How do we work out the returns to campaigning? Nice example from the Philippines

Like any campaigning organization, Oxfam has limited funds, and so needs to know whether its investment has paid off. The push from everyone and their dog to pursue a ‘results agenda’ and ‘value for money’ has added further momentum to that effort. That’s fine if you’re doing something that’s easy to measure, (say vaccinating kids, or cash transfers), and where attributing an effect to a particular cause is relatively straightforward, even if sometimes technical and expensive to establish. But what about influencing government policy, where there are dozens of voices, numerous events, and establishing any causal chain is both elusive and (inevitably) disputed (did anyone else grind their teeth watching Bono and Bob making poverty history the other night………?)

This matters because Oxfam increasingly sees a big part of its role as working with others to influence government policy, especially in developing countries, through programmes, partnerships and advocacy.

I got involved in a brain-bending conversation about this when trying to help out with a ‘killer fact’ on some smart campaigning by our team in the Philippines. At first glance, the success of the campaign for a ‘People’s Survival Fund’ was ideally suited to the task. Oxfam and partner iCSC (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities) commissioned research, and then launched a campaign in July 2010 calling on the government to set up a climate change adaptation fund. We did all the usual stuff – backgrounders for policy makers, popular mobilization, media work, celeb endorsements etc and (voila!) a US $25m a year People’s Survival Fund (PSF) was passed by the Philippine Congress in June 2012 after a two-year campaign. Result!

But was it value for money? At first glance it seems pretty easy to calculate the return on the money invested in the campaign – it’s just how much cash reaches poor people over a period of time, compared to the amount Oxfam spent on the campaign, corrected to take into account the fact that Oxfam wasn’t the only organization campaigning on the issue, and so shouldn’t take all the credit.

In mathematical terms, it’s even easier: Return to Campaign (RtC) = (AxBxC/D)

Where

A = The total new expenditure on climate change adaptation resulting from the PSF.

B= the proportion of that money that reaches poor people.

C = plausible % of attribution to the Oxfam campaign

D = Oxfam’s expenditure

We calculate the value for A, B, C and D as follows

A: P$1bn a year, taken over say a five year period, making it P$5bn (about US$125m).

B: If the money is equally distributed among all the people in the areas receiving PSF funds, some 45% would go to poor people (based on the 30-60% poverty rates in the relevant areas). But experience suggests that richer people may be more likely to get their hands on the cash. As we are looking for a conservative estimate here, we therefore assume that only 20% of the money would go to poor people

C: As the main funder, and lead agency in the lobby effort that led to PSF, it seems reasonable to take half the credit for the victory, so D = 0.5

D: Oxfam’s total expenditure over the three years of the campaign comes to P$7.4m

So using $Pm as the unit of calculation

Return to Campaign = (5000 x 0.2 x 0.5)/7.4 = 68

i.e. over a 5 year period, Oxfam’s campaign generated at least 68 times more resources for climate change adaptation than we invested in the campaign/for every $1 we spent we generated $60 for climate change adaptation for poor people.

Enter the nagging self doubt (otherwise known as Claire Hutchings in our monitoring and evaluation team). Every single one of those terms can be challenged:

A: assumes all the budget is disbursed and that none gets eaten up by overheads – any underspend or overhead costs would obviously reduce the amount available to reach poor people.

B: how do we know if that is a reasonable estimate of the proportion of the PSF that will ultimately reach poor people?

D: but what about all the other money Oxfam has spent globally and within the Philippines on raising awareness of climate change, supporting partners etc – didn’t that play a role in the victory?  What about cost of programming we’ve done in the Phillipines and other countries that have contributed to building the Oxfam brand, enabling us to ‘sit at the table’, participate in these conversations, influence etc.

And then we get to C: let’s assume for a moment that we can get an accurate costing of all the resources Oxfam has spent national and globally that have contributed to getting this issue on the agenda in the Philippines, and can reach a credible estimate of the proportion of PSF that will reach poor people.  The question remains how can we credibly attribute a % of any decision to the influence of the campaign?

For example, suppose years of global and national campaigns, by Oxfam and others, had got the issue to a tipping point, where only a small nudge was needed to persuade the government. Should the credit go to the patient slog of a multitude of actors, or the last minute glory-grabbing campaign (back to Bono and Bob)?  A light touch approach might be to ask people – staff, partners, government officials and perhaps most importantly, independent experts – to give us an estimate. But such questions risk being pretty leading (‘please attribute a percentage of attribution to the campaign’ is likely to get an inflated estimate), and open to bias. But doing something more rigorous, to investigate the main factors that contributed to the Parliament’s decision, would be expensive and still may not find the evidence needed to reach credible conclusions.  Now there’s a whole measurement challenge around evaluating campaigns and advocacy efforts, and through our Effectiveness Reviews we’re investing in trialing and refining an impact assessment approach for this work, one that builds from process tracing, to explore what it takes to reach credible conclusions about the contributions of our work to policy change (watch this space).

