Citizens Against Corruption: What Works? Findings from 200 projects in 53 Countries

I attended a panel + booklaunch on the theme of ‘Citizens Against Corruption’ at the ODI last week. After all the recent agonizing and self-doubt of the results debate (‘really, do we know anything about the impact of our work? How can we be sure?’), it was refreshing to be carried away on a wave of conviction and passion. The author of the book, Pierre Landell-Mills is in no doubt – citizen action can have a massive impact in countering corruption and improving the lives of poor people, almost irrespective of the political context.

The book captures the experience of the Partnership for Transparency Fund, set up by Pierre in 2000. It summarizes experiences from 200 case studies in 53 countries. This has included everything from using boy scouts to stop the ‘disappearance’ of textbooks in the Philippines to introducing a new code of ethics for Mongolia’s judiciary. The PTF’s model of change is really interesting. In terms of the project itself:

-          Entirely demand led: it waits for civil society organizations (CSOs) to come up with proposals, and funds about one in five

-          $25k + an expert: the typical project consists of a small grant, and a volunteer expert, usually a retiree from aid agencies or governments, North and South. According to Pierre ‘the clue to PTF’s success has been marrying high quality expertise with the energy and guts of young activists’. (I’ve now added ‘Grey Wonks’ to my ‘Grey Panthers’ rant on why the aid world is so bad at making the most of older people).

-          The PTF is tapping into a zeitgeist of shifting global norms on corruption, epitomised by the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003). The idea that ‘they work for us’ seems to be gaining ground.

-          The PTF prefers cooperation to conflict – better to work with champions within the state (and there nearly always are some, if you can find them), than just to lob rocks from the sidelines (although some rock-lobbing may also be required).

-          It also prefers action and avoids funding ‘awareness-raising’, ‘capacity building’ and other ‘conference-building measures.’

So what works? On the basis of the case studies (chapters on India, Mongolia, Uganda and the Philippines), and his vast experience of governance and corruption work, Pierre sets out a ‘stylized programme’ for the kinds of CSO-led initiatives that deliver the goods:

1. Nail down the problem: use surveys, focus groups, right to information laws where they exist
2. Come up with (and implement) an action plan: get people involved with community report cards, community radio, public hearings and other approaches
3. Propose ideas for ways to reform the system or reduce the opportunities for corruption, drawing on the results of (1) and (2)
4. Discuss the ideas with stakeholders and amend
5. Campaign to persuade officials and politicians to adopt the ideas
6. Once you’ve won (bit of a leap, that – see cartoon) monitor the implementation of any measures introduced to reduce corruption.

This may look like a bit of a blueprint, but actually it isn’t – the PTF fits the model of how to work in complex systems pretty well. It acknowledges that outsiders can’t possibly understand the labyrinths of formal and informal power, or identify potential allies and windows of opportunity. Those have to come from within. By breaking funding down into small grants, and using only volunteer experts, it tries to keep power away from the consultancy/donor complex, and stay true to being country-driven. At the ODI, Pierre described the underlying theory of change as ‘the aggregation of millions of actions to reach a tipping point.’

He also expanded on the problem of aid institutions. Anti-corruption campaigning is often long-term, over 25-50 year time horizons. That means aid donors can support particular phases, but if they don’t have the staying power to see the work through, they need to avoid trying to control it. Unfortunately, ‘politicians and officials who think they can make their mark are the biggest menace for this work’.

Despite this critique, the book is a pitch for funding from the aid agencies, although Pierre believes that in the long term CSO anti-corruption work will have to find alternatives sources.

Which all sounds great, but the results debate is obviously getting to me, because I did have some sympathy with DFID’s Mark Robinson, who said at the ODI that although the UK Government (which has been a core funder of PTF) ‘is increasingly persuaded about the value of citizens’ transparency and accountability initiatives’, we really can’t be expected to judge PTF entirely on the uplifting case studies and stats collected by, errrm, the PTF.

I raised another issue: the rhythm of civil society action is almost always episodic – long periods of tranquillity (people getting on with their lives), punctuated by episodic spikes of protest. Attempts to turn this dynamic into some kind of permanent state of mobilization are probably destined for frustration and failure. Between spikes, the long term work of renewing or changing social capital, social norms and values etc takes place in the more permanent ‘grains’ of civil society – trades unions, neighbourhood associations, religious communities – that endure between spikes. It wasn’t clear that PTF understands and works with this – it seems to have permanent mobilization as its underlying model of how civil society works.

PTF seems to belong to a family of ‘post supply side’ approaches to governance, which also includes the International Budget Partnership, the research of Matt Andrews or the Africa Power and Politics Programme, as well as Oxfam’s own work on governance and accountability.

What they have in common is the need to move from ‘best practice’ to ‘best fit’, to identify and support locally driven initiatives, and to support coalitions between champions within the system and those outside. Where they seem to differ is on the prominence of civil society in these discussions – at one end of the spectrum is PTF’s perhaps excessive glorification of its role; at the other the APPP’s rather contemptuous dismissal of civil society as irrelevant to the ‘real’ Paul Kagame world of big men and decent chaps sorting out political settlements (’citizen pressure is at best a weak factor and at worst a distraction from dealing with the main drivers of bad governance.’) I would love to see APPP’s David Booth and Pierre Landell-Mills go head to head on this.

To be continued, I suspect (not least because Matt Andrews is in London this week).

The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: a big new book by Matt Andrews

There’s nothing like an impending meeting with the author to make you dig out your scrounged review copy of his book. So I spent my flight to Boston last week reading Limits (sorry the full title is just too clunky).  And luckily for the dinner conversation, I loved it.

Limits is about why change doesn’t happen, and how it could. It synthesizes the ‘groundswell’ of disquiet about the failure of the governance and institutional reforms that have been promoted for many years now by aid agencies like the World Bank. And it’s not just a whinge – there are plenty of ideas for how aid agencies can do better. The book is particularly useful for those working on fragile states – lots of the positive examples (as well as some failures) come from Afghanistan, Ivory Coast and elsewhere, although there is a bit of ‘why can’t everywhere be more like Rwanda?’ in there too.

Overall, the approach reminded me of Dani Rodrik’s great book, In Search of Prosperity, and Matt says Rodrik (a fellow Harvard prof) was influential in pushing him to nail down the always-elusive ‘so whats’.

