When Governance Becomes Maintenance

Under constraint, governance shifts from ambition to endurance.

In 2026, governance across much of the Global South is no longer oriented toward transformation, but toward persistence under constraint. Three point three billion people live in countries where debt service consumes more public spending than health or education. This represents half of humanity. This is not crisis governance. This is maintenance governance. States endure shocks they cannot prevent, repair systems they cannot modernize, and manage expectations they cannot meet.

From Reform to Survival

The shift from reform ambitions to survival imperatives did not announce itself with policy declarations. It emerged through accumulated decisions. Infrastructure projects were deferred. Civil service hiring was frozen. Capital budgets were converted to recurrent spending. Successive shocks compressed the space for strategic choice. COVID-19, inflation surges, climate disasters, and geopolitical fragmentation combined until persistence became policy.

Kenya illustrates the political economy. In 2024, mass protests erupted after the government proposed tax increases to address spiraling debt. Interest payments consumed over 60% of government revenues. The proposed fiscal measures triggered widespread anger, particularly among youth and urban workers. This pattern repeats: governments must choose between servicing creditors and maintaining public legitimacy.

Sri Lanka provides the extreme case. Following the 2022 collapse and IMF Extended Fund Facility agreement, the 2025 public health allocation accounts for just 1.5% of GDP. This is five times smaller than debt service. Civil society estimates 6.3 million people skip meals. Even the September 2024 election of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake with a historic mandate changed little. The new administration operates within constraints imposed by the IMF and previous commitments.

Fiscal Space as the Binding Constraint

Debt servicing increasingly crowds out capital investment, compressing long-term reform capacity. This is not merely a budgetary challenge; it represents a structural transformation in what governance can attempt.

The composition of creditors complicates restructuring. Between 2020 and 2025, commercial lenders received 40% of external debt repayments from lower-income countries, while only one-third went to multilateral institutions. China committed more than $472 billion through policy banks between 2008 and 2024, emerging as the world's largest single creditor to the Global South. This fragmented creditor landscape makes coordination difficult and delays resolution. Bilateral, multilateral, private, and Chinese creditors all operate under different frameworks.

The G20 Common Framework has delivered limited relief. Zambia's restructuring negotiations stretched years, with the final agreement requiring very high payments in initial years. Ethiopia reached agreement in principle with the official creditor committee only in March 2025. Suriname's arrears ate up most savings the rescheduling would have generated. Debt Justice calculates that even successful restructurings leave countries paying an average 48% of budget revenue on debt service over the next three years.

Three Outcomes Under Constraint

States cluster into maintenance, reform, or collapse depending on institutional resilience and fiscal flexibility. These are not discrete categories but zones on a spectrum where small shocks can trigger transitions.

Maintenance States

These countries sustain basic services and administrative continuity but defer transformation. Fiscal policy prioritizes debt service and wage bills, leaving minimal capital budget. Infrastructure ages in place. Public employment freezes or contracts, reducing administrative capacity gradually rather than catastrophically. Elections occur on schedule, but policy options narrow regardless of which party governs.

Maintenance states share characteristics. Functional bureaucracies operate with eroding resources. Infrastructure systems near end-of-life without replacement timelines. Political systems offer opposition parties that provide different managers of the same constraints. Populations demonstrate declining trust in state capacity but maintain persistent engagement with state institutions.

The political logic differs from crisis states. Maintenance governance buys time through managed decline rather than dramatic collapse. Leaders promise stability rather than transformation. The electoral reward goes to those who contain risks rather than deliver breakthroughs. This creates self-reinforcing dynamics: risk-averse governance produces incremental degradation, which reinforces preference for stability over ambition.

Reform States

A small number of countries retain fiscal space and institutional capacity for strategic investment. These states typically combine favorable commodity positions, prudent debt management during the low-interest-rate period, and institutional strength that survived recent shocks relatively intact.

Reform capacity requires more than policy will. It depends on fiscal revenues exceeding debt service plus basic operations by margins sufficient for capital investment. It requires institutional memory and technical capacity to design and implement projects. Political coalitions must sustain multi-year commitments. External relationships must provide technology transfer and concessional finance. These conditions rarely align simultaneously.

The challenge for reform states is avoiding regression. Commodity price shocks, climate disasters, or political turnover can rapidly eliminate fiscal buffers. The graduation from concessional finance as countries achieve middle-income status often occurs precisely when climate adaptation needs spike. Reform states operate with narrow margins for error.

Fragile and Failing States

Where debt distress combines with institutional weakness, governance retreats from territory and function. Basic services contract to urban cores. Security provision becomes selective. Administrative presence thins. These conditions create space for non-state actors to provide rival governance structures. Paramilitaries, criminal networks, and foreign proxies fill the vacuum.

State failure rarely arrives suddenly. It emerges through accumulated institutional thinning. Revenue collection declines. Payroll becomes irregular. Qualified staff depart. Systems that once functioned through informal workarounds finally break. The transition from maintenance to failure can accelerate rapidly once thresholds are crossed.

