Whether you work on complex systems or governance reform or fragile states, the emerging common ground seems to be around what not to do and to a lesser extent, the ‘so whats’. What can outsiders do to contribute to change in complex, unpredictable situations where, whether due to domestic opposition or sheer irrelevance to actual context, imported blueprints and ‘best practice guidelines’ are unlikely to get anywhere?

In his book Matt boils down his considerable experience at the World Bank and Harvard into a proposal for ‘PDIA’ – Problem Driven iterative adaptation, which I described pretty fully in my review. The conversation this week fleshed out that approach and added some interesting new angles.

PDIA needs funding, but not big million dollar cheques that come with all the paraphernalia of targets, milestones, logframes etc that are more likely to kill thought than promote experimentation and learning. Instead, it needs a trust fund approach – lots of small grants that allow incubation of local solutions to a given problem while ‘avoiding a premature results agenda’.

But does that mean that institutional reform should avoid the big aid dollars altogether? Matt thought not – he portrayed PDIA as a new and extended incubation phase, which can then take the homegrown solutions that emerge and move into the more traditional aid world of large scale, large budget programming. So the challenge for aid agencies is how to create, fund and protect a space within their institutions for small budget experimentation and incubation, sitting in parallel with the big stuff.

Timelines emerged as a useful, but undervalued tool. But these are timelines of what has actually happened in the past, not the imaginary future timelines of funding applications. Matt reckons any project seeking funding should start by building a 20 year timeline of what has happened on that issue/in that locality. If done properly, the exercise of reconstructing the timeline using documents and interviews will reveal overlapping interpretations of what actually happened and recover the kinds of knowledge and experiences that all too often go missing in Aid World as staff leave and projects are wound up. We need a decent timeline methodology – Matt uses the work of Peter Hall at Harvard but it also sounds a lot like process tracing, something our MEL team uses.

The issue of narratives is central – it lies at the heart of the response to a reductionist results agenda that privileges pseudo medical trial data over real experience. Claire Melamed likes to say ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’. True, but I think that a well researched anecdote rapidly becomes a ‘narrative’, and the plural of narrative can definitely be evidence, if not data. Matt, ODI and Oxfam are all separately thinking about the need to build a collection of rigorous, nuanced narratives on stories of power and change – we’ll be swapping notes and hopefully coming up with some ideas for working together on this. What would people recommend in terms of references on rigorous narrative methodologies?

There was a good discussion on what constitutes ‘results’. Good PDIA-type work in developing countries requires a rapid feedback loop of results, but of a different kind to those typically demanded by the aid business. Developing country politicians want to know what’s happening with their money, what has been learned, what has worked and what hasn’t, and how the project has responded. They don’t need the (often bogus) certainty and data demanded by aid planners.

I do find this all slightly baffling – politicians intrinsically know how to navigate in complex environments, respond to shocks and opportunities, using trial and error, instinct and rules of thumb. They make decision on partial information and change direction if things don’t work. That’s what politics is about. But then they become aid ministers in donor countries, and suddenly buy into a paraphernalia of logframes and a particular understanding ofresults that in some other part of their brains they must know has huge limitations in the real world. How to get ministers to think more like pols and less like aid bureaucrats?

All fascinating and thanks to Matt for kicking off and CGD Europe for organizing the discussion (am I allowed to say that under Chatham House rules? If not, please ignore). I’m thinking of writing a paper on the ‘so whats’ of complex systems, but will first wade through the draft of Ben Ramalingam’s forthcoming book before deciding whether it’s necessary.

Update: more thoughts from Matt Andrews on his blog

Oxfam’s Humanitarian Policy Adviser (right), introduces ‘No Accident’, Oxfam’s new paper on resilience and inequality

Asking 50 Oxfam staff what they think of resilience will get 50 different responses. These will range all the way from the Sceptics (“just the latest buzzword, keep your head down and it’ll go away”), to the Deniers (“really nothing to do with me”) to the Pioneers (“it’s obvious, we’ve been doing this for years”).  But probably the biggest category would be the Unsure Interested – “well, I suspect it’s pretty important, but I’m really not clear what it means for me.”

Answering that last point is key, and at a recent Oxfam get together, a humanitarian colleague gave a wonderful example.  He spoke about a tropical storm which had devastated a rural area of Honduras; Oxfam humanitarian staff had responded quickly and effectively with water and sanitation, cash-for-work, and essential household items to help people get back on their feet. But when he visited the area, and talked to the community, he found that the problem was less about flooding, and more about agribusiness.