Let’s assume (for the moment) that such evaluations would allow us to credibly attribute our influence.  The fact is that these evaluations take time and resources.  Do we really need to commission an evaluation any time we want to talk about the resources that are being leveraged through our campaign work?  Or can we identify a rule of thumb, with all the necessary caveats and qualifications, that’s ‘good enough’, at least for cases that seem pretty clear cut.

What would be good enough in this case? Your thoughts please

Top tips for more effective advocacy

As I whizzed round the Philippines recently, the many conversations about advocacy brought together several past conversations and hobby horses. So here, laid before an indifferent world, (and because everyone loves lists) are my 7 top (and very random) tips for how to sharpen up your advocacy work.

Technical Fixes:

What’s your Home Page?: Everyone in the team should set Google Reader or similar as their home page. When they turn on the computer in the morning, they should spend half an hour reading its contents, before diving into the email backlog. (For non techies, Owen Barder explains how to set it up). Why? Because advocacy is about knowing what’s going on in the world outside, not being on top of your emails. And nothing impresses in the first meeting of the day more than casually asking ‘did you see Krugman’s piece in the New York Times this morning?’

How are you reducing your level of e-navel gazing? Irungu Houghton, who directs Oxfam’s Pan Africa programme uses number of business cards collected by members of his team as a performance indicator. Alternatively, what % of your emails end in @oxfam.org? How do you propose to reduce it? Do you remonstrate with colleagues who clog up your inbox by hitting ‘reply all’ and saying things like ‘yes’? Why? Hours in the day/opportunity costs – advocacy is about engaging with them, not us.

Getting/training the right people

Hire refugees from target organizations: nothing like an ex-City boy, or hydrocarbon girl for knowing how financial/oil & gas companies operate, and having credibility in speaking and lobbying. Ditto those who’ve worked for governments, whether in the North, or in developing countries (one reason why so many ex ODI fellows work for Oxfam).

Secondments: If you can’t hire from them, at least try and ensure your policy people go and spend a week or two working for a target institution (aid agency, government, private sector company). Why?  Because advocacy is about getting inside the heads of your targets, understanding their cultures, language and incentive systems. Can’t do that if you’re living in an echo chamber.

Immersions: You can’t do effective development advocacy if you haven’t spent time with a poor community in years. Why? You lose conviction and passion; you become just another bureaucrat; you start to resemble ‘them’. And what if (shudder) someone actually asks you ‘when was the last time you talked to a poor person’?

Apply your power analysis and theories of change internally: It always surprises me that when sophisticated Oxfam lobbyists, with a subtle grasp of power and the nature of change, want to get stuck into internal battles, they leave all those skills at the door. Windows of opportunity? Killer facts? Iconic stories? Coalitions of interest? Nope, moaning and finger wagging should do it……. Why? Because internal power battles matter – resources, organizational priority etc are crucial. And anyway, there’s nothing boosts team morale more than winning those arcane internal battles.

Finally, when was the last time you stole a good idea from a smaller organization? Why? Because big INGOs don’t know everything, and all the problems of navel-gazing, internal transactions etc mean that small organizations  are often quicker to spot and respond to an emerging issue or develop new ideas – we want to be more Google, less Microsoft, right? When I was at CAFOD, my two main UK targets were HM Treasury (to take up our suggestion) and Oxfam (to steal it). (Don’t get me wrong – you should of course credit the source of the idea).

See also Grey Panthers, harnessing universities, research for impact etc etc. Any other tips?

How should our influencing strategy vary with the kind of state we’re working in?

Despite the deeply unimpressive response to my last attempt (on top killer facts - not too late to chip in), I’m willing to give you another chance to provide us with unpaid consultancy crowdsource some useful ideas. This time it is helping us think through how an INGO’s influencing strategy at national level (whether through advocacy, programming or both combined) needs to adapt to the institutional environment and in particular, the nature of the state. To do this, we borrowed a handy 2×2 matrix from our humanitarian colleagues, categorizing states along two axes –Willing-Unwilling and Able-Unable (see pic).

‘Able’ refers to a state having the resources and governance structures to be effective (in delivering sustainable development).

