/6a684a4b-en.
OECD (2022) “Adding the human dimension to the OECD fragility framework”, OECD Development Co-operation Directorate, OECD Publishing, Paris. https://www.oecd.org/dac/2022-human-dimension-fragility.pdf
OECD (2022), OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2022 Issue 1: Preliminary version, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/62d0ca31-en.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Introduction
0:45 The 80s in Ireland and the military as a career
2:06 Jonathan’s 1st deployment with NATO in Kosovo and civil-military cooperation
5:45 The daily life of a peacekeeper
8:31 Peacekeeping entrepreneurship
11:25 How to build trust as a soldier and peacekeeper
15:44 What’s the difference: peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and development?
19:39 The missing operational middle: local peacebuilding vs. national development planning
23:51 Planning challenges: military vs. development
28:45 Business case for prevention
34:07 What is fragility?
39:58 Value added: States of Fragility & the OECD
44:54 Comfortable in ambiguity: the continuum of fragility
50:52 Ukraine & the price of a cup of coffee: the value of multidimensional analysis and systems thinking
57:23 How can diplomacy help in Ukraine and the role of diplomacy in development
1:03:47 Diversity of perspectives on fragility and the challenges of communication
1:08:41 The human dimension: a new addition to the States of Fragility framework
1:15:34 Wrap-up
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Hi and welcome to F-World: The Fragility Podcast! Together with our guests from across the globe, we explore how fragility manifests across economics, politics, society, culture development, and the environment, and how we can build a more resilient future. I'm Mihaela Carstei and I'm joined by my two co-hosts Paul Bisca and Johan Bjurman Bergman. And today we're speaking with Jonathan Marley. Jonathan is a policy analyst in crises and fragility at the OECD. He leads the OECD States of Fragility team and their work, and he also brings a very interesting and rich background to this conversation. He's a former soldier and academic. Welcome to F-World Jonathan!
JONATHAN MARLEY: Thank you very much for having me.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, we usually like to start at the beginning with all of our guests. We love to learn how do you end up becoming interested in fragility? What about the way you grew up or what you studied, led you to work on what you're working on today?
JONATHAN MARLEY: So, I grew up in the west of Ireland in the - I'm born in 78, so a child of the eighties, which is significant because the conflict of Northern Ireland was still relevant back then. So, even though I was not affected by it, it was always on our TV screens. We were always aware of something that was happening to, to the north of the island. I was always inclined towards the outdoors, and so that kind of led me towards the military and choosing the military as a career. And when I joined the military, I didn't fully appreciate how diverse military organizations are until I was fully in there and realized actually it opens up panoply of careerist options to you and that through deployments to Kosovo and Lebanon through engagements with people like the Geneva Center for Security Sector Governance [DCAF], eventually wound its way through a couple of universities and to where I am today at the OECD.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: That sounds absolutely wonderful. And I'm actually curious tell us a little bit about what is it like to be a peacekeeper or soldier, and how does that then influence your desire to address fragility, which is such an abstract concept?
JONATHAN MARLEY: My first deployment was with NATO to Kosovo in 2004, and we deployed just a few days after the March riots that year. So, the week before we arrived, 19 people were killed in fighting just, just prior to our arrival. So, my first exposure to peacekeeping or peace-forcing as that mission was labeled was being my crowd control gear at the airport.
And essentially, I spent the first month moving around Kosovo trying to mitigate and head off various clashes and incidents. But it's what happened after that, actually, that really set me on the path to where I am now, that period in the Balkans saw a huge amount of experimentation by military forces because of the context they found themselves because of the post-conflict context that they found themselves in.
So, within weeks of putting away our crowd control gear, I was delivering Irish Aid projects in our area of operations. And even though at the time we called them humanitarian. In fact, they were development, we were building schools, we were building houses. We were speaking to local councils, councils trying to figure out what their financial projections were. We were looking at health centers. So, very quickly it went way beyond what up to that point had been called "hearts and minds" type work that militaries would have done because the opportunity allowed them, maybe it was a nice thing to do.
The other thing that happened at that time was you saw the consolidation of ideas around civil-military cooperation. And so, you saw some of that activity being brought into military planning processes becoming categorized as another way of achieving your objective. And that really evolved from the Balkans through Iraq, into Afghanistan, into certainly a lot of what we saw around stabilization and interventions and so on.
But so much of the experimentation that lies behind things like the provincial reconstruction teams that we saw in Afghanistan. Actually, a lot of the origins of that was in the Balkans and a lot of the experimentation that was going on in the Balkans at that time. There was no way I would be allowed to do or someone in uniform would do an Irish Aid project like that now, but at that time, people were trying to adapt and respond to what they were seeing in front of them.
That got me thinking initially about that relationship between the military and civilian actors in a post-conflict setting. And over time that evolved into looking at issues like how fragility evolves and particularly in my case, looking at issues around security sector reform. And that gradually led me more and more to development conversations, where I saw a gap between what military planning and strategies were and what development planning, and strategies were and how they impacted on each other in different contexts.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, Jonathan, you just described for us the fact that as a peacekeeper in the Balkans, you did a lot of development and humanitarian work, but tell us a bit more about the peacekeeping part. How was that like? You got up in the morning, you went on patrol, and then what happens next?
JONATHAN MARLEY: No two days were the same. The initial, the initial focus was very much on dealing with the aftermath of those riots and trying to ease tensions between communities within the area that we were operating in. So, we put a lot of emphasis on building community relations.
This was just before the liaison on an observation team concept really took hold in Kosovo, but we would assign our troops to different villages, we encouraged them to meet the locals, meet not just the local leaders, but stop people in the street and chat to them. And it was all about building up relations, building up networks around simple issues.
And I think that's where a lot of the drive came for the kinds of projects that we started to build in around schools and so on. They became very much part of that conversation and they allowed us. To shift the emphasis away from some of the more sensitive issues that maybe divide a communities to areas that maybe you could build consensus around.
So, I've seen it happen in a lot of other places elsewhere, but what we were trying to do was to adapt our way of working day to day so that we would go to villages, find out what was going on, build the relationships, take that information back, to see how we can manage the resources we have to allow tensions to reduce.