The Politics of Low Expectation

Elections reward risk containment rather than delivery. This represents a fundamental shift in democratic accountability. In high-growth periods, voters compare parties based on who will deliver more development faster. Under constraint, voters compare who will manage scarcity least unfairly.

The electoral logic favors incumbents who can claim stability over challengers promising transformation. Promises of reform sound reckless when fiscal space cannot support implementation. Opposition parties face a dilemma: they must differentiate themselves to win power, but cannot credibly promise material improvements within existing constraints. The result often resembles what happened in Zambia's August 2026 election, held mid-IMF program: whoever wins will administer the same fiscal consolidation path.

This dynamic alters political incentives. Politicians invest in targeted patronage networks rather than broad public goods, knowing they cannot deliver universal improvements. Ethnic and regional identities intensify as the basis for distributing constrained resources. Populist appeals focus on external enemies or internal corruption rather than policy alternatives, because policy space is genuinely limited.

Democratic satisfaction reflects these constraints. Mauritius saw a 50% drop between 2012 and 2022, with only 32% satisfied by 2022 according to Afrobarometer. The November 2024 election produced a 60-0 opposition landslide, yet the fundamental fiscal parameters remain unchanged. New governments discover that winning power means inheriting constraints, not escaping them.

Bureaucracy as Shock Absorber

Administrative routines provide endurance even as institutions thin. This deserves emphasis because it contradicts assumptions about state fragility. Well-established bureaucracies continue processing functions long after they have lost capacity for strategic planning or service expansion. Issuing permits, collecting some taxes, and maintaining some records all continue despite reduced capacity.

Bureaucratic resilience operates through several mechanisms. Routinization allows tasks to continue even when skilled personnel depart, as procedures outlive individual expertise. Redundancy in systems means some functions survive even when others fail. The persistence of norms provides continuity when material incentives weaken. Showing up for work and following established processes continue even under duress.

But administrative endurance has limits. Systems designed for specific resource levels malfunction when inputs decline too far. Informal workarounds that allow underpaid staff to function eventually degrade core functions. Second jobs, small-scale corruption, and reduced hours initially sustain operations but gradually erode service quality. The tipping point varies, but exists. At some threshold, routine cannot substitute for capacity.

The challenge for maintenance states is managing this degradation curve. How far can administrative systems thin before basic functions fail? How long can routines substitute for resources? These questions lack precise answers, but every maintenance state navigates them implicitly through thousands of small decisions about where to sustain capacity and where to let it lapse.

Infrastructure That Ages in Place

Maintenance replaces expansion as climate stress accelerates decay. This may be the most visible manifestation of maintenance governance: infrastructure systems that age without replacement, accumulating deferred maintenance while facing accelerating climate stress.

The OECD's "Infrastructure for a Climate-Resilient Future" report details growing pressure on infrastructure across all sectors. Electricity, communications, transport, water, and waste treatment all face mounting stress, with developing countries particularly hard hit. Record global temperatures around 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages led to more heatwaves and floods, longer wildfire seasons, and widespread droughts in 2023. These events compound infrastructure stress, creating cascading failures.

Central and South America experienced at least $24.4 billion in economic damage from flooding, landslides, wildfires, and droughts in 2024, with over 430 fatalities. Insurance coverage remains limited, especially for rural communities, informal economies, and low-income households. The financial burden of rebuilding falls on governments and individuals, stretching public resources beyond capacity.

The arithmetic reveals the trap: Africa needs $143 billion annually for climate adaptation and mitigation to meet Paris Agreement commitments. It received approximately $44 billion in 2022. Meanwhile, it spent nearly $90 billion servicing external debt in 2024. Countries must choose between paying creditors, maintaining existing infrastructure, or building climate resilience. They cannot afford all three.

This creates perverse outcomes. Infrastructure built decades ago for different climate conditions now faces stresses it was never designed to withstand. Roads crack under heat extremes. Drainage systems overflow from intensified rainfall. Water systems struggle with droughts and floods. But fiscal constraints prevent redesign for new conditions, so systems are patched rather than upgraded, prolonging ultimate failure.

The United States offers sobering context even for a wealthy country. States face an estimated backlog of nearly $1 trillion for deferred maintenance and needed upgrades to public infrastructure as extreme weather events become more intense and common. Climate-related damage to paved roads alone could incur up to $20 billion for repairs by the end of the century. The principle applies everywhere: deferred maintenance during constraint creates compounding costs later.

What Breaks Maintenance States

Overlapping shocks expose the limits of persistence. Maintenance governance buys time, but every year of endurance consumes buffers that might absorb future shocks. Eventually, the margin for error disappears.

Several shock combinations prove particularly destabilizing. Commodity price collapses can eliminate fiscal buffers overnight for resource-dependent economies. Climate disasters that exceed response capacity can overwhelm thin administrative structures. Hurricane Mitch-scale events, multi-year droughts, and coastal flooding exceed institutional capacity. Political succession that disrupts patronage networks can trigger cascading institutional failures when bureaucratic routines depend on informal accommodations.