A ‘willing state’ is one where a significant part of the state apparatus wants to deliver sustainable development and is willing to engage and involve active citizens.

Yes, I know these are very crude categories: states and countries are not homogeneous, and different strategies suit different issues, sectors and target institutions. But bear with me – the idea is to help us understand the different political contexts in which we work, and how we need to be organized for maximum impact.

So let’s unpack the four quadrants. For each one, I’m listing some tentative candidate countries, some general characteristics of the most suitable approach to influencing, and some specific strategies that might suit the political context.

1. Able & Willing
Possible candidates: Brazil; South Africa; Mexico; India? 

General Characteristics: In Able/Willing states, you can employ the full repertoire of influencing strategies, supporting civil society organizations to make maximum use of the ‘invited spaces’ offered by the state, but also supporting more confrontational approaches to create new spaces where necessary. But what works best?

Possible Influencing Strategies:
Support civil society strengthening and activism
Engage with countries’ role in the world
Engage publics (incl. using traditional & digital media) – middle class & poor
Convening and brokering discussions between different sectors (state, civil society, private sector, media, academics, faith-based etc)
Strong evidence base & research
Private sector – engage positive actors & push for regulation by state
Use legal system and test cases

2. Able & Unwilling
Possible candidates: Russia; China; Indonesia?

General Characteristics: People-on-the-streets style activism is likely to be counter-productive, but often the state technocracy is amenable to arguments based on evidence, especially when conducted through respected (state-approved) institutions. Beyond that, what else is possible, especially to strengthen citizens’ voice?

Possible Influencing Strategies:
High quality evidence & research
Partnerships with respected think tanks
Programmes that demonstrate best practice
Influence private sector CSR and encourage investment best practice
Support civil society space

3. Unable & Willing
Possible candidates: Haiti; Zambia; Ghana; Bangladesh; Kenya; Nepal; Mozambique; Nigeria?

General Characteristics: What do you do when the state’s door is open, but there is nothing much behind it? It’s all very well to support demands for change, but INGOs may also have to build the supply side – working with the state at local or national level to enable it to respond to those demands. Plus what’s the right way to engage with non-state actors to build state capacity in the long term (rather than undermine it by creating parallel systems)?

Possible Influencing Strategies:
Build civil society capacity & active citizenship
Programmes that could be taken to scale
Influence donors
Brokering role with private sector
Support communities in defending against abuses
Technical/advisory support to local/national state
Engagement with important non-state actors (faith-based, traditional authorities, other)

4. Unable & Unwilling
Possible candidates: DRC; Afghanistan; Zimbabwe; Ethiopia; Pakistan; South Sudan; Mali; Somalia; Yemen; Egypt

General Characteristics: The most difficult environments in which to do influencing (or pretty much anything else, apart from selling arms). We can support basic ‘bearing witness’ style work, and engage with non-state actors such as aid donors, but what else is possible to build a brighter future in some pretty dark places?

Possible Influencing Strategies:
Donor engagement
Humanitarian advocacy
Bear witness
Help provide support and “cover” for civil society?
Engagement with important non-state actors (faith-based, traditional authorities, other)
Concentrate on building next generation (eg work with student leaders)

So does this resonate with your reading/experience of influencing in different polities? Or is it too crude and generalised to be useful? Over to you…….

How to write Killer Facts and Graphics – what are your best examples?

Time for a spot of crowd sourcing. We’ve had research guidelines on our intranet for ages, covering everything from survey design to writing for impact. Now we’re updating them and, more importantly, making some of them public on Oxfam’s Policy and Practice website. I’ve been lumbered with revising the ‘Killer Fact’ two pager, so naturally thought I would try and use the blog to get other people to do the work for me. Here’s the draft - all comments welcome, but particularly, give me your best killer facts under each heading (or suggest new headings) – with links please. Honourable mentions to the best suggestions.

‘Killer Facts’, are those punchy, memorable, headline-grabbing statistics that cut through the technicalities to fire people up about changing the world. They are picked up and repeated endlessly by the media and politicians. They are known as ‘killer’ facts because if they are really effective, they ‘kill off’ the opposition’s arguments. The right killer fact or graphic can have more impact than the whole of a well-researched report.

