Incantations, inclusive growth and the illusory ‘we’: whatever happened to politics in the post-2015 process?

French development guru Pierre Jacquet laments some of the gaps in current debates on the ‘post-2015’ successor to the MDGs

It is altogether amazing how wishful and incantatory discussions on global issues have become. We seem to be content with passionate statements about what “we should”, “we need”, “we must” consider and do. “Inclusive growth” may well have become the new global development objective to worship, and it is hard to disagree with all the statements that go with it and sometimes resemble a laundry list of great things to do. Have we reached a sort of “end-of-History” development approach in which we believe that everyone agrees on some final objectives and we collectively know how to get there? Or is it, rather, that we try to exorcize our impotence and helplessness, while buying ourselves a conscience?

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress my full support to all the objectives that “we” should achieve! However, I find this display of self-indulgent and well-intended thinking almost totally irrelevant. My objections are twofold.

First, who is this “we”, as in “we should” or “we need”? Presumably, there are several such “we”s, and “they” might not all agree. Or “they” might have other priorities. For example, I believe that gender equality is a crucial aspect of inclusive growth and an objective very much worth pursuing, for ethical, social, economic as well as cultural and other reasons. Yet, seminar participants saying for example “we should promote gender equality” are generally not the main or unique actors. It thus amounts to talking at length about what others should do, which may seem a pointless incantation (I’ll qualify this below, though).

Second, these objectives seem so obvious and (ethically at least) incontestable – and they are so repeatedly discussed and endorsed – that the real question is not whether “we” should pursue them, but why they have not yet been achieved!

Motherhood, apple pie, and post-2015?

Answering that question is much more difficult. It is tempting to explore the idea that we did not know enough to be able to do the right thing, and so we turn to diverse sophisticated studies to get knowledge and inspiration on how to do things better. This is the altogether well-established technocratic approach to life. I do not want to dismiss it too easily, nor to underestimate its merits in providing useful evidence-based guidance from serious evaluations. But it comes as a complement to something at least as fundamental, which belongs to the realm of the political economy: there are power issues and relations out there; there are scores of individuals with interests, and the collusion of these interests shapes individual and collective actions. If all these objectives we discuss at such length have not been met, it is likely to be because they were not seen as a priority by most of the relevant actors, notwithstanding any lip service to the contrary.

Hence, my own recommendation would be that global seminars (and the post-2015 process) focus more on the process of political and social change rather than on desired outcomes. Influencing the process is indeed possible, and brings me to qualify my earlier critique: mobilizing agreement around objectives helps attract attention, both global and local, and may change the political environment. However, instead of brooding over broad objectives and principles, one effective way to focus attention is to provide facts and data and report on experiences, in order to shape a better evidence-based diagnosis and precisely define the space for action.

What is measured and reported cannot be ignored, so that describing and measuring are powerful instruments of political influence. For example, facts and data on income distribution are bound to feed a discussion on whether the current situation is compatible with an acceptable vision of social justice; facts and data on the quality of public service delivery, a crucial element of social inclusion, will lead to questions about how to organize that delivery in more effective ways and how to reach out to people who may be excluded. Instead of trying to define social inclusion through a laundry list of objectives, a better way to push the agenda is to document various aspects of social exclusion and their costs.

But the final judgment about whether the situation is acceptable or not is bound to be specific to local politics. A major point, here, is that it would be naïve to believe that there is a spontaneous demand from policy makers and politicians for academic knowledge and evidence to formulate policies. Unfortunately, the connection between knowledge and policies is not a simple, linear process. It is rather chaotic and political as well. The interest of policy-makers in what good research can bring needs to be built through a sense of urgency that will re-shape local priorities and demand action. This is why good facts and data are so crucial in the process.

Finally, “we” need “them”, I mean the people described by our statements. Diagnoses and recommendations need to be owned locally, rather than formulated by outside, foreign observers, however well intentioned. For example, the debate on social protection in developing countries is often cast in terms of resources: do they have resources to develop an effective system, can development assistance help with additional resources, etc. But since no amount of resources will allow governments to do everything that might be useful, the central question is how the allocation of scarce resources is decided, which points to the establishment of local priorities.

The political process is bound to be run by local actors. Data collection and fact finding and their use in the local debates will also be more credible and convincing if local actors are fully involved: the role of NGOs is emphasized and known; empowering local academics and researchers is also crucial.

“We” as actors can help by building their capacity. My own organization, the Global Development Network (GDN) was created to promote research capacity building in economics and social sciences, both for the sake of increasing the stock of relevant knowledge, but also to enhance the quality and density of the local debate on development policies. Research gives access to debate and ownership. My central message, here, is that “we should” (I’m not immune…) focus on what we can do, and let (and help) “them” decide for their own good. Yet, beyond my own ranting, I believe that pressure from the international debate, including the worshiping of global objectives and the adoption of good principles and guidelines, can help. What is missing is a more conscious and deliberate attempt at promoting empowerment and ownership, through a better understanding that the governance of globalization “needs to” be better anchored in local and regional politics.

Pierre Jacquet is President of the Global Development Network, and a former Chief Economist and Director of Strategy at the French Development Agency (AFD)

Merit, Privilege or Slumdog Millionaires? Income Inequality and Social Mobility

In memory of Sebastian Levine, who liked to read these posts.