Local communities had been displaced by massive sugar and melon plantations, denuding the land of trees, diverting water sources and thus altering the local hydrology.  The companies had employed cheaper Guatemalan labourers from over the border, so people no longer had either land to farm or paid labour, leaving them without livelihoods and impoverished.

All the tropical storm did was to expose the deepening vulnerability of the community.  So while Oxfam’s humanitarian response helped the community to cope with the flood, it would leave them in no better position for when the next inevitable storm/flood came.

People in a waterside house raised on stilts in a slum in Manila. © Robin Hammond / Panos

A programme with ‘resilience’ as the desired outcome would look at the underlying factors for people’s vulnerability.  Critically, it would look at power dynamics and inequality (the latter extremely high in Honduras: for index geeks, a Gini coefficient of 55).  These are too often left out of the resilience debate, which so far has focused more on technical measures.  Yet Oxfam’s new report, No Accident, shows that countries with higher income inequality have populations which are more vulnerable to climate change, natural hazards and conflict.

The link between inequality and vulnerability is no doubt complex and defies simple correlation or causation.  But using language like ‘risk being dumped on the poor’ opens up a new way of looking at vulnerability.  At the international level it’s easy to see – rich countries reap the economic rewards of pumping carbon into the atmosphere, but poor countries bear the highest burden.  So whilst the impact of climate change by 2100 is estimated to cause GDP losses of 12-23% in poor countries, in the richest countries, the impact will be a range of 0.1% loss to a benefit of 0.9% of GDP.

Biofuel production and excessive speculation on food commodities is another way of exporting risk.  Food price spikes cause misery and hunger for poor people yet agribusiness firm Cargill’s profits surged during the global food crisis of 2007-8 and the US drought of 2012.

And at national level, big business and local elites can manipulate markets and governments to privatise the profits and socialise the risks. Clearly big business is not always bad but it can be.  In Peru, water supplies are dwindling as glaciers melt, but much is siphoned off or contaminated by mining companies, leaving local communities short of clean water.

The current response – at national and international level – is not good enough.  Climate change is picking up speed, food and commodity markets are more volatile than ever, environmental degradation is increasing, and more and more people are exposed to risk – either through population growth or migration. Whilst global poverty is declining, inequality is not.

States have the legal and political responsibility to reduce the risks faced by poor people, and ensure that they are borne more evenly across society.And note that equality is NOT about everyone having the same resources and support.  Disadvantaged people require more services and support simply to give them equal life chances (see pic, right).

Clearly targeted support, plus social protection, health, education – which one might call key building blocks of resilience – cost money.  Brazil is bringing down its (still high) inequality through concerted efforts by the government, including major increases in the minimum wage, and social protection schemes including a universal pension and the Bolsa Familia.  This is possible in part because there’s enough money – the tax-to-GDP ratio is approaching 35% in Brazil, compared to only 9-10% for Bangladesh and Pakistan.  Increasing tax revenues through progressive taxation has a key role to play in redistributing risk.

In terms of the aid sector – at the risk of oversimplifying, humanitarians are good at risk, and development experts are good at power.  But what we need is both.  Development thinking has often been blind to the shocks, changes and uncertainties that poor people face, and naïve in assuming that development takes place in largely stable environments.  Long term programmes need to internalise shocks and hazards (instead of sticking them in the risks/assumptions column of a logframe and then ignoring them) and then scale up and down as appropriate.

The newly fashionable focus on resilience can help communities not only to cope but to thrive despite the shocks and stresses, but only if the current resilience dialogue and practice is broadened out to tackle inequality, redistribute risk and stop risk dumping.

And here’s Debbie doing the increasingly obligatory video exec sum for wasters 3m piece to camera

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).

I got a glimpse of the background on Wednesday at a meeting of the Ethical Trading Initiative, which brings together big brand retailers, including garment companies, trades unions and INGOs like Oxfam to work on wages and conditions in company supply chains. The Accord got some pretty rave reviews – ‘absolutely historic’, said Ben Moxham of the UK Trades Union Congress; comparable to the 1911 Chicago factory fire, according to one of the big clothes retailers at the meeting.

So what does it say? The Accord covers independent safety inspections, publicly reported; mandatory repairs and renovations; a vital role for workers and trade unions, including a commitment to Bangladesh’s Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety (a national initiative). A key, and controversial aspect is that the Accord will include a legally binding arbitration mechanism, which wins a lot of trust from civil society and trade unions, but has spooked a number of companies based in the litigation-tastic USA (not all though –  part of Tommy Hilfiger’s in there, while Abercrombie and Fitch have said it they will join).