External financing withdrawal creates acute pressure. If commercial lenders refuse to rollover debt at accessible rates, countries face sudden stops that force immediate adjustment. The IMF and World Bank become lenders of last resort, but their programs require exactly the fiscal consolidation that maintenance states have been avoiding through partial compliance and negotiated delays.

The transition from maintenance to crisis often involves multiple simultaneous pressures. Sri Lanka's 2022 collapse combined COVID-19 revenue loss, commodity price shocks affecting fuel and food imports, foreign exchange reserves exhaustion, political instability, and loss of commercial credit access. No single shock would have triggered collapse, but the combination exceeded system resilience.

The warning signs are detectable but not deterministic. Countries showing multiple indicators face elevated risk. Debt service above 30% of revenues, declining foreign exchange reserves, infrastructure maintenance backlogs exceeding 20% of asset value, administrative vacancies above 25%, and rising social unrest all signal vulnerability. But many countries display these indicators for years without collapsing, making precise forecasting impossible.

The Maintenance Trap

Maintenance governance creates its own constraints. By prioritizing continuity over transformation, it locks in structures that become harder to change. Infrastructure ages toward replacement thresholds simultaneously, creating cliff effects where multiple systems fail at once rather than gradual degradation. Skilled personnel emigrate, creating brain drain that makes future reform more difficult. Political constituencies adapt to constrained expectations, resisting changes that might create uncertainty even if they promise improvement.

The fiscal arithmetic grows more daunting over time. Between 2010 and 2023, interest payment increases (73%) outpaced health (58%) and education (38%) spending growth. This divergence compounds: less education investment now means lower productivity later, reducing future fiscal capacity. Less health investment means higher disease burdens, reducing labor force participation. Deferred infrastructure maintenance creates larger future liabilities.

Escape requires either external relief or internal transformation, and both face obstacles. External relief through debt restructuring takes years to negotiate and often provides insufficient reduction. The G20 Common Framework has delivered limited results. Multilateral institutions don't participate in restructurings, meaning their debt remains senior even as bilateral and commercial debt gets reduced. This creates perverse incentives: countries that borrowed from multilaterals rather than commercial lenders find restructuring less beneficial.

Internal transformation requires fiscal space that maintenance states lack. Tax reform, subsidy elimination, and public enterprise restructuring represent standard recommendations from international financial institutions. All require upfront capacity and political capital that constrained states have depleted. Governance reforms to curb corruption and improve efficiency are essential but resource-intensive to implement, creating a circular problem.

Alternatives and Adjacencies

Some states find partial exits through specific advantages. Commodity exporters with favorable price environments can accumulate buffers, though commodity dependence creates vulnerability to future price swings. Countries with strategic geopolitical positions can access concessional finance from competing powers. Chinese infrastructure loans, Gulf development funds, and Western climate finance all become available, though this requires navigating complex diplomatic alignments.

Regional integration offers theoretical benefits but limited practical impact. African Continental Free Trade Area promises market access and economies of scale, but implementation remains nascent. Most regional trade agreements struggle with infrastructure gaps, regulatory fragmentation, and political tensions that prevent realization of paper commitments.

Innovation in public finance provides marginal additional resources but not transformative sums. Diaspora bonds, blended finance, and carbon credits all offer potential. The voluntary carbon market faced criticism as ineffective, with 47 million credits linked to projects with environmental or social issues retired in 2024. Parametric insurance and catastrophe bonds show promise for climate disasters, with the cat bond market growing to nearly $50 billion by end of 2024, but these tools transfer risk rather than eliminate it.

The most significant variable remains the global macroeconomic environment. Lower interest rates would reduce debt service burdens. Sustained commodity demand would support resource exporters. Climate finance at the scale promised would create fiscal space for adaptation. The developed countries committed to $100 billion annually. These factors lie beyond individual country control, making maintenance states price-takers in global markets they cannot influence.

Closing Insight

Maintenance governance buys time, but every year of endurance consumes a portion of the future. Infrastructure ages, human capital depletes, institutional memory fades. The buffer between functioning systems and failure thins. Eventually, maintenance states face a choice they have been deferring. Pursue transformation that risks disruption, or continue endurance until the next shock exceeds system capacity.

The choice itself may not belong to them. External creditors, climate disasters, or political upheaval can force transitions regardless of government preference. In this sense, maintenance governance represents not a stable equilibrium but a staging area between reform and collapse. It is sustained through accumulated small choices that protect immediate continuity at the cost of long-term capacity.

The question for 2026 and beyond is how many countries can sustain this balance, and for how long. The data suggests growing numbers teeter on thresholds where small additional shocks trigger disproportionate consequences. Half of humanity lives in countries where debt service exceeds health or education spending. That proportion may grow before it shrinks.

What breaks maintenance states, ultimately, is not any single shock but the accumulated depletion of resilience that turns manageable stresses into system failures. Governance becomes maintenance when states lose capacity for anything else. It remains maintenance until something forces transition to a different state. Reform, relief, or collapse become the only options.