This post is written by Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, Oxfam’s Head of Research (twitter @rivefuentes)

In Danny Boyle’s movie Slumdog Millionaire, the young character wins a large pot of money against all odds. The movie is a fantasy tale for all practical purposes. The hero knows the responses posed to him in a quiz show through a number of coincidences and lucky breaks. It was his only chance to become wealthy.

What type of societies give better, more just chances to everyone? What is the connection between opportunity and socio-economic disparities? There are, at the risk of being simplistic, two broad sources of inequality: inequality resulting from individual entrepreneurship and effort (I’ll call it merit inequality) and the inequality that reproduces privilege and elite capture (I’ll call it privilege inequality).

A simple way to discover whether inequality is actually a result of merit is to think how far effort and hard work can take us. I recently heard Kaushik Basu, the new Chief Economist at the World Bank, detail an anecdote about this during a meeting with civil society people in London.  When Basu visits his home city of Kolkata he goes for long walks and sometimes he wanders around a privileged district that stands in sharp contrast with the nearby slums. The close proximity of the two vastly different lifestyles ensures that slum dwellers also visit this district. Then Basu said, to the best of my recollection: “it is not fair to tell a kid in the slum that by working hard he will be able to achieve the wealth needed to live in that neighbourhood.”

It is a candid story that got the attention of all people present in the meeting. It makes a powerful point. What Basu was pointing at is that perfect social mobility does not exist. Basu focused on the immorality of a development narrative that promotes aspirations that cannot be attained – the slum kid that will not become a rich mogul. I want to focus on the existing rigid class structures and how they limit opportunity.

Equality of opportunity is a central tenet of modern societies, but it implies that family characteristics should not have a strong influence on the opportunities someone faces throughout life. Empirical evidence shows that is not the case. There is a strong correlation between children’s chances and their parents socio-economic status. A book aptly titled “Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting” put it like this: “The abundant evidence in the economic, demographic, and sociological literature of the association between parents’ and children’s social positions makes it very clear that children’s chances for a good life are highly dependent on their social origins or socioeconomic status”

Social mobility is far from perfect – where you’re born will have some influence on where you end up. But what is the actual correlation between inequality and social mobility? It turns out it’s rather high. Several academic papers (look here, here and here) show this. Take, for instance, recent research by Miles Corak. In this graph, Corak plotted the Gini coefficient (a standard measure of inequality) against “intergenerational elasticity between fathers’ and sons’ earnings” (or how much someone’s income is determined by their parents’). In Denmark, for instance, a country with a low Gini, only 15 percent the a young adult’s income today is explained by their parents’; in Peru, where the Gini is amongst the highest in the world, two-thirds of what someone earns today is related to what their parents earned in the past. Alan Kruger, a former senior official in Obama’s administration and professor at Princeton, dubbed this relationship “The Great Gatsby Curve” (a movie with Leonardo Di Caprio is coming if you don’t feel like reading the book). The rich are different from you and me. And so their offspring are too.

Figure: Like father like son? Parents’ earnings influence income of offspring, and more so in countries with high inequality.

Note: Income inequality in the horizontal axis, persistence of income across generations in the vertical one.

Source: M Corak (2012) Inequality from generation to generation: the United States in Comparison.

A recent debate on The Economist site shed more light on the issue. In a blog post, Francisco Ferreira from the World Bank showed the relationship between opportunity and mobility. Here’s the graph.

You can only climb the social ladder if you have opportunities

Note: persistence of income across generations in the horizontal axis, inequality of economic opportunity in the vertical one.

Source: Brunori, Paolo; Ferreira, Francisco H. G.; Peragine, Vito. (2013) Inequality of opportunity, income inequality and economic mobility : some international comparisons

Countries where economic opportunity is low also present low levels of mobility – Norway is a mobile society where there is low inequality of opportunity, while Brazil, for all its progress, still shows a rigid society with higher levels of inequality of opportunity. The indicator Ferreira and co-authors use in their research (inequality of economic opportunity index) is not without flaws but it’s a solid attempt to capture how much someone’s ability to participate in the economy is determined by circumstances outside their control – characteristics you cannot change easily (race, parent’s education, sex and the like). Ferreira and his co-authors conclude: “The evidence reviewed suggests that an important portion of income inequality observed in the world today cannot be attributed to differences in individual efforts or responsibility. On the contrary, it can be directly ascribed to exogenous factors such as family background, gender, race, place of birth, etc.” Their evidence indicates that privilege inequality trumps merit inequality.

Why? Because privilege persists across generations through difference in access to education, health and social and professional networks and it starts very early in life. This is the connection between income inequality, inequality of opportunity and social mobility. In countries with high income inequality, you only have opportunities if your parents had them too. Ferreira explains “as the rungs of the ladder grow further apart, it gets harder for people to climb up (or move down). Conversely, countries with institutions that promote a level playing field, and redistribute income or opportunity, may also promote mobility”.

The evidence that income inequality limits our control over our destiny is strong. We know something about the dynamics of the class divide. There are some examples of increased mobility throughout history in Britain and the US. As The Economist puts it “…in both America and Britain the effect of high (or low) incomes in one generation lasts for at least two more. Yet [Long and Ferrie’s] study also suggests it is possible to break patterns of immobility. Although American and British mobility rates had converged by the middle of the 20th century, America’s social order was considerably more fluid than Britain’s in the 19th century. The past has a tight grip on the present. But in the right circumstances, it can apparently be loosened. “. So it is possible  to change the level of mobility in society.

