Jobs for wonks: three new openings at Oxfam

I’m taking time out from blogging today partly because my computer’s on the blink, but also because I promised to plug some new jobs in Oxfam that I thought would particularly interest the kinds of weirdoes intellectuals and deep thinkers who read this blog:

First up, our MEL pin-up Karl Hughes is off to the ADB, so if you fancy becoming our ‘global impact evaluation adviser’ (aka number cruncher in chief), now’s your chance. We need a seriously heavy hitter on this one – Job Description here, or go to the website. Closing date 13^th Feb.

Second, my old chums in the research team are looking for a research officer. Again, top number crunching skills required, working in a great team led by Ricardo Fuentes. Details here. Closing date 7^th February.

Finally, only a two month job, but really interesting, an great way to get a foot in the door/on the ladder and it’s on a topic dear to my heart: how change happens.  ‘A recent graduate/post-graduate and/or someone with research and writing skills and experience in international development, political or social sciences for a two month role, starting early February, to help produce some How Change Happens case studies.’ Be warned though – you may have to work with me on this one. Details here. Contact renglish[at]oxfam.org.uk. Closing date as soon as we find someone.

And if you’re in Leeds with nothing to do this evening, you can come to the University and hear me launch the second edition of FP2P at 5pm. Ditto Warwick University on Saturday.

Arab Spring v Muslim Tigers: what’s the connection between human development and revolution?

Just before the Arab Spring kicked off in early 2011, I was happily linking to some really interesting work by Dani Rodrik (one of my development heroes) on ‘muslim tigers’, pointing out that in terms of human development, the top 10 performers since 1970 were not the usual suspects (East Asia, Nordics) but Muslim countries – Oman, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria all featured.

So did the Arab Spring happen in spite of or because of such amazing progress? A new paper from Randall Kuhn of the University of Denver (right, without the hat) explores just that question and comes up with some intriguing hypotheses. Tigerishness in these countries is largely confined to childhood, which then gives way to:

‘“waithood” – the long and precarious path to adulthood facing Arab youth. Potential consequences of youth exclusion include lost productivity, social anomie, atrophying skills, and of course civil unrest. But these particular crises did not occur in a vacuum. While the Arab States experienced the same global economic recession as other nations, the specific crises were conditioned by decades of progress in basic human development.’

The most interesting aspect of this ‘waithood’ is the interaction between the labour market and the ‘marriage market’, which partly as a result of improved education has seen a ‘rapid transformation towards delayed marriage and high marriage costs.’ Female age at first marriage rose from 20.8 in 1966 to 29.2 in 2001 for Tunisia, and from 18.7 in 1973 to 31 in 2007 for Libya, and the changes have been similar for all women (rural and urban, more and less educated). In Egypt, the cost of marriage in 2005 was close to $7,000, or about 11 times annual household expenditure. As a result ‘an increasing number of women were accepting long engagements or delaying marriage in order to earn money to pay for the marriage or to wait for a better match.’ Oh, and by the way, ‘Unlike western countries, premarital sex does not have wide social acceptance.’

The result is a pressure cooker of expectations and frustrations. Young educated people unable to find jobs, seeing the status and fulfilment of marriage and parenthood receding into the far horizons the other side of ‘waithood’. And sex, drugs and rock and roll, which at least provide a temporary outlet for my kids’ generation in the UK, were not really on the menu.

Final word to Randall Kuhn:

‘No developing region had seen such improvements in multiple indicators of human development, reflected in declining child mortality, increased schooling, and increased stature of women. This progress permeated widely throughout most populations and sub-populations. Advances in human development contributed to a fundamental reordering of the relationship between citizen and state. Human development fostered a set of higher expectations, both physiologically and socially determined, that placed considerable pressure on governments, particularly in the context of extended adolescence. As the bond between citizen and state frayed, a new generation of political protest movement emerged, facilitated by the rise of information technologies. In addition to material grievances, the wave of protest reflected a collective sense, emerging throughout the Arab world, that citizens could expect more from their governments, including a right to self-determination. If human development does indeed shape the path to revolution, we may hope that it will also determine the ultimate success of the Arab Spring, which remains a work in progress.’

I’m told that Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa team are heartily sick of reading what they call ‘Western narratives’ about the Arab Spring. Is this just another one of those or something more interesting? For the moment (until someone puts me straight), I go with ‘interesting’.

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

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

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

So what does it say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Zimbabwe’s land reform actually been a success? A new book says yes.

I’ve never been to Zimbabwe, so tend to get my messages from the news coverage. On land issues, that means a picture of a predatory state driving white farmers off the land and handing it out to cronies and bogus war veterans, who fail to produce anything much in the way of crops.

Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land, a new book co-authored by Joe Hanlon, Jeanette Mangengwa and Teresa Smart, sheds a very different light. Based on field visits, numerous conversations with farmers, and mining the available data, it paints a much more nuanced picture that is broadly positive about the impact of Zimbabwe’s land reform. It makes some telling points, including:

The media story about efficient white commercial farms is a half truth at best: at independence in 1980, 700,000 black farmers were squeezed onto 53% of the farmland, while 6,000 white farmers had 46% (and often the best land at that). Yet when Zimbabwe achieved majority rule, one third of white farmers were insolvent and a third were just about breaking even. Only 5% (300 people!) could be described as ‘very profitable’.