30 companies  signed up ahead of Wednesday’s midnight deadline, including Primark, (who were buying clothes from Rana Plaza), Tesco, Sainsburys, M&S, Inditex (eg Zara), NEXT, C&A, Carrefour and PVH (part of Tommy Hilfiger). There are some holdouts – Walmart is insisting on going it alone and doing its own factory inspections, which is disappointing, not least because it is focussing on the short term problem and missing the need for longer-term coordinated political engagement. And of course, nothing legally binding there.

Given my current work focus, I fell to musing on the theory of change that underlay this apparent breakthrough. Obviously, the immediate driver is a particularly grisly ‘shock as opportunity’. But other factors worth noticing include:

1. The ETI’s prior existence of a forum that established a high degree of trust between traditional antagonists (companies, unions and NGOs). This allowed people to get on the phone to each other and get things moving, without  first having to overcome barriers of distrust.
2. Prior work on some kind of accord had been going on since 2011, but had got nowhere due to lack of urgency and trust – the Rana Plaza disaster massively escalated the pressure to act.
3. A nascent national process (the National Action Plan for Fire Safety), that gave outsiders something to support and build on.
4. Energetic leadership from two new international trade unions, IndustriAll and UNI Global Union, helped get the right people in the room.
5. The organizers set a rather arbitrary, but very effective 15 May deadlineto prevent the response getting kicked into the long grass. A number of companies are feeling bruised by the pressure for immediate action, so there will be some fences to mend there once the Accord is up and running.

An interesting underlying challenge, reflecting my ramblings last week on change, complexity and national ownership, is how to combine the catalytic effect of a massive shock, with the need for slow, painstaking construction of new/improved institutions from within Bangladesh – the only way to ensure that whatever emerges is not just another bit of corporate spin. Peter McAllister, ETI’s Executive Director, reckons that the circle can be squared if the shock is primarily used to get all the international actors lined up behind the Accord, but that the implementation process needs to be slower and nationally owned.

Next steps? The Accord lays out a 45 day period to come up with an implementation plan, involving a crucial shift from being internationally to locally driven.

The TUC’s Ben Moxham hopes the accord, and the ensuing government agreement to relax restrictions on trade unions, will help consolidate and strengthen Bangladesh’s chaotic garment workers unions (39 separate unions by his count).

Others at the meeting hope that the Accord could act as a model for both other garment exporters (Bangladesh is world number 2, after China), or for other sectors within Bangladesh – collapsing buildings are not confined to garment factories.

One last thought – in this conversation between companies, unions, NGOs and the ILO, where is the UK Government? So far pretty quiet, but you’d think that coming in behind a business-led response like this with some matching funding would be a pretty attractive ‘announceable’ for a Conservative Party minister, not least because the Accord could head off other short-term, and ultimately damaging exits like Disney, where companies stop buying from Bangladesh to protect their brand, but leave thousands of women without jobs. How about some constructive engagement, DFID?

This guest post comes from Exfam colleague and education activist Swati Narayan

This summer, India missed the historic deadline to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. This landmark law, the fruit of more than a decade of civil society activism, has many path-breaking clauses. For the first time, it bans schoolteachers from offering private tuition on the side – a rampant conflict of interest. It also legally prohibits corporal punishment.

Most powerfully, it insists that every private school must reserve 25 percent of classroom seats for children from poorer or disadvantaged families in the neighbourhood. This quota is by no means a silver bullet. After all, eighty percent of schools in India are government-run and in dire need of teachers, infrastructure and more.

Nevertheless, this masterstroke, which aims to piggyback on the rest of the mushrooming for-profit private schools, single-handedly opens the door for at least 1 million eligible children each year across the country to receive 8 years of free education.

Despite strident opposition from school management and parents’ associations, the Indian Supreme Court last year upheld this visionary clause. Though it may not (yet) be as internationally renowned as the United States’ Brown versus Board of Education ruling, its ripple effect will be no less important in a country as socially stratified as India.

In the last three years, apart from resorting to the courts, private schools have used every trick in the book to deny children their rightful admissions (see video). Despite a ban, some have held separate evening classes to accommodate students from poorer families. Others have sent eligible parents literally in circles over admission paperwork. As a result, last year, Maharashtra state, for example, filled only 32 per cent of reserved seats.