Limits summarizes research and thinking from disparate disciplines, with lots of fascinating case studies (he’s put in the legwork to build a serious empirical basis for his conclusions). His big idea is captured in a new acronym, PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation), which, as he pointed out, is similar to the Participatory Institutional Appraisal idea I raised in a recent blog. I’m not sure if PDIA will catch on – it could have done with a snappier title, as could the book – but the content is really important if you are interested in aid, institutions or governance.

So what does it say? Firstly, that we have a big failure on our hands. The spate of projects and programmes around institutional reform has at best a mixed record of success; in many countries institutions have actually deteriorated in terms of effectiveness, corruption etc.

Limits argues that governments’ real motive for committing to reforms is often not about improving performance, but is actually about ‘signalling’ a willingness to ‘modernize’ (which usually means move power from state to market, deregulation and privatization, increase budget controls and  accountability and reduce debt). It often involves ‘isomorphic mimicry’ – if poor countries mimic the institutions of rich ones, then – voila! – they too will become rich. The trouble is that the current aid system rewards such signalling. When the reform fails, a new government typically introduces a new round of signalling and off we go again.

Uganda is the Daniel Day Lewis of isomorphic mimicry: according to the think tank Global Integrity, it has the best anti-corruption laws in the world, (it scores 99/100), but came 126^th in the 2008 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Oops. More generally ‘developing countries are now more likely than developed countries to boast systems that resemble international best practice.’ So if laws and best practice were decisive, Uganda would rapidly be overtaking Norway.

Such reforms as do take place happen on the fringes of real power ‘in areas that are externally visible and where reform is influenced by concentrated sets of reform champions.’ Eg the ‘ceremonial’ world of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Or perhaps (at the risk of sounding like a bad loser) the MDGs…..

Aid agencies often focus on identifying and supporting a small number of champions, but Limits debunks such ‘decent chap-ism’ as an ‘illusory promise’. He quotes Brecht’s ‘Life of Galileo’: ‘Unhappy is the land that has no heroes….. No. Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.’

If not single heroes, then what kind of leadership is needed for genuine reform? ‘Institutional entrepreneurs’ are essential, but there’s a paradox – those in power benefit from the status quo, so are unlikely to support change. That can change ‘when something creates a bridge between these highly embedded agents with power and low embedded agents with new ideas.’ And they often need convenors and brokers to help them overcome barriers of distrust and status.

But there’s a further group – the ‘distributed agents’ that are required to implement what the entrepreneurs come up with. And for ownership and relevance, they need to be engaged from the outset, not as ‘adopters’.

Otherwise, ‘reforms often progress well when under the control of champions in concentrated agencies directly involved in designing change, but falter when deconcentrated agencies must implement what these agencies design.’

The book examines the broader contexts for institutional reform, pointing out that there are always ‘multiple logics’ that govern how people think and act. Sometimes one logic is dominant, at other times there are strong competing alternative logics. The job of change agents, whether internal or external, is to back the good guys when there is genuine competition, but otherwise incubate alternative logics to challenge a damaging status quo. Either approach needs a deep understanding of what is there, rather than an imported blueprint for best practice.

Matt recognizes that shocks are important drivers of change, but the argument goes into much more interesting terrain than the standard spiel. Shocks disrupt, weakening the dominant logic and testing the viability of alternatives. That creates the conditions for change, but the change process itself needs to be broad and incremental – how do discontinuity and gradualism fit together? I think the idea is that shocks create the conditions for reform, but reform itself can’t be sudden.

But there may be trade-offs, as the appetite for reform may fall away soon after a shock, so the question (which the book doesn’t answer) is what do reformers need to put in place before the window of opportunity closes, to pave the way for that longer, more inclusive process? I’ve got a horrible feeling the rise of Thatcherism may provide the perfect case study here…..

What happens after shocks is a five stage process (this is new to me, from the literature on institutional change):

• Deinstitutionalization: encourage the growing discussion on the problems of the current model
• Preinstitutionalization: groups begin innovating in search of alternative logics, involving ‘distributive agents’ (eg low ranking civil servants) to demonstrate feasibility
• Theorization: proposed new institutions are explained to the broader community, needing a ‘compelling message about change.’
• Diffusion: as more ‘distributive agents’ pick it up, a new consensus emerges
• Reinstitutionalization: legitimacy (hegemony) is achieved. We all go off to the pub.

As to what outsiders can do, again he has some sensible recommendations, while desperately trying to avoid creating a new blueprint of his own:

• Focus on identifying, highlighting and exploring problems, but leave solutions to local players. Accept that this process may take time
• Provide opportunities for local actors to reflect on problems – convening and brokering
• Focus on clearing out the obstacles to new approaches (deinstitutionalization)
• Fund flexible learning-by-doing approaches to finding solutions

Specific suggestions include Cash on Delivery Aid, stringent tests for all ‘manifestations of good, better or best practice’ and creating institutional reform trust funds that can disburse smaller grants fast in response to evolving local processes.

At those happy moments when governments buy in to the need for reform (he cites Rwanda’s decentralization and Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (right) as examples), Andrews proposes ‘purposive muddling’ – slow, experimental and incremental approaches. Outsiders can contribute by exposing decision makers to experiences elsewhere, helping them develop hybrids best-suited to local contexts, and then test them. They can also capture and publicise successes to build momentum and buy-in.

Outsiders should also look beyond champions in positions of authority, and try and cultivate ‘mobilizers’ who connect different constituencies and spread ideas. An interesting survey of those involved in 12 different reform processes showed that leadership was far more dispersed than is customarily assumed – multiple leaders, often non-usual suspects (no-one in Afghanistan cited the president), such as those behind the scenes who brought people together and acted as catalysts.

The survey did identify external agents like aid agencies as important leaders, but only their locally-based staff, who are embedded in national contexts; no-one cares about visitors from HQ. Outsiders are more important at the start of reform processes (their influence tends to diminish after that). Not surprisingly, providing funding is their key role, with the key proviso that the funding is open ended and flexible, not tied to the ‘roll out’ of ‘best practice’. Overall however, outsiders are bit parts in the reform drama.

Discussing all this over dinner, Matt thinks we have arrived at a ‘moment’ – a coming together of dissidents from numerous disciplines to reject the logframe/best practice culture and push for something more rooted in reality. Political science, complexity theorists, aid veterans, Cash on Delivery proponents, the Development Leadership Program, the Africa Power and Politics Programme and many more are all challenging linear/blueprint thinking and proposing new and (hopefully) better alternatives.