And it worked. It worked because you could, if something happened, if you heard something happened in one part of your area and you knew it was likely to reverberate in another. You could get on the phone, you could say something has happened we're checking this out, please stay where you are and we'll get back to you with more solid information when we have it. And that sounds like a, quite an innocuous call, but so often that just bought you the time and space you needed to figure things out, maybe to position troops so that things couldn't escalate. So, a lot of it was about prevention, about preemption, about gathering as much information, and I say information as opposed to intelligence, to respond to the dynamics that were within your area. And so much of our time was spent doing those kinds of building those kinds of relationships and doing those kinds of tasks. And what I learned later in my career, when I was aide-de-camp to the UN head of mission in Lebanon, was actually how much the same dynamics played out, that it was the personal relationships you build, even at very high levels that often allowed for potentially serious incidents to be mitigated before they got out of hand.
PAUL M. BISCA: And you've just mentioned that today, no Irish soldier would deliver Irish Aid in the way you did it during your deployment in Kosovo, which reflects a bit, the fact that these lines of work, humanitarian, development, and security have become more structured. Whereas in your time there were more entrepreneurial. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
JONATHAN MARLEY: I really enjoy doing the work that we did in Kosovo. And it was entrepreneurial. Maybe we were not the most entrepreneurial group that were there. I know the Finish were so advanced they had relations with the local university, they were trying to embed research projects around what they were doing, they had bigger budgets, which also helped. And what was interesting about that time was almost every contingent there and it wasn't just major contingents, Ireland is not a member of NATO. So, there were a lot of other non-NATO countries there as well. Almost all of them had a different approach to how this has been, this how to engage in these kinds of issues.
So, we were all looking at each other's notebooks in that sense to see what was working, what was having traction. By the time I went back to Kosovo in 2007, for my second tour, you could see the structures beginning to take hold, you can see, as I said at the start, how some concepts were being formalized within military planning processes and how I think that led to some unfortunate practices, maybe not necessarily in Kosovo, but in other contexts that didn't help.
I think also the military, certainly Western militaries invest a huge amount in education and our awareness of the boundaries between military and humanitarian actors, between military and development actors evolved significantly during that period as well. So, and I think particularly between military and humanitarian, where our sense of what was important to them was continuously reinforced through our training, I think that allowed for better relationships to emerge at local level certainly. That didn't happen to the same extent on the development side. And, and I think it's still a gap that remains to be addressed. Military and development actors don't typically talk to each other. I appreciate the dynamics are different and maybe conversations need to happen at a higher level, but they're not really happening at the higher level. And when you see that entrepreneurial spirit that a lot of militaries have, and you see how that went unchecked through a 20-year period and through different deployments, you can see the implications of that lack of dialogue and how they can affect not just an individual organization's or sector's effectiveness but the entire effectiveness of the overall strategy.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, you've alluded to - in your description of Kosovo and of Lebanon - to the importance of interpersonal relations at every level. And we know that of course for those to work and in general for, for societies in fragility we find challenges with trust. So, I wanted to understand a bit more, how did you go about building that trust interpersonally as a soldier, as a peacekeeper in such volatile environments and perhaps how has that influenced your work today and, and how you think about the concept of trust in your in the conceptualization of the states of fragility reports and, and your work at the OECD?
JONATHAN MARLEY: In Kosovo, we were very conscious of the posture and the image we presented to the local population. So, where the situation allowed - and certainly as things calm down - you sling your rifle behind your back, you would wear a beret instead of your helmet, and these are very small gestures, but to a community that has just come through conflict, they notice these things quite quickly. And then it is about looking at the areas where you can essentially build relationships. And so it's a lot of time going drinking coffee and just simply listening and finding out to what's going on. The difficulty we always have, and it certainly wasn't unique to us, was the high rotations of military cycles through these areas. We were on a six to eight months cycle, depending, depending on the circumstances. So, by the time again, I went back in 2007, you were a very aware of a certain fatigue with the local community, because it was yet another rotation, yet another new set of faces. And if you didn't manage that process carefully, they were being asked the same questions that they'd been asked 10 times before, and you could easily lose the trust that you might've established at an early stage. So, it often evolved around local issues that simply made their life, the lives of people in your area easier. In 2004 we spent a lot of time looking at opening up local markets managing the security around those markets so both communities were comfortable going to them and using them. We spent a lot of time talking to education authorities about how schools who typically ran staggered schedules so different ethnic groups would go at different times. So, you were trying to manage elements of that because there was different communities moving to and from. And so much of it was about just maintaining a presence to keep the peace and speaking to people about what the best way to do that was. And we didn't always get it right. There was a lot of ad hocism in that I think, because it was such an unusual environment at that time.
A lot of our experience had come from Lebanon, which was static peacekeeping mission. Our troops have been there since 1978, that there is a deep corporate cultural knowledge there to fall back on. We didn't have that in Kosovo, certainly in the early days. And we didn't have in some of the other missions that we went on to take after that. But the fundamentals were always about the same.
You couldn't stay in the barracks. You had to get out, you were conscious of your posture, you engaged on the issues that matter to the local community. And then the other side of that was being realistic about what you could do about their situation and being honest, that a lot of the times, the things that we're asking for were simply not possible for us to deliver on. And so there was that finding that balance and that replicated itself, not just in Kosovo, replicated itself, certainly in Lebanon after 2006. And we we've seen this in almost all conflict situations since then.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: So, hearing you talk and sort of, you already said that what you were able to do as a soldier in terms of sort of some of the development programs you would not be able to do today. It made me wonder, what's the difference between peacekeeping and peacebuilding actually not peacekeeping is more clear, but peacebuilding and development ultimately, because the kind of activities you're describing are helping those elements of society, economy governance, there are essential for development in a way. And I know it's a bit of a provocative question, but I really want to sort of maybe clarify even just for myself, but also for the audience. What's that difference? Because it's sometimes hard to see.
JONATHAN MARLEY: It is hard to see, and I won't be able to give you an easy answer to that. Peacebuilding for me, that was always about a much more locally political process, looking at communities, looking at relationships, and trying to figure out ways for maybe allowing coexistence, maybe looking then towards better sharing the space. It can unfold in different ways, but always with that idea of getting to some kind of idea of positive peace for a particular area. So, it's bounded in that kind of political context for me, that you find it depending whether it's a local community or whether it's on a national scale. So, it is about people and relationships and how to get those relationships to work coherently with each other. Whereas for me, development, and I knew nothing about development, at this point in time and arguably still I'm on a steep learning curve over the last couple of years, but it's much broader, it's more technical, and you can see where the emphasis maybe with development is more on the resilience that sits around peace than necessarily on the peace itself.
