What have we learned from 5 years of research on African power and politics?

The Africa Power and Politics Programme (APPP) is winding down as its five year funding from DFID comes to an end, and I’ve been wading through the 120 page synthesis report as well as the strictly-for-wimps Policy Brief. Both are entitled ‘Development as a collective action problem: Addressing the real challenges of African governance’.

Like previous APPP work, the papers are intriguing and frustrating in equal measure. David Booth from the ODI, the principal author, appears torn: his comfort zone is the abstruse conceptual landscape and language of political science. But his paymasters are practical men and women who insist on their ‘so whats’. ‘Researchers have a duty to provide more than negative messages and evidence of complexity. There needs to be a meeting point between researchers’ recognition of complexity and practitioners’ hunger for guidance.’ He does his best, and promises much, but it doesn’t come easy, with conclusions that often stop just as they get interesting (at least to prosaic practitioner types like me).

First comes the standard take-down: a comprehensive and persuasive rubbishing of mistaken approaches. Yes, the development world may have moved on from ‘magic bullet’ approaches, accepting the APPP’s core argument in favour of adopting ‘best fit’ approaches, ‘going with the grain’ of existing histories and institutions in any given place. But in practice ‘even the most reflective country activists and the best governance advisers have trouble imagining what to do differently.’

On current aid practices, the synthesis report is far more damning than the Policy Brief (perhaps in deference to DFID’s sensitivities). Booth lambasts the ‘per diem culture’ (or as my colleague Ben Phillips puts it, ‘carpe per diem’) that undermines genuine attempts to resolve local collective action problems, as well as

• ‘the distortions caused by the availability of donor money and organisational templates, now delivered to the remotest rural areas by local governments and NGOs, and
• mechanical application of donor-inspired policy guidelines by sector ministries in ways that not only contribute to policy incoherence but prevent local actors from coming together to provide their own solutions.

He’s particularly critical of direct funding to grassroots organizations, arguing that ‘in Pakistan and elsewhere, civic groups that get funding from development assistance end up with no members.’ But he then acknowledges that in Malawi ‘in fact, some of the promising experiences do involve NGOs as actors, and some involve the use of project funds’ although frustratingly, there are no further details.

APPP reckons a more profound conceptual shift is required, ditching the ‘straitjacket of principal-agent thinking’ on governance. It pours equal scorn on supply side governance (governments are keen to run the place better, they just need training) and the more recent switch to demand side (just help citizens’ groups who are dying to hold governments to account, and that will lead to development). ‘The conventional idea of supporting a pent-up ‘demand for good governance’ must be put aside.’ ‘Citizen pressure will normally lead to more effective clientelism, not better public policies.’ [ouch]

Instead ‘governance challenges are not fundamentally about one set of people getting another set of people to behave better. They are about both sets of people finding ways of being able to act collectively in their own best interests. They are about collective problem-solving in fragmented societies hampered by low levels of trust.’

How? First engage with states, but not all of them: learn how to spot more developmentalist bits, and where you find them, reject the ‘dominant view for the last 25 years that African governments cannot be trusted with interventionist policies.’

I’ve written before about David’s apparent love affair with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame (left), but here he accepts that just wishing all African leaders were benevolent autocrats is not really good enough, not least because such ‘developmental patrimonialist’ regimes tend to emerge from major wars and national liberation struggles and/or major threats to national survival like the Rwandan genocide, which are unlikely to be repeated. Instead, he acknowledges ‘the most urgent policy questions relate to options for the modal type of contemporary African regime, where clientelism is competitive and operating under a formally democratic political constitution.’ Still, there is a lingering fondness for what the synthesis report terms ‘strong, visionary leaders’, combined with a rather old school notion of development as economic transformation first, and we’ll worry about all that fuzzy human rights, well-being and agency stuff later.

