As I think I put it in the longer submission, by no means is this to suggest that it's only the Netherlands. The U.K., Norway, Sweden, and several other countries have recognized the contextual specificity of fragility—let's not say the state or country or context—and the very innate, fluid nature of how the situations can change. What it means is essentially the calculus about how long and how deeply one is prepared to be engaged: as I've laid out, in terms of time frames it means 10 to 15 years. It's very easy, if you look at some of the stats that our colleagues have shared, to think that you can do something in shorter time frames. If you look at the average time frame of our engagement in terms of projects, currently, in terms of Canadian data, which is comparable to the global OECD, it's about three years. So it's a wildly different way of looking at it.
Now, to your question about states and countries and borders, the U.K., for instance, has an explicit financial target of spending 50% of its assistance budget, but they've very creatively tacked on to it that it's not just about fragile states, and it doesn't prescribe to any of these global lists, be the failed states index, be it INCAF, or be it the World Bank. It is their own understanding of fragility. It also has in it, very explicitly, the word “neighbourhood”. It is very much about fragile states and neighbourhoods, because it explicitly takes into account the recognition that the borders are very porous in these situations.
It comes back to the point I was making earlier, that the reason I think we need a dedicated fragile states strategy or fragile contexts strategy is that it would force us to think about what it means and what opportunity costs there may realistically be in engaging in these contexts versus doing development in other contexts—what the payoffs are, what the risks are, and whether we have credible partners to work with.