So where have we got to on Value for Money, Results etc?

Great posts, great comments. My head is now spinning as I try and disentangle some of the different threads that have emerged over the last two days.

First: horses for courses. Some aid work is akin to Ros’ bathroom problem – linear, measurable, and suitable for a logframe + results approach. Other areas are emergent and unpredictable and a results approach would struggle. Say you had a programme in Egypt right now, and were wondering what to spend your money on. You could reassure your donors and supporters by opting for a measurable bathroom problem, say building schools, but that would be to ignore the historic opportunities for change presented by the social and political upheaval in that country. But how could you support that with any likelihood of proving impact or attribution? Tricky, but a clear risk that the results agenda will drive you in the wrong direction. Could senior management, as Jonathan suggests, create a situation where some programmes are assessed on results and others on relationships? In the current climate, it’s easy to imagine that the latter category would end up being starved of funds.

Second: upwards v downwards accountability. Can a results agenda strengthen both -  can countability improve accountability? (thanks for the soundbite, Sceptical Secondo). Claire, supported by Penny Lawrence and Alex Jacobs (with an excellent link to some practical examples) thinks it can.

Third: theory v practice. Claire’s right, I think, that in theory, a results agenda can be built on the perceptions of beneficiaries, improving quality and accountability. But Ros has spent a lot of time looking at what happens once all these ideas are implemented on the ground, and what looks good in the thinktank (and apparently in the NHS) may not survive the collision with reality, where staff are overstretched, working to tight deadlines and have little time for innovation or risk-taking. When I talked to Oxfam’s number crunchers about this exchange, they said they would love to take part, but were simply too busy generating the numbers needed to satisfy our donors!

Fourth: Trust. Ros rightly raises this, but trust between whom? The results agenda aims to build trust between northern publics and aid agencies, which is of course vital if aid spending is to continue to rise. And given that NGOs endlessly tell corporates and governments that we have moved from a ‘trust me to a show me agenda’, it would be pretty hypocritical to say the same shouldn’t apply to us. But what about the trust between aid workers on the ground and the partners they work with? Ros worries that that trust will be eroded by a crude results focus (and Alice Evans’ example from Zambia suggests she’s right), whereas Claire seems more concerned about using measurement to tap directly into the lived experience of poor people (hard, if that group is not as easily identifiable as NHS patients – back to my Egypt example).

Fifth: It all comes back to people, in particular the skills and motivations of the people who work for bilaterals, NGOs and all the other bits of the aid industry. If you have brilliant, motivated staff dripping with a sense of vocation, then they can probably make either a results agenda or a relationship-based approach work just fine. If you have demotivated nine-to-fivers who see this as just another job, then they will find a way to tick boxes and achieve little, whatever approach is adopted. I guess the interesting question is about those in the middle – what works best with normal staff doing the best they can, while coping with all the other pressures in their lives?

Which brings me to my final conclusion. I assume that the value for money people would never dream of asking us to take their ideas on trust. What are the results of the results-based agenda, compared to other approaches? What would be the best way to evaluate the evaluators? Is the balance of evidence different for say, work on women’s empowerment, governance, livelihoods or health and education? Lots of work for researchers over the next few years. [update: Ben Ramalingam came to much the same conclusion a few months ago on the Aid on the Edge of Chaos blog]

So thanks everyone, I’m now better informed, but still on the fence. As are the rest of you, judging by the pretty even split on the poll. It stays up til Monday, so not too late to vote…..

Update: in a similar vein, someone just put this up on twitter [h/t Henry Northover and Ian Thorpe]:

“Can I pay for Nancy Birdsall’s new book on Cash on Delivery aid after I’ve tried it out to see if it really works?”

If not results, then what? The risks of not having a results agenda

The ODI’s Claire Melamed replies to yesterday’s guest post from Ros Eyben:

“Ros Eyben suggests that instead of a results agenda, we should rely on good relationships to deliver good aid.  And indeed, if all relationships were good, and all the people involved in making decisions about aid were thoroughly well-informed, open to new ideas, flexible in their approach, lacking in ego, adept at dealing with cultural and religious differences and aligned with the needs and priorities of poor people, that might just work. 