And so that can present a lot of different ways. You can see it in the justice system. You can see it in the alleviation of poverty. You can see it in the maybe antidiscrimination work. You can see that may be not directly relevant to a particular peace building concept, but they all feed into it. And I think that's where the, for me, it is the connections that exist between these two spaces that are perhaps much more pronounced and extensive than is often given credit for. And so that's really my primary interest now is exploring those connections, and when you find those connections, what they mean for each side of for each type of approach.
So, that's the distinction I make when I approach this work. I also find that peace building tends to be often more intuitive and certainly more political, whereas development approaches tend to be more technical, and process driven. And there are things to be learned on both sides for the effectiveness of both of those approaches.
I've found that a lot of on a lot of occasions, but peacebuilding processes the evidence to inform a peace conversation exists on development side whereas on development side, the political capital for sustaining the kinds of reforms and institutions that you're trying to build exists in the peacebuilding space and connecting the two is often difficult, but arguably is the necessary blend that you need to start delivering more effective outcomes.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, how do you make that connection effective? In one of your OECD papers. You talk about this missing middle between the kind of local peace building processes that you've described, and then the broader national development strategies or policies. Can you tell us more about that? What are your views?
JONATHAN MARLEY: I bring a particular military perspective to this part of the conversation. One of the things that strikes me as one of the most pronounced differences I see between the world I came from the military space and where, where I am now is the emphasis on planning. So,: the military typically plan at three levels.
They plan at a strategic policy level, they plan at an operational level, and they plan at a tactical level. There is no operational level really when it comes to development planning. And that speaks to a lot of the literature. I've read on this idea around a missing middle. And it's curious that that is not resourced, and you see it play out in different ways. If you look at the conversations around, say localization and local localized peacebuilding often what you see is really exceptional work, really innovative, impactful work that struggles to maintain an impact over an extended period of time because the architecture and frameworks are not there to allow the success to hold. A lot of military planners look at this distinction between tactical and tactical actions and operational and strategic effect. And so they resource that area. They're constantly looking to see how can you capitalize on the effect that you achieve at a local level and ensure that reverberates up through different levels of a particular area. And it's curious to me that there is not more attention emphasized on that in development cycles.
And also, I've noticed that people talk about fragmentation in the development space, and you can see this disconnect between very localized approaches, which are community driven and then these national processes, which may be completely technically driven with an obvious relationship from a stand away point, but actually no connection practically between them in a given context.
And I saw that play out, for example, in Gambia where you had a security sector reform process running essentially in parallel to a national development plan that it was supposed to be part of. And the localized component, which was also relevant there, was a truth and reconciliation process, which was immensely powerful and very admirable and arguably could have lent more momentum to processes elsewhere across the system. There was a lot to admire in what the Gambians were doing. But there were these little, just these little gaps that maybe limited some of the realization of the potential that was there.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Can you hypothesize about why there's such lack of attention? What are the incentives within the structure of those that do development, those entities that focus on these issues, whether the local level or at the national level? What's missing? What incentives could we bring to the table? Because the way you described it from the military, and I remember also reading the examples you gave with the NATO led missions in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and how the UN peacekeeping missions, for example, report directly to headquarters without actually going through that operational middle.
It's also, if you're thinking about private sector, corporations, when you organize a giant project - let's say you're building a nuclear power plant, you have to have that operational middle, otherwise your project is going to fail. So, what is missing in the - if you can hypothesize or if you know, or have a strong opinion about it - what's missing in the development space?
PAUL M. BISCA: I actually wanted to, to build on that and offer possible counterpoint to what you just said, Jonathan, because a lot of development project and fragile states that I'm at least familiar with and the people working on them will say, hang on, actually, there's a lot of operational planning going on. We have these massive project appraisal documents that are developed together with the government. We do a host of consultation efforts with local communities. We go on mission to supervise project implementation multiple times of the year. We get the reports. It could even be geolocated. We have people in the field trying to work closely with communities. So, how would you respond to that argument?
JONATHAN MARLEY: I have to be honest and say that I'm coming from a pretty constricted, evidence-based, or experience level when it comes to these issues. So, I can only speak to the experience that I have, what I've seen. Is first of all, that there is a difference in scale of resources that I've seen in the application of the military style of planning and delivery versus development, and development tends not to have access to the same scale of resources that military planners typically have in these kinds of contexts.
I've found the teams that I've observed have been quite small, doing immense work but actually don't have the same number of levers to pull that somebody in a military mission might have. They also don't have the analytical capacity behind them that I'm not sure we have. I mean, if you look at NATO, they have entire headquarters just doing this analysis all the time, in peace and in war. There's nothing comparable to that on the development side. The other stand out point I've seen is the development space is much more fragmented. There's so many more actors. There are different ideologies that play different interests at stake. Militaries have the advantage of generally when they deploy, they have a more coherent and simple structure to follow. So, they have that advantage and that shouldn't be discounted. I think there's a lot in that kind of. You have to plan for a particular level and the level that you're operating at, and that includes supporting that the operational connections between the local effects that you want to have and the more national strategic effects that you want to have.
I think the other elements that is striking for me is the challenges associated with working with the local people in your area, whether that's a community or whether that's national government, and the balance between delivering an effect from the point of view of your program construct and actually meeting the priorities that they set for themselves. And I've been really impressed with a lot of the issues that has come out on this, people like Simon Campbell, who've been looking at questions around accountability and trust, and the willingness to allow the local leaders, wherever you are, the local communities, wherever we are, to take the reins and drive forward themselves.
I think that is not typically a challenge that militaries have, but it is a really big part of the development challenge. So, it is more complicated in that sense. So, there are aspects of this that the development community just simply have more to deal with when it comes to the types of work that they're doing. But I think they would definitely be aided with looking at the kind of analytical, the investment and analysis, and evidence, and data and deep intelligence both that goes into military decision-making processes. And I think there's something to be learned from that model that could benefit development.