One bone of contention is who will foot the bill? The Act is categorical that the state will reimburse private schools only based on what it spends per pupil in government schools, which is typically much less. For-profit private schools are therefore keen to pass on the burden and increase their already inflated fees for the remainder of the class. Unfortunately, this has pitched wealthy parents against semi-literate ones, further aggravating tensions across the class and caste divides.

On the other hand, many civil society activists are disappointed that the legislation only reserves 25 percent and does not embrace the more inclusive concept of a ‘common schooling system’.

But, even this diluted, watered-down 25 percent reservation clause offers an unprecedented window of opportunity to break the shackles of centuries of social prejudice, which has pigeon-holed and stymied educational, occupational and social opportunities for generations. For the first time, there is a genuine effort to ensure that that children — rich and poor, upper and lower caste — are schooled together at an impressionable age, perhaps laying the basis for India to overcome centuries of divisions.

Even today, children of marginalized castes and tribes are less likely to attend pre-primary and primary school and the quota defines them as primary beneficiaries of the new legislation. The law also supports the entry of children with disabilities. In addition, some states have devised truly progressive rules. Tamilnadu, for instance, has recognized transgender children as eligible. Andhra Pradesh explicitly includes orphans, street and homeless children. Gujarat has clarified that teachers should be professional trained and sensitized for the proper integration of children and warned that schools which discriminate could face closure.

These gems in the rulebook could revolutionize private education in India.

Sister Cyril’s award-winning elite Loreto School in Kolkata, has over the last three decades, already showcased first-hand the transformational potential of integrating street children in mainstream classrooms.

Now, the key to the success of this dream to create inclusive classrooms lies with the burgeoning Indian middle class — to support rather than oppose — this transformative initiative to build the foundation for a more integrated India.

Swati Narayan is a social policy analyst

(SfC) is one of Oxfam America’s flagship programmes, reaching 680,000 members, mostly women, in 13 countries. Here Sophie Romana, Oxfam America’s Deputy Director of Community Finance, reports on some findings from an innovative qualitative and quantitative survey of the groups in Mali, published today (click through to summary or full report)

How do you save money and borrow when you live in rural sub-Saharan Africa?  Millions of women do just that every week, through their Savings Group.  Formed and monitored by teams of field agents from local organizations, 20 to 25 women gather every week at the same time and place to put a few cents in a wooden “savings box”. Once there is enough money in the box – i.e. the saving fund – members who need a small, short-term loan come in front of the self-managed group to explain the purpose of the loan (food purchases, life’s emergencies or working capital for an income generating activity).  The loans are paid back to the group with interest, which provides them with a return.  In a nutshell, savings groups provide basic financial services to poor rural women underserved or ignored by commercial banks and microfinance institutions.

But does belonging to a group actually improve the lives of members, their families, and their villages? To answer this, Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger commissioned Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona to conduct a unique piece of joint research on Saving for Change groups in Mali: a randomized controlled trial (RCT) combined with a qualitative longitudinal study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The RCT included 500 villages: in 210 of them we introduced SFC, the other 290 were “controlled” (intentionally left out of the intervention) to try and measure the difference, hence the impacts. The qualitative survey focused on 19 villages included in the RCT and interviewed members, husbands, women non-members, villagers etc… This mixed-methods approach combines the benefits of ‘quant’ and ‘qual’ to try and get under the skin of the impacts of savings groups.

The findings of the three-year study (see chart) show encouraging results in terms of increased saving (up 31%) and lending (12% more women took a loan from a savings group), increased food security, and an increased investment in livestock (households in SfC villages own on average $120 more in livestock, which buys you four goats, three ewes or one calf).  The findings also demonstrate that savings groups reach the poorest of the poor with 82% of households in study villages living on less than $1.25 a day.

The results from the RCT also show that there was almost no change in income and health and education expenses. We hope that these results will come with longer study, but we are not sure.

Social capital, one of the outcomes most valued by group members, is proving to be a puzzle. The group offers a safe space for women to share family problems and seek advice from each other. Outside the meeting, women have also reported over the years that they tend to greet each other more in the village, and engage with each other more often than before they joined.  But here’s our evidence puzzle: this is what the anthropological findings support, but they were not captured at all by the quantitative-RCT.

Take up rate: how do groups get created in zones where we don’t run the program?

Based on feedback from our partners and staff, Oxfam started to train “volunteer replicators” members who themselves train new groups. They have been responsible for SfC “going viral” In treatment zones the take up rate is 40.5% of women – by comparison in other similar approaches such as microcredit, the take up rate is 15% to 22.5%.