But just supposing, for a moment, that aid bureaucracies aren’t all like that, let’s think about the risks of not having a results agenda.

If you don’t define in advance what the objectives of an aid programme are, you leave it up to the managers who make the decisions and the politicians who guide them to impose their own values and prejudices onto the aid programme.  Of course if they could all be trusted to make the right decision, there’s no problem.  But evidence suggests that might be over-optimistic.  Exhibit A: attempts to fund the building of a dam in Pergau that had nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with arms sales.  Exhibit B: the ideological pursuit of structural adjustment programmes in the face of substantial evidence of the harm they were causing.

A focus on results can help to rebalance inequalities of power. When the Labour Government created the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK in 1999, to ensure that evidence about value for money and effectiveness was used in deciding what drugs to prescribe in the National Health Service, pharmaceutical companies were among the most hostile to the idea. Naturally, from their point of view, they preferred their own marketing ‘evidence’ to help doctors make prescribing decisions. 

Actually, of course, leaving all decisions about prescribing up to doctors – informed by partial evidence – led to inequalities (the dreaded ‘postcode lottery’), and to millions of pounds wasted on ineffective treatments. NICE’s role in bringing together evidence from clinical trials (which included patients’ own assessments and valuations of changes in their health) with the costs of treatment, has started to improve value for money in the NHS and also to take more account of health benefits (or lack of them) from patients’ own point of view. 

A results agenda, as long as the right results are being pursued, can help to rebalance inequalities of power and make the actions and decisions of the powerful more transparent. It helps people to know what the objectives of decision makers are – and so to argue that they should be different, if that’s the case; and also to hold people to account for their success or failure to meet those objectives. Without measurement, there can be no accountability. 

The real question is what results we are looking for, and how to measure them. Of course if donors want to do the wrong things, and measure the wrong things, they won’t get good results. But pointing to examples of the wrong way of using results and saying, ‘so let’s not measure results’, seems to me as big a folly as the, sadly all too popular, pastime of pointing to the latest example of unsuccessful aid and saying ‘so let’s give up on aid altogether’. 

So if the numbers of polio vaccines isn’t the right result to ask for, then let’s look for something that is a better measure of the strength of health systems. And instead of counting the length of roads, let’s measure the strength of solidarity in communities – that’s doable. 

The results agenda is actually a huge opportunity for people who care about relationships, trust, empowerment, rights and complexity to find ways of getting these things firmly integrated into how we measure development.  Then they’d be part of the mainstream.

These things can be counted. There are approaches developed in the UK’s National Health Service, for example, which allow patients to say how much they value different health outcomes, like the absence of pain or the ability to move about normally. Research shows that the values that ordinary people attach to different outcomes are different to those of even the most well-meaning professionals – which should be a warning to us all not to make assumptions about what people want. This information is turned into numbers and used to allocate funding and to measure results.  Imagine if we actually knew what poor people wanted and if they were getting it?  Everyone who works in development should surely admit that we don’t know as much as we should about if we are actually delivering ‘value’ as the recipients of our efforts would define it. 

We should be welcoming the focus on the results, because a world where we don’t know the results of our actions is not one that any of us would want to live in. This agenda should be used too, to  encourage a focus on what results poor people themselves (or, more likely, poor women, poor men, poor people in cities, in rural areas and so on, who would all have different priorities) most want to see, and how they’d define ‘value’ or ‘effectiveness’. 

Information is power. I say, don’t fear it. Use it. ”

Claire Melamed is the Head of the Growth and Equity Programme at the Overseas Development Institute

Update from Duncan: In a desperate attempt to stem the tide of consensus and mutual respect sweeping over the comments, I’ve put up a poll to the right of this post that allows only a yes/no answer to the question of whether the current focus on Value for Money is a Good Thing. ‘Sometimes’ ‘Maybe’ ‘It depends’ type answers all forbidden!