It often takes a generation for a land reform to produce results – the larger of Zimbabwe’s two post apartheid land reforms is only a decade old, but new farmers have already caught up with the previous white-dominated system in production (although of course, there are always better and worse farmers in any category). That is initially being achieved by bringing some of the idle land into production, but yields are also rising.

Zimbabwe is special in several ways: one of the best educated populations in Africa actually sees farming as a good way to earn a living. Those making a success of farming include ex army generals, teachers and businesspeople.

The book is not an apologia for Robert Mugabe’s government – it acknowledges corruption and cronyism, but argues that the more recent land reform was driven from below, initially in the face of Zanu opposition, before the government finally decided to accept a fait accomplit – ‘perhaps the only thing Robert Mugabe and the British Government agree on is a myth, namely that Mugabe was responsible for the land occupations’. The book also points out that not all cronies are the same – some are just interested in speculating on land values, but others have actually become successful commercial farmers.

The more recent land reform comes in two types: ‘A1’ farms handed out about 150,000 plots of 6 hectares to smallholders by dividing up large white farms, while the ‘A2’ model sought to create large black commercial farms by handing over much larger areas of land to about 23,000 farmers.

One side effect of Zimbabwe’s educational record is plentiful research and survey data, which the authors make the most of in exploring the impact of the land reform. Has most land gone to government cronies? No.  Large-scale black commercial farmers have received just 7% of the land handed out since independence.

The first half of the book covers this history, the second surveys today’s agriculture, with evocative reportage from the field supplementing the number crunching. The book draws lessons about which farmers succeed and which fail, and why.

Overall, a lot of the smaller A1 farmers (including a significant number of women beneficiaries of the land reform) have become successful small commercial producers, breaking into markets for tobacco, maize and barley, often as contract farmers. This despite the lack of support for new farmers (a contrast to the lavish support for white newbies in earlier times).

The big A2 farmers have faced more of a struggle, both because hyperinflation and economic crisis had more of an impact , and because political infighting and favouritism tends to target the big farms. The largely unreported story here, though, is that the dollarization of 2009 and subsequent economic stabilisation has led to a resurgence of agriculture.

Not all is great of course, land reform has led to deforestation, and gold panning is causing environmental damage. Paid agricultural workers now number more than a million, and often face low wages and poor working conditions. Water and irrigation remain a big challenge.

The book concludes:

‘In the biggest land reform in Africa, 6,000 white farmers have been replaced by 245,000 Zimbabwean farmers. Zimbabwe’s land reform has not been neat, and huge problems remain. But 245,000 new farmers have received land, and most of them are farming it. They have raised their own standard of living; have already reached production levels of the former white farmers; and with a bit of support, are ready to substantially increase that production.’

So who’s right, the book or the Daily Mail? I’m off to Zimbabwe for a few days in March, so hopefully will get a clearer idea then, but would love to hear your views before I head off.

And if you’re in London, there are two opportunites to hear from the authors this week – at Chatham House on Thursday, 31^st January, 5pm (need to book) and LSE today (28^th January), 6.30pm (no booking required).

From pinstripes to poverty: a refugee banker’s first 100 days at Oxfam

Oxfam is always keen to employ unusual suspects, none more so than Will Martindale, a banker turned “do gooder” (right, and no, that isn’t his Oxfam desk). Here he reflects on his first 100 days working among the (supposed) angels.

Banking. Most hate it. Few understand it. And I miss it.

I miss the pace, the energy, and the super smart people fluent in numerous languages. I miss the neon ties, the pinstripe suits and the sales guys with shiny shoes. I miss the IT geeks with their dozen monitors and knee-high coffee flasks. I miss the chic hotels, the business-class flights and French restaurants.

But I left – and was looking to move for a while – because underneath all the flash, my work had absolutely zero social worth. I worked in the more exotic side of credit default swap trading: a financial product far removed from the real economy.

So 100 days ago I joined Oxfam, eight years after I started JPMorgan’s graduate scheme, and I’m excited to have made the change.

At first “NGO-speak” was a babble of acronyms, the array of recycling bins brought on a mild sweat, and I can confirm that hot-desking is not cool. But there are super smart people fluent in numerous languages at Oxfam too. There is energy, but of a different sort; less pace but more space – to think, to challenge. There is an excitement that our work – my work – is changing people’s lives for the better. And contrary to my preconceptions, Oxfam is agile, radical and fundamentally progressive.

So the transition has been stark, but I survived, not least because I find my role fascinating.

With my colleague, former City-boy Rob Nash (ex Lehman Brothers), our objective is this: to create the space for progressive bankers to make financial stability, transparency, financial inclusion, a return to real economy banking and socially productive investment the norm, not the exception. And to sideline tax evasion, disproportionate remuneration, unsustainable leverage, high volatility and endemic price rigging.

This is a challenge. On the surface, the all male, all macho City stereotype prevails. A Christmas party involved a London treasure hunt in taxi cabs. A quiet day in the markets turned into a Krispy Kreme doughnut eating competition. A colleague’s mistake prompted a manager to send an email in size 100 font with the letters: “WTF”. And being a “tree-hugging banker” (as I was named), a trader thought it would be funny to slowly and methodically pour spaghetti bolognese into the paper-only recycling bin opposite my desk.