In a nice twist, he applies PDIA to the task of persuading the aid agencies to adopt, erm, PDIA. He thinks the level of disruption to the signalling model is high, driven by growing evidence of failure. I’m not so sure. To steal from Robert Chambers ‘whose reality counts?’, for many aid donors right now, reality feels like political and financial siege, and that is fuelling the pursuit of a divisive emphasis on ‘results’. I’m not sure there will be much appetite for a movement, however well grounded in evidence, which says that the way to achieve change is to make it up as we go along (a sceptic’s version of PDIA) rather than to pursue short term, attributable results.

And (and this gets politically tricky for me), both the volume of aid and its management may also be obstacles to realigning it. Matt cites the World Bank’s ‘Learning and Innovation Loans’, which have been largely ignored, mainly because they are too small – an average of $5m, compared to $150m for other investment projects. As long as Bank staff are promoted on the basis of banking-style rules that reward the volume of aid they move, who is going to waste their time on LiLs? Then of course there is the ‘pre-programming’ model epitomised by detailed logframes and other project documents that require a pretence of predictability and linearity – all of it toxic to a PDIA approach. The increasing influence of governance indicators like the

CPIA that themselves enshrine ‘best practice’ at the heart of what we measure closes the conceptual circle and makes it even harder to conceive of new approaches.

As you may have realized from the quotes, the book’s language is pretty dense and technical. That, plus being published as an academic hardback, could easily reduce the book’s audience and impact. Any publishers willing to back a more popular version should beat a path to Matt’s door.

Finally, there is lots of overlap with my own work on power and change – the importance of power analysis/understanding local context, seizing critical junctures, convening and brokering rather than trying to go it alone, evolutionary learning-by-doing rather than single grand plans. Over dinner, we kicked around some exciting plans for working together in future – watch this space.

Matt is launching the book in the UK (London – ODI and CGD – and Manchester) from 20-22 May. Details here.

Are global gender norms shifting? Fascinating new research from World Bank

I’ve been thinking a bit about norms recently – how do the unwritten rules that guide so much of our behaviour and understanding of what is acceptable/right/normal etc evolve over time? Because they undoubtedly do – look at attitudes to slavery, women’s votes, racial equality or more recently child rights.

So in advance of International Women’s Day, I ploughed my way through a really important new World Bank study, On Norms and Agency: Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and Men in 20 Countries. Like the Bank’s path-breaking Voices of the Poor or the more recent Time to Listen, it’s an attempt to take the global temperature on a big topic through a process of rigorous and deep listening involving 4000 women and men around the developing world.

Such studies are lengthy, complex and expensive, but are incredibly revealing and useful, especially as they start to accumulate. We’re trying a mini version with the Life in a time of Food Price Volatility listening project – first year results out soon.

The report is 150 pages and pretty heavy going – subtle, nuanced and complex, and very hard to extract easy headlines. A close reading will yield much more than a skim, but for the time-poor blog reader, here are some of the findings that jumped out at me.

Bending not breaking: norms are evolving, but through guerrilla warfare more than open confrontation: ‘gender norms [are] changing, albeit slowly and incrementally, with new economic opportunity, markets, and urbanization….. Economic roles for women often creep into their domestic role and, in some places, younger men even take on some narrow domestic responsibilities. What is striking is the glacial pace of this change relative to the pace of change in contextual factors. Gender norms are being contested, bent, and relaxed, but not necessarily broken fully and changed. Younger people may delay compliance to a later point in time, but the norms and the expectations around them do not change.’

The impact of urbanization: Across the board, women are making more progress in urban than rural areas. Attitudes to equality are more favourable among both sexes; young women are more able to express dissatisfaction with marriage practices; and when asked for who is climbing the ladder of empowerment (see chart), in a large number of urban areas women are moving up as men fall (largely due to economic pressures). In contrast, this quote from an interviewee in rural South Africa captures the stasis in the countryside: the new gender laws “have changed nothing here. We do not have any job opportunities, our husbands assault us, and most of the time the tribal court favors the man. So really nothing has changed. These laws apply only to urban areas.”

Education is a major driver of shifting norms: Both parents’ and children’s attitudes to education seem to have gone through a major shift. Mothers, but fathers too, want their girls to be educated, and girls are now often keener on getting an education than boys (see chart). The old stereotype of ‘what’s the point of educating girls, they’ll just get married’ seems to be receding fast. Feels like in future many more countries could be following the UK in heading for a male education crisis (low expectations and performance).

Women’s time poverty: hardly a new finding, but striking nonetheless. The very notion of ‘free time’ seems to be confined to men. ‘Unlike men, women use their free or spare time to work; they simply shift activities. Women are the losers in the time distribution game.’

Could male roles be about to shift? Male roles have changed far less than female, but the authors find some grounds for optimism in ‘glimpses of ground-breaking changes in household cooperation, open dialogue, and even power sharing.’ However ‘the task of initiating more open dialogue is placed on men’ and there are hints of desperation in citing Poland and Serbia to make their case. One of the more interesting findings was ‘the polarizing dynamics of economic stress on men’s and women’s agency’: economic crisis drives women into the public arena and relaxes gender norms, Rosie the Riveter style. But men’s identity is so wholly bound up with being the breadwinner, that economic crisis triggers emotional turmoil. The result unfortunately is at least as likely to be destructive (drinking, abandonment, violence) as ‘hey, let me do the cooking for once’. Which reinforces the growing focus within the gender rights movement on the construction of masculinity.

Violence Against Women falling but slowly: (see chart)

What does all this mean for women’s ability to make choices? The report detects ‘a window to aspire’ in which ‘women have gained some autonomy to decide about their education, jobs, marriage (who and when), and reproduction, although they still are permanently challenged not to neglect their domestic duties. Men in the study are showing more willingness to consider sharing power (if not actually share it) and to release some control over household decisions to women. Shared decision-making means men have to bend constraining norms, but it introduces a better decision-making process into their households. And as these men and women change, they transform the traditional playing field in their communities. In the domestic sphere, the women are stealthily altering traditional definitions of duties and responsibilities associated with their expected roles, which may induce change in the norms or make them more flexible.’

Just how deep these changes go is reflected in adults’ sex preferences for children (see chart) – a remarkable degree of equality in whether would-be parents want daughters or sons. That feels hugely significant.