‘Stuff happens’: the risks of a results agenda. Guest post from Rosalind Eyben

A few months ago, I blogged about the risks associated with the aid industry’s current overriding obsession with audit/value for money/results (pick your term). Since then, that debate has been swirling around both on this blog and (more importantly), in aid and development circles in many countries. So to help it along a bit I’ve asked two people who think about this a lot more than I do to set out some competing arguments. First up is Ros Eyben, who got a big and largely positive response to her recent challenge to the dumber/more extreme varieties of value-for-moneyism. Tomorrow the ODI’s Claire Melamed responds. Please join in the debate.

“The UK’s development ministry (DFID) has just completed a review of its bilateral aid programme. The Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell has ‘set out the results that UK aid will deliver for the world’s poorest people over the next four years’. DFID will be more ‘hard-headed about making every penny count’. Its press release highlights results such as 11 million more children at school and 50,000 fewer women not dying from having babies. Digging into the review’s report, you will find numbers relating to DFID’s other aims, including wealth creation and tackling the root causes of conflict. Here, DFID is more modest: 50 million people with the means to help work their way out of poverty, rather than creating millions more jobs as some enthusiastic DFID country offices apparently offered to achieve. How can a government (let alone a foreign aid agency) deliver jobs? Likewise, DFID is not going to reduce the number of conflicts in the world but instead help citizens hold their governments more accountable.

When we look at the details, DFID’s plans seem pretty sensible. But the press release worries me. Explaining to the British public how UK aid delivers value for money – promising to educate more children than those we educate in the UK, but at 2.5% of the cost – must surely influence how DFID thinks and works. I am in charge of redecorating our bathroom while my partner is away. The paint is peeling and there is mildew on the ceiling above the shower. To demonstrate I got value for our money I will get two quotations for the redecoration. Many donor governments are treating the complex problems of poverty like my bathroom. They contract a Third Party Operator to deliver a result pre-determined by DFID. At the end of three or four years, there is an evaluation to check on results before paying the contractor.

Sometimes DFID’s bounded problem-approach to change (as typified by the logical framework) is going to work. But there are major concerns about the institutional and financial sustainability once the intervention ends, if these have not been addressed as an integral part of the design. By 2006 the global polio vaccination campaign had successfully eradicated polio from all but four countries, yet by 2008 it had reappeared in nineteen additional countries. In the drive for results, insufficient attention had been paid to the national health systems needed to keep polio at bay.

To be able to count exactly how each penny or Euro of aid money gets spent, donor governments are risking not making any difference at all. They can show how many kilometres of roads they have built or numbers of babies vaccinated as compared with before they started the projects. But such facts reveal little about how the change was achieved and what can be learnt for future policy and practice. End-of-project evaluations are no substitute for continuous learning and adaptation of approach. Donors are ignoring lessons long since learnt: without local people empowering themselves to change those less tangible factors that cannot be counted, once donor money stops the roads will crumble away and the next generation of babies will not be vaccinated. These inadequate measures of assessment – and the effect of such measures on the design of aid – risks donor governments wasting, instead of securing ‘value for money’.

Eventual outcomes are often very different from what the logical framework required. Stuff happens. Power, history and culture shape the multiplicity of relationships and actors influencing any aid intervention. It makes more sense to design aid to recognize this. Experienced staff and consultants know it. But they are being forced to misrepresent reality in order to keep things simple for the taxpayer. They have to work with complex problems – such as why maternal mortality rates refuse to go down – as if they were bounded problems like my mildewed bathroom. In a largely unpredictable and dynamic environment, rather than choosing a single ‘best option’, a more value-for-money might be achieved by financing two or more different approaches to solving a complex problem, facilitating variously-positioned actors to implement an intervention according to their different theories of change and diagnoses and consequent purposes.