We need to understand better how to loosen those circumstances to make societies more fluid but we know that inequality hampers it.  The higher the inequality level in societies, the farther we are from that ideal that with hard work we can achieve what we set our minds. Then, like in Slumdog Millionaire, only an implausible array of coincidences allows people to move up the ladder. How can we support the narrative that says hard work and effort will really improve poor people’s relative position in society when we know that with growing inequalities it becomes much harder?

Tomorrow, I wonder what the aid biz might actually do differently as a result of all this renewed focus on inequality

Government Spending Watch – a new initiative you really need to know about

I’m consistently astonished by how little we know about the important stuff in development. Take the Millennium Development Goals – the basis forinnumerable aid debates, campaigns, and negotiations. A large chunk of the MDG agenda concerns the size and quality of public spending – on health, education, water, sanitation etc. So obviously, the first thing we need is to know how much governments are spending on these things, right?

Well no actually, because we don’t have those numbers. Until now. Oxfam has teamed up with an influential and well-connected NGO, Development Finance International, which advises developing country governments around the world. Working with a network of government officials, DFI has pulled together and analysed the budgets of 52 low and middle income countries (With another 34 to follow). The result is a new database, called Government Spending Watch, (summary of overall project here) and a report ‘Progress at Risk’, previewed in Washington last Friday in a joint DFI/Oxfam America event to coincide with the IMF and World Bank Spring meetings. The full report won’t be ready ‘til May, but an initial draft exec sum is available, and here’s what it says.

The data cover seven sectors (agriculture/food, education, environment and climate change, gender, health, social protection and water/sanitation), from 2008 to 2015 (including medium-term forecasts). They examine planned and actual spending, disaggregated by types (recurrent and capital), and sources of funds (government revenue or donor funding). There are some major gaps (see map), so the first call is for donors (who are often the worst culprits) and governments to collect and publish more and better data.

The report looks separately at countries with and without IMF programmes (although attributing the differences to the IMF is tricky, and the report avoids doing so). Headline findings are:

• Most countries have been increasing revenue and spending as a % of GDP, but this is now going into reverse
• The sources of government finances have shifted from grants to loans, including more expensive domestic borrowing, raising fears about growing debt burdens (although no new debt crisis is imminent)
• Countries with IMF programmes have raised less revenue, are cutting deficits faster and have seen less positive trends in MDG spending. Agriculture and health spending are now much higher as a percentage of GDP, and education and social protection spending are rising faster in non-IMF countries. Other MDG sector spending is stagnating compared with GDP or total spending.
• For all MDGs, the vast majority of developing countries are spending much less than they have promised or than international organisations have estimated is needed. Only one third of countries are meeting any education or health goals, and less than 30 per cent are meeting agriculture and WASH goals. Trends have been even less positive for gender and sustainable development.
• Some of the spending has been funded by rapidly growing aid – especially in education, health, WASH and agriculture. Progress in these areas is threatened as OECD aid flows are now declining in real terms, and are increasingly moving away from MDG sectors to infrastructure and growth.
• In most countries, actual spending is substantially less than the amounts announced in budgets (see table). This is particularly true in the health, agriculture and WASH sectors, reflecting delays in donor funding, and absorptive capacity problems in sector ministries and decentralised government agencies.
• Types of spending show two worrying patterns. Some sectors (WASH and agriculture) are dominated by investment, raising the need to increase recurrent spending dramatically to maintain buildings and equipment. Others (education, health and social protection) are dominated by recurrent spending on wages and supplies. Especially if donors reduce budget support, which funds much recurrent spending in many countries, governments will need to make even greater revenue efforts to maintain recurrent spending and keep delivering progress.

If the excitement around last week’s prelaunch is anything to go by, this is going to be a really important initiative. According to report author and DFI boss Matthew Martin:

“We had conversations with officials from about 20 IDA countries about their relative performance in terms of spending and transparency and all of them were anxious to see the full data and report, and to improve their performance. Senior donor government officials were also energised about being able to use these data to see country spending inputs for the MDGs and for the post-2015 framework.

Major global campaigns on education and health were anxious to see and use the data. The DC development research community (Brookings, CGD, IMF, World Bank) as well as USAID, MCC and the African Development Bank  were very excited by the data and want to organise further seminars after the full report is published and consider using the data for their own research and policymaking.

We also had great conversations about potential partnerships with the International Budget Partnership (who run analysis and campaigns on budget transparency and accountability), and the BOOST team in the World Bank (who help countries produce much more detailed geocoded data and would like to code it for the MDGs).

All in all, an amazing week: it has felt like standing on a snowball which is rolling faster and getting bigger every day – we start again with the New York academic and UN community next (i.e. this) week.”

Looking ahead, citizens and social movements in poor countries will now be able both to see what their governments are promising and delivering, and to compare that with other countries in the neighbourhood. International bodies will be able to track the extent to which warm words translate into cash on the ministerial table. Internationally, Oxfam will certainly be using the database as a vital new tool to help local citizens and civil society actors ensure their governments actually deliver the goods.