Yet, as with most sectors, dig a little deeper and you’ll find thousands of influential and hard-working bankers who care deeply about good banking and – like Oxfam – want a pro-poor financial sector that is inclusive, sustainable and responsible.

Both internally and externally, many ask why this is relevant to Oxfam.

On the negative, predatory land investments in the world’s poorest countries have made thousands of people homeless and hungry; commodity speculation has driven volatile food prices; the City finances arms companies and corrupt mining companies; and facilitates tax avoidance that starves poor countries of much needed tax receipts.

On the positive, there’s more low carbon and climate financing; new technologies make funds available to poor people in remote rural areas; and bridging loans provide upfront funding needed for humanitarian disasters. And in my short time at Oxfam, I have met many financiers who are focusing their efforts and expertise in innovative products and business models designed to meet the most urgent social and environmental challenges of our time.

The financial services are central to this. But arguably, there is the subtle but more important concept of financial stability. I remember a senior trader once told me that “as long as you don’t mess with people’s lives, finance is ok”.

But even the far removed credit default swap market messes with people lives. Credit default swaps replicate the risk of trading bonds, but whereas bonds are paid for upfront, sellers of credit default swaps pay in arrears. And as we found out, nobody had the money to pay. As the markets tanked, more payments were triggered needing yet more scarce cash, so the markets tanked some more. And thus began a credit crunch which affected everyone, particularly poor people.

Take the LIBOR scandal. LIBOR is the benchmark interest rate for pretty much every floating rate trade that exists. So when it was kept artificially high, interest rate payers paid too much, including poor countries servicing debt payments.

Finance is everywhere. Banks, central banks, international finance institutions and governments are a public private hybrid, controlling national wealth, capital allocation and redistribution (or not).

We believe 2013 presents a unique opportunity to place Oxfam’s voice at the heart of financial reform as the City rebuilds its business and reputation in the wake of the credit crunch and the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

As you read this, the World Economic Forum is being held in Davos. As ever, the titans of global finance will be prominent in the corridors of Swiss resorts, trading ideas over cocktails and canapés. It is a good day to reflect on what positive engagement with the City might look like. As with Oxfam’s first foray into the sector, the policy document “Better Returns in a Better World”, we are looking to divide the City; to challenge the status quo and to identify, support and encourage progressive, sustainable and pro-poor financial services.

The detail is still to be decided. Here are some of our ideas:

• We feel it’s necessary to start with a map. Who does what where in the City, and more importantly, how and why?

• We will pioneer public “City” workshops to move beyond a bank’s CSR department and reach an audience of finance experts with anuntapped interest in development. We want better banking, not token hand-outs: “we financed a biofuels project which displaced 1000s of people, but not to worry, we built a health clinic in the neighbouring village.”

• We will ask banks and other investors to share their research and provide access to their trading and operation desks. And in the same way that Oxfam hosts trips for policy makers to visit our programmes, we will extend such invitations to those with influence in the financial sector.

• With a greater understanding of the City’s power-base and having built a wider network of City professionals, we will root our work in Oxfam’s priority campaigns; on land, food, tax and climate change. We will publish a series of “investor briefings” in a language and style consistent with the City: more graphs, fewer words.

• Finally, through active campaigning we will hold financial organisations to account; exposing and challenging harmful practices and supporting and encouraging policies with clear and demonstrable development impacts. We seek to end the business-as-usual approach which disproportionately hurts the world’s poorest and contribute to the rise of sustainable and responsible investment as the new mainstream of financial markets.

But to what extent should Oxfam work with the City? Is a pro-poor financial sector a distant dream? What’s your experience of bankers and banking? How can we measure progress? And which issues should Oxfam – a global aid and development charity with a mission to end poverty and suffering – prioritise within the City?

My colleague Rob Nash and I would welcome your suggestions, comments and concerns as we engage with this complex and powerful sector.

Evidence and results wonkwar final salvo (for now): Eyben and Roche respond to Whitty and Dercon + your chance to vote

In this final post (Chris Whitty and Stefan Dercon have opted not to write a second installment), Rosalind Eyben and

Chris Roche reply to their critics. And now is your chance to vote (right) – but only if you’ve read all three posts, please. The comments on this have been brilliant, and I may well repost some next week, when I’ve had a chance to process.

Let’s start with what we seem to agree upon:

• Unhappiness with ‘experts’ – or at least the kind that pat you patronizingly on the arm,
• The importance of understanding context and politics,
• Power and political institutions are generally biased against the poor,
• We don’t know much about the ability of aid agencies to influence transformational change,
• Mixed methods approaches to producing ‘evidence’ are important. And, importantly,
• We are all often wrong!

We suggest the principal difference between us seems to concern our assumptions about: how different kinds of change happen; what we can know about change processes; if how and when evidence from one intervention can practically be taken and sensibly used in another; and how institutional and political contexts then determine how evidence is then used in practice. This set of assumptions has fundamental importance for international development practice.