A universal story, with no magic bullets: The report stresses ‘the universality and resilience of the norms that underpin gender roles’ across the 97 research sites. To their credit, the authors acknowledge that they failed to find equally universal solutions and interventions. But education, a focus on domestic violence, moral support for women, and well publicized and enforced legislation are held up as hopeful ways forward.

One nagging doubt – in focussing so much on people’s aspirations are we mistaking dreams for reality? Would we have got many of the same results if we had done this report a generation ago? The authors think not, but I’m not sure how certain they can be. But all in all, a fascinating, and cautiously encouraging survey.

What do 6,000 people on the receiving end of aid think of the system? Important new book

Just finished Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid, by Mary B. Anderson, Dayna Brown and Isabella Jean. It’s published by CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a non-profit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The book reminds me of the World Bank’s great Voices of the Poor study, only this time it’s ‘Voices of the aided’, a distillation of 6000 interviews carried out from 2005-9 with people who have received or been involved in aid – individuals, local NGOs, international NGOs, bilateral aid agencies etc.

And it’s an uncomfortable read: it had me squirming on multiple levels, because of its highly convincing criticisms of the aid business, the crassness of its generalizations, and its tendency to suggest what we already know to be true (and are trying to put into practice), not to mention wondering whether my negative reactions were just defensiveness. But the book’s origins – giving a voice to those on the receiving end of aid – means it is particularly worth reading, and some of it is unexpected and (I think) new.

So what does it say?

First, people are not anti-aid (sorry, aid slammers). ‘Universally, when asked to comment on their assessment of international assistance and its cumulative effects on their societies, people respond with, “International aid is a good thing, and we are grateful for it … but ….”’

But there is always a but, and these are remarkably consistent between countries.

‘The story is often cheerful in the short term, but…. as people analyze the longer term and society-wide effects of international assistance, the negative impacts seem to outweigh the positive ones.’

This focus on the cumulative impact of aid on poor people is really valuable, because it contrasts with most aid evaluations, which focus on individual projects or programmes.

‘When asked to step back from particulars and to comment on how aid efforts add up over time, the judgments change in two important ways. First, assessments go from mixed to primarily negative. Second, they go from specific and tangible to broad and intangible.’

Examples of those ‘intangible’ negatives? People hate the sense of dependence, and feel it can undermine their own sense of agency and potential. Aid workers are always in a hurry, without the time to talk, listen or really understand the local context. There is often confusion and/or resentment that some groups (refugees, ethnic minorities) are targeted over others, building tensions between the aided and the unaided. As one villager in Cambodia told the researchers: ‘“I feel jealous. I don’t know why NGOs help [the refugee village] and not our village. The refugee village has electricity; the road is better there, and here it is muddy. It makes me feel they are better than us.”

Perhaps the most striking (and cheering) finding of the book is that gender-related aid is a massive exception:

‘People illustrate how international assistance can get it “right” by citing examples of processes and programming to improve the status of women. Women—and some men—told of experiences where an international program focusing on women led to economic benefits for both men and women. Some told how changed perceptions of women’s roles and capacities also changed broader attitudes and social interactions. Although some people felt that it is inappropriate for external actors to interfere with local male/female relations, it was interesting how many people described positive benefits from programming aimed at women. One possible interpretation of this appreciation is that in this area, international assistance agencies did recognize and focus on an existing, but internally undervalued, resource (women’s abilities).’

The authors put aid’s failings down to its ‘delivery system theory of change’ (this is where it starts to feel like a bit of a caricature). They argue this focuses on what is missing, not what resources and capacities local communities possess and can build on. That in turn leads to a supply-driven approach that squeezes out the views of the recipients, and a focus on spending – both volume and speed, which undermines aid’s ability to listen, learn and adapt to local contexts. Sound familiar? There are plenty of other old chestnuts – the constant and perplexing kaleidoscope of donor fads; a per diem culture creating ‘professional workshop goers’; the gulf between the rhetoric of partnership and participation and the reality of power imbalances between donor and recipient; the culture clash between discursive, oral traditions and donors’ insistence on endless reports, audits and paper trails.

So what do aid’s recipients want its providers do instead? Their most consistent desire was for aid workers to be ‘present’ in communities. No, not yet more aid missions, but a more permanent rootedness in order to understand local realities. Stop writing project proposals and take the time to listen more (hence the book’s title).

Beyond that, the authors summarize the implications of their study by setting out a comparison between old and new aid systems (see table). In fairness, they acknowledge that much of their proposal is not new, but in their view, such approaches still represent the exception, not the rule.

Final thoughts? The prose is admirably clear and jargon free, but a bit repetitive: a good editor could have cut the book’s 150 pages in half. I would have liked to see a lot more differentiation (in addition to the discussion on gender) – rather than just ‘aid’, did the interviews reveal differences between project aid and direct budget support to governments? Between humanitarian, long term development and advocacy? Between INGOs and official donors?

But perhaps the most disturbing point is that I cannot think of a previous exercise like this – recording the views of aid recipients on this scale. I really hope I’ve missed something (please send links). If you want a challenging, thoughtful, uncomfortable, bottom up (and free to download) critique of aid, ‘Time to Listen’ is the place to start.

Book Review: Knowledge, Policy and Power in International Development: A Practical Guide

This review appears in the Evidence and Policy journal, where it is now available free online (after I protested about the scandalous, rip-off $30 they were charging). Or you can just read it here. Note to self: in future, I will not write anything for journals that are not open access (thanks to Owen Barder for that suggestion).

In recent years, the public and policy debate over climate change, ‘climategate’, and the debacle of the Copenhagen Summit (and seemingly the wider UN negotiations) has brought home the tenuousness of the links between knowledge and public policy-making. ‘Do the research and they will come’ is clearly not a credible doctrine. Knowledge, Policy and Power, written by a group of researchers from the Overseas Development Institute, tackles some important aspects of these links, building on ODI’s strong track record on the interface between research and policy-making.

The book has good instincts – sceptical of all things linear, of researchers claiming to know more than they do, stressing the importance of values, beliefs, assumptions, taboos and other group pressures, hidden power  and in/exclusion in what are often portrayed as neutral processes of research and debate. There is ample discussion of the relative strengths and weakneses of different kinds of knowledge, whether derived from practice, ‘pure’ research or the people themselves.