But the replicators have unexpectedly ‘spilled over’ into control villages, far away from a treatment village. This may mess up the control zones by “contaminating” the sample for the RCT, but it’s potentially good news for the women in those villages, and a testament to the attraction of savings schemes like SfC.

Depending on how strict a definition of a Saving for Change group we used (other traditional groups resemble SfC groups), we see a take up rate in control zones varying from 6% to 12% of women.  So how did that happen?  Did a conversation in the market lead to the replicator offering to go and create a new group there?  Did a member get married, move to another village and start a group there? Did a woman decide to help her daughter in another village to set up a group? Traveling to another village to form a group is challenging for many Malian women, yet SfC groups were created with no encouragement or promotion from the project, no visits from paid field agents.

We also found that women who are more socially integrated and already have an income generating activity are more likely to join earlier, but that more marginalized women do indeed join later on. When women want to save money together, they find a way to make it happen.

Are members of SFC more resilient?

Whatever your own personal definition of resilience may be, in the Sahel any sign of resilience is a success. The study took place in the Segou region of Mali, where 40% of the households experienced a ‘shock’ last year (food price increase, drought, or illness) and 40% are food insecure (unable to produce or buy nutritious food). Households in SfC villages experienced an 8% increase in reported food security and were also eating more during the hungry season – spending 39¢ more per adult per week on food during this difficult time of year and eliminating the seasonal dip. In Mali 39¢ buys you a plate of nutritious beans or a few large cassava roots.  We also found that this impact is greatest for one of the most marginalized groups of women, those women married to younger brothers in large households.

From my point of view as a program manager, I see a value in combining an RCT with a qualitative study because I need to know if the program produces the impacts we designed it for and if it does not, what needs to be corrected.  However I do have a lot of questions around the findings, which I regularly debate with my Monitoring, Evaluating and Learning colleagues. That being said, would I run another RCT if a donor asked for (and funded!) one? Why not? Would I look for funding to run another RCT? Not necessarily – there are other less expensive tools to measure program impacts.  But for the time being, I’ll say with the confidence that only statistical evidence can give me: belonging to a savings group does make your life better!

Sophie Romana. with Janina Matuzeski and Clelia Anna Mannino. Today also sees an important Mali donor conference. Oxfam report here.

So where did I end up after my most recent attempt to promote FP2P in the US and Canada? The basic talk is still ‘What’s Hot and What’s Not in Development’ – the title I’ve used in UK, India, South Africa etc. But the content has evolved. In particular, the question of complex systems provoked by far the most discussion.

I started off with the infamous US military mindmap of Afghanistan. Although ridiculed at the time, the map looks like a genuine and nuanced effort to understand the country and is probably fairly typical of the complexity of power and relationships in any given country. The point is that such a system is complex, not complicated. Complicated means if you study it hard, you can predict what happens when you intervene. In contrast a complex system has so many feedback loops and uncertainties that you can never know how it will react to a stimulus (say $100m in aid, or an invasion….).

The crucial point is that most political, social and economic systems look like the map. Yet the aid business insists on pursuing a linear model of change, either explicitly, or implicitly because a ‘good’ funding application has a clear set of activities, outputs, outcomes and a MEL system that can attribute any change to the project’s activities – a highly linear approach. Other organizations – say forest fire managers, or the military, seem more able to cope with complexity, although I found out from a woman in one seminar who had served in Afghanistan that the power map was actually drawn up by a consultant, who was promptly sacked after showing the slide to General Petraeus, so maybe the soldiers aren’t so comfortable with complexity after all.

In denying complexity is obliged either to seek islands of linearity in a complex system (vaccines, bed nets), which may not always be the most useful or effective places to engage, or to lie – writing up project reports to turn the experience of ‘making it up as you go along’ that epitomises working in complex systems into the magical world of linear project implementation, ‘roll out’, ‘best practice’ and all the rest. That not only wastes a lot of staff time and energy, it also reduces the ability to learn about how to work best in complex systems.

So how should the aid system change? Overall, we need to think though ‘How to plan when you don’t know what is going to happen’ (my best effort at explaining complexity without resorting to jargon). Here are my bullet points, and brief explanations:

Fast feedback: if you don’t know what is going to happen, you have to detect changes in real time, but also have the institutions to respond to thatinformation (as was not the case recently in the Sahel).

Focus on problems, not solutions: Drawing on Matt Andrews’ work, the role of outsiders is to identify and amplify problems, but leave the search for solutions to local institutions. (At the World Bank, Shanta Devarajan pointed out the contradiction between this approach and NGOs’ preference for big, simple solutions – end land grabs, no to user fees. Ouch.)

