Introduction

The High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda set the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 as the key task for the widely-anticipated successor set of development goals, now adopted as the Sustainable Development Goals. While acknowledging the daunting range of issues with which framers of the post-2015 agenda were confronted, this chapter focuses on the challenge of ending extreme poverty in fragile and conflict-affected situations by 2030. To address this question, we present our argument as follows. First, we describe the background context in which fragility and conflict exist, and then discuss the current state of lessons learned and policy agreement and divergence regarding international approaches to peace and security. In the third section, we emphasise the critical role of institutions – understood as the formal and informal rules of the game – both as constraints and as foundations to development, and then in the fourth section offer some recommendations on what key elements are needed in laying institutional foundations. In the fifth section, we make some suggestions about the ‘how to’ and suggest how responsibilities for implementing the goals might be assigned in practice. In the final section of the chapter we reflect on the impact of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in fragile and conflict-affected situations and consider the implications of current understandings of conflict and fragility for the new generation of development objectives.

The changing context

The changing global composition of poverty and extreme poverty

Where poverty had been concentrated predominantly in the poorest countries during the MDG period 2000–14, there is agreement among development analysts that the geographical composition of global poverty has been undergoing significant change as a number of countries have graduated to middle-income status (Sumner, 2012; Kharas and Rogerson, 2012; Chandy and Gertz, 2011). There is, however, some debate within the development community as to whether the majority of the world's poor in 2015–30 will reside in middle-income or low-income countries. While the total number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen dramatically in recent years, it is estimated that for the first time in history the majority of the world's poor will soon fall within fragile and conflict-affected states (Kharas and Rogerson, 2012, 7; Chandy and Gertz, 2011, 10).