In addition to scaled up advocacy and campaigns, the plan now is for GSW to expand the database to cover more countries and years, and to publish regular updates. But to do that we will need to find funders and advocacy partners. Please form an orderly queue……

Learning the Lessons: Why is change NOT happening in the response to hunger crises?

I know I go on all the time about ‘how change happens’, but often in development the important question is ‘why doesn’t change happen?’, and we need to get better at answering it. On Tuesday Oxfam published Learning the Lessons, an analysis of the response to the 2012 Sahel food crisis, which affected some 18m people across 9 countries. It’s a serious piece of work, drawing on interviews with 30 external bodies – donors, governments etc, other published research, focus group discussions with affected communities and perspectives from civil society.

Compared to the ‘too little, too late’ response to previous crises in the region in 2010 and 2005, the report finds some improvements: early warning systems had improved and raised the alarm earlier, and governments in the region reacted in good time – Niger, for example, appealed for support six months earlier than it did during the 2010 crisis.

But there were still problems with governments, donors and the aid system. Governments in the region still lack the financial and technical capacity to really be able to lead. As for donors:

‘There was still disagreement about the likely severity of the crisis. Some donors, such as the European Community’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO), acted earlier than in previous years, but overall, donor funding was no more timely than before. By the beginning of July 2012 and the peak of the crisis, the UN appeal remained just under 50 per cent funded.’

This really matters: 5.6 million people didn’t get the seeds and tools they needed in time to prepare for the 2012 harvest cycle.

Interestingly, the report sees the roadblock as conceptual, and argues that this can be overcome by changing the way we think about such crises to emphasise the concept of ‘resilience’ – very much the current buzzword in a lot of development circles. ‘Learning the Lessons’ reckons a ‘resilience lens’ would allow donors to:

-          Develop a shared understanding of vulnerability to food insecurity so that support is targeted to the poorest and responses can be launched rapidly;

-          Break down barriers between humanitarian and development actors so that long-term and emergency programmes effectively support each other;

-          Invest in strengthening the capacity of national and local actors so that governments can deliver large-scale, sustained support to their citizens.

I must admit I was initially sceptical that the answer to such a profound failure is a new buzzword. But actually, I think the authors may be on to something.

The most useful framework I’ve found for understanding the roots of inertia (aka ‘why change doesn’t happen’) is the ‘3i’ model of ideas, institutions and interests. A combination of these three underlies the kind of paralysis we’ve seen in the Sahel response.

Institutions: there is still a deep division between the ‘humanitarian/emergency’ and ‘long term development’ wings of the aid business. This is reflected in funding structures, which are completely different for the two silos. The polarization makes it hard to take a long-term approach to reducing the vulnerability to the inevitable future crises.

Interests: if you work in an aid agency, there are clear risks to responding early to a crisis – what if the rains come, you are accused of crying wolf etc? In any case, your political pay masters often only start banging the table when the grim TV images start to roll (by which time it is often too late, and certainly much more expensive, to respond). There is also still something of a macho ‘I’m here to save lives, get out of my way’ approach to humanitarian work which can all too easily brush aside national governments and local knowledge that are crucial to understanding the long-term roots of crises, and building institutions to deal with future ones. National governments need to be at the heart of efforts to address food insecurity, but that is likely to threaten the power relations of the status quo,

Ideas: The institutional silos reflect a crippling conceptual dichotomy. Cyclical crises such as those affecting the Sahel really can’t be described as ‘emergencies’, in that they are predictable and regular. But the underlying thinking in the aid business is still ‘is that an emergency, or is it long term development? Do we send in the engineers or the economists?’

One of the things I’ve noticed about climate change is that it is a ‘disruptive idea’. Disruptive ideas can’t be fitted into existing entrenched mental and organizational frameworks, and so often prompt violent rejection, but also the possibility of paradigm shifts. Because climate change doesn’t ‘belong’ to any existing camp, it makes it easier to bring people together (development and environment, for example) to think differently about how we respond to it without prompting accusations of turf wars and interference. Is ‘resilience’ also a disruptive idea, with the potential to bypass the humanitarian/development divide?

I’m sure there is a big literature our there about the characteristics and impact of disruptive ideas. Any links appreciated.

Why has economic crisis produced a new left in Latin America, but not elsewhere?

For a wonk parent it’s hard to beat the heart-warming experience of seeing your book referenced in your son’s university essay. In this case, junior had the task of trying to understand the link between neoliberalism and the rise of a new left in Latin America, so he cited Silent Revolution, a book I first published in 1995, when he was 3 years old.

But his essay also got me thinking. Citing Polanyi, he put the rise of Chavez, Morales, Lula et al down to the ‘commodification’ of land, labour and money. Through privatization, deregulation etc, the Washington consensus over-reached itself, trying to commodify things like jobs that have much deeper human significance than just being tradable items. That provoked the backlash that became Latin America’s centre left, while simultaneously undermining the unions that were the backbone of the previous ‘old left’.