What I don't know is how you can capture that for a community that is so diverse and so fragmented. And I don't mean fragmented in a negative way I just mean the reality of so many different actors in so many different agencies. I don't know how you consolidate and capture that kind of analytical potential in a way that allows a substantial part of that community to move forward to greater effectiveness.
I think that's part of what we're trying to address with the OECD is that we're trying to provide that shared analysis that people can coalesce around and therefore build more consensus in their approaches.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, one of the aspects that you've alluded to now, and a little bit with talking about the continuous analysis of NATO and also in one of the background papers to the States of Fragility report is of course the business case for prevention, and we know how incredibly effective $1 spent on prevention has something like, correct me if I'm wrong, eight or $10 effects and save costs of war, et cetera. But you also mentioned how the current funding patterns are at odds with this very strong business case. So, would love to hear a bit more from you kind of how, how are they at odds more in detail and how do you see them shifting? How do we create the incentives to focus more on, on prevention when it's so hard to quantify and estimate the crisis that never happen? And so would love to hear your thoughts on that aspect.
JONATHAN MARLEY: This has been one of the most interesting areas I've encountered since I've started, since I switched to the OECD. What I've noticed is, and you're right to say the volumes of funding that are going to prevention are comparatively much, much smaller than what you see going to other to humanitarian, to development practices. And so on. It's a noticeably small piece of the pie when you consider the emphasis that has been placed on it, certainly since the Pathways for Peace report of 2017. What I've observed is that there is still a lot of uncertainty about what good prevention looks like. I've noticed that people have struggled to strike the balance between what is conflict prevention, what is preventing crisis - we've got I think some really excellent work in the disaster response space, which I think has informed some of this conversation - and then what is development. And then how do you strike a balance between all of those areas in a fragile and conflict affected context to deliver the effect? How do you disentangle all of that? And I think people are still struggling quite a lot with that. And it's not an easy, it's not an easy one to disentangle. We have looked - my colleague Harsh Desai has researched this extensively and we're still continuing to work on this - we are looking at what are the helpful distinctions that could be made here to allow people working in capitals, people working in fragile contexts directly the, the institutions of these contexts, what are the distinctions that we could make to allow them to better organize themselves for this to be more, more effective when it comes to prevention?
I suspect, given the weight of evidence that there's now coming forward, given the fact that our appreciation and our understanding of how fragility presents itself is evolving and improving all the time, I think there will be a push to maybe breaking down ideas around prevention into components that work for policies and programs in fragile contexts.
So, it may be that the way out of this, the way to respond to this challenge, is to break it into parts that we can manage more easily. And I can see, for example, there's already a, quite a well-developed literature well-developed policy consensus around what good conflict prevention can look like. I think it's when you step back from it, particularly in instances where there is an immediate threat or presence of conflict, when you step back from that immediate threat, the concepts start to lose traction insofar as how you can translate the concept into practice. I think that's where ideas around crisis prevention - and I know this was touched upon in Pathways for Peace and several other reports since the, in the work of Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at NYU - where you shift maybe the emphasis to crisis, and that allows for different conversations to take place and maybe it allows maybe to de-politicize some of the components that go into a conflict prevention conversation.
And then, I think this is where I think the advent of DRR has been so helpful, the disaster risk response approaches, because they allow again to shift the emphasis into a space where you can, you can concentrate on a certain set of propositions whilst being mindful of a broader dynamic. So, I would hope that there's some potential in that.
I think the other thing we see, the other part of this and that as you kind of pull back from the immediate threat of conflict, is then the questions of what, how do you build coping capacities and resilience to respond to risks that are identified. And I think that is for me, I think what I've seen over the last two years is that there is a shift and emphasis more clearly now on to being smarter about how to support those coping capacities and how to build that resilience. And I think that's, hopefully, where we'll see a lot of better progress in the years to come.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: I also have a thought on this, and I'm always wondering. When it comes to prevention of anything just like in our day-to-day lives. We know we're supposed to eat healthy and exercise and not have the brownie, but usually we start taking action when something scares us enough to actually do something about it. So, sort of the crisis comes and then then we invest in ourselves or, let's say, in fixing a disaster. I'm half joking, but I'm also wondering the role that human psychology plays in this and whether that's something we can even do anything about, no matter how good our systems are. But that was just a comment.
I actually want to take us to a key question that we always find to ask our guests. And that is what is fragility to you? How do you define it?
JONATHAN MARLEY: So, my first exposure to the concept of fragility was when I was working in the Irish Defense Forces Military College. My job there was to design third level programs for military officers, essentially a kind of a military MBA type program. And part of the thing we were looking at was how we could improve our approach to that operational level and planning. Now, already in that planning design you have the space for multi-dimensional analysis. So, you do look at political indicators, you're looking at economic trends, so that is already allowed for in the military planning. But it struck me that often we didn't have the depth of expertise to really do it at the scale that you would like done, or we didn't have the network to tap into to get access to that expertise and information, to round out what we would hope to be a good operational level plan. And that's how I came to find to the concept of fragility and the idea of fragility as an analytical lens and bringing that in. So, that's where I initially encountered the States of Fragility work with the OECD and so I integrated that into some of our training modules for operational level planning and it worked really well because immediately it gave a breadth and depth of analysis that we weren't getting access to. And so we found that when the staff were getting to decision points about where they wanted to be at certain points in the planning cycle their decisions were much better informed and much more aware, not just of what their immediate military objective was, but what was the impact on society likely to be, what was the impact on the economy like to be, if you're going to use up 60% of the port capacity to get military equipment into a particular area, what is the impact going to be environmentally, if you're going to, if you were going to conduct operations in a certain way. Suddenly you found that they were producing much more rounded solutions to the scenarios that were presenting. So, that's where my interest was sparked. And I arrived at the OECD at a really good time because the conversation around fragility and the definition and understanding of fragility had evolved through the introduction of the multi-dimensional fragility framework in 2015-2016, and then with this definition that sought to move away from the focus on states to this idea of a balance between exposure to risk and coping capacities to mitigate and deal with that risk both at kind of community level, up to a national level. So, that was immediately attractive to me with my military planning hat on because so much sense that you would look at situations in this way and maintain that perspective to provide a certain level of analysis. And I still think that that definition strikes the right balance. I think where we have work to do is in communicating the coping capacity, the resilience side of that definition of fragility alongside the risk that people tend to focus on.
