Rebuilding core government functions and supporting civil service restoration and reform in fragile and conflict-affected settings

UNDP supports countries spanning a wide range of development and fragility contexts to help them (re)build responsive, accountable, efficient and inclusive institutions. Strengthening the basic functionality of core institutions to deliver essential services and support sustainable development and peacebuilding processes is critical for countries to achieve the 2030 Agenda. Responding to the commitments of the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 and the 2015 reviews of UN peace operations, UNDP’s offer on core government functions (CGF) in crisis-affected settings is designed as a new way of working in the nexus between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding needs. Local governance, in particular, can enable economic revitalization, resource distribution and response to the needs of communities, including marginalized communities such as refugees, IDPs, ethnic minorities, indigenous populations, etc. UNDP, as a world leader in the provision of democratic governance assistance, has a comparative advantage in supporting countries implement SDG16 on just, peaceful and inclusive societies. UNDP’s objective is to reinforce national and local institutional capacity and systems to operate throughout situations of fragility and crisis and to strengthen their ability to respond more effectively to crisis recovery and sustainable development needs. To create an enabling environment for sustaining peace, UNDP seeks to ensure a rights-based approach to strengthening the responsiveness of core government institutions. UNDP prioritizes six distinct but interdependent core government functions where UNDP has developed an expertise and/or has built strong collaborative partnerships: i) managing the center of Government (supporting the executive branch on leadership and coordination); ii) civil service management; iii) local governance; iv) aid coordination; v) public financial management; vi) support to security institutions. To do so, UNDP has built and continues to strengthen partnerships with the United Nations Secretariat and sister funds, agencies, and programmes, including DPA, DPKO, PBSO, UNCDF, UNICEF, UNWOMEN, DESA, UNHCR; international and regional financial institutions such as the World Bank; bilateral donors from Member States; leading academic institutions; civil society; the private sector; as well as with non-governmental organizations to offer an integrated response that can scale up impact, by leveraging existing financial and comparative advantages, on UN support to the restoration of the basic functionality of government in conflict-affected and fragile environments.