Rules of thumb, not best practice toolkits: I am told that the US marines do not go into combat brandishing Oxfam toolkits and online resources on best practice. They operate on rules of thumb – take the high ground, stay in communications and keep moving. They improvise the rest. Aid workers on the ground operate far more like this than our project reports admit. If we were honest about it, we could have a better discussion on how to improve those rules of thumb.

Some possible approaches that spring to mind (and I would love to hear examples of others)

Work on the ‘enabling environment’ rather than specific projects: things like norms, rights or access to information

Evolutionary/Venture Capitalist approach: run multiple experiments and then zero in on what seems to be working best. Example, the Chukua Hatua project in Tanzania

Convening and Brokering: Get dissimilar local players together to find solutions – the outsiders’ job is to support that search, not do it themselves. Example, the TAJWSS water project in Tajikistan

But any attempt to move in this direction raises some fundamental challenges to the current structures of the aid industry:

Results for grown ups: The current approach to measuring results favours linearity. But rejecting results altogether is the wrong approach – both because even those who recognize the central role of complex systems still want to know if they’re doing any good, and because the results people control the cash. No results, no funding. We need to get much better at ‘counting what counts’, and reclaim the idea of ‘rigour’ for qualitative and other methods better suited to complex systems.

Who to employ? Risk-taking, entrepreneurial, maverick searcher types have a hard time in an aid business dominated by bureaucratic procedures and risk aversion. Moreover, working in complex systems requires deep local knowledge of formal and informal power maps, something expats on a two or three year posting are unlikely to acquire. How do we turn the tables to attract and retain searchers, and value locally embedded knowledge?

Short Term v Long Term: Funding and project cycles are short term, change in complex systems is often long term. How can we bridge the gap, for example by combining good, plausible stories about the short term, with more rigorous impact assessment in the long term (how often do we go back and study the effects of an intervention 10 or 20 years after the funding has ended?)

How to keep/build political support given that working in complex systems means acknowledging a lack of control over what takes place and limits to attribution (no you can’t ‘badge’ the Arab Spring as created by Oxfam, USAID or anyone else, sorry). It also means greater tolerance of failure – a venture capitalist approach means accepting 9 failed start-ups for every 1 big success, but imagine what aid critics would do with a 90% failure rate. And how do we communicate and sell this approach to the public after systematically dumbing down the aid and development story for decades? (From buy a goat and save the world, to a post-goat narrative….)

Ben Ramalingam has been thinking about this for years, and writing about it on his Aid on the Edge of Chaos blog. His book of the same name is due out later this year, so let’s hope it can settle a lot of these issues (and doubtless raise many more).

Overall impressions?  Lots of really smart and committed people caught between what Oxfam America’s Greg Adams calls the ‘high and low politics’ of aid. High politics is about policy – thoughtful discussions of how to make aid better; low politics is fending off the ‘aid doesn’t work/charity begins at home’ counter attack from right wingers and fiscal conservatives.

In Canada, it felt like low politics is in the ascendant – the aid community seems besieged as the government takes the axe to a number of institutions, including ‘merging’ CIDA with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (feels more like an acquisition than a merger).

The US felt more finely balanced – lots of good reform proposals coming from the Administration, and a really interesting discussion with USAID on how to move from funding relationships to partnerships like its triangular relationship with Brazil, where USAID and Brazil jointly support aid programmes in Lusophone Africa. They’re wondering how to expand that approach as more middle income countries set up their own aid agencies.

For all my admiration for their blogging, I found my day or so at the World Bank pretty depressing in terms of politics and policy. The Bank seems stuck in a ‘technology + private sector = solution to everything’ mindset. I’m not against either, but you have to take politics, power, institutions etc at least as seriously.

A Band for the Bank?

I’ve already covered my exchange with Marcelo Giugnale. At my staff talk, Bank uberblogger Shanta Devarajan stated ‘poverty is a series of government failures’ and came out with examples where ‘governments intervene, but make people worse off.’ Unfortunately his conclusion seemed not to be that the Bank should help strengthen states, but that it should bypass governments/find private sector solutions to everything. An approach that is unlikely to reduce inequality and has little historical foundation, I fear.

As for the evidence debate, Shanta reckoned ‘results always have to be relative to a counterfactual – that’s what they’re about’. So how do you assess things with no counterfactual, like the fall of apartheid, or the invasion of Afghanistan? Or the impact of international conventions on the rights of women?