Firstly, we understand social change to be emergent and messy. Organised efforts to direct change confront the impossibility of any of us ever having a total understanding of all the sets of societal relationships and contested meanings that generate change and are in constant flux. New inter-relational processes are constantly being generated that in turn affect and change those already in existence. Complexity theory privileges a concern for process as much as goals and supports an approach that seeks to make a difference by working through relationships rather than focusing on narrowly defined pre-set projects and outcomes. It encourages being explicit about values and a concern for how an organisation’s intervention is judged by others, in particular by those that are meant to ultimately benefit, and the creation of effective feedback mechanisms – including, but not limited to, those produced by high quality research.

At their best, development practitioners often have to surf the unpredictable realities of national politics, spotting opportunities supporting interesting new initiatives, acting like entrepreneurs or searchers, rather than planners. They are keeping their eye on processes and looking to ride those waves that appear to be heading in the direction that matches their own agencies’ mission and values, and which can support local coalitions for change.  On the contrary, assuming that development practitioners are in control and that change is predictable – as expressed through some of the demands of evidence-based planning approaches – prevent them from responding effectively to feedback in an often unpredictable and dynamic policy environment, and can, if badly managed, chain them to a desk. Ben Ramalingam’s blog site – Aid on the Edge of Chaos – offers current insights on complexity thinking in development.

That it is relatively easier to eradicate rinderpest in cattle and build bridges than tackle police corruption or reduce violence against women is because the first are examples of what Dave Snowden describes as complicated problems and the latter are complex – an effect of there being so many collaborators involved in non-routine interventions with absence of consensus among them.  Such issues can’t be ‘solved’ like a Sudoku puzzle. In that respect, we were puzzled by Chris and Stefan’s two examples of what we would describe as complex issues. We found the first – the effect of political quotas for women in rural India – to be somewhat superficial and wondered why so little reference was made to the considerable number of studies from political sociology on the same topic that ask more probing questions and arguably provide more insightful understanding of what has been learnt in different contexts.  The World Bank study on whether top-down large scale interventions can stimulate bottom-up participation was on the other hand  puzzling for exposing myths that perhaps only World Bank staff had previously believed in, while ignoring the very considerable body of sociological and anthropological knowledge on this topic. It led us to wondering whether you need economists to find something out for it to be accepted as evidence.  Perhaps that explains some of ‘the evidence-barren areas in development’………

Which brings us to the second set of assumptions about how we know and therefore what is judged as evidence.  This is about more than pluralism and mixed methods, though we recognise that recent advances, in this case funded by DFID, are important.  Let’s start by insisting that a criterion for rigorous research is that it should be explicit about its assumptions or world-view. We suggest that a weakness in many studies is that they usually focus solely on the methodological and procedural and render invisible their ‘philosophical plumbing’. The evidence-based approaches that Stefan and Chris advocate are imposing a certain view of the world, just as our approaches do. Their claims to the contrary foreclose any possible discussion about the different intellectual traditions in interpreting reality.  Theory invites argument and debate.

An interesting paper by Greenhalg and Russell on evaluating health programmes notes how experimental approaches often ignore thetricky philosophical and political questions. Like the authors of that article, we take an approach that recognizes the partial (in both senses of the word) nature of our knowledge. How does this approach try to deal with unavoidable bias?  Through seeking to use dialogic, democratic methods in which multiple perspectives and understandings of what is at stake are explored, and the use of multiple and hybrid approaches.  The implications for practice are to be involved in mutual single and double-loop learning and adaptation as you go along. This does not preclude specific studies commissioned from ‘experts’, but it is not they alone who should define the problem nor should they assume that only their kind of knowledge has validity for collective efforts to try to secure greater equity and social justice.  Knowledge and power are bed-mates.  Our critique of ‘expertise’ – the laboratory references are an extreme example of the trend – is that expertise often uses its power to ignore other ways of knowing and doing, something Chris and Stefan would seem to agree with. Might it be that some of these ways might prove to be pretty good at tackling police corruption or reducing violence against women?

This is where reflexivity comes in.  Those of us working as practitioners, bureaucrats and scholar activists in international development cannot escape the contradiction that we are strategizing for social transformation from a position in a global institution – international development – that can and does sustain inequitable power relations, as much as it succeeds in changing them. Reflexive practice seeks to address these power inequities by recognizing that (a) many problems we seek to address are the products of human interaction – and some very important problems for people with less voice go ignored for that reason, and  (b) even if people are in agreement about there being a problem, they will often offer multiple diagnoses for its existence, and thus of course (c) multiple solutions, which need to be debated democratically with different kinds of evidence, based on alternative ways of knowing, and having the space to be heard.

We are heartened to note that Chris and Stefan believe “that all actions by external actors will interact with political forces and vested interests” and that “in many of the settings where development actors want to make a difference, power and political institutions are biased against the poor”. We would therefore assume that a reflexive donor would recognise that their power and agenda need examination as much as anyone else’s.

Chris and Stefan suggest ‘the commitment to evidence has opened up the space fundamentally to challenge conventional, technical approaches to aid.’ We would agree, but it would seem that the exception to this is when it comes to addressing the power of donors such as DFID, being honest about the domestic political pressures they are under, and assessing the possibility that their behaviour (including how evidence-based approaches are managerialised) may on occasions be undermining processes of development and social transformation. Is DFID drawing upon anthropologists or ethnographic researchers, as the Police in the UK have recently done, to understand how its policies on, for example, results or value for money change behaviour in the agency, and its relationships with others?

