Highlights

The Strategy for Fragility, Conflict, and Violence 2020–25 is the first such strategy to cover the entire World Bank Group, and it is influencing approaches to work in fragility, conflict, and violence contexts in other multilateral and bilateral agencies. When the strategy was approved, it was timely, ambitious, and comprehensive, building on the Bank Group’s engagement on fragility, conflict, and violence issues for more than two decades.

The strategy lacks a theory of change that links improvements in its operational framework to achieving desired higher-level outcomes at the global and country levels. A theory of change would help clarify the underlying assumptions and logic behind the strategy, ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of why certain actions are expected to lead to desired outcomes. This can then be tailored at the program and country levels to help design, monitor, and evaluate the different pathways between operations and outcomes.

The strategy does not establish clear performance targets for success, which are essential for effective monitoring and evaluation. Their absence limits opportunities to enhance accountability and support learning.

The strategy is not supported by an implementation plan detailing actions to be taken under the different pillars of engagement and identifying responsibilities for achieving intended outcomes across Bank Group units and entities. This inhibits the strategy from being actionable and monitorable and reduces the opportunities for learning and adaptive management.

The Bank Group’s role has evolved over a quarter of a century from having an initial focus on postconflict reconstruction to addressing challenges across the full spectrum of fragility and conflict situations today. The current focus includes prevention of conflict and engagement during conflict to preserve institutional capacity and human capital. In 2016, the World Bank began amplifying its engagement in fragile states and humanitarian contexts. It co-convened the World Humanitarian Summit and collaborated with the United Nations (UN) on the Pathways for Peace report after the 2016 Sustaining Peace Resolution of the UN Security Council, while also scaling up the UN–World Bank partnership. The 18th Replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA18; FY18–20) doubled the financing resources available to IDA FCS. The Bank Group’s long-term engagement in FCV contexts culminated in the development of the 2020–25 FCV strategy.

The strategy builds on the Bank Group’s long-term engagement on FCV issues, and it is influencing approaches to work in FCV contexts in other multilateral and bilateral agencies. Many multilateral development banks and bilateral aid agencies have adopted similar strategies or operational documents to guide and enhance their engagement in FCV contexts. Several agencies use definitions of focus areas that are more appropriate for their regions or mandates, such as urban violence for the Inter-American Development Bank and a specific focus on small island developing states for the Asian Development Bank.

The strategy is comprehensive, but its broad ambition is at odds with the focused FCS list.1 The FCV strategy is the first strategy to cover the entire Bank Group. It also comprehensively addresses challenges across the full spectrum of fragility, conflict, and forced displacement. The identification of FCS is clear, and the FCS list helps the Bank Group operationalize and report on the strategy. However, the strategy does not articulate approaches or objectives for engaging with FCV areas anticipated in the strategy—such as subnational conflicts, interpersonal crime and violence, forced displacement contexts, support to justice and the rule of law, and engagement with the security sector—that are not captured in the FCS classification. This is also a main reason why the scope of this evaluation covers countries classified as FCS only, as this is the coverage of the strategy.

IFC and MIGA have diverged from the harmonized list of fragile states, which limits the comparability and transparency of reporting commitments and results. The list of FCS is updated annually by the Bank Group based on a methodology approved as part of the FCV strategy. IFC and MIGA define FCS as those on the FCS list in the current fiscal year plus those that graduated in the previous three fiscal years, as both institutions consider these countries as still being fragile and having considerable political and economic uncertainties (World Bank 2021e). Thus, IFC’s and MIGA’s FCS classification list in FY25 contains 41 countries, compared with 39 for the World Bank. Harmonizing the lists would enhance monitoring, reporting, and implementing joint approaches in FCS countries. Furthermore, IFC’s and MIGA’s key performance indicators for engaging in FCS are commingled in the broader IDA17–FCS country group (comprising up to 92 countries) rather than those that are FCS specific. This lack of specificity makes tracking progress specifically in FCS more challenging.

The FCV strategy lacks a theory of change that links operational measures to the achievement of FCV outcomes and indicators. The strategy does not articulate how it expects to achieve higher-level FCV impacts—for example, how achieving the operationalization measures of the strategy (that is, programming, personnel, partnerships, policies, and financing tools) would enable the Bank Group to achieve its objectives of helping countries address and mitigate the drivers of fragility and conflict. The strategy therefore does not guide Bank Group teams on how to operationalize measures to achieve FCV objectives. Designing a theory of change would help clarify the underlying assumptions and logic behind the strategy, ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of how and why certain actions are expected to lead to desired outcomes. This process would also aid the identification of potential risks and barriers.

The strategy does not explicitly articulate pathways or indicators for higher-level impacts on fragility and conflict, although it implies desired outcomes in FCS in its objective to help countries better address drivers of fragility and conflict (figure 1.3). Such indicators would include inclusiveness and trust in institutions, social cohesion, perceptions of fairness of resource allocation, inclusiveness of community engagement processes, resilience, and stabilization (see final box of the conceptual framework in figure 1.3; World Bank 2018b, 2021d, 2025e). Furthermore, the strategy lacks a definition and objectives for engaging in strategic pillars such as preventing violent conflict (World Bank 2020).

The strategy fails to set out specific performance targets for success, making it difficult to monitor progress and evaluate outcomes—this gap limits opportunities to improve accountability and foster learning. A recent Group Internal Audit report notes that the strategy lacks performance indicators that would enable the World Bank to assess whether it achieved the intended objectives (World Bank Group 2025). Consequently, the focus remains on short-term outputs rather than long-term transformation. The strategy identified 23 measures linked to the Bank Group’s operational framework that mainly describe outputs and changes to documents and instruments. These include adopting guidance, improving the quality of country strategies in addressing drivers of fragility, and adapting the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework for FCV contexts (World Bank 2023e). The strategy does not provide for tracking the outcomes of such changes.2

The strategy would benefit from an implementation plan to ensure that it is actionable and can be monitored and adapted. Besides the identification of the 23 measures, the strategy was not supported by an implementation plan detailing actions to be taken under the different pillars of engagement and identifying responsibilities for achieving intended outcomes across Bank Group units and entities. The lack of an implementation plan may have also precluded the development and adoption of a Bank Group–wide change in approaches to help address institution-wide systemic issues and incentives. Other recent Bank Group strategies (for example, on gender) have included implementation plans. Developing such an action plan would offer an opportunity to facilitate ownership of the strategy objectives, as well as ensuring that the strategy is actionable and can be monitored and adapted.

The 2023 Mid-Term Review (MTR) of the FCV strategy concluded that the strategy remains relevant. The MTR found substantial progress in implementing the FCV strategy while recognizing that more needs to be done to enable deeper and more effective engagement. It indicates that although the FCV strategy remains fit for purpose and has proven effective, the Bank Group’s approach needs to be adjusted to adapt to future FCV challenges and align with the Bank Group’s evolution. The MTR also calls for more effort to prevent conflict and emphasizes the importance of the domestic private sector, fragility in middle-income countries, and gender-based violence.