So, hopefully that is something we can do with our forthcoming report next September, but I think there is - I appreciate there are a lot of criticisms and critique that we really try hard to engage with around fragility and how as a concept and how it's used. But what we've seen over the last year as we've gone through a review process of our multi-dimensional framework, is the variety of ways that the framework is used by different donors, by fragile contexts themselves more and more. So, we're seeing that people appreciate that kind of analysis and that it has a value at a particular level, mindful that value only goes so far. It won't give you a local an understanding of the local situation sufficient to come up with a localized response, but it will help to maintain the perspective, to ensure that whatever response you come up to at a local level is balanced with a broader set of needs. And I think we've seen some good, good examples of how that can be applied.
So, I'm convinced of the value as an analytical tool, I've been impressed with the community that I've stepped into and their willingness to test and evolve the concept, and their openness to critique and conversation. I think that's a really healthy sign as we look ahead, that there is a space around the concept to evolve it even further, and to refine it, and to make it more useful for the people who apply it to their policies and programs.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: And so I wanted to go into that because obviously you have such rich operational background and that's a key differentiator, I think, for you compared to a lot of other people who are in this space. So, I imagine that you also think a lot about how the work that you and your team at the OECD does gets translated through levels of bureaucracy and actually gets implemented in the field and benefits people who experience fragility in their day to day. So, as you and your team, think about the operationalization of your work and of your insights what are some of the, some of the key aspects for you and what are some of the key value added you think that the OECD and the States of Fragility reports can have in terms of bringing new and more innovative and perhaps as you say, more locally responsive ways for, for operations in fragile states.
JONATHAN MARLEY: We've seen it play out in a number of different ways. Our primary focus is on serving the international network and conflict and fragility at the OECD, the members there. So, we try and support them as much as we can with the work that we do. And their needs are very different.
Some of the smaller members don't have the analytical capacity to generate the kinds of research that they need to inform their policies at scale. So, we can meet a need there. For some of the bigger members we often find that we have quite intensive exchanges around the methodologies that we use. Comparing notes and findings is a really big part of what we do. I mean, you know, simply comparing the research analysis and outcomes to see if we're on the same page or what the differences are. And often those conversations can be really beneficial.
For our conversations with fragile contexts directly - and I must acknowledge the g7+ here - it is often I find some of the conversations around the particular dimensions within our fragility framework come to the fore in those cases where, for example, in the environmental dimension or the security dimension, where they're looking at particular issues that they see from reading our reports and documentation and then can say well, what does a good response look like here? And those are very rewarding exchanges as well.
To be honest though about where at the level that the OECD strategic framework sits at, I think it has a very clear strategic value. If you want to do entry point analysis for conflict prevention, it's a really good framework to use. If you want to get a sense about whether you have attained a good balance of emphasis in your policy or program across different dimensions of fragility, it's a really good way to test that and indeed, a lot of our members do use it that way. It's also useful to, in so far as in any context you will have humanitarian development and peace actors, including all of the local actors operating in a space, it is also useful in getting a sense of what the best division of labor might be to respond to that particular situation. Who should you be talking to based on the issues that you see from the multi-dimensional analysis? So, what's happening in the economic space, who do you need to talk to there? What's happening the political space and who do we need to talk to there?
So, I think it provides the evidence-base for a healthier dynamic across the triple nexus to allow more focused conversations to happen. And again, we've seen good examples of that, and I hope with our work on the peace and development side, that we can lean more into that side of the conversation and hopefully have more traction.
So, throughout our analysis over the last 18 months, we've seen the framework applied in a lot of different ways and we also have a sense of where the potential is to go further with it. We spent a lot of time looking at our environmental dimension, which I think would be much more geared towards looking at ecological issues and looking not just climate change but environmental degradation. I think we're positioning ourselves to offer more value in that space. And similarly, across some of the other dimensions, we've had really excellent exchanges with academics and with policy leaders about how to fine tune the indicators that we have to provide better analysis.
So, it's been a fantastic journey, a learning journey, to go through people and it go through people's experience of applying the two that is the fragility framework in different ways and there is so much more potential to be explored with it yet, and I think that's what's exciting about it.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, speaking of that, I wanted to ask you, do you find it useful to think of fragility as a kind of continuum between say one stage of elevated risks, which the OECD framework clearly identifies, then moving on to a stage of active conflict, followed by usually a protracted period of post-conflict reconstruction, and then situations where a country may be on the verge of becoming fragile but it's really affected by external spillovers, so whether a huge influx of refugees or spillovers from violence and armed groups. I'm asking because development banks have now started applying these kinds of differentiated frameworks and the kind of critique that you sometimes get is well, first, how do I know which stage I'm at, because there's a lack of a lot of back and forth. So, then none of these stages are static and some are more obvious than others, like when you have an insurgency going on, but then in situations when the risks are rising then how do I really know that fragility is going to bubble up into conflict. Or if you have external spillovers, how can you adequately assess or predict that they're going to really hit your society and your economy? What do you think about that?
JONATHAN MARLEY: The phrase we used to get in the military was that you should be comfortable in ambiguity. And at the time we used to elicit a series of eye rolls, but I think it probably applies even more when it comes to consideration of fragility. It's interesting to see how the concept is presented. So, you have people talk about escaping fragility, with your fragility traps. We do our very best to keep up to speed with the literature that comes out on fragility to see where people's perspectives are. I think our experience of the pandemic maybe has pushed forward our appreciation, certainly within our little team about what our understanding of fragility might be in that we've seen how interconnected risks are, we've seen the importance of systems, we have seen how risk can cascade through systems. And often the pathways that risk travels and that you have the knock-on effects are maybe not immediately obvious from an initial analysis. So, from that first instance of an outbreak in Wuhan through, if you were to say to somebody back then, how is this going to travel, nobody would have been thinking about global supply chains and people would not have been thinking about food prices in West Africa. People would not have been thinking about how this was going to affect fishing and how it was going to affect violence. What we saw was an explosion of cascading effects through systems and through networks, that each of this didn't require their own responses.