What of more specific so whats? There are tantalising glimpses here and there, never fleshed out fully. These include:

• New forms of power-sharing to deal with ethnic conflict
• Ring-fencing long term development priorities (eg infrastructure, smallholder agriculture) from party politics
• Pursue what APPP dubs ‘practical hybrids’, the result of ‘conscious efforts by elements of the modern state to adapt to local preferences and ways of doing things.’
• Learn from successful governance turnarounds in Latin America (Brazil, Bogotá), which ‘worked less by changing the formal rules of the political game, and more by bringing informal social norms and moral sentiments into line with the high ideals articulated in national constitutions, making creative use of mass media and the power of example.’
• ‘Official agencies should do more things ‘at arm’s length’, delegating assistance to organisations that have demonstrated an ability to work in the ways that are required to make a positive difference.’ Would that include ODI by any chance?

Stepping back, the underlying challenge identified by APPP seems to be how both governments and citizens can move to a less short-termist mindset and agree on the kind of institutional development that underpins long term development, finding ways to overcome the paralysis of collective action problems: ‘Where positive outcomes are achieved, the reasons are almost always that circumstances have permitted a collective action log-jam to be overcome, usually at several levels simultaneously and interactively.’

I think this analysis fits with some thinking we’re doing in Oxfam around the topic of ‘convening and brokering’. In certain circumstances, the best role for an outside player like us is not to build stuff, or dispense large amounts of cash, but to get disparate local players into a room and encourage them to find their own solutions. In Oxfam the iconic programme story is in Tajikistan, where we convened a bunch of ministries, private companies and civil society organizations to discuss water and sanitation. We don’t lobby for a particular agenda or institutional template, we just keep them talking – an afternoon every two months. Already the process has yielded an inter-ministerial coordinating committee on water, a new water law, and specific projects are now starting to emerge. The secret to success in this is often the human skills of the facilitator (in this case a rather charismatic water engineer who is now the Tajikistan country director) and acceptance by all parties of the credibility and independence of the convenor.

It also reminds me of Dani Rodrik’s work on growth diagnostics and bottlenecks: ‘development progress is about overcoming institutional blockages, usually underpinned by collective action problems. It is not, for the most part, about resource shortages or funding gaps.’

This seems to be heading towards some kind of ‘participatory institutional appraisal’ approach, where development actors specialize in convening discussions of local players to get over these logjams in ways that reflect and adapt local traditions and values. This runs up against the way aid agencies currently work: high staff turnover, massive pressure to dole out funds in large amounts, demands to show ‘value for money’ via an increasingly demanding and imposed system of governance, monitoring, evaluation etc etc

A suggestion: APPP should present this work to a group of practitioners (bilateral, NGOs etc), then brainstorm on examples where they are successfully pursuing this kind of approach. They should then write them up in plain English and use them to illustrate their arguments – I think I can guarantee a significant improvement in research take up and impact. Any takers?

Small farms can be beautiful – how farmers’ markets changed attitudes and policies in Colombia

As a curtain raiser for this week’s GROW Week at Oxfam (see bottom of this post), this piece appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters site last Friday, as my contribution to Sunday’s Blog Action Day, which this year coincided with World Food Day. I’ll also be doing on online Q&A (on Facebook) on the issues behind the campaign from 1-2pm tomorrow (Friday 21st October).

Small farmers get a bad press: developing country governments often see them as a developmental throwback and hanker after the glitter of modernity offered by large-scale investment in biofuels or export crops. Aid agencies and donor governments with more money than staff prefer the scale the big farms can offer. But there are at least two good reasons for sticking with a small-is-beautiful approach.

First, investing in small farmers brings a developmental double whammy: it helps put food into circulation and at the same time boosts the income of some of the poorest people on the planet – small farmers. It is an enduring and horrible irony that the people who grow the food are often also the ones who go hungry, because their crops are too paltry, or prices too low, for their harvest to see them through the year.  Jobless agribusiness growth in the farm sector won’t help those people; boosting small farm output will.

