- Most international approaches assess fragility at the country level, yet some of the region’s most severe challenges are concentrated in specific territories and can be hidden in national averages.
- To capture that reality, the IDB Group’s Framework to Support Populations in Situations of Fragility, Conflict, and Criminal Violence (FCCV) identifies subnational pockets, assessing each dimension separately and calibrating thresholds to country-specific data.
- Pilots across six countries revealed sharply different territorial patterns, offering a more precise basis for development diagnostics, country strategies, and project design.
From a distance, Latin America and the Caribbean does not look like a fragile region, and by most measures, it is not. Most countries are middle-income and democratic, several hold investment-grade credit ratings, and some are OECD members—a different world entirely from the low-income, conflict-torn states people usually picture when they hear the word “fragile”.
When National Averages Miss the Picture
International approaches to fragility normally assess a country as a whole. They are largely designed to capture armed conflict, near-total institutional collapse, or shocks that overwhelm national capacity, and most countries they flag sit at the severe end of low income and high conflict.
Latin America and the Caribbean breaks that paradigm. A country can show a strong national picture while specific territories within it face challenges as severe as those found in officially fragile, conflict-affected, or violence-affected countries.
That happens at the territorial, subnational level: on a highway where trucking companies budget for extortion payments the way they budget for fuel; in a neighborhood where an ambulance will not enter without an armed escort; or at a checkpoint where what matters more than the uniform is who actually controls it that week.
Much of this variation can be difficult to capture in a country-level score because conditions in one country can spill across borders into another.
A Framework Built Around People and Territories
The IDB Group’s Board of Governors called on the institution to address the development needs of populations in fragile, conflict- and violence-affected, and vulnerable situations.
Most international approaches group these challenges under the single concept of “fragility, conflict, and violence” (FCV), which is largely shaped by the realities of the world’s most fragile states. Yet much of Latin America and the Caribbean falls outside that picture because its development challenges often emerge at the territorial rather than national level. These challenges are closely linked to organized crime and criminal violence rather than war or political conflict.
In response to the governors’ request, the IDB Group developed the Framework to Support Populations in Situations of Fragility, Conflict, and Criminal Violence (FCCV).
The framework focuses on people and territories rather than countries, working at the subnational level to identify areas where fragility, conflict, or criminal violence are concentrated. Because organized crime drives much of the region’s violence, the framework treats criminal violence as a distinct category.
One “C” stands for conflict; the second stands for criminal violence. Together, they reflect the realities that shape insecurity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean.
From Municipalities to “Pockets”
The framework’s core unit is the pocket: a cluster of adjacent subnational administrative units at the most granular level supported by available data, where conditions related to fragility, conflict, or criminal violence are higher than a country-specific threshold.
Once identified, a pocket is flagged so that teams preparing a country strategy, a diagnostic, or a project can adapt their approach accordingly, using tools established by the Bank.
To identify these pockets, the framework examines conditions municipality by municipality. It looks at factors associated with fragility, conflict, and criminal violence, assessing each dimension separately.
Local experts review the scores of each municipality and determine which ones have unusually high levels of violence, fragility and criminal violence for that country’s specific context. The experts group the adjacent flagged municipalities into pockets (Figure 2).
Different Problems, Different Geographies
Fragility, conflict, and criminal violence do not necessarily appear in the same places, which is why the framework keeps the three scores separate.
Fragility tends to be concentrated in rural and remote areas where the state has limited reach: places with smaller populations, weak infrastructure, and thin public services.
Conflict, by contrast, is more likely to emerge in more populated areas where authority is contested or tensions escalate into organized confrontation.
Criminal violence often lives somewhere entirely different. It tends to cluster around ports, border crossings, and the logistics corridors that connect them—the same infrastructure that carries workers and exports, but can also carry illicit flows.
The Criminal Violence Paradox
Some of the most difficult conditions appear where fragility and criminal violence overlap, and the pattern can be counterintuitive. Areas under strong criminal control may exhibit less overt violence when a single criminal group dominates. In that case, conditions may not have improved but rather coercion may have replaced open confrontation.
Once rivals are displaced, extortion, intimidation, and social control can persist long after the shooting stops. For instance, a market where every stall owner pays a weekly fee to organized crime may register fewer homicides than before. This is not because criminal influence has receded, but because it has become entrenched.
As a result, looking only at homicide rates can mistake the consolidation of criminal control for genuine improvement.
Putting the Framework to the Test
To see how the methodology would perform across very different contexts, the IDB first piloted it in six countries representing heterogeneous geographies, economies, and systems of government. Across the six countries, more than 150 million people live inside an identified pocket, more than 131 million of them in a criminal violence pocket.
That diversity produced sharply contrasting results, with distinct territorial patterns of fragility, conflict, and criminal violence.
The same tool thus produced very different maps across countries, revealing patterns that national averages would otherwise obscure.
Bringing Territorial Insight into Our Work
The pilot showed how identifying FCCV pockets can help inform IDB country strategies, project preparation, and development diagnostics. That gives teams a more granular resolution on the conditions surrounding an operation. Teams can identify whether a proposed operation is wholly or partially inside a flagged pocket and incorporate those conditions from the start.
In practice, that can mean a simpler project design, results monitoring built for conditions that can shift quickly, and procurement and execution arrangements tailored to the capacity that actually exists on the ground.
Looking below the national level does not replace the national picture. It adds the territorial resolution needed to understand where FCCV conditions are concentrated, bringing into view local realities that can remain hidden behind national averages suggesting that conditions are broadly stable.
By identifying these pockets and applying tools tailored to the conditions in those territories, the IDB Group aims to design more effective projects for people whose circumstances may not be visible from a national-level perspective.