Nice thesis, but surely if that was true, the centre left would be much more of a global phenomenon, given that commodification is hardly confined to Latin America? So what, specifically, about Latin America has led to the rise of such an interesting range of political movements and governments over the last 15 years? Candidates include:

- The depth of prior trauma from hyperinflation meant that people were less willing to go for slightly friendlier variants of neoliberalism and ready to pursue more radical solutions

- Disillusion with more orthodox forms of ‘bourgeois democracy’ because in Latin America, the return to democracy from military rule coincided with the debt crisis and economic stagnation of the 1980s

- The particular depth of progressive social capital: the radical Catholic Church, the fight back against military rule, the rise of identity movements (indigenous, black, women) created new political expressions outside the previous structures

- The concept of ’social debt’ – the new left successfully argued that the legacy of military rule was a degree of inequality that was unacceptable, and they won that argument even with the middle classes. As a result, Latin America is the one region in the world where inequality has been falling.

Hold on, what's HE doing there?

And of course, (sorry, son) it’s very dangerous to generalize about the whole region (even in an undergraduate essay). For a start, there are at least two ‘new lefts’: a more social democrat ’sensibilist’ left, epitomised by the PT under Lula, and the more fire-breathing ‘Bolivarian’ left of Morales, Chavez and friends (see left). One reason why Venezuela and Bolivia were able to depart further from the Washington Consensus was at least partly because they were enjoying massive oil and gas royalties, so felt much freer of fiscal constraints. Brazil, traumatized by memories of hyperinflation, pursued a different combination of radical social policy and cautious economic policy. Argentina, as always, is a special case, buying itself fiscal space by defaulting on its debts after the 2000 meltdown, but is now having trouble maintaining it (and the Peronists are virtually indestructible, and have so far headed off any new political challenges).

Not that Silent Revolution is much help in understanding all this. One painful aspect of being an author is that your thinking is captured at a fixed point, even as time moves on. The first edition in 1995 lamented the Latin American left’s inability to move from ‘protesta a propuesta’ (protest to proposal). The second edition in 2003 saw much more evidence of a crisis in the prevailing paradigm, but failed to find any clear signs of what was emerging. Oops.

Any other thoughts on the origins of Latin American exceptionalism? (Don’t worry, junior’s already handed in his essay, so he can’t be accused of crowdsourcing.)

Do hunger and malnutrition make you want to cry? Time to get your HANCI out

Today sees the launch of the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI), produced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) with funding from Irish Aid and DFID. It looks like it could become one of the more useful annual league tables.

It may not be seen as a progressive view in the UK, but I’m a big league table fan, especially when they’re combined with access to new information. They use political rivalry to motivate politicians, the media love them, they allow good guys to be praised, as well as under-performers to be slapped, and they hand civil society some useful ammunition. The post2015 circus might be well advised to spend more time designing an effective league table, rather than adding yet more issues to its Christmas tree.

The HANCI assesses governments both by intention and action, examining policies and programmes, legal frameworks and public spending in 45 developing countries across 22 indicators (see chart). It uses separate analyses for hunger and undernutrition, and stresses the differences between them.

Guatemala wins the beauty parade, coming ‘a resounding number one’ both on hunger and undernutrition. The report hails ‘a range of efforts by the Government of Guatemala:

• Ensuring high level of access to drinking water (92% of the population)
• Ensuring good levels of access to improved sanitation (78%);
• Promoting complementary feeding practices, and ensuring over nine out of ten pregnant women are visited by a skilled health personnel at least once before delivery;
• Investing substantially in health and having a separate nutrition budget line to make its spending accountable to all;
• Putting in place a Zero Hunger Plan that aims to reduce chronic malnutrition in children less than 5 years of age by 10% in 2016;
• Ensuring that public policy is informed by robust and up to date evidence on nutrition statuses;
• Establishing a multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder coordination mechanism that is regionally recognised as an example of good practice.’

In contrast Guinea Bissau is at the bottom of the heap. Other findings include:

• Big variation between countries (eg within the BRICS, South Africa is the hero, and India the zero)
• Economic growth has not necessarily led to a commitment from governments to tackle hunger and undernutrition

• Conversely, countries with low per capita GDP and relatively slow growth, like Malawi, can demonstrate commitment (Malawi came second after Guatemala)
• Very low level of correlation between performance on hunger and on nutrition (not clear what to make of that)

Here’s the full index (keep clicking to enlarge a bit):

The HANCI raises lots of questions about the patterns that emerge. All 3 Latin American countries are in the top 5, but the Asian and African countries are much more intermixed. What other features are worth studying? The link to political regimes? Aid dependence? Conflict? It’s a good index and will provide lots of, errm, food for thought.

(And for non-English speakers wondering about the title of this post, it’s a pun on hankie. Geddit?)

What questions help us understand how change happens?

How do we analyse the stories of change that we all use in development? Such stories shape narratives, illustrate approaches and enrich our understanding of how change happens. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a running theme, but I’m now about to step it up, working with colleagues across Oxfam and beyond to collect and use case studies of change to sharpen our thinking and practice.

What emerges when you do this is the problem of ‘retrospective coherence’. Asked to remember what happened, people rearrange and reinterpret a change story. Typically they downplay the importance of failure and unexpected events, and the role of individuals (eg champions within state institutions). They also tend to minimize the role of actors outside the civil society-state interaction – faith leaders, academics, media, private sector, traditional leaders. What remains is a smooth, well-planned and executed project that bears little resemblance to the messy reality faced by people working in real time. So part of the effort in collecting such stories is to recapture what actually happened.