That's where the coping capacity side of that definition comes into play. And so, we equally saw how some coping capacities rose to the challenge. So, we saw those social safety nets emerging, we saw countries adapting - often in the absence of any kind of international support - adapting to what they had to face the challenges that that were brought forth, maybe some local risks that were already there, but they were amplified by the impact of the pandemic. So, that reassured us as to our definition. But I think it also pushed us towards thinking about this idea of the universality of fragility, that everybody is exposed to fragility regardless of where you live, regardless of how your stage might be categorized, everybody is exposed to fragility to some degree. And what we saw in fact was that interplay of risk and coping capacities play out globally. And some places were able to manage that better than, better than others, and what can we learn about that? So, I think the idea of continuums and almost trying to structure it in a sequenced way was exposed by that experience very clearly.
And I think this is where ideas around adaptation, and certainly I have seen that in the peace space, but I think some of the ideas you see around more dynamic adaptation around some of the emerging ideas around building resilience, I think that's where you get that sense of, well, we live in this kind of a system, we've been given a really good example about how risk can travel through networks and systems, and how public capacities have responded. So, how can we learn from that to come up with a response that is agile enough at local and national levels to respond to that. But there is no beginning and there is no end. I think that's one of the points we took away. That there is this constant dynamic that you engage with, and you respond to, and you adapt. And what works 12 months ago might not work in 12 months’ time. And you do the best with the evidence and analysis you have to try and build in decisions into that process. So, that is the best answer I could come up with to that question at the moment. But it is a question that we'll continually try to answer, but it's not so much of an answer, maybe more of where we are right now in our thinking about what we've learned from the experience of the pandemic and how that applies to what we're seeing elsewhere.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: I actually think it's a fantastic answer because it triggered about 10 simultaneous questions and thoughts, and I'm going to try to order them in some way. So, let me just start with adaptation. The word adaptation immediately made me think that there are other areas, such as climate change adaptation, where we can take a highly multidimensional risk, with various degrees of uncertainty, and localize its adaptation planning. So, I'd love to, at some point maybe if we get to it, hear your thoughts about what can we learn from other domains.
But then that also made me think of systems thinking and how much it's lacking. And how much we need human capital that has more of a practice in understanding systems and understanding networks, how things propagate through a network and what are unintended effects. One example - because we are talking pretty abstractly and that makes me excited, might make you excited, but some people need real examples - so you mentioned the pandemic, and another example would be Ukraine - what's going on right now, not necessarily with the war.
What does Ukraine have to do with the price of the cup of coffee that we're all enjoying this morning? Well, guess what, Russia is the largest exporter of various fertilizer products and that is needed in Brazil, which is the largest exporter of coffee, sugar, and soybeans, which all depend on the price of fertilizer. As we know from econ 101, when you take supply off the market and demand stays stable, price will increase. So, that is for example, a second and third order effect where the average person might go to the store and not understand why the price for coffee has just increased, hopefully not doubled because that would be very sad for me personally.
So, this is - and I saw in the States of Fragility 2020 and I was very excited by it that you mentioned we need a systems approach, in thinking about them, but also in planning and adaptive dynamic response. My question to that is, while I fully support that notion, programmatically, in how we dish out money, both in development and in any sort of, even in the humanitarian space, you have to have a mandate. Donors have their own interests and desires, and funding cycles and budget restrictions. And for anybody that has managed a grant, you know the bureaucracy in place, which is there for good reason, because you do not want to mismanage donors' money. But if you're trying to respond to a system that's dynamic and adaptive - because unfortunately that's what we're talking about in the real world - how do we respond with static tools?
JONATHAN MARLEY: Part of this comes back, I think to the points I was making early on about the value of the operational level of planning. And this I think is an example of an issue that if we could resource this so that the people designing the programs don't have to do it, but have the benefit of the analysis and the evidence coming from that analysis, then I think it would make for better decision-making and I think that's where the potential lies.
It's interesting, only yesterday, the OECD published its economic outlook on Ukraine. It was a short piece looking at the, at the immediate impact and it touches indeed on those points you make about rising food prices, rising energy costs. From the point of view of the work that we do at the States of Fragility, where we know that these risks are compounded in fragile contexts, where we know that the people often most exposed to the reverberating impact of those issues, as they traveled through systems, live in fragile contexts, I think that's where we need to maintain the perspective and what a globalized response looks to this - globalized, not the best word to use in this instance, but my point is that the more expensive price cup of coffee in Washington or New York is, is a whole different proposition when you look at the impact of increased food prices and economic and energy costs for a certain fragile context.
And then you look at the multi-dimension, you bring your fragility analysis to that, and you say, well, actually, what are the reverberations across other dimensions? What does this mean societally, where people have to make prioritization about how much food they can afford to buy, and what does that mean politically, but what pressures do they, what do they put on their local political leaders?
And so that's where I think the value of multi-dimensional analysis comes into play because we can start to think about what the implications might be and then adjust accordingly. So, we definitely see the potential in this, the value of bringing more systems thinking into this space and we touched on that in the last report. We've spoken to a number of people within the OECD and indeed beyond, about how this might be done. I mean, it's such a broad and intense area of literature on its own, but what we would like to see are ways of actually bringing that analysis to bear for the benefit of fragile contexts. And what that comes down to is really getting them, whoever they might be in a fragile context, the evidence that they need to give them the best possible chance to make the best decisions.
And I think that's where we've seen the potential in systems thinking because it can, again, identify those connections across in a particular context that might not be immediately obvious to an initial analysis or indeed where local actors are forced to deal with immediate issues, and they maybe don't have time to think about the medium to long term consequences. There's also a particular value there. So, again, not a very neat answer to your question I'm afraid, but that's where we definitely, we see the potential of integrating that approach. And again, it ties back into that point about, can we resource a level of planning above maybe the programmatic level that would help and make their life easier to deal with all the other points that you've identified.