Secondly, helping small farmers get access to the kinds of things big farmers take for granted – bank loans, technical support, land rights, can have a catalytic effect on their productivity. That particularly goes for women farmers, who in many countries grow most of the food, but have least access to such support. Forget all those myths about stick-in-the-mud peasants – most small farmers are businesspeople, keen to experiment, manage risk, break into new markets and better themselves.

One example from dozens in Oxfam’s work around the world. Small-farmers supply 67 per cent of the food consumed in Colombia’s capital Bogotá (7 million population), but they weren’t earning a decent price for their produce. Much of the produce sold in urban markets is handled by commercial intermediaries, who buy from individual producers at low prices and then sell high.

So Oxfam teamed up with local NGOs and peasant organizations and tried to find out what the problem was by asking the key decision makers – for example, government officials who thought that the peasant economy was no longer viable and that “The peasants are lazy, they support the armed groups, they take advantage of the drug mafias, and take their cut growing coca.” What emerged was the need to change attitudes towards peasant farmers, both among officials, and the urban public.

The timing was propitious: in 2004, the Office of the Mayor of Bogotá had begun to speak openly for the first time about poverty and food security. It had drawn up a draft ‘Food Supply Master Plan’, but this failed to recognize the potential of small producers. The plan was based on obtaining food supplies for the minimum possible price, but did not consider the needs of producers or the potential for reducing rural poverty. Instead of a minimum price, campaigners demanded a ‘fair price’ principle.

The Mayor’s Office remained sceptical of the peasants’ ability to supply food efficiently, so the project organized farmers’ markets in strategic locations around the city, including the main square. Officials and shoppers were duly impressed by the level of organization and capacity on display, but also by the prices. Monitoring showed that the average net increase in prices for farmers was 64 per cent in wholesale markets and 52% in retail while urban consumers also benefited, paying average prices lower by some 15 per cent (a bit different from farmers’ markets in the UK…..).

The markets, backed by some savvy media work, got the message home. The Mayor agreed to revise the city’s plan to one based on fair prices, and backed it up with some investment to help small producers supply the city and representation for small farmers on the relevant committees.

Since then, more than 30 municipalities in the area around Bogotá have decided to organize their own local markets; Bogotá’s Mayor has signed contracts with five other regional governments pledging to increase rural investment for food production and we’re now trying to replicate the initiative in Medellín and Cali, the two other mayoral cities in Colombia.

There are hundreds of millions of small farmers who could benefit from schemes like these. When it comes to ending hunger, how food is grown and marketed (and who by) matters at least as much as growing more of it.

And here’s more about GROW week

Can Cities build local ‘developmental states’? Some surprising good news from Colombia

Discussions of the role of states in development, and in particular the role of the hands-on ‘developmental state’ in producing impressive take-offs in East Asia and elsewhere, almost exclusively focusses on the national level. But in many countries, particularly since the push for decentralization in recent decades, local and city governments play an increasingly influential role. So might we see a ‘local developmental state’ emerge in some cities or regions, even when the national state isn’t up to much? A recent paper from the Overseas Development Institute argues that this is exactly what is happening in the former drug capital of Medellín, Colombia:

‘After more than two decades of very well-publicised narco-industry and paramilitary-driven violence and chaos, Medellín has made significant economic and social progress since the late 1990s thanks to a renewed appetite for local state activism that has proved both popular and effective.’

The authors, Milford Bateman, Juan Pablo Duran Ortíz and Kate Maclean, argue that this is nothing new:

‘A ‘local developmental state’ model appears to have emerged in many of the most successful countries and regions, most notably in post-war northern Italy, Southern Germany and in several Scandinavian countries…. The core idea is that sub-national levels of government can, and should, be pro-active in building the institutional and organisational infrastructures required for growth-ori¬ented micro-, small and medium enterprises to emerge and succeed.’