[update: Shanta says I got him all wrong - see his comment below]

Meanwhile a discussion with the team producing the forthcoming World Development Report on Managing Risk suggested that the Bank still cannot get past its traditional technocratic approach of ‘if a state wants to improve, here are some suggestions’. On fragile states, what if a state isn’t interested in solutions? Reply – private sector + foreign investment. Oh dear. No theory of change for how fragile states turn around, finding nuclei of good governance in otherwise fragile states, building coalitions of civil society, faith-based institutions, media, academia, traditional authorities, shifting norms in the next generation. Nope, just a fairly barren state v private sector dichotomy. Still, these were rushed conversations, and I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.

Other impressions? Great intellectual capacity at the UN, frustrated by the lack of clarity and political constraints of the system. A professor who still remembers her first class with Robert Chambers. Robert had pinned up a map of the world, with the North at the bottom. Then he just sat in a corner as his new students filed in and commented that he’d put the map up upside down. You can imagine the rest. Genius.

And a great suggestion from someone (sorry can’t remember who) – a ‘voices of the activists’ study on lightbulb moments: what were the life-changing experiences that set you on your present course – a meeting with an individual? A personal experience of violence or injustice? A seminar (hey, it happens)? Something you read? That is research I would love to read.

Dogs that didn’t bark? Surprisingly little discussion on the rise of China, depressingly little on climate change. Otherwise, my over-riding impression of the trip is the network of smart, committed people who read this blog, comment, think and argue with passion. Thankyou – you have definitely renewed my commitment to keeping this forum going, even though it can be daunting when (as this morning) I wake up jetlagged, with nothing ready to post. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Update: here’s the video of one version (at Oxfam America) of my ‘what’s hot and what’s not: new thinking in development’ presentation.

How, I asked, has the World Bank apparently cracked it, with 300 bloggers on 32 separate blogs?

Jim Rosenberg, head of the team, argued that this all dates back to 2010, and the World Bank’s broader shift to an open access policy – a default position in favour of external publication, which is slowly gaining ground in Oxfam, but seemingly struggling to get much traction in the UN. Jim characterised the basic message as ‘if you’re good enough to talk at a conference, you should be able to write a blog post.’

The team distinguished various kinds of blog – ‘comms blogging’ to broadcast the Bank’s messages; sectoral blogging, targeting particular demographics such as youth, and ‘community of practice’ blogging for peers on themes such as education or governance (where I have a regular slot).

The discussion revealed the ‘blogging culture’ as an emergent phenomenon, unevenly distributed across the Bank. A crucial part in spreading the culture was the success of early adopters such as Shanta Devarajan and Michael Trucano. But there are still ‘dark zones’, often determined by the culture of a particular unit, or the attitude of its boss.

The Bank has tried to put incentives in place, eg including blogging as a performance objective, but it is uphill work. Many academic disciplines still disapprove. Many Bank staff are still risk averse and reluctant to upset people, especially their bosses. As a result, there are few younger bloggers, and the space is dominated by the senior experts (like Shanta). These celebrity bloggers are great advocates for blogging and very hard to rein in, and so created space for bloggers, but their very status is also inadvertently inhibiting new entrants. ‘No-one under 40 blogs at the Bank’, one staffer told me at another meeting – many of them are on short term contracts and don’t want to endanger their chance of a permanent job. Tricky.

Bloggers described a three tier risk management approach, which is very similar to my own:

-          No go areas: so sensitive that blogging on them will just start a debilitating fight. Not worth it.

-          ‘Professional courtesy’: run drafts past issue leads and experts to correct mistakes and avoid fights

-          Let it flow: low risk areas, just go for it.

As to the comparison with the UN, some reckoned  that, while the Bank has a lot of government staff looking over their shoulders, the UN system is even worse and ‘more political’. They also felt that the Bank bloggers are often recognized experts, who are leading figures in global communities of practice, and that status to some extent insulates them from internal pressures.

One of the key differences is that the Bank has worked hard to sort out its comms governance. Who can start an official twitter account? Who can blog? The system needs to have clear, transparent rules to avoid the UNICEF moment of a comms person who thought (wrongly) that the UN banned blogging by staff.

The team clammed up a bit when I raised some comments on the previous post, which argued that the Bank is doing much worse on twitter than it is on blogging. They seem to use twitter in a more top down way, to ‘amplify’ blog content and corporate messages.

What happens when bloggers screw up? The social media team sees part of its remit as rushing to their defence, and have also won some key test case battles (often, they stress, with support of management), heading off attempts to shut down the more edgy bloggers, even when the result is potentially awkward for the Bank.