I’ve got case studies coming out of my ears at the moment – working with Oxfam Novib, in East Asia, and with the campaigns and advocacy team – and will be blogging about them as they develop. But in the meantime, here’s the latest version of the guidance questions I send round to kick off the process – I would really appreciate any suggestions for sharpening them up, references etc. They’re also available as a Word document here.

Starting Point

What change did Oxfam seek? Where/how did the idea originate? Was it specific (eg improving livelihoods for X women) or systemic (changing government policy, prevailing norms)? Was it primarily economic, political, social or a combination?

The remaining questions help you work your way round the power and change cycle, which helps in analysing a wide range of change processes (see graphic)

Power Analysis

What was the nature of the redistribution of power involved in the change? Was it primarily about ‘power within’ eg empowering women to become more active social agents, ‘power with’ (collective organization) or ‘power to’ (e.g. supporting CSO advocacy)?

What was the power analysis of the key forces driving/blocking such a change? What economic or political interests were threatened/promoted by the change? Which groups were drivers/blockers/undecided? Was their power formal (eg elected politicians) or informal (traditional leaders, influential individuals)? Was it visible (rules and force) or invisible (in people heads – norms and values) or hidden (behind the scenes influence)

Which individuals played key roles, either as allies or opponents?

Change Hypothesis

What aspects of (or changes in) political, economic, social context made the desired change more or less likely (eg functioning institutions, political leadership, new technologies, new threats or opportunities)

What was the hypothesis for how the change was likely to come about? What alliances (eg with sympathetic officials or politicians, private sector, media, faith leaders or within civil society) could drive/block the change? What tactics were likely to work best (cooperation v conflict, research v street protest)?

What were the pivotal moments/windows of opportunity (eg new governments; changes of leadership; crises and scandals; election timetables)?

Change Strategy

What was Oxfam’s role in promoting change? As an active player or supporting partners? One programme approach, or advocacy/programme only?

Who were our partners – were they ‘usual suspects’ (local civil society organizations and NGOs), ‘unusual suspects’ (private sector bodies, local/national government, faith leaders) or a mixture of both? What was Oxfam’s contribution eg helping them develop a clearer theory of change; bringing partners together with other actors to build alliances; building particular aspects of their organizational capacity; funding?

Implement and Evaluate

What did we/partners actually do (as specific as possible, please!)

What was unexpected? Few change processes go according to plan (although we often rewrite them to make them look that way!) What unforeseen events or realizations (e.g. that something wasn’t working) led to a change of approach? How did the original plan change as the work developed? Were there unintended outcomes and impacts?

Were there early wins that helped build confidence and momentum in the work?

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

How did you monitor and evaluate impact? What evidence can you provide to persuade someone who questions whether your actions actually led to the change described?

What are the top lessons you would draw from this experience for development workers in other contexts?

Whither (wither?) the ANC? Final thoughts on South Africa as a developmental state and the crisis of leadership

Like most of my overseas trips, my recent visit to South Africa resembled an intensive rolling seminar, as debates with brilliant Oxfam staff, partners and academics spilled over from conferences and meetings into cars and bars. Before it all recedes into the mists, I wanted to capture one of the recurring themes. The role of the South African state and the ANC.

Discussions on the developmental state are vibrant in South Africa. They are also very confusing. Often, the term is bandied about to describe anything a state should do to pursue development. But the term’s original meaning is much more specific, rooted in Chalmers Johnson’s attempt to explain the Japanese economic miracle of the 1960s and 70s. That includes a starring (and steering) role for a semi-autonomous technocracy, able to pursue a long term industrial upgrading project without succumbing to the short term demands of interest groups. Would anyone seriously compare that to what is currently happening in South Africa, where every day newspapers splash on the latest stories of chaos, intrigue and incompetence within the state machinery?

Actually, there is one part of the South African state machinery that is renowned for its efficiency and transparency – the South African Revenue Service (SARS, unfortunate acronym). One staffer at an Oxfam partner even said ‘if SARS was a party, I would vote for it’. Not often you hear that level of affection for the taxman.

But there are other points of comparison – Japan was certainly not free of corruption. More importantly, South Africa does have an activist state and that began long before the ANC. A questioner from the floor caused a stir at one seminar when he said ‘the closest South Africa has come to a developmental state was under apartheid’. The state provided for whites, and the non-white labour  it required. I was struck by the amount of state housing for all ethnic groups – rows of identical brick two bed houses are dotted around the chaotic sprawl of self-built ‘informal settlements’.

That tradition of state provision continues under the ANC. Housing, education and health have improved, though there is an awfully long way to go. But this prompts heated debates on whether the South African style of provision encourages passivity and dependence. Anti-state types love the dependence narrative as it provides a perfect excuse for cuts, but not everyone who worries about it can be written off as a bloodthirsty fiscal hawk.

what happens after he's gone?

On housing for example, I was struck by the different approaches in some places in Latin America, where the state supports (rather than replaces) self-build, eg by providing an engineer to advise, or by building only one room and leaving spaces for shanty-town dwellers to add their own (as they inevitably do). Does that approach increase agency as well as produce more housing per dollar?

In the end, all conversations came back to the state and fate of the ANC. The party suffers from Beatles syndrome – applauded outside the country, but much less popular at home. The headlines are all about corruption, which seems widespread, but in many ways patronage is more of a problem than plain theft. Not only does that benefit ‘tenderpreneurs’ who use their connections to win state contracts, however incompetent the execution; it also leads to the wrong people in key jobs – ‘someone who has never been to school becoming a mayor’.