To imply that we are suggesting that ‘it is not worth trying to provide the best and most rigorous evidence to those who need to make difficult decisions’ is simply a wilful mis-stating of our position. On the contrary we are arguing there is more ‘evidence’ out there than some seem to admit because their world view precludes seeing this as such. Where we in particular see the need for more evidence is about how the evidence-based and results agenda plays out in practice. How it affects the behaviour of development agencies and their staff as well as their ability to support the promotion of the kinds of transformational change which are likely to make a significant difference to the lives of people living in poverty and injustice. It is odd that those that argue for more evidence seem rather reluctant to admit that this is needed!

This is a debate we are keen to pursue further in the upcoming Big Push Forward conference on the Politics of Evidence.

Launch of ‘If’ – new megacampaign to tackle global hunger: how does it compare with ‘Make Poverty History’?

Sorry for a second post in one day, but the launch of If is a biggie

Ah the perils of age – am I becoming one of those annoying old guys who greets every new idea (however excellent) with a weary sigh and ‘we already did/discussed all that back in the 19XXs’? I ask because I have a distinct sense of ‘here we go again’ as today, a smorgasbord of 100 NGO logos will adorn the press releases for the launch of ‘If’, a big campaign to tackle global hunger. Logotastic, lots of killer facts, a smart video (below) and, wait for it, white wristbands! Yep, it feels a bit like a rerun of Make Poverty History (2005, for the younger readers). I may blog about this properly when I’ve had time to gauge the debates around the launch, but initial impressions are:

What’s the same as MPH?

Northern focus, pegged to this year’s UK presidency of the G8 (although the G8 is not the global steering committee it was (or at least thought it was) back in 2005).

The wristbands and celebs, which should take development debates outside the usual circuits (a good thing, in case more wonky readers are in any doubt).

The big coalition of NGOs managing the tensions of any alliance in terms of pushing their particular priorities while maintaining a clear enough message to get media ‘cut-through’. More subtly, they also have to balance the dangers of over-hyping impact, ‘make poverty history’ style, with the risks of disappearing into an academically rigorous but entirely incommunicable message of ‘hey everything is context-specific, and there are enormous limits to the efficacy of international action, but we think this would probably help a bit.’

The focus on aid – this is a big year, with UK government becoming the first G8 country to meet the international aid target of 0.7% of national income, even as other governments are tearing up their aid promises under the weight of economic crisis.

What’s different

We didn’t say ‘cut through’ back in the day.

Many more technological options for viral campaigning – twitter (#If) being the most obvious. Linked to that is a much greater focus on transparency (helpfully, if clunkily, translated as ‘seeing clearly’ in the campaign literature). And a seriously funky website (left).

If reflects the shifting development agenda: in come tax dodging, biofuels, agriculture and nutrition, out go trade (Doha round going nowhere) and debt (successful cancellation in dozens of countries). More of a focus on the rich countries putting their houses in order (tax, biofuels etc), which has to be a good thing (its lack was one of the main critiques of MPH by Dani Rodrik and Nancy Birdsall, among others). Climate change is one of If’s core issues, whereas in Gleneagles, it was put on the table by the British government, not MPH.

This one feels more UK-centric (at least for now).

No sign of Bob Geldof so far (but the year is young….)

So what do you think?

One other consequence of age: for my generation ‘If…..’ conjures up images of the 1968 film, which ends with a young Malcolm McDowell on a rooftop machine-gunning the parents and teachers of his posh public school (as we call private schools in the UK). It even has a memorable reference to Oxfam. Trust that’s just a coincidence.

The evidence debate continues: Chris Whitty and Stefan Dercon respond from DFID

Yesterday Chris Roche and Rosalind Eyben set out their concerns over the results agenda. Today Chris Whitty (left), DFID’s Director of Research and Evidence and Chief Scientific Adviser and Stefan Dercon (right), its Chief Economist, respond.

It is common ground that “No-one really believes that it is feasible for external development assistance to consist purely of ‘technical’ interventions.” Neither would anyone argue that power, politics and ideology are not central to policy and indeed day-to-day decisions. Much of the rest of yesterday’s passionate blog by Rosalind Eyben and Chris Roche sets up a series of straw men, presenting a supposed case for evidence-based approaches that is far removed from reality and in places borders on the sinister, with its implication that this is some coming together of scientists in laboratories experimenting on Africans, 1930s colonialism, and money-pinching government truth-junkies. Whilst this may work as polemic, the logical and factual base of the blog is less strong.

Rosalind and Chris start with evidence-based medicine, so let’s start in the same place. One of us (CW) started training as the last senior doctors to oppose evidence-based medicine were nearing retirement. ‘My boy’ they would say, generally with a slightly patronising pat on the arm, ‘this evidence-based medicine fad won’t last. Every patient is different, every family situation is unique; how can you generalise from a mass of data to the complexity of the human situation.” Fortunately they lost that argument. As evidence-informed approaches supplanted expert opinion the likelihood of dying from a heart attack dropped by 40% over 10 years, and the research tools which achieved this (of which randomised trials are only one) are now being used to address the problems of health and poverty in Africa and Asia.

