How Does State Fragility Affect Rural Development?

International development agencies are focusing increasingly on fragile and conflict affected states and the challenges they are facing in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Recognizing that fragile states are ‘different’ from more stable and less vulnerable (though not necessarily poorer) developing countries, donors are nowadays paying more attention than before to specific problems of governance, service delivery, the development of core state functions, and – more recently – conflict resolution, peace-building and violence mitigation in fragile and conflict-affected settings. However, despite the fact that many fragile states have large rural populations and (subsistence) agriculture and associated, nonfarm economic activities constitute significant sectors of their economies, the relationship between state fragility and rural development remains underexplored.