Cities can promote this form of local industrial policy through local state ownership of key enterprises, local taxes, and use of local powers such as planning laws and transport policy – ‘Medellín has proved adept at using pro-poor transport policies to link communities together.’

In addition, the city of Medellín has developed its own programme of cash grants, the Medellín Solidaria programme, similar to the successful Bolsa Familia experiment undertaken in Brazil since the early 2000s.

‘Medellin has set up a network of 14 publicly-funded business support centres (the local acronym is CEDEZO, Centros de Desarrollo Empresarial Zonal). These CEDEZOs are located in the very poorest areas and are designed to support business development by the poor by offering free-of-charge business support services and technical advice to anyone with a good business idea. Working alongside the CEDEZOs is the Banco de las Oportunidades, which provides microloans up to $2,500 at a favourable interest rate (0.91% monthly) to establish microenterprises.’ [i.e. nothing like your standard microfinance lender - one of the authors, Milford Bateman, is a trenchant critic of microfinance]

Fascinating – a lot of the good things that have happened in Latin America over the last couple of decades have been incubated at city level, even though, like Bolsa Familia, they are then sometimes adopted by national governments. Cities offer natural laboratories, ideal for testing a range of new approaches to sift out what works from what doesn’t. They are also at a scale where it is much easier for relatively small organizations to engage at the city level (see this example from Bogota). And turning around a city like Medellin is a huge achievement – in a previous job in the early 90s I published ‘Born to Die in Medellin’, a bloodcurdling set of interviews with teenage assassins in the City (a translation of Alonso Salazar’s great book, ‘No Nacimos pa’ Semilla’). Wonder what the surviving ex-gangsters are doing now?

Anything else to read on local developmental states? They certainly seem a lot more plausible than Charter Cities.

How can theories of change help in working with the private sector?

As regular readers will know, I’ve been doing some thinking on ‘theories of change’ recently. A few people have asked me if the change in question is mainly political/social change, or whether it applies to economic developments too. I think there’s a high degree of commonality, so at last week’s discussion on working with the private sector, I took the set of ‘change archetypes’ and strategies below and tried to apply it to Oxfam’s work on livelihoods. 

Here’s what jumped out in terms of our current work on the private sector:

Active Citizenship: Four Powers
What is it? Focusing on redistributing power within society, starting by supporting poor people to build their ‘power within’ – a sense of dignity, agency and rights, then ‘power with’ – collective organization around common goals, before moving on to ‘power to’ express demands and ‘power over’ those in authority.
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of work on strengthening producer organizations to improve their bargaining power in markets, and brokering relationships between them and more powerful actors in supply chains.

Elites: Enlightened leaders
What is it? Kind of obvious
How does it apply to private sector work? Direct networking with captains of industry at places like Davos to persuade them to overhaul their business models and practices

Elites: Appealing to technocrats
What is it? Forget the leaders, we need to work directly with the officials who actually do stuff, and show them how being pro-poor can help them achieve their organizational objectives
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of conversations with mid-level executives about the business case for doing good stuff – staff morale and retention, reputational risk, positive brand image etc

Cross-class Coalitions
What is it? Often more effective to work in coalitions of dissimilar organizations than to put 100 NGOs in a room to negotiate a joint communiqué.
How does it apply to private sector work? Teaming up with progressive sectors of business and others to lobby governments and less forward-thinking firms on everything from ethical trading to ‘publish what you pay’ to climate change.

Dynamics: Power of example
What is it? Seeing that something works in practice is more convincing than a thousand policy papers
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of pilots, which we then document and publicise

And what does the table suggest might be missing from or weak in our current work on the private sector? Some thoughts (we may be doing some of these already, but they certainly weren’t prominent in last week’s big cheese discussion)

People in the streets: Outsider strategies such as protest movements or working in coalition with trade unions

Democracy works: Campaigns through parliaments or local governments on issues such as access to finance for small producers, the ‘enabling environment’ – infrastructure etc, labour regulation, competition policy or public procurement policies (e.g. the work on smallholder supply chains in Bogotá)

Shocks and tipping points: Hurricane Katrina is credited with transforming Walmart’s attitude to social and environmental responsibility. How many U-turns in corporate practices are down to similar shocks, whether external like Katrina, or internal, like corporate scandals or financial meltdowns? Should we focus more on spotting and seizing those moments of opportunity rather than more linear advocacy strategies?