The culture feels fairly macho – self-confident experts willing to blog, and shrug off any criticisms. So obvious question – how many of the 300 bloggers are women? And (tut tut) they didn’t know – some room for improvement there, I think. Interesting gender stat on twitter – men are twice as likely to tweet; women are three times more likely to take their tweets down.

There has been lots of interest in the UN post, including a nice follow up post from Ian Thorpe of UNDP. Seems like a lot of people are thinking about the challenges of blogging from within institutions.

But what we didn’t get on to, and which I would love to hear from people on, is what comes next. Is there some successor to blogging in the wings? Or will blogging just become a permanent part of the landscape, alongside more traditional channels. If so, I haven’t seen it. Please enlighten me peeps (and tweeps).

The past five years has been a period of extraordinary global turbulence.

The turmoil has struck as three “shocks” — the financial crisis, a breakdown in the world food system, and the Arab Spring — combined with a slow motion train wreck in the form of the seemingly inexorable onset of chaotic climate change. Together, these are having a profound impact on our understanding of how the world works.

Just how much has changed was one of the overriding impressions from updating my book From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, first published in 2008.

The global financial crisis was a watershed event. It triggered historic geopolitical change in the rise of the emerging powers such as China and India. It also drew attention to the risks of an excessively “financialized” global economy; but it failed to lead to a reining in of the excessive size and volatility of “hot money,” condemning us to future financial crises, possibly starting with Europe in the coming months.

Simultaneous with the financial crisis, the world witnessed a food price spike. In many countries this traumatized the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the shenanigans on Wall Street, and reversed decades of low and falling prices, threatening long-term progress on hunger and nutrition. That has led to renewed attention to the basic issues of food and hunger, and some unfortunate side effects such as “land grabs” across the developing world by investors from rich countries.

The Arab Spring confirmed the importance of active citizens in driving social and political change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in majority-Muslim societies.

Taken together, these events have made us much more aware of the impact of volatility, risk and vulnerability on the lives of poor people. That leads both to a focus on trying to prevent shocks from occurring in the first place and to dampen their impacts when they occur. “Shock absorbers,” from social protection to food reserves, to help for poor farmers to adapt to climate change, have become a much more central part of development thinking.

Inequality and redistribution have become mainstream debates, with even the International Monetary Fund weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. And the levels are breathtaking. I recently calculated that the amount the world’s richest 100 people added to their wealth in 2012 ($240 billion) would be enough to end extreme poverty for the 1.4 billion people living below the international $1.25 a day poverty line ($66 billion according to the Brookings Institution), four times over! With that focus has come renewed interest in how tax systems and reforms can reduce or exacerbate inequality, both at the national level, and through the international system of tax havens.

Finally, these changes are feeding into a deeper questioning of the nature of poverty itself. As the World Bank’s path-breaking and unsurpassed “Voices of the Poor” study in the 1990s showed, to be poor is as much about anxiety, vulnerability and shame as about income levels. And that anxiety has only been heightened by the turmoil of recent years.

In response, governments around the world increasingly acknowledge the limitations of income or GDP per capita as a measure of well-being, and are developing much more sophisticated metrics — aid agencies are rather lagging behind national governments in this regard.

This more subjective, people-based understanding of well and ill-being may be one explanation for a greatly increased focus on issues of power and agency in development, often linked to issues of the basic rights that are (or are not) enjoyed by poor people. The spread of “rights thinking” on areas such as gender, disability, ethnicity and sexuality appears to be a global phenomenon, bringing significant changes in national legislation and practice in many countries. The challenge for aid agencies is to ensure that their plans and methods, including the pressure to demonstrate “results” and “value for money” reflect this more human understanding of the nature of poverty and power. As the title of my book makes clear, we need to move “from poverty to power” in both our thinking and our practice.

Are we successfully completing an “age of development” or seeing the prize slip from humanity’s hands in an economic and climatic meltdown? It is hard to recall a period when developmental optimism and pessimism co-existed to such a high degree.

The stakes could not be higher. The coming decades will show whether poverty enters the history books, joining slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage, or whether an age of chaos and scarcity starts to reverse the wonderful progress of the last 70 years.

Duncan Green is the author of the book From Poverty to Power and Oxfam GB’s senior strategic adviser. He is launching his book and giving a public lecture at the University of Ottawa on Friday May 10. The event is sold-out, but a recording of the event will be made available soon on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/CCICable.