The consequences of moving from expert (ie opinion-based, seniority-based and anecdote-based) to evidence-based healthcare policy, far from being some sinister neocolonial experiment, have been spectacular. To quote a recent Economist headline, ‘Africa is currently experiencing some of the fastest falls in childhood mortality ever seen, anywhere’. It is a great example of the positive side to modern Africa the current excellent Oxfam publicity campaign (right) is all about. This success is based on many small bits of evidence, from many disciplines, leading to multiple incrementally better interventions. Critically, it also involves stopping doing things which the expert consensus agreed should work, but which when tested do not. It is no accident that one of the most evidence-based parts of development is also one where development efforts have had some of their greatest successes.

Proper evidence empowers the decision-maker to be able to make better choices. This is a good thing. In every discipline, in every country, where rigorous testing of the solutions of experts has started, many ways of doing things promoted by serious and intelligent people with years of experience have been shown not to work. International development is no different, except that the communities we seek to assist are more vulnerable, including to our bad choices.

Much of what we all do in international development has very limited evidence that it does any good  (in this it is no different from many other policy areas) – which is not the same as saying it is pointless. Rather we don’t know what is pointless. Some of our actions will work better than we think, much of it will work much less well than we hope, and some of it will be damaging the poorest without us realising it. In the evidence-light areas we just don’t know which are which.

We must have the humility to accept that we are all often wrong, however reflexive the practitioner, however deep their reading and experience and passion to do good. Evidence-based approaches are not about imposing a particular theory or view of the world. It is simply about taking any opportunity to test our own solutions in the best way available, using evidence honestly when it is available to inform (note the word) decisions, and when the facts change, changing our minds.

This honesty includes saying to decision-makers when evidence is methodologically weak, mixed or missing so they know they are on their own, unable to rely on (or make a claim on) the evidence. The worst possible solution, which we know Chris and Ros would also deplore, is using the social power of the ‘expert’ to imply we know the answer when we actually have no solid evidential basis for our opinion or prejudice.

A few false assumptions about evidence-based decision making

Some of those who express unease about evidence-based policy and practice seem to assume that it is always based on randomised trials and quantitative methodologies: not so. Methods from all disciplines, qualitative and quantitative, are needed, with the mix depending on the context. Randomised trials are one tool amongst very many, although a good one in the right setting. The argument that evidence-based approaches can “only apply in cases of individual treatment and not the wider community level” ignores over 30 years of methodology which has done exactly that, with very convincing results.

A sterile argument  between people who are on the one side believe that a  randomised trial can answer any question (they can’t), and people who do not appear to be aware of any  methodological advances since the 1970s except in their own narrow field is a depressingly familiar experience. We know this does not apply to Rosalind and Chris, but listening to people passionately critiquing methodologies they have not taken the trouble to understand does no good to anyone. This applies both to a randomista who seems to believe that all there is to social research is a few focus groups and in-depth interviews, and to people from a more qualitative social science background who would have trouble explaining the difference between cluster randomised and step-wedge design but assume both are irrelevant to social research anyway (both can be used to measure societal rather than individual effects).

It is tempting to take every point the authors make where we have concerns about their factual basis and logical framework but we will take just three.

“Evidence-based approaches are pre-occupied with avoiding bias and increasing the precision of estimates of effect”. On less bias – generally true. Please complete the sentence ‘More biased research is better because…’. On precision – no, incorrect, the range of situations where a more precise answer is a better answer is small.

One statement we would like to address head-on starts “Evidence-based approaches became linked to value for money concerns to deliver ‘results’…”. We agree- and this is a good thing. Doing a pointless thing, professionally delivered and passionately believed in, is always going to be poor value for money. Testing what works and what does not therefore is essential to value for money. More importantly, doing pointless things diverts very limited human and financial resources, in an ocean of need, away from those who could best use them- not what any of us are in international development to do.

Is it “technical approaches” on the one hand, and “power, political economy” analysis on the other?

Rosalind and Chris’ key criticism is that evidence-based approaches “deflect attention from the centrality of power [and] politics […] in shaping society”, and they offer “power analyses” as an apparent alternative to assessing rigorously what works. This creates a false dichotomy, as if a choice has to be made between a “technical, rational and scientific approach to development” and an approach that recognises politics and the role of power. It is easy rhetoric, but troubling and, if taken much further, even dangerous. Understanding power and politics and how to assist in social change also require careful and rigorous evidence, and again, results are not simply what experts would have expected a priori. Recent studies on the positive impacts of female leadership quotas in rural India are for many of us rather surprisingly good news, even if one can fairly worry about its applicability in other settings, while the struggle to find systematically a positive impact of decentralisation and community-driven development programmes is important to internalise in our actions for change, and highlights the importance of understanding contexts and politics. In these cases, it is not a matter of just RCTs, but of rigour, and of combining appropriate methods, including more qualitative and political economy analysis.

Strong analysis of politics and power without offering much in terms of what can be acted upon is similarly unhelpful. They criticise an evidence-focused agenda by stating that “to act ‘technically’ in a politically complex context can make external actors pawns of more powerful vested interests and therefore by default makes them, albeit unintentionally, political actors.” But all actions by external actors will interact with political forces and vested interests. In many of the settings where development actors want to make a difference, power and political institutions are biased against the poor. Being able to act on strong evidence of what works in constrained political settings is crucial.