Evolution: If we were to take evolution seriously, we might try and ‘see like a venture capitalist’, spotting new and emerging ideas in the private sector, supporting and publicising them, spreading them to new geographies and situations, accepting (and learning from) much higher failure rates. We would act as amplifiers rather than do-ers.

So yes, I still think theories of change are useful, and yes, that includes private sector work.

Helping small farmers get a better deal in Colombia

I’m on a panel at the Harvard Kennedy School tomorrow, pulling together some of the lessons from on the ground success in development programming. I’ve already posted on some of the stories, but here’s an interesting one from Colombia, where small scale farmers find it hard to sell into urban areas at a decent price. Partly it’s because they cannot achieve sufficient quality and scale to sell directly into supply chains of large buyers (e.g. wholesale markets or national and municipal institutions) and they get bad prices from middle men. Women smallholders are particularly excluded – a progressive Law for Rural Women was passed in 2002 but not implemented.

But it’s also about attitudes – government officials have long seen peasant agriculture as destined for the scrapheap – state investment in smallscale farming collapsed after the 1980s. While national government was largely unsympathetic, city authorities, in particular in Bogotá, were in some cases more open to dialogue.

So working with local partners such as ILSA, (Instituto Latinoamericano de Servicios Legales alternativos) and CICC (Comité de Interlocución Campesino Communa), and with funding from DFID and the EU, Oxfam funded a project to: 

1. Support small producers to lobby Bogotá’s Mayoral Office and other municipal institutions and large private sector buyers for access to markets

2. Help the setting up of a network of women’s organizations to press for implementation of the rural women’s law

The organizers sought out ‘non usual suspects’ as allies – political parties, local governments in producer communities, private sector traders. They also gave support to producer organizations to build capacity, especially of women members. All this was backed up with a public campaign through the media and farmers’ markets to change negative urban attitudes towards the peasantry.

What happened? When a new and progressive city authority drew up the ‘Bogotá Food Supply Plan 2007-15’, it recognized the importance of small-scale agriculture, and included a ‘fair price’ principle for its products. It also allocated $700,000 in municipal funds to help small farmers enter supply chains. Two farmers’ association representatives were included on the plan’s oversight board. Another major city, Cali, is now following suit and the Mayor of Bogotá is championing the initiative with colleagues from other Colombian towns.

As of December 2009, some 2,000 small producers were benefiting, seeing higher farmgate prices for their products and (interestingly and unexpectedly) lower prices at the farmers’ markets for poor urban consumers (due to shorter supply chains, cutting out middlemen etc).

The lobby of Congress led two national public entities to implement the law, helping rural women get identity documents and access to social protection systems. The Ministry of Agriculture set up a round table with rural women. Peasant and women’s organizations have now established a permanent coordination body on rural women’s rights to take forward the work. Interviews with women farmers suggest they now feel more confident about marketing their products.

Learning Points?

Good power analysis at the outset is essential to identify potential allies (Mayors, Congress) and blockers (national government).

You need to target attitudes as well as institutions – establishing the potential of smallscale agriculture in the minds of public, buyers and officials was crucial.

Lobbying for implementation of existing legislation is often easier/more effective than demanding new laws.

NGOs are often most effective when facilitating/coordinating to build trust between between polarized constituencies, eg farmers and local officials, rather than doing it themselves.

Marketing is often a bigger barrier for smallholders than production.

Organization is key and (as in the case of the rural women’s network) often takes wing and goes far beyond the aims of the initial project.

[And I never used the awful word 'livelihoods' once!]