PAUL M. BISCA: So, we've briefly mentioned Ukraine, and of course, until now in our conversation, we've discussed a lot the relationship between security and development, but as we are all watching the terrible events unfolding now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there's also, of course the diplomatic angle to this. And it's a topic, the relationship between security and development and the humanitarian side, and of course, diplomacy, they're all aspects that you have written about. So, I wanted to ask you two questions. The first is, you've helped us a bit identify blind spots that the security and the development world have vis-a-vis one another, could you do a bit the same, but for the development side and the diplomatic world. What do you believe are some critical elements, advantages, that you believe all development professionals should know about diplomacy? Especially in bringing that kind of a missing middle, of the operational side, the link between local peace building processes that diplomats can be quite embedded into, making the link between those processes then of course, and then the development efforts.
And then my second question again, going back to your work on the role of diplomacy along the humanitarian and development peace nexus, we have a situation right now in Ukraine where diplomacy, at least on one side, the Russian side, is actually working to make the country more fragile, more conflict prone. So, then what would need to get done to make sure that diplomacy is actually helping rather than hindering at this point in the conflict?
JONATHAN MARLEY: I think I'll take the last point first on Ukraine. I think it's way too early to say with any degree of certainty, how that conflict is going to unfold. I don't think a particular trend has established itself yet that allows us to start thinking about what the diplomatic response would need to be and what kind of frameworks and structures would need to fall into place around that for some kind of solution to emerge. There's just too much uncertainty in that space for me right now.
What we have seen and what we try to draw out with that paper was, first of all, diplomats are uniquely positioned to work across the triple nexus. So, they have, by virtue of their position, they can speak to and engage with actors across humanitarian, development, and peace pillars in a way that nobody within, it's very difficult for people within those pillars to do for themselves.
So, they have that perspective, a strategic perspective that they can bring to that relationship. That also comes, I think, with their convening power. And we've seen demonstrations of this. There's really good example, for example, led by Sweden, in Congo, where they were able to play that convening power to bring actors from different parts of the nexus together around a particular set of issues.
So, there are good examples already out there of how this can work and how diplomats can play different roles, often in very ad hoc ways, responding to the situation that they find themselves in, but capitalizing on their ability to move across pillars, and to convene, and to bring political heft, maybe to certain conversations.
And so that perspective and convening power is really your starting point. Thereafter I think it is the quality of the evidence and data that that they have to work with that counts. So, where, for example, let's stick with conflict and post-conflict situations, where you're looking at the development value or the value of development thinking for a peace process, diplomats are very well positioned to capture that agenda. They typically have, they have the access, but can we give them the evidence that they need to make the right decisions within a particular arena? And so this matters because you will see, for example, how important maritime policy is maybe for the overlap, say for example, between maritime policy and maritime security and how that plays out, which could be a component, could be an important component of the peace mission. We can see it in the extractive sector with the management and governance of natural resources.
So, when you break it down into individual sectors, there is a degree of specialization that comes in, which diplomats may not have. So, that's where supporting them to play that role is important. And I think that's probably, if we are to really achieve something with the recommendation on the implementation of the humanitarian development peace nexus, I think it is maximizing the potential that diplomats can play in fragile and conflict affected contexts by giving them the information that they need when they need it, to allow them to play that role.
So, I think there's really great potential for me in that space. And unfortunately, though, the downside of this comes back to the point I think Mihaela was making earlier on where it comes back to resources. I mean, already we see how stressed many diplomatic organizations are. We've seen diplomatic resources cut by some countries. So, and maybe there is part of that is reflected in a lack of appreciation of what they do and indeed what the potential of what they do is, but from our perspective, looking at the diversity of issues in fragile contexts, looking at the importance of working with the local political settlements, with political leadership at different levels within society, looking at building the best possible cohesion across the different pillars of the humanitarian development peace nexus, diplomats have a huge advantage across all of those areas and I think it's something well worth resourcing.
JOHAN BJURMAN BERGMAN: So, diplomats, obviously, as you mentioned, have this, this bridging effect, but within the development space and within the let's say if we want to call it the fragility niche, there are, as we discussed several different actors, multilaterals, development banks, the OECD. You all take slightly different approaches to the idea of fragility. You alluded to earlier, the fragility trap or fragility as risks and lack of coping capacity. How do you make sense of and conceptualize the kind of additive capacity of these different perspectives of fragility and how should those working in the field, perhaps in development institutions, but also across the nexus, make sense of these different perspectives and we kind of use the best of each of them?
JONATHAN MARLEY: I think the first thing to say there is that I don't think it's a bad thing that there is this variety of understandings of the concept. And it's one of the things I've enjoyed joining this community is that there is a vibrant discussion. We can pick up the phone to the IMF or the World Bank, or to a think tank in South Africa, or we can speak to the Asian Development Bank, or whoever the case may be. And the variety of perspectives is a really healthy thing because I think it challenges us to test our own assumptions and there is a value, a real value to that, and it's something to be cherished. Where we perhaps need to consider our approach a bit more is how we communicate that. Are we being clear about what our analysis says and are we being clear about how it relates to the other types of analysis that are out there, and what's useful to people who are designing policies and programs? So, there is a big communications element of this that we are very mindful of.
And I think, if you look at the OECD's approach to fragility, over the last five years in particular, what you sees is a steady evolution, not just of thinking about the concept and how it works for our membership, but also how we communicate that concept. So, the reports are getting smaller, we're trying to diversify the kinds of outputs that we create to make them as usable and as integratable as possible for donors and members. And we're not the only ones doing that. A lot of people are doing that. And if we can alleviate the kind of burden on our membership by doing that, then I think that's a really important contribution.
So, I think that is the communications part of it is important, and I think we're seeing progress, but more needs to be done. I think the diversity of conversation within the community is quite healthy. Also, it goes beyond just the policy community. I think that there is there is a vibrant exchange with the academic community as well. You know, we see people like David Carment at Carleton (University), and we've seen also think tanks like ODI, and there is a constant conversation there as well, where assumptions are being tested and ideas are being exchanged. I think what we've maybe missed during COVID is the interaction at national level with some of the national level bodies, although we've maintained it quite well or as well as anybody has with the tools available to us. But we've certainly missed that person to person contact and the ability to exchange ideas more freely. And hopefully we're going to see that comeback now because a lot of the more detailed questions about, well, how does this affect the way we design our programs come forward from those kinds of conversations. And they have been limited because we just can't replicate the scale when you're working remotely. I don't know if that necessarily answered your question. I think maybe that was the point on communicating during COVID, maybe it was a bit of a tangent. But I think that the positive is the diversity that we've seen in the community. And I think the challenge is to communicate that, what we do, more effectively. I think the, the way I would try and conceptualize that is that We are, we have a capacity to share the burden on. I think we, depending on the organization, we have different competencies that we can bring to bear. So, if we can harness that sense of community that we have on one side and bring that forward through to how we deliver for our membership on the other, I think we're going in the right direction.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Actually, I think this should be the last question because we don't want to take up too much of your time. First of all, we also agree with the need for communication. This is actually the reason why we started the podcast. We felt that it doesn't it doesn't hurt to bring together people from the different organizations and expose absolutely all of the thinking on fragility. So, we're very happy to hear you highlight the importance of communication. As for my last question, I'm really curious about how the States of Fragility approach has evolved. I've just seen the human dimension report that you just released, and I was very excited to read it. I'm really curious if you can share with us what is new this year.