Aid bureaucracies have never recognised that effective aid depends on people and the quality of their relationships with each other. Sheela Patel of SPARC, an Indian NGO that supports slum dwellers federations has written that when SPARC was founded in 1984

‘ Donors gave money to us because there was a sense of trust. These funders did not set our priorities; communities of poor people did….. we were given all the space we needed. Consequently, SPARC and its partners now operate in nine states of India and help some 750,000 households….. I cannot imagine donors in today’s world granting an organization like SPARC the kind of latitude it required in its early years. Instead,[they] have become more focused on developing portfolios of projects, managing risks, and producing outcomes rather than on listening to communities, healing deep inequities, and supporting innovation’.

The origins of the results agenda lies in a mistrust that eats like a cancer into aid agencies’ capacity to make a difference. I am not convinced the emphasis on results will solve the problem of trust. On the contrary, it risks making things worse. The results rhetoric gets exaggerated by bureaucratic systems and by those middle level managers with little country level experience who are forcing grantees and development partners into straitjackets that constrain them from helping transform the lives of people in poverty.

We aid practitioners must start building trust. Steps in the right direction include paying attention to the inequitable power relations, including our own behaviour, which keep people in poverty; being modest about what any purposeful intervention can achieve; and communicating simply with taxpayers about complex realities.

Rosalind Eyben is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and former Chief Social Development Adviser at DFID.

7 steps from autocracy to democracy

From a recent speech by International Crisis Group’s deputy president Nick Grono, Alex Evans has distilled 7 very plausible lessons on how to ensure a successful transition from autocracy to democracy.

1) Reform has to happen quickly before impetus runs out – which it will, quickly. “If reforms don’t happen almost immediately, the opportunity is soon lost. Not full democratic transition of course, but enough to establish momentum for continued transformation.”

2) Democratisation after protests can happen faster and more easily in places that don’t have entrenched traditional elites. “…frequently popular uprisings are co-opted or taken over by the members of the existing elite. Sometimes this is defensive, to ensure the elites’ survival, after the sacrifice of a few leaders … other times, as recently in Kyrgyzstan, the revolt was simply an extra-constitutional, intra-elite, reshuffle.”

3) Try to get the military out of politics as soon as possible. “All too frequently Western nations seem comfortable with this, as the militaries are known entities, create a semblance of order and normality, and their commanders have often been trained at Leavenworth or Sandhurst. But more often than not, the military just ends up undermining democratic development, as in Pakistan.”

4) Get elections right. Not too early, not too late, and understanding that “they’re not an endgame”. “Often it will be better to build elections from the ground up – starting with local elections before moving to parliamentary or presidential polls, as local democracy helps build capacity.”

5) Understand that outsiders are largely bystanders during the transition, at least in the early chaotic stages. “The US did not persuade Mubarak to leave, nor could the Saudis convince him to stay – the Egyptian army decided.”

6) Don’t try to pick winners. Often irresistible to international actors, but rarely successful (Grono cites Karzai, Kagame, Meles, Museveni); external actors should focus on institutions rather than on individuals.

7) Conflict prevention matters. “The long term, painstaking work of investing in institutions, building the rule of law and developing civil society may be the most effective way for outsider actors to influence these transitions, in the years before they occur. Those countries with more developed institutions and more entrenched rule of law will likely stand a better chance of a stable transition than those without – think Jordan, or even Egypt, as compared to Libya.”

Any additions?

