What Nation Builders Know: Four Foundational Concepts and the Critical Link to Innovation
Building a country from scratch turns out to be among the most complex of human endeavours.
Key Takeaways
The desire to build and create is a fundamental human behaviour – but it isn’t easy.
Nation building may be the most complex of all human endeavours, given the proliferation of inputs.
Fragile states – where nation building is most sorely needed – face an exponentially more difficult path to successful development.
The Liberian experience is instructive: their strategy of peace and security, infrastructure and basic services, and administrative integrity made use of available resources while pragmatically targeting the most acute of issues.
Innovation ecosystem leaders are opening new terrain for nation builders to explore – leading from fragile state to start-up state.
Take one kid, add one computer, and what do you get? Pretty often, a Minecraft player. The most popular sandbox game of all time, known for unlimited creativity and quaintly antiquated pixelated graphics, scratches very human itches: to build, to be free of others’ rules – to be king! – not to mention the average kid’s great interest in avoiding homework or cutting the grass.
Let’s focus for a moment on the itch to build, the scratch that lies at the heart of Minecraft’s success. Planet-wide, kids are world-building: crafting fantastical cities, scouring the landscape for critical resources, chasing off withers and chivvying recalcitrant sheep into oddly shaped paddocks.
It is an intensely compelling, zero risk game where the worst that happens is some other kid entering the server, knocking over a few buildings and making off with a diamond sword or two before the /kick command and commiserations in the chat restore serenity.
Were the adults given the chance to play a real life game of Minecraft, where would their world-building begin? Where would you begin? Likely with a vision of your own utopia, and a plan to accomplish it. Visitors to your country might find clean air and a warm breeze, the sight and sound of waves crashing on the beach, snow-capped mountains visible on the horizon. Soaring, futuristic buildings perhaps? Autonomous vehicles silently flashing from place to place, kids and grandparents exploring idyllic green parks while the rest of us do Very Important Work in those buildings? May we interest you in adding a space port?
As the saying goes, life comes at you fast, and so it is in real world-building exercises. Buildings don’t go up without a workforce, someone needs to construct a gigafactory to manufacture those electric vehicle batteries, and the grandparents want to feel safe in the park while minding the kids.
We need positive social and economic ingredients. We need political stability. Building one’s own country from scratch turns out to be among the most complex of human endeavours, an assertion nation builders from previous centuries would have readily endorsed.
Today’s nation builders say the same, and it turns out that the factors they deal with can be measured. Given the complexity involved there are exceptions but certain foundational concepts are usually present in successfully developing nations. These include cohesion, economic, political and social indicators, the presence of which make a nation more stable – and therefore more successful. Correspondingly, poor scores on these indicators make a nation more fragile and more prone to failure.
The Fragile States Index puts it this way. States may be considered fragile if they experience:
The loss of physical control of territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force;
The erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions;
An inability to provide reasonable public services;
The inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.
FROM FRAGILE STATE TO START-UP STATE
We heard much the same thing during our discussion with Gyude Moore, a former Minister for Public Works for Liberia. He emphasized quality and competence measures with regard to providing public services for citizens, and economic disparity, as crucial factors in addition to nations’ capacity to control their own territory from both internal and external antagonists.
Naturally then, nation builders like Gyude Moore and the President he served under, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, aimed at resolving these issues when Sirleaf took office following Liberia’s civil war. Nation builders being characteristically innovative – Sirleaf and Moore being no exception – their three-pronged strategy of peace and security, infrastructure and basic services, and administrative integrity made use of available resources while pragmatically targeting the most acute of issues, from restoring power to building bridges supporting 2-way traffic.
In their bones, nation builders’ perspective is holistic: in their view, the built environment creates the ability for blood to flow between all the organs of a socio-economic ecosystem. They want administrative integrity in order to offer services to the most vulnerable and far flung of citizens, they want to embed educators, researchers, innovators and builders such that they become deeply intertwined in and with local groups, institutions and infrastructure. They lead the way from fearfully complicated to economically complex.
If building a modern nation state is complicated, then it is economic complexity that defines a key element of the successful end game. Why? Economically complex regions stimulate the invention and production of differentiated products and services, leading to sustainable competitive advantage, while both attracting and creating educated, high income talent. If it is a futuristic utopia, a roaring economy and happy citizens you want, the route from complicated to complex is the one to follow.
From upon this route innovation ecosystem leaders are opening new terrain for nation builders to explore – leading from fragile state to start-up state. From current state to future state. Smart grid technologies, blue economy ocean opportunities, critical infrastructure, cybersecurity: this is a proliferating and endlessly optimistic network of growth and opportunity.
Including, one day?