If there's things you have to unveil in the fall, we understand, but at the very least, maybe you can talk about what's new. What is the human dimension and how does it enhance the framework? How does it add a new dimension to the five already there?
JONATHAN MARLEY: So, the current framework, as I mentioned earlier, is in existence since I think it was designed in 2015, launched in 2016. And since 2019, we've been looking at what needs to change. We were mindful of that five-year point coming up where it was a good time to reevaluate the framework and get a sense of what works, what doesn't, and what needs to be updated. One of the big parts of that conversation initially was the feeling that the framework was not necessarily geared towards telling stories around education and health and social protection, as well as it should be. And this is where the idea for the human dimension evolved from. So, with the next report in September, we will launch the sixth dimension to the framework, which will be the human dimension, which will pick up precisely on those issues. And that was driven interestingly, by a lot of - when we talk about the connections that matter between different issues in a fragile context, some of the examples that we looked at were civil service reforms that were disconnected from educational processes and therefore struggled to hit the targets that they had set for themselves. So, that's precisely the kind of instance where the value of bringing that analysis into a multi-dimensional framework is really important.
On the health side, I think, again, the experience we're still going through with the pandemic exemplifies the importance of focusing on health and health systems. And likewise, with social protection again for the same reason. So, I think the new dimension addresses those gaps that we had identified going back to 2019.
Some of the other changes we're looking at this year - I mentioned already that we've significantly overhauled the environmental dimension. I think it's much more in step with some of the literature that has emerged over the last five years. And I think it's also more in step with some of the thinking, the policy and programmatic thinking, that we're seeing among our membership. So, we're trying to more astutely support them in the direction that they want to take. The other thing we're keen to emphasize, one is the communication on the resilience part of our understanding of fragility, the coping capacity side, not just the risks side. That is something that we're going to try and address with the next report.
The other is the idea of the universality of fragility. And while we've been clear on this, and indeed we were clearest on this in the last report, I think two years on from the start of the pandemic, we have a much better appreciation now of that the universal presentation of fragility and therefore why that matters.
So, yes, is true that some drivers of fragility are localized and maybe particularly important at the national level, but no matter where you live in the planet, what's happening elsewhere on the planet can affect you. And we've seen that. So, I think there is that level of analysis that I think the framework will be a bit better geared to capture as well.
So, that I think is another step beyond and another step away from the more state centric approaches that we've seen previously, which that journey we've been on to striking a better balance of analysis. I also think it's a more honest approach. I think that certainly when we speak to fragile contexts themselves, I think it helps them step beyond the idea of a label of fragility more effectively. I think that's probably the best way I can put it, where there is that sense that, to come back to your earlier point, Paul, that there is this much broader manifestation and countries are dealing with it continuously as best as they can. We have seen some countries who would be classified maybe as middle-income, developed states, who have fallen sharply due to conflict. We've seen other countries who have never experienced conflict, but experienced fragility. And I think that distinction between fragility and conflict is important. So, I think there is a more balanced emphasis on what we're trying to achieve in that regard. So, that is, if you like, the thinking behind the report has evolved in that way, specifically our focus on the next report will be on how to respond to compound risks, particularly looking at preventative measures. So, we have yet to decide how that is going to break down, but I think there is definitely an appetite for more thinking on how to do prevention better. So, we're going to look at that. But I think what we've seen over the last two years is the importance of responses that can deal with compound risk, and in the most fragile contexts, that epitomizes the challenge that they experience.
And I think hopefully with the new framework, what we can do better is, in that instance, look at the overlay, the correlation between extreme fragility and ecological hotspots and what that tells us. And that's where again, hopefully you can start to drive more informed conversations about what more integrated responses might look like and what coordination responses can look like. So, hopefully that's where we will go, but we're only just at the beginning of that journey now. We're nearly finished with the updating and review of the framework, and now we're about to transition into the drafting of the report itself.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Well, Jonathan, I think we could talk for hours longer than I think we've already been talking for about an hour and a half. We really appreciate you taking the time and we really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And I have a final comment on the human dimension. As I was reading the report you put out, as you were announcing that this is going to be added, I actually was thinking about United States and I was thinking that this is a wonderful document that should be read here, when you're trying to eliminate, let's say whatever level of a gender pay gap, but you're not addressing the need for childcare or maternal leave - the United States is one of the only two countries in the world that doesn't have that.
I really appreciate you have taken fragility, you and your team have taken fragility beyond borders, and you're genuinely considering highlighting fragilities that exist in systems, for people. And they can be found even in high-income countries, right here, where I am in Washington, DC. As I was reading your report, I could think of more than just the example I gave.
So, this is a very, very exciting update and we hope to have you back, if you would be so kind to, to join us again. And you and your team you're doing fantastic work and we genuinely appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.
JONATHAN MARLEY: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. It would be remiss of me not to mention the team. As I've mentioned at the start, I am new to this space and I have the benefit of an immensely brilliant, multi-disciplinary team in the Crisis and Fragility team at the OECD, and none of this happens without everybody working together. So, hopefully it's a reasonably good reflection of all of us. So, thank you for the opportunity.
MIHAELA CARSTEI: Thank you for tuning into F-World: The Fragility Podcast. We hope you found our conversation interesting and inspirational. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts, and if you want to know more about F-World, please visit our website f-world.org and follow us on Twitter at @fworldpodcast. Thanks for listening!