Knowledge, Policy and Power argues that four key dimensions need attention in understanding how research translates (or doesn’t) into policy:  the political economy of the knowledge-policy interface, the actors who engage at it, the types of knowledge used and the role of knowledge intermediaries. It devotes a chapter to each of these, and concludes by summarizing its ‘core messages’ as:

1. Systematic mapping of the political context is necessary to improve the success of knowledge-policy interactions. Adopting the position that ‘it’s all down to political will’ is not only inaccurate but also counterproductive.
2. Understanding the role and behaviour of actors is not a simple matter of imputing self interest, but of considering the interplay of actor interests, values/beliefs and credibility and the power relations that underpin these.
3. Research needs to be complemented by other forms of knowledge, based on local conditions and practical experience.
4. Anyone working in this field as a ‘knowledge intermediary’ needs to think through a range of possible approaches to ensure their role is effective.

Along the way, it scans a vast literature to cull numerous useful typologies – of states, schools of thought, influencing factors, forms of knowledge etc, which can provide useful tools for those seeking guidance. The chapter on ‘facilitating knowledge interaction’ is the most practical and useful, setting out and discussing a spectrum of roles for ‘knowledge intermediaries’ (which I guess includes people like me), from low level ‘informing’ to ‘engaging’ to ‘building adaptive capacity’. With sensible guidelines on how do decide which approach to use in a given situation, it came closest to fulfilling the ‘how to’ promises of the book.

For the book claims to be a practical guide, which brings me to my first of three main criticisms. It isn’t very practical. The style doesn’t help: Firstly the language is variable, (chapters feel like they have been written by very different authors), but veers overall towards the opaque, with the verbiage of post-modernism (plural contexts mediated by contested discourses etc etc) scattered liberally over the text, seriously blunting its ability to communicate a clear message. Even the (very welcome) case studies seem too abstract! Example: ‘The difference between an informal designation process (Viet Nam) and a dual system where birthright and elected leaders share control (Morocco) is manifest in the degree of regulation and openness.’ Yeah, right.

That may be why, although I had regular glimmers of recognition and the odd wry smile, I had no ‘aha moments’ when reading this book. That is unfortunate– I think revelatory ideas are probably in there somewhere, but are so buried beneath the dense language, that several readings would be required to uncover the gems, and few people will have sufficient time or patience.

My second problem with Knowledge, Policy and Power is the alarming extent to which it blurs (or more accurately, ignores) the boundaries between research and advocacy. The book recommends that researchers consider ‘shaming techniques directed at veto players’ and ‘building wider movements’ as part of their day job.  It contrasts the Brookings Institution (high credibility, but limited advocacy role) with the much more overtly partisan and activist Heritage Foundation, and the authors seem to prefer the Heritage model, but don’t discuss the costs of doing so. The section on credibility is rather weak and ignores the issue of reputational damage.

I work for an organization which specialises in ‘research for advocacy’, but even I was alarmed by this – if research organizations veer too blatantly towards activism or ‘policy-based evidence making’ they risk reputational damage that can be close to permanent. Instead, I would have liked to see much more discussion on the kinds of alliances researchers can make to improve impact, while preserving their reputation, and the challenges they face in forming those alliances (for example NGOs typically work on much shorter timescales than researchers, resulting in much mutual frustration). The book seems to assume that researchers can do it all – they can’t, and nor should they.

My final point is that Knowledge, Policy and Power includes only passing reference to shocks, or ‘critical junctures’ as they are categorised in Why Nations Fail. The discussion portrays a largely steady state world of research, engagement with policy makers, and civilised debate, but in advocacy terms, readiness for such junctures is all. Very often, it is scandal, failure, crisis and disaster that drive change in policy, and that carries important implications for researchers and advocates. The most obvious is that when a shock hits, researchers should be repackaging existing research to show its relevance to the current crisis and making every effort to get it into the hands of policy makers, even if that means temporarily abandoning the cherished five year research programme. A discussion on the use of research before and after elections would have provided another excellent example of influencing in practice.

Overall, I think there is enough in here to warrant close study by researchers seeking to improve the policy impact of their work, but be warned – you will have to work at making this book produce practical guidance.

Why ‘Why Nations Fail’ Fails (mostly): review of Acemoglu and Robinson – 2012’s big development book

Every now and then, a ‘Big Book on Development’ comes along that triggers a storm of arguments in my head (it’s a rather disturbing experience). One such is Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and James Robinson (Harvard). Judging by the proliferation of reviews and debates the book has provoked, my experience is widely shared.

First, what does the book say?

‘The focus of our book is on explaining world inequality’, which is essentially a phenomenon of the last 200 years (certainly at its current extreme levels) – the average income of a conquistador was only about twice that of a citizen of the Inca empire.

Inclusive Institutions rock: ‘Countries like Great Britain and the US became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.’

Politics trumps economics: ‘While economic institutions are critical for determining whether a country is poor or prosperous, it is politics and political institutions that determine what economic institutions a country has.’

Failure is the norm: ‘To understand world inequality we have to understand why some societies are organized in very inefficient and socially undesirable ways. Nations sometimes do manage to adopt efficient institutions and achieve prosperity, but alas, these are the rare cases. Most economists have focused on ‘getting it right’, while what is really needed is an explanation for why poor nations ‘get it wrong.’

One of the core problems of most institutional arrangements is that those in power have ‘a fear of creative destruction’ – that the disruptive effect of innovation and capitalism will undermine their power base. The luddites in the presidential palace or the chamber of commerce do far more damage than the protesters on the streets. They therefore act to stifle it – elites’ interests are opposed to those of the long-term development of their country. An ‘iron law of oligarchy’ means that even when oligarchs are overthrown, the revolutionaries, like the pigs in Animal Farm, often come to resemble them. ‘New leaders overthrowing old ones with promises of radical change bring nothing but more of the same’. Understanding how change doesn’t happen is as important as understanding why it does.

In contrast, when a combination of institutional accident and inspired leadership leads to an elite that is willing to accept creative destruction (as, the authors argue, is historically the case in the US), then a take off can occur.

The style is captivating – dotted with great historical accounts, amusing and telling anecdotes (in the 16^th Century African kingdom of the Kongo ‘taxes were arbitrary: one tax was even collected every time the king’s beret fell off’). Great use of contrasts and ‘natural experiments’ – Mexico v US at the border; Bill Gates v Carlos Slim; North Korea v South. The pace is breakneck, hopping manically between countries and centuries, from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to the disappearance of the Mayas to the rise of Japan, plucking examples to illustrate the thesis.