Food and the G20; tackling soot; Mauritius’ miracle; GM bananas; healthcare in Ghana; women’s voices; Fate of the World as a computer game: links I liked

Olivier de Schutter, the UN’s hyperactive (how often do you see those words in the same sentence?) Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, sets out his set of policy asks on food and the G20

The Economist reckons other ways of attacking climate change, by tackling soot or non-CO2 greenhouse gasses, may be easier (though not an alternative) to the stalled Kyoto talks

What could America and Europe learn from the Mauritius Miracle? asks Joe Stiglitz

Time to light the blue touch paper and retire – does Uganda need GM bananas?: ‘In recent years a devastating bacterial disease has swept across Uganda, wiping out the crucial banana crop (Ugandans eat a lot of them). For smaller farmers the damage has been so severe many have given up on the fruit. But local scientists have not. On a sprawling campus outside Kampala, Wilberforce Tushemereirwe and his colleagues at the National Banana Research Programme have been on a quest to defeat the disease by building a better banana. This has involved adding to the fruit a sweet pepper gene that has already improved disease resistance in several vegetables. Laboratory tests on the genetically modified bananas have been highly promising, with six out of eight strains proving 100% resistant.’ 

The World Bank is pushing Ghana as a health insurance success story, arguing that even in low income countries, governments can avoid the cost of providing free health care by introducing insurance instead. Ain’t so, according to a new report by a coalition of local NGOs, supported by Oxfam. The Bank and other boosters say the scheme covers 67% of Ghanaians. The report looks at the figures and estimates that coverage could in fact be as low as 18%. And the better off are disproportionately benefiting from the schem even though it is 70% funded by VAT -  not a progressive tax.

I’m at a loss to know what to link to from the avalanche of gender-related content around International Women’s Day. The Guardian had some great ‘women’s voices’, and I also liked this BBC piece on Lesotho, ranked eighth in the world when it comes to bridging the gap between the sexes. [h/t Caroline Sweetman]

In 2011 Oxfam will launch a new section of its website with a remit to share Oxfam’s policy, practice and research with development practitioners, researchers, and policy formers worldwide. That’s you, that is, so any chance you could complete a short survey to help us get it right? 10 minutes, tops. If possible please share this survey with your wider colleagues and networks. The closing date is 25th March. The survey is here

So say all our campaigns, advocacy, research etc get nowhere and the world drifts towards irreversible climate change. What to do? Well, at least future world leaders have a computer game they can practice on. Check out Fate of the World [h/t Gonzalo Fanjul]

How not to run an aid programme: Afghanistan

‘The American marine captain [Patrick Lavoie – see pic] only has to step out of his base to be overwhelmed by turbaned men anxious to be his best friend. All along the main road they try to catch his eye and beg him for money to spruce up their shops. As part of his campaign to smarten up the market, which is not especially shabby, Mr Lavoie is happy to oblige. But they must follow his rules, including putting up signs above their shop. Many are in dodgy English, in a town where few can even read Pushtu. One ten-minute conversation with some vegetable-sellers ends with Mr Lavoie agreeing to give them over $8,000 to fix up their stalls. “I’m like Santa Claus!” he says.

With their programme of small grants, goodies such as a surfaced road and street lighting, and a policy of putting many of the district’s “fighting-age” males on the payroll of a rash of new defence militias, the marines are spending $500,000 every ten days in a poor rural community of 250,000. The people have known only predatory government or Taliban rule. It is the sort of splurge that horrifies development experts.’

Yep, I’d say that this recent Economist account is pretty horrifying, wouldn’t you? Just how does this have anything to do with long term development, rather than just buying some short-term acceptance of the US military (a clue: it doesn’t)? For good measure, the article quotes an ‘old saw that you can rent an Afghan, but you can’t buy him.’

For more on the dangers of this kind of nonsense, check out Whose Aid is it Anyway? Politicizing aid in conflicts and crises, a recent Oxfam paper. Wonder if Captain Lavoie has a copy. My favourite stat from that report: ‘the Spanish army’s high-profile vaccination programme and water distribution following the Haiti earthquake cost over 18 times that of comparable civilian efforts, which the Spanish military partly duplicated.’

What’s China doing in Africa (including Libya) and to the climate?

Time for some random links on China: 

China may now be the world’s second-biggest economy, but some of its provinces by themselves would rank fairly high in the global league. This map from a recent Economist shows the nearest equivalent country. For example, Guangdong’s GDP (at market exchange rates) is almost as big as Indonesia’s; the output of both Jiangsu and Shandong exceeds Switzerland’s.