If the ANC is to rekindle its waning legitimacy, it has to tackle some big headaches. How to redistribute land without destroying agroexports? Could it nationalise parts of the mining sector, and if it doesn’t, does it risk a Zimbabwe style split between party and trade unions, as Cosatu loses patience?

Overall the level of political paralysis and growing inequality and unrest means the ‘ANC is tiptoeing on a land mine’. How might it all end? Random speculation over a beer Deep and thoughtful analysis suggested a few possibilities:

• Rising expectations both among the poor (growing protests over poor quality services) and the middle class (‘I’ve got my degree, now where’s my job?’) leads to a broad protest movement and some kind of Arab Spring type meltdown.
• Possibly linked to this, the party splits and South African politics becomes genuinely competitive and multi-party. All parties have to sharpen up, both in terms of corruption and competence, if they are to get elected.
• Alternatively, the lack of opposition removes any incentive for party discipline. Politics becomes a vehicle for grabbing the spoils of power, and leads to increasing infighting within the ANC and a slow slide into chaos and incompetence (call it Nigeria on a bad day).
• The ANC pulls back from the brink, finds new, dynamic leaders, and regains its appeal by attacking South Africa’s malaises of inequality, unemployment and poor administration.

Any other plausible scenarios?

The other posts from South Africa were on Women on Farms and the recent farmworkers’ strike; Brazil v South Africa on inequality; How to build local government accountability and How can South Africa promote citizenship?

What is the impact of women’s collective action? Evidence from 3 African countries

A day in the life of a woman agricultural policy adviser in West Africa

Sally Baden (left, in the white shirt), Oxfam’s former Senior Adviser on Agriculture and Women’s Livelihoods, summarizes the findings of a new Oxfam report and research project on women’s collective action in agriculture.

As an Oxfam policy adviser in West Africa (2001-8), I worked with many different kinds of farmer organization. These included cotton farmers, pastoralists and rice growers, grouped in informal enterprises as well as more formal associations and cooperatives.

On occasion, they were women-only groups – such as the organic Shea butter producers of Songtaaba in Burkina, one of a small but growing number of women-led collective businesses. But most farmer organizations were mixed sex – which in practice often meant male dominated, providing plentiful anecdotal evidence that led me to question whether, in fact, women benefit.

• In a meeting with national level producer leaders, the proposal from a (lone) women farmers’ leader that women members be targeted for literacy training led to one (male) farmer storming out of the room, such was his fury.
• When facilitating a planning workshop with leaders of pastoralist groups from different countries in the Sahel, it was clear that the few women present were reluctant to speak.  During the lunch break, one woman grabbed my arm and whispered in a panicked tone, ‘You must help us: If the men get better access to markets, they’ll use the money to buy more wives’.

• When interviewed separately during a funders’ visit to a cotton-farmer cooperative, a group four or five women, expressed their disenchantment with the coop. They felt they are used as free labour and to cook food for meetings and village festivities but have limited say in decisions and derive little benefit.  (Back in the room, the men, by contrast, said they favoured women’s involvement!)

These experiences, plus similar ones from other colleagues led us in 2009 to launch the ‘Researching Women’s Collective Action’ (RWCA)  project to understand which women participate in collective marketing groups – in Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania – how they benefit, and what NGOs and others are doing to support women’s engagement in markets. We first did an extensive literature review, organized stakeholder dialogues and conducted scoping research in 15 agricultural sectors. Then we carried out surveys of nearly 3000 women (members of marketing groups and non members with similar characteristics – as a control) focused on one subsector in each country, as well as in-depth case studies of 12 groups, via focus groups and interviews with key informants.

The RWCA’s results are published today in a new Oxfam research report.

Are the examples above an unfair caricature of patriarchal attitudes (especially coming from a European feminist)? Yes, up to a point: Oxfam’s RWCA research found that male leaders’ and husbands’ support has been vital to those women who have been able to actively participate in and benefit from collective action groups, including as leaders.  Whether to engage their support, or to mitigate their opposition, strategies to promote women’s empowerment ignore men at their peril.

In more detail, the findings included:

Women’s participation in collective action groups delivers significant economic benefits, but the choice of market is critical: High value products (vs.staples or traditional exports) which have local as well as national or international markets are likely to yield more benefits. This is true for producer organizations in general, but women in particular.  Women in groups gained high returns from the vegetables sector in Tanzania:  up to $340 per annum for women who joined groups compared to those not in groups.  The estimated monetary value of increased gains from sales was lower in Mali (Shea butter) and Ethiopia (honey) but still significant, at $12 and $35 a year respectively. Those sectors were also relatively easier for women to enter, as they do not require control over land.

Wealthier, higher status women are more likely to join groups, unless measures are taken to target the less well off: Group membership rules of ‘one member per household,’ requiring land ownership, or only admitting married members, indirectly discriminate against women or certain categories of women.  In Ethiopia, unmarried women were able to access groups because NGOs and government specifically targeted female heads of household. Married women’s participation dramatically increased after local lobbying for ‘dual membership’ per household led to changes in cooperative by-laws.