The strongest part of the book for me was its focus on the dynamics of change. It almost feels like physics – path dependence is key; minor ‘butterfly’s wing’ differences in initial conditions caused by gentle ‘institutional drift’ make a huge difference when a country hits a ‘critical juncture’ (e.g. the French Revolution, or the Black Death in 14^th Century Europe (left), which wiped out a large part of the labour force and so transformed economies), and can set them on diametrically different paths. ‘The richly divergent patterns of economic development around the world hinge on the interplay of critical junctures and institutional drift. Existing political and economic institutions – sometimes shaped by a long process of institutional drift, and sometimes resulting from divergent responses to prior critical junctures, create the anvil upon which future change will be forged.’

The problem is, much of this only really works in hindsight – almost by definition, there are always lots of minor differences floating around, and it’s impossible to tell in advance which are going to provide the butterfly’s wing that determines that (for example) the industrial revolution takes place in Britain and not Spain. This is a book written almost entirely in the rear view mirror.

The trouble with these grand theories is that when they coincide with your own prejudices, they feel like a flawless romp through history. But if you are uncomfortable with the numerous assumptions, explicit and implicit, you get a sense of suspicion and vertigo – it feels like you’re being conned (and the complete absence of footnotes make it harder to check the source of some of the sweeping claims). The reader is being asked to take an awful lot on trust here. And I kept hearing a phrase of Thandika Mkandawire’s  in my head: ‘a theory that explains everything, explains nothing.’

The book’s biggest problem (at least for me) is the authors’ love affair with the American Dream (though not perhaps, American Reality). In their account, successful institutions bear a remarkable resemblance to America’s constitution, separation of powers etc etc. That means that the China question hovers over the book throughout, and their fairly perfunctory attempt to answer it is deeply unconvincing. China is portrayed as on the wrong side of history, pursuing ‘authoritarian growth’, while trying to defy an inexorable push towards matching economic inclusion with the political equivalent.

But can this book really be arguing that China’s economic transformation is substantially more fragile than that of, say, Brazil? Apparently

so. ‘Growth under extractive political institutions, as in China, will not bring sustained growth and is likely to run out of steam’ is a hell of a throwaway line, especially when you don’t say whether that might be in one year or a hundred. Nor do they buy into the optimistic liberal account that holds that China’s growth will create pressure for political reform – A & R think it will hit a growth ceiling before that reform happens, with unforeseeable, but chaotic consequences.

More generally on the role of the state, the book seems to swallow the rather discredited argument of the ‘East Asian Miracle’ school that ‘South Korea is a market economy, built on private property.’ (Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang beg to differ.) The authors systematically downplay the role of industrial policy and a hands-on state in its take-off . ‘[The] process of innovation is made possible by economic institutions that encourage private property, uphold contracts, create a level playing field and encourage and allow the entry of new businesses…. It should therefore be no surprise that it was South Korea, not North Korea, that today produces technologically innovative companies such as Samsung and Hyundai.’. There is no real attempt to explore the concept of ‘developmental states’, a term originally coined to describe Japan’s take-off, but one which is increasingly interesting a range of developing countries as they see the more liberal capitalist economies being rapidly overtaken by ‘state capitalists’ like China and Brazil. But for A & R, the high growth figures of countries like South Korea are always ‘in spite of’ a hands-on state, not ‘because of’.

Which all reminds me of a baffling exchange in 2003 with the FT’s Guy de Jonquieres, as we looked out over the beach at the WTO summit in Cancun (NGO advocacy’s a tough gig sometimes). Me: ‘how can you say state intervention destroys economies, when South Korean industrial policy has been so successful’. Guy: ‘But think how much better South Korea would have done if the state had stayed out of it.’ Err, right.

Overall, the book left me with a sensation of raised expectations, which were then disappointed. That was summed up in the book’s bizarre finale. After a hyperactive romp across the millennia this purported survey of what works fizzles out, pinning its hopes on – wait for it – the media, Facebook and Twitter. Oh dear. All that history ends not with a bang but a tweet.

For more erudite reviews and arguments, with my entirely unscientific assessement of the star rating they give the book (I guess I’d give it three, slightly above the average), take your pick from

Jeff Sachs 1 star, which provoked A&R’s tetchy response,

Edward Laws and Adrian Leftwich 3 stars

Peer Vries 2 stars

Jared Diamond 4 stars

Martin Wolf 3 stars

Michael Heller 2 stars

Francis Fukuyama 2 stars

Feel free to suggest others. All men, I notice – is it book reviewing that’s a male preserve, or pontificating about the broad sweep of history?

Lost in translation: the alienation of the development worker

I’m writing this flying over Afghanistan, on my way back from India (blog flurry to follow). The air is extraordinarily clear, so that even from 30,000 feet, I can make out individual fields, clusters of mud-coloured houses, nestling among the serrated, snow-topped mountains and winding river courses. At the same time, I’m reading ‘Lost in Translation’, by Eva Hoffman, a stupendously thoughtful, observant study of the fragmented, alienated nature of immigrant identity (in her case, of a Polish Jew in Canada).

The combination brings home the deep fragmentation of what Robert Chambers calls  rural development tourism’. Within the space of ten days, I have been a besuited presenter at an OECD forum, a besandaled interviewer in a Delhi slum, and a laughing Sahib visitor delighting in the dances and songs of girls in a village school run by a bearded sage in an Ashram. And now I’m looking down on what may be (for all I know – the aircraft map is rubbish) the battlegrounds of the Afghan war.

The result is a kind of spiritual/emotional vertigo, a high-speed zooming in and out in terms of scale and emotional landscape. Grappling now with the political economy, then with the life struggles of slum women trying to stop their men from drinking, next with the subtleties and hypocrisies of international networking. You try and stay open to them all, antennae at full receive, assimilating where you can, compartmentalizing where

you must. But I do wonder whether overall, it dulls the nerve endings, blunts the edges of the sensibilities, leaving you seeking refuge in the bland abstractions of development-speak.

It resembles Hoffman’s attempt to capture the fragmented consciousness of the immigrant, both in the negatives (the lack of any deep, unconscious sense of belonging) and the positives (the cross-fertilization of different worlds). We may not be immigrants, but we are increasingly all migrants, and there’s some overlap between the two conditions. It makes me wonder if a spell at Walden Pond, amid a single, slowly changing and unpeopled landscape might not be a spiritually healthier alternative. But in this connected age, such a deliberate decision to step outside the information stream feels highly unlikely – have they started marketing ‘only disconnect’ holidays yet, in the world’s remaining ‘no signal’ digital wilderness areas? Tell me when they start.