A reductionist and misinformed view of evidence as purely ‘technical’ or as being only about “what works” is unhelpful – it is also about generating evidence and understanding (and learning) on why interventions and approaches may work, including understanding the social, political, and economic factors that may enable or constrain success of different approaches. Far from the search for evidence pushing us in a ‘technical’, apolitical direction it has reinforced the importance of understanding and trying to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and conflict. There is agreement on the importance of politics and institutions in shaping growth, security and human development. However, the ability of external actors to influence institutions is much less clear and this is where DFID research is now focussed. Ros and Chris have misread the context – the commitment to evidence has opened up the space fundamentally to challenge conventional, technical approaches to aid.

Why it matters for international development

There are large areas of international development where decision-makers are largely flying blind – forced to make decisions purely on gut feeling and ideology not because they wish to because they have no option. Try making difficult decisions in education policy compared to health policy and the difference in usable evidence is dramatic – yet both are complex, social and context-dependent parts of human life. It is always puzzling when people say airily ‘health is easy’- it is not, and is an intensely political and social subject requiring interventions at societal level.

Today we can eradicate rinderpest in cattle and build bridges over the Zambezi based on rock-solid evidence from many disciplines, but do not have anywhere near as clear an idea how to reduce violence against women or tackle police corruption. All are great challenges with social dimensions but in two of them people have set about finding and testing solutions in a systematic way over many decades.

Having robustly tested evidence-based solutions certainly does not eliminate politics: the decision whether to build a bridge, what sort and where, is an intensely political choice – but at least those making the choice now have a fair assumption it will stand up- based on hundreds of years of incremental evidence. The evidence-barren areas in development are a collective, and in our view shameful, failure by us all in the academic and practitioner community. We should never excuse them with the feeble assertion that it is too difficult or complicated. Development is difficult and complicated – but the bases for making decisions will gradually improve if we are serious about improving it.

In conclusion, we collectively have the capacity to be able to give to our successors in every continent a far better basis on which to make their decisions for their lives than our generation have. To imply it is not worth trying to provide the best and most rigorous evidence to those who need to make difficult decisions because they will have other influences as well is like saying to someone going for a walk in dangerous mountains that they do not need a map because there will be many other factors that will determine where they go. That is true – but they are still less likely to fall off the cliff if they have one.

Where evidence is clear-cut we should be making that plain to decision makers – and where it is not we should say that as well, be honest about what is there and try to get better evidence for the future. That, in essence, is what evidence-based decision making is about – and all it is about. If the academic community is serious about trying to assist those working in the field (including in Oxfam), and above all empowering the most vulnerable communities to make the most informed possible decisions available for their own development, we should be putting our greatest efforts into supporting decision-makers to use the best evidence, and finding better methodologies in areas where we currently have very weak evidence. There are many, and this should be tackled as a matter of urgency.

Tomorrow, Chris Roche and Rosalind Eyben respond

The political implications of evidence-based approaches (aka start of this week’s wonkwar on the results agenda)

The debate on evidence and results continues to rage. Rosalind Eyben (left) and Chris Roche (right, dressed for battle), two of the organisers of April’s Big Push Forward conference on the Politics of  Evidence, kick off a discussion. Tomorrow Chris Whitty, DFID’s Director of Research and Evidence and Chief Scientific Adviser, and Stefan Dercon, its Chief Economist, respond

Distinct from its more general usage of what is observed or experienced, ‘evidence’ has acquired a particular meaning relating to proof about ‘what works’, particularly through robust evidence from rigorous experimental trials. But no-one really believes that it is feasible for external development assistance to consist purely of ‘technical’ interventions. Most development workers do not see themselves as scientists in a laboratory, but more as reflective practitioners seeking to learn how to support locally generated transformative processes for greater equity and social justice. Where have these experimental approaches come from and what is at stake?

The origins and critiques of evidence-based approaches

Evidence-based approaches are pre-occupied with avoiding bias and increasing the precision of estimates of effect. In the UK they spread beyond clinical practice when the government elected in 1997 was keen to demonstrate that its decisions would not be driven by political ideology but rather by objective evidence. Evidence-based approaches became linked to value for money concerns to deliver ‘results’ as efficiently and effectively as possible, by a government recently described as ‘truth junkies’.

Yet, even within medicine, the leap from evidence-based clinical practice into evidence-based policy was challenged. A British Medical Journal article by Nick Black in 2001 drew on an extensive body of contemporary literature on policy processes to argue that policy was shaped by institutional arrangements, values and beliefs and a variety of different sources of information.

Opponents of evidence-based education critiqued its positivist assumptions; its linear cause-effect thinking; and the poor understanding of the tensions between scientific and democratic control of educational practice. An OECD report in 2007 on the reasons for the uptake of evidence-based education in Sweden, the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia, noted the increasing pressure for greater accountability of expenditure and effectiveness, an explosion in the search for measurable outcomes, and demands that impacts and effectiveness be given a monetary value.

The same report noted that evidence-based approaches were largely absent in OECD countries ‘less used to empirical and quantitative methodologies in the social sciences.’ The de-politicization of policy making is one of the reasons given by development researchers for its neglect in France.