Elsewhere, China in Africa author Deborah Brautigam examines recent Chinese efforts to construct a series of official economic cooperation zones in Africa. These zones are a central platform in China’s announced strategy of engagement in Africa as ‘mutual benefit’.

She discusses China and Libya. What does China want and how is it reacting to the crisis? Answer – not always as the stereotypes would suggest. She also links to a piece by Xan Rice at the Guardian with some nice interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, whose voice is seldom heard.

Meanwhile, the news in Africa may be encouraging, but China’s record on carbon emissions is a lot worse than all the ‘green growth’ coverage suggests, according to the Climate Progress blog. Carbon emissions from energy production have accelerated in previous years (see bar chart), because China’s overall carbon intensity (how much CO2 is emitted per unit of GDP) has got stuck and is still where it was in the late 1990s (see line graph). Reliance on CO2-spewing coal power stations underpins both trends.

The World Bank gender team responds; lessons from successful women’s rights coalitions; male attitudes to violence against women: some reading for International Women’s Day

Some International Women’s Day reading at the wonky end of the spectrum.

Firstly, an excellent response from its co-directors (Ana Ravenga and Sudhir Shetty) to my earlier post on this year’s World Development Report on Gender Equality, whose website goes live today. Secondly check out a couple of papers on the Developmental Leadership Program website. The DLP describes itself as providing ‘thinking and policy about the critical role played by leaders, elites and coalitions in the politics of development’. All of the papers follow a similar format, identifying ‘critical overarching themes’, factors that facilitate the formation of successful coalitions, the strategies the coalitions used for greater influence and some do’s and don’t’s for donors. Nice.

Structure and Agency in the Politics of a Women’s Rights Coalition in South Africa: The Making of the South African Sexual Offences Act, 2007 studies the National Working Group on Sexual Offences (NWGSO), established to influence the progressive reform of national rape laws. The NWGSO became the largest civil society coalition to have collaborated on law reform in South Africa and won substantial improvements in rape laws and attendant policies. The study identifies 11 overarching themes:

• ‘Critical junctures’ such as national political change may provide opportunities for civil society to redefine its rules of engagement with the state. Knowing when and how to seize such opportunities is crucial.
• Many factors account for the emergence of coalitions, including: new opportunities for political engagement during political transition; how local actors form collective initiatives and their motivation to initiate meaningful social change; the existence of prior networks and experience; the ability to mobilise popular civil society support; donor support.
• New spaces for policy influence may be opened through engaging in law reform. This study shows how the coalition’s extensive experience in women’s advocacy and in-depth understanding of the law contributed to their success.
• Strategies of ‘judicial/legislative advocacy’ can assist the process of legal reform, but success depends on the existence of a relatively free judiciary.
• Women’s coalitions may draw on and expand their elite networks and exploit political and institutional arrangements to build developmental partnerships.
• Co-operative networks between elite actors that span both civil society and government may initiate new processes of legal reform.
• The building of elite networks between national and international advocates at high-ranking meetings (such as UN Conferences) may have positive developmental outcomes – if the right people are involved.
• ‘Soft advocacy’ or ‘backstage politics’ may be more effective strategies where co-operative relationships exist between high-ranking state actors and civil society leaders.
• In dominant one-party states such as South Africa, ‘adversarial advocacy’ such as monitoring government’s fulfilment of laws and policies or criticising political elites in the media may antagonise the party and reduce engagement.
• A coalition’s leadership structures and functioning must be determined through consensual processes and not automatically assumed or enacted by its key figures.
• Competition over funding may lead to disruptive tensions and there are strong grounds for ensuring transparency about a coalition’s funding.