Can you help promote ‘From Poverty to Power’? This won’t take long…..

OK, out of consideration for your sensitivities, I’m going to try and condense all the humiliating, grovelling self promotional authorial thing into a single post (OK, I’m lying, but the other promo will be less blatant). The second edition of From Poverty to Power is published on the 23^rd October, and as you doubtless know, there is nothing so craven as a writer desperate to promote their book. So let’s get it over with:

Presentations and lectures: Have Powerpoint, will travel. If you’re in the UK, I’m happy to add your organization to the launch roadshow, provided you can guarantee a reasonable turnout. Please contact chingley[at]Oxfam.org.uk to discuss dates etc. If you’re outside the UK, I’m still interested, but it may be more complicated (and expensive) – but please get in touch. The current list of launch events is here.

You can also follow event news on facebook and twitter

Buying it: You can order individual copies, or if you want to get a bunch of them, contact andrea.palmer[at]practicalaction.org.uk to discuss bulk discounts.

Reviewing it: Andrea is also the go-to woman for review copies

Translations: We’re keen to see translations, either of the whole thing, or in an abridged version. The first edition is already in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Korean, so you can cut translation costs in those languages (we can provide track changes versions). Contact rcornford[at]Oxfam.org.uk.

Blogs: I am generally keen to repost stuff as a guest on other blogs. My ideal model is the World Bank’s People, Deliberation, Spaces site, which regularly reposts, and is really easy to work with (no demand to post before/at same time as me etc). Anyone else out there interested? You don’t have to ask permission to repost, but if you let me know, I can alert you when suitable subject matter is on the way.

Free access: If you want a taster of the new edition we’ve opened up the ‘Food and Financial Crises‘ chapter ahead of publication to clelebrate World Food Day and Oxfam’s GROW week – Look inside now

Finally, here’s a promotional video, featuring me reading an autocue for the first time, which induces a strange zombie-like party political broadcast tone. Felt like having a lobotomy.

Phew, glad that’s done.

Tackling the jobs crisis: new thinking from the World Bank and UNESCO

Oxfam’s head of research, Ricardo Fuentes (right) reviews two big reports on jobs from the World Bank and UNESCO

Youth unemployment is making headlines everywhere – and with good reason. One in eight people between 15 and 24 are unemployed and the problem affects rich and poor countries alike. In Spain, almost half of young adults are unemployed; in the Middle East and North Africa is around one in four. The younger generation in many countries feel cheated: the past was truly a better time. Their perception, at least in some places, is that they will struggle to live as well as their parents.

Two recent flagship publications from large international organizations shed light on the problem of youth unemployment and propose solutions to policy makers. The Education for All Global Monitoring Report from UNESCO (full disclosure, I recently joined their Advisory Panel but didn’t participate in the preparation of this year’s EFA-GMR) and the World Development Report 2013 from the World Bank both tackle employment and employability. They are timely both for short term needs – the protracted global economic downturn has hit the young hard – and long term reasons – as UNESCO points out, the demographic pressures are here to stay since “young people are more numerous than ever; and their numbers are increasing rapidly in some parts of the world. In developing countries alone the population aged 15 to 24 reached over 1 billion in 2010.”

The GMR focuses on how to create useful skills for the young. It is a brave and comprehensive effort, especially because the GMR gives particular attention to the skills required by marginalized groups. The problems start with access to training: “All too often, access to skills is unequal, perpetuating and exacerbating the disadvantage that attends being poor, female or a member of a marginalized social group”. To back this argument, UNESCO recently launched a very comprehensive database on inequality on education that shows the extent of the disparities.

So far, so good. The report is thorough and detailed and describes the types of skills young people need (basic skills such as literacy and numeracy; problem solving and communication abilities and technical know-how). The evidence presented is solid. The element missing in the picture is a thorough discussion on “soft skills” that cannot necessarily be learned in the formal system. These include issues around confidence, self-esteem, and aspirations. This is an important omission; evidence suggests that prejudices and social expectations have an important role in educational and cognitive outcomes. One of the most notable examples is the change in problem-solving results of children reminded of their caste in Uttar Pradesh – two otherwise identical exercises showed different outcomes when personal information of the participants (including caste) was announced at the beginning of the test – children from marginalised backgrounds did worse when their situation was made public as part of the experiment. The point is that providing technical skills to marginalized young people may not be enough to break entrenched patterns of external and self-imposed social exclusion.

In addition, economies around the world are struggling to create the jobs required to keep up with population growth and more young people. This is where the WDR 2013 contributes. The Report tackles that issue of job creation. The team working on the WDR went to great lengths to make explicit that the document is about jobs and development, not labour markets. Even more, in their analysis, jobs are an important element for personal achievement and better social interaction, not only as sources of income.

The Report poses some challenges to readers. I got frustrated during my first two readings of the WDR’s Overview. I couldn’t see heads or tails in the construction of the argument. It wasn’t until the third reading that I realized, to my surprise, that the Report is not following a formal economic model. Forget one size fits all recommendations, where typically, labour markets should be made more flexible and wages reflect labour supply and demand. The WDR 2013 instead suggests a taxonomy for policy makers: depending on the structure of the economy, different policies could create jobs that promote development. They even provide examples of countries that, in their view, have succeeded in the challenges.

After I got over my initial frustration, I welcomed this innovation in the WDR. The authors decided to focus on the policy relevance of its recommendations and not on the internal consistency of whatever model. This is where the World Bank can put to use its vast knowledge and create room for policy debate – in suggesting different policies for different settings based on the latest evidence. The Report, however, falls short in failing to clarify what the Bank actually means by ‘development’ – a glaring omission given that they repeat  that jobs are ‘at the center of development’ again and again. Probably I am reading too much in this, but there are paragraphs in the WDR 2013 where the authors move away from the idea that economic growth is the best proxy for development (see, for instance, their box on “Growth Strategies or jobs strategies?”). They should make explicit the alternatives.

Both reports share something that is not quite evident in the first read: with different approaches, they both are concerned about social exclusion and their recommendations aim to change the structures that keep people out of jobs – either because they lack skills or because the economy does not create enough good jobs. The practical angle as well as the myriad of examples that both reports give will make a good initial step for policy makers when solving the youth employment conundrum. Now it’s the policy maker’s turn to do something.

More commentaries on the WDR by Martin Rama and Brendan Martin. Brendan and I both think it’s improved a lot since the first discussions – kudos to the Bank and WDR team on that.