Participation in informal women’s groups increases the likelihood that women will join formal marketing groups and reinforces the benefits they derive: Building on traditional institutions such rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), burial societies (iddir – in Ethiopia) or labour-sharing groups, informal groups help women to develop confidence and leadership skills as well as accumulate savings, which facilitate marketing of their produce.   However, as the basis for collective marketing such groups have limitations: collective enterprises require different skills, strong networks, group investments and legal recognition.  Linking informal women’s groups with mixed marketing groups can be an effective hybrid strategy, as we found in Ethiopia.

Women rarely have equal say in or leadership of mixed groups, while women-only groups may face challenges with business viability: Women themselves recognize these tensions: when the Matumaini A group in Tanzania lost most of its male members due to ‘women’s dominance’, members recognized that this also meant losing valuable skills, resources and networks. In Mali, ostensibly women-only groups had one or two male members, deployed for tasks such as negotiating with village chiefs where women were prohibited from crossing the threshold. One such group was even named after their token man!

Participation in marketing groups leads to improved incomes, but weak effects on empowerment: In contrast to the economic benefits, we found limited evidence of a clear link between women’s empowerment and group participation.  To assess this, we adapted elements of the ‘Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index’, an innovative methodology called developed by the Oxford Human Poverty Institute (OPHI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – explanatory video here.

Graph comparing women group members control over different areas of decision making vs. non members (Mali)

Our research showed that empowerment was greater when women participate in informal as well as formal groups.

Control over credit was the one area where women’s decision making was enhanced by group membership across all three countries. Other dimensions of empowerment – such as mobility – were affected, though less consistently. Women reported increased control of incomes from the sale of Shea butter, honey or vegetables, but this didn’t seem to extend to wider household incomes, except in Ethiopia. And it was only in Mali that stronger women’s rights over land were linked to group membership.

Learning from such experiences, development actors  – including Oxfam – need to adopt flexible approaches to supporting collective action, taking the wider context into account, and supporting women’s own initiatives.  We also need to pay more attention to the policy environment, enshrining clear principles of equality in cooperative laws, setting explicit targets to address women’s participation and leadership, making membership rules and procedures more flexible, and protecting the space for informal association.

So: Does organizing groups of rural women producers contribute to rural women’s empowerment as well as increasing their incomes?  My answer is a qualified ‘yes’; it can be a step towards increased empowerment, for some women, under the right conditions.  But we are only just beginning to understand the relationships between markets, collective action, intra-household relations and ‘women’s empowerment’.  More innovation and more research are (of course) needed.

The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Synthesis > novelty in a big new UN report.

Of the big reports that spew forth from the multilateral system, some break new ground in terms of research or narratives, while others usefully recap the latest thinking on a given issue. Last week’s 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, falls into the latter category, pulling together the evidence for a tectonic North-South shift in global economic and political affairs, summarizing new thinking on inequality, South in the North etc and asking what happens next. If you’re currently sunk in the depths of Europessimism or US political stalemate, you may find such an upbeat story refreshing (or even disturbing). You can read the exec sum online, but it doesn’t seem to allow you to cut and paste (v annoying for lazy bloggers like me).

Some useful numbers to demonstrate the extent of the shift: From 1980 to now, developing countries’ share of global GDP rose from 33% to 45%, their share of world goods trade from 25% to 45%, and South-South trade as a % of the world total rose from 8% to 26%.

How has this happened and so what? The HDR’s approach is to learn from the success of 18 of the more than 40 countries in the developing world that have done better than expected in human development terms in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past ten years. Not just China and India, but countries like Turkey, Ghana and Mauritius. Again, nothing new there – the Growth Commission had a go at that five years back – but still infinitely preferable to maths-led regression-tastic nonsense that ignores history and politics.

Compared to the Growth Commission, the HDR’s conclusions are more interventionist, and more political. The Report identifies 3 main drivers shared across the success stories:

1. A proactive developmental state

2. Tapping into global markets

3. Determined social policy innovation

On the role of the state, successful countries ‘share some key characteristics. Most were proactive “developmental states” that sought to take strategic advantage of opportunities offered by world trade. They also invested heavily in human capital through health and education programs and other essential social services. More important than getting prices right, a developmental state must get policy priorities right. They should be people-centred, promoting opportunities while protecting against downside risks.’

In case you missed it, that’s a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Washington Consensus and its preference for ‘getting the prices right’.

Oops, wrong South

The report points to some downside risks that threaten this progress: ‘short-sighted austerity measures, failures to address persistent inequalities, and a lack of opportunities for meaningful civic participation.’ But overall, as the South rises, the focus will shift to ‘long-term challenges shared by industrialized countries of the North’ – both commonly shared issues like ageing and jobs, and collective action problems like climate change.

Its recommendations for continuing this amazing progress include

1. Developing countries need to move their focus from ‘growth first’ to human development

2. Enhanced South-South learning and integration

3. Greater representation for civil society and the South in the international system. Global institutions have not yet caught up with this historic change (the international system’s loss rather than the BRICS’). China, with the world’s second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.

And in a nice table-turning touch, the report ‘urges the convening of a new “South Commission” where developing countries can take the lead in suggesting constructive new approaches to effective global governance.’

Nothing earth-shattering, but a useful exercise in synthesizing the evolving understanding of development and repositioning the multilaterals within it. So what have I missed?

And here’s the rather frenetic animated version