Working Politically Behind Red Lines: Structure and agency in a comparative study of women’s coalitions in Egypt and Jordan analyses six cases of collective initiatives to advance women’s rights in Egypt and Jordan between 2000 and 2010. It finds a mere 6 overarching themes:

• Coalitions to advance women’s equality are rare in the Middle East, challenged by a restrictive and professionalized political culture that discourages collective forms of agency.
• A constellation of factors, rather than a single factor, accounts for the emergence of coalitions. This constellation includes (but is not restricted to): a cause that touches on people’s lives, a politically opportune moment, and local actors that respond by mobilizing to form a collective initiative.
• Given that the space for influencing policy is restricted to a closed circle of elites, it is not the agency of the coalition alone that leads to policy influence. The key finding is that engaging in informal ‘backstage’ politics is equally, if not more, important than formal channels of engagement in these ‘closed’ political spaces. Policy influence heavily relies on informal relationships rather than strictly formal citizen-state engagements. The “formal” faces of advocacy [such as through petitions, conferences and media advocacy] play a secondary role to informal processes in eliciting change, which is often facilitated by informal, backdoor processes of negotiation and mediation between coalition leaders and key players.
• Moreover, informal networks and, often, prior relationships, are crucial for building the internal cohesion of a coalition; and they also help to reduce their vulnerability to external political threat.
• Influential coalitions are those that are able to build formal as well as informal links with the appropriate actors, establish the right kind of image locally and secure the right kind of support from international official and civil society actors.
• In all of the six case studies studied, strong linkages existed between international and national actors, hence highlighting the importance of understanding how international actors can play an enabling role to support coalitions. In five out of six coalitions studied, donors played a critical role at some point in the life of the coalition, in both positive and detrimental ways.

Finally (just to be contrarian), what about men? Oxfam publishes an interesting research report on ‘The Effects of Socialization on Gender Discrimination and Violence’, based on a set of interviews and focus groups with men in Lebanon’s Ballbek area. It reveals a collision between cultural norms (boys being raised to be violent law givers/honour defenders by both their mothers and fathers) and modernity (more women getting an education and going out to work, undermining men’s sense of superiority and power).

How can better models of change sharpen up our work on development?

Regular visitors to this blog will know that I’ve been doing quite a lot of floundering about thinking on different models of change (e.g. what triggered the revolution in Egypt? What does complexity theory add to/subtract from our thinking about development?) Partly it’s because in my ideal world, every time an NGO or research institution publishes some recommendation for change (of policy, practice, attitudes) it would include a power analysis of how/when it might actually come about – the drivers, blockers and waverers among different political and social actors, and the possible triggers for change. The largely meaningless phrase ‘political will’ would be banished forever. Well, I can always dream….

I set out where I’ve got to at IDS last week – there’s nothing like presenting to a room packed with illustrious academics and sharp-witted students to get the mental juices flowing (as well as exposing every weakness and confusion in your arguments).

The powerpoint is here, and you can listen to the lecture here, so I won’t rehearse the whole thing. Rather here’s a few reflections on the discussion.

Levers v Envelopes:
It feels like the discussion on change is getting unhelpfully polarised between two camps. On one side are what I call the ‘levers people’, who prefer to work with predictable, plannable change models – they are basically looking for levers of change they can pull, whether through advocacy or programming, to make change happen. They want lots of rigorous monitoring and evaluation to help improve the quality of such work.

On the other side are the ‘envelope people’, who see change as complex, emergent and unpredictable, essentially an unknowable black box, and so are highly sceptical of attempts to plan (‘log frame-ism’), pull levers or measure impact. Ros Eyben, an archetypal envelope person, reckons (slightly tongue-in-cheek) that if we administered a Myers-Briggs personality test to the two camps, we would find a pretty exact split – levers people need predictability; envelopers relish paradox and surprises. If true, it doesn’t bode well for the dialogue between them.

Horses for Courses:
But surely the most appropriate model of change varies according to the change process? Expanding service provision, or infrastructure, lends itself to the levers model, whereas social transformation may well be best captured by envelope models. One approach that partly captures this ‘horses for courses’ approach is the Cynefin framework (see diagram), which divides up change processes into four categories:

Simple: relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all

Complicated: relationship between cause and effect requires investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge.