Robert Chambers – why don’t all development organizations do immersions?

Following on my review of Robert Chambers’ new(ish) book, ‘Provocations for Development’, I’m posting a couple of edited-down excerpts that caught my eye. Today, immersions –  written in 2007 and a nice illustration of how Robert combines both the politics and practicalities of aid work.

Immersions can take many forms, but an almost universal feature is staying in a poor community, as a person, living with a host family, helping with tasks and sharing in their life. The overnight stay is vital for relationships, experience, and relaxed conversations after dark and talking into the night. There may be activities like working with and helping the family, listening and dialogue, learning a life history, keeping a reflective diary or trying to explain your work and its relevance, but the essence is to be open much of the time to the unplanned and unexpected, to live and be and relate as a person. The unplanned incident is so often the most striking, moving and significant. Much is experienced and learnt, but what that will be is hard to predict.
 
Agreement seems universal that immersions give insights and experiences that are not otherwise accessible. Those who participate learn in a personal way about people’s lives, livelihoods and cultures and the conditions they experience. The world can be seen the other way round, from the perspective of people living in poverty.
 
Quite often there are stark and startling insights and impacts. Ravi Kanbur had an immersion with SEWA in India as part of the preparation for the World Development Report 2000/2001 for which he was Task Manager. He spent three days in a remote village, Mohadi. Parents were keen for their children to learn to read and write but the schoolmaster only came once a month. But he turned up on the second day when he had heard there were visitors. He launched into a litany of the difficulties of teaching the village children whom he described as ‘junglee’(from the jungle). This “Master of Mohadi” incident, Kanbur wrote, ‘encapsulated for me the gap between macro-level strategies and ground-level realities’.

All this is enough to justify immersions over and over again. If this were all, the case would already be overwhelming. But people repeatedly say they gained much more than just useful insights and knowledge. They stress, and often give more importance to, the experiential learning, the personal and emotional impact. Fred Nunes writes that [former World Bank President] Jim Wolfensohn “wanted managers who had heart as well as intellect”. The aim was to “rekindle the staff’s passion for poverty reduction”. For Taaka Awori:

“All of me was learning, not just my mind, as is usually the case. The immersion allowed me to stop analysing people living in poverty as objects of development, but rather just to be with them and allow the learning to emerge.”

Why did immersions not take off earlier?

If these experiences mean so much, and can make such a difference, why have they not spread more and been more widely adopted? They cost less than going to a workshop. They take little time – usually not more than a week. It is not as though most organisations lack money: training and capacity-building funds for professional development are frequently underspent.

Three clusters of forces stand out.

The first is personal. It is easy to make excuses, especially being too busy with important work. There is time for a workshop, within our comfort zones, but not for an immersion which is outside, unfamiliar, threatening. For myself, I am reluctant to give up what is known, cosy, and controllable for the unknown, perhaps uncomfortable and uncontrollable. I fear behaving badly and making a fool of myself. And here I and others must thank Ravi Kanbur for his “I don’t think I want to go to that temple any more”: he asked twice to visit an inviting-looking temple before realising that his host family were excluded from the temple because they were lower caste. This makes it easier for me to acknowledge my own shameful mistake, so hurtful to our host lady in Gujarat, of going to bed instead of meeting the people who had come across the desert to meet us. And then there are other arguments that can be mustered: ‘I know all about that. I grew up in a village (or slum). I don’t have anything to learn about that’.

The second cluster of forces is institutional. These are so many: values and incentives that reward writing good memoranda and reports and speaking well in meetings with important people; and the low value given to listening to the unimportant poor. There are senior staff who regard immersions as frivolous, useless or voyeurism, and/or feel personally threatened by them. There are normal pressures of work and other perceived priorities. Bureaucratic culture looks inwards and upwards, not downwards and outwards.

A third force is rhetoric about development relations. For staff of lender and donor agencies, there has been the convenient political correctness of government ownership. For international NGOs there has been increasing reliance on the insights of partners who are supposedly close to poverty. To seek direct personal experience through immersions could then be thought of as untrusting and interfering.

These personal, institutional and rhetorical forces combine. Any organisation or individuals who want excuses for not pressing for immersions have no difficulty finding them. It is not difficult, then, to understand why until recently effective demand for immersions has not been strong.

Why now?

The case is stronger now than ever for three reasons.

First, the conditions, awareness, priorities and aspirations of poor people are changing faster than ever before. There is a continuous and intensifying challenge to policy makers and practitioners to keep in touch and up to date.

Second, a new simplistic certainty has been infiltrating development thinking and practice. The downside of the Millennium Development Goals and of the inspiring movement to Make Poverty History, has been the belief that ‘we know what needs to be done’ (especially on the part of non-Africans about Africa) – and that the solution is more money. The issues are not so simple; nor in most cases are the solutions. Immersions provide one means of checking against the complex and diverse realities of poor people.

Third, the grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened – for government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with fewer staff; participation in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty; donors’ budget support, sector-wide programmes, and harmonisation on policy issues, all of this in what Koy Thomson calls our “self-referential universe.” Qazi Azmat Isa speaks for other agencies too when he notes that ‘increasingly World Bank staff are confined to government departments in capital and provincial cities, removed from the reality of poverty and from our ultimate clients – the poor of the country’.

Immersions are means to offset these biases and trends: to keep up to date; to be in touch; to escape the self-referential trap. It is fitting and fortunate that they are rising fast on the agenda. They are now better understood, more talked about and easier to arrange. More organisations – EDP, SEWA, ActionAid International, Praxis, Proshika – are providing them for others. More people and more organisations are setting them up for themselves. The increasing numbers of those who have experienced immersions and the conviction, commitment and authority with which they can speak, encourage others. We appear to be approaching a tipping point of a critical mass of stories, buzz, communications and enthusiasm.

What would those living in poverty want us to do? Would they, as Koy Thomson has asked ‘express their amazement that people who are experts in poverty don’t even bother to spend time with them’. As he observes ‘For a development organisation to see four days simply being with people living in poverty as a luxury is a sign of pathology’. The question is not whether the direct experiential learning of immersions and reality checks can be afforded. It is whether anyone in any organisation committed to the MDGs, social justice and reducing poverty, can justify not affording and making space for them.

Well that was written five years ago, and there doesn’t seem to have been an immersion tipping point since then. Any thoughts or personal/organizational experiences from readers?