In UK social policy, evidence-based approaches with their ‘gold standard’ of experimental or quasi-experimental design, have been criticised as being inapplicable to complex issues. In What Works, Tony Harrison argued that evidence-based approaches can only apply in cases of individual treatment and not at the wider community level where multiple perspectives come into play and no agreement exists about the nature of the problem.This of course is the case with most development programmes, and in particular those that seek transformational change.

Evidence based approaches in development: an anti-politics firewall?

Arguably evidence-based approaches build an anti-politics firewall. Development assistance becomes a ‘technical’ best practice intervention based on rigorous objective evidence, delivering best value for money to domestic taxpayers and recipient country citizens mostly without interfering in that country’s politics. They are the latest manifestation of  a certain long-standing approach to development that as Timothy Mitchell wrote in Power of Development, speaks to the sector’s ‘need to overlook its internal involvement in the places and problems it analyses and present itself instead as an external intelligence that stands outside the objects it describes’.

In the 1930s Africa was seen as ‘a living laboratory’ to achieve improvements in the welfare of the populations. Evidence-based approaches are reviving the development-as-laboratory idea. In 2012 the World Bank established a Gender Innovation Lab to design ‘innovative interventions to address gender inequality and to develop rigorous research projects in order to produce evidence on what works and what does not’.  Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages have been framed as  ‘laboratories to lift people out of poverty’. The most well-known is the J-Pal Poverty Action Lab whose mission is to reduce poverty ‘by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence’.

In the absence of political debate, this approach can exacerbate the tendency to see people as subjects requiring treatment, rather than as citizens with political voice. Power silences any challenges to the technical framing of ‘the problem’, foreclosing discussion of the structural causes and consequences of inequity and how these should be tackled. To act ‘technically’ in a politically complex context can make external actors pawns of more powerful vested interests and therefore by default makes them, albeit unintentionally, political actors.

High stakes

Evidence-based technical approaches can therefore deflect attention from the centrality of power, politics and ideology in shaping society. We agree with the view of the Developmental Leadership Program that recent research suggests that  the development sector should be ‘at the frontier of a narrative shift between a technical, rational, and scientific approach to development, and a recognition that politics matters; that poverty reduction is not a technical problem but requires significant social change, and that this social change is, and must be, both political and locally led.’

However this has some significant implications for external actors. We need to be self-aware to avoid disempowering others.  This requires undertaking power analyses with ourselves factored in – as organisations and individuals who can make a positive or negative contribution, often inadvertently.  It means engaging with a wider and more diverse group of policy actors in the state, civil society and the private sector; whenever possible, supporting debate, locally-driven problem solving, and independent research. It means avoiding overly linear project-based aid modalities that demand omniscience before they have even begun.

As Michael Sandel has recently argued in his book about the moral limits to markets, how we put values (and prices) on things can change their meaning, as well as change the relationship between economic actors.  More information, (dare we say ‘evidence’), is needed to draw some firmer conclusions about the consequences of evidence-based approaches to designing projects and assessing results. This is why the Big Push Forward is currently seeking to crowd-source more information from development practitioners about how they actually experience the ‘results’ agenda, and why we believe this issue needs more debate.

And make sure you come back tomorrow for DFID’s counterblast

Should we (and everyone in Davos) worry about extreme wealth? New Oxfam briefing

Good to see Oxfam highlighting inequality in its media briefing ahead of this week’s annual gathering of power & plutocrats in Davos. Because inequality is about the relationship between different social groups, it is inherently more political and more controversial than poverty. As our head of campaigns Ben Phillips, who packs a mean sound bite, said in his Al Jazeera interview, ‘’We sometimes talk about the ‘have-nots’ and the ‘haves’ – well, we’re talking about the ‘have-lots’.’ (I misheard it as ‘have yachts’, which would have been even better….)

An extreme concentration of wealth not only misallocates resources, it undermines political processes, as those who control wealth pay for increased lobbying, which in turn leads to decisions that further skew wealth (Joe Stiglitz has highlighted this kind of destructive feedback loop in relation to the finance industry).

The briefing calls for an end to ‘extreme wealth’. I helped out with our first killer fact of 2013:

‘The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012 – enough to end world poverty four times over.’

I suspect this one could be around for a while, so here are the sources for the calculation:

First, Bloomberg for the increase in income of the richest 100 people:

‘The world’s 100 richest people added $241 billion to their combined wealth in 2012, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 100 controlled an aggregate $1.9 trillion as calculated by the prices on world stock markets December 31, for an average of nearly $20 billion apiece.’

Then the Brookings Institution calculated the money required to lift everyone in the world over the $1.25 a day line

‘Providing every person in the world with a minimum income of $1.25/day in 2010 would [cost] just $66 billion.’

Divide Bloomberg by Brookings and you get the figure of (roughly) four.

The more I think about it, the more astonishing this number is. A quarter of the additional wealth accumulated in 2012 by 100 people could end extreme poverty for 1.4 billion people – that’s a ratio of 1 to 14 million. So if each of the world’s top 100 billionaires gave up 25% of their income (we could call it a ‘tax’ or ‘extreme wealth surcharge’…), they could each take 14 million people out of extreme poverty. OK I know it’s not that simple, you can’t just get money directly to poor people (though it’s getting easier with mobile banking etc), but still, the disparity in scale is breathtaking.