Complex: relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect

Chaotic: there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level

I think we could probably learn a lot from an institution that specialises in (and plans for) working in chaotic environments – the military. How do you combine the planning necessary to make sure troops are equipped, both physically and mentally, for combat, with the improvisation and agility required in combat?

Another (pretty obvious) part of the ‘horses for courses’ approach is that lever people have much more success explaining past changes than future ones (various aphorists are credited with saying ‘I never make predictions, especially about the future’). But we (NGOs, activists, anyone interested in change) live and work at the place where the (largely) unknowable, emergent future and the (on a good day) analysable past collide, namely the present. Shades of TS Eliot and Four Quartets.

The question is, can thinking more analytically about change help us operate more effectively in the present – Eliot’s ’still point of the turning world’? I think it can – one example: with better understanding of both envelopes and levers, we should be able to spot opportunities for advocacy much quicker. Change is rarely a single moment, but a process, spread over months and years – the Egyptian and Tunisian upheavals are far from over. Often the earlier you get involved, the more impact you can have. How have organizations been using their change models to develop advocacy priorities, partnerships etc in such countries, or have they merely been trying to work out if there is a humanitarian emergency requiring a relief effort? Indeed, could better change models help development people become as agile and decisive in their response to events as their humanitarian colleagues, showing the same dynamism in responding to advocacy opportunities as we currently do to humanitarian threats?

Which brings me to my final rumination. It’s notable how quickly these discussions revert to what are essentially management and recruitment issues. How do we equip existing advisers on livelihoods, healthcare, disaster relief etc, who may see themselves primarily as technical specialists, to think systematically about change? And that may mean thinking about who we recruit in the first place – working on the cusp between levers and envelopes, spotting opportunities quickly, being entrepreneurial, coping with uncertainty may all require a very different kind of person than simply grinding through the Plan (back to Myers Briggs again).

All comments and suggestions welcome – I’m trying to sort out my work programme on this, and need all the help I can get.

[Update: really useful comments, keep em coming!]

Food prices – US bad, IMF worried; Big Oil transparency; India shifts on cash transfers; blog news; the state of global education: links I liked

Food prices update: Alex Evans berates the Obama Administration’s silence on biofuels as a factor driving up corn prices. Meanwhile, the IMF warns “Since the turn of the century, food prices have been rising steadily – except for declines during the global financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009 – and this suggests that these increases are a trend and don’t just reflect temporary factors.”

 “Britain is throwing its weight behind European efforts to force oil and mining companies to publish details of every penny they pay to governments in poor countries where they operate.” Britain backing a French initiative? Whatever next… More analysis on Aid Thoughts. And rather than just slagging off governments, Transparency International has helpfully turned its attention (and league tables) to oil companies. For most countries, country-level disclosure on international operations is the Achilles’ heel.

India shifts from fuel and food subsidies to direct cash transfers to poor people. [h/t Steve Price-Thomas]

Some blog-related stuff: What’s the best way to spend £11m on development? Help Lawrence Haddad with his dilemma. For Spanish speakers, my friend Gonzalo Fanjul has moved his brilliant blog to El Pais’ website, where it should flourish.

Calling all development bloggers – do you want to be researched? If so, contact Jane Sparrow:
“I am a research student in international development at the University of Bath, UK. As part of my studies I am looking at blogs in development (specifically the blogs of international NGOs). You are invited to share your experience of blogging and participate in this study which will take place during March 2011. Please send an email to: jsn23@bath.ac.uk and I will send you a short questionnaire by email to complete. All information, including your identity, will be anonymous and I will of course send you my research report if you would like a copy. ”

“What do you think offers the best value for money? A global education initiative that could put over 67 million kids in school, or a week’s spending on military hardware.” Kevin Watkins launches his latest UNESCO broadside on the failings of the global education system, with a focus on the impact of armed conflict.

Or watch UNESCO’s 7 minute video