Suggestions for how to do it

There are various kinds of killer facts. Most involve some kind of comparison:

Killer Graphics

Graphs can speak louder than words, as can infographics [example below]. They can illustrate the contrasts of killer facts but in addition

• Show sudden changes in long term trends, e.g. food prices
• Show projections into the future

Do’s and Don’ts

DO:

• Be totally certain of the data you use to create your killer fact. The sources must be reliable and respected, and as up to date as possible. You should reference them in your report.
• Be ready to provide sources to media or politicians – if the killer fact succeeds, they will be on the phone very quickly and you need your sources ready!
• Make sure that the fact can’t be misinterpreted, i.e. that the language is not too convoluted. Otherwise journalists will attempt to re-write it in plain terms and accidentally twist your meaning. The same applies to killer graphics: make sure they can be readily understood and not given alternative interpretations.
• Make sure the best killer facts are included in the executive summary and the press release – ask someone other than the author, e.g. a media officer, to read through the paper and pick out the best ones.
• Plan ahead: early on when working on your report, decide on the kind of killer facts you would really like to have. Does the data already exist to fill it out? If not, is it possible to generate that data?
• Working out killer facts can take a long time – it often involves adding statistics up in a way that they are not usually added up. So make the time, or get a research assistant to help you with all the calculations.

DON’T:

• Cut corners on killer facts. They are crucial to a report’s impact. If you are exhausted and have run out of inspiration (a common problem late on in the writing process!) ask a media officer or campaigner to help with ideas.
• Use too many killer facts in one paper: focus on the most powerful. Otherwise they overwhelm the reader.
• Rely on killer facts that have been overused in the past: keep it contemporary, relevant, and interesting.
• Use a killer fact that is not credibly sourced, even if it fits your message. It is not worth damaging your credibility for quick hit.

And remember – if in doubt, leave it out!

Over to you…….

So the world is a complex system – what should aid agencies do differently?

Had a fascinating chat with Jean Boulton (right) this week. Jean is a physicist-by-training (a real one, unlike me – I jumped ship after my first degree). These days she is a management consultant and social scientist who has been working to bring ideas of complexity theory into organisations for many years. More recently she has become interested in international development – hence the chat.

Jean argues that facing up to complexity is not an option. Behaving as if the world is stable and predictable when it is not does not make it so. Such mechanical thinking can lead to blindness to change and difficulty in adapting to shocks and fast changes. So a shift in mindset is needed. Don’t assume the world is a smoothly functioning machine: review progress often, pick up on unintended consequences, look for the unexpected, scan for signs of change.

But there is still a dilemma here. Some people use these ideas to suggest that a) The world is complex, so there’s no point trying to understand it – just do what you feel, or b) The world is complex, so we should give up trying to influence change in any particular direction and just pick civil society/other partners and accompany them through thick and thin. In fact, complexity theory has a much richer set of implications for development policy and practice, but they can be hard to nail.

So in addition to Jean’s more general points, here are some more specific candidates:

Firebreaks: forests and forest fires are classic complex systems, in that you can’t predict where the fire will take place, or how it will spread. But you can still introduce ‘circuit breakers’ into the system by clearing firebreaks in the forest that will slow down the spread of fire. In the development world, the closest parallel is perhaps with financial systems – e.g. suspending share trading once a certain level of volatility has been reached. What other examples are there?

No regrets policies: back to the financial system – we can’t be certain what kinds of speculation, if any, increase food prices, but could we take steps that would be effective if speculation is indeed the guilty party, while not harming the useful operations of financial markets if it isn’t?

Decentralization:  bringing decision makers closer to the ground makes sense in complex systems where they are required to spot trends and react to them, rather than develop the master plan and implement it.

Enabling environment: rather than ‘picking winners’ – e.g. backing a particular social actor, technology etc, in complex systems where such winners could come from anywhere, it might make more sense to focus on creating a broader enabling environment to support would-be change agents. Things like data transparency, literacy, health and education, communications infrastructure (see internet pic), or even trying to influence the underlying norms and values that guide human behaviour.

Regulation: If the previous point sounds a bit like the Washington Consensus, that’s because complexity theory sometimes risks veering towards blind faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of markets. Jean’s counter-argument is that the self-organising invisible hand does not necessarily lead to ‘the good’. It depends on the values and intentions of the actors. The work of complexity economist Brian Arthur emphasises that free markets tend to lead to the big getting bigger and the powerful more powerful. The voice of the powerless and the voice of the future are soon lost. Governance, social movements, even good old-fashioned regulation, can be crucial in countering this ‘pull to power’.

Run multiple experiments: If you can’t pick winners, why not pick 20 runners and see which ends up being the fastest, then pick that one? This is essentially what we are doing with the Chukua Hatua project in Tanzania, and it seems like a really sensible way to intervene in complex systems.

Real-time data: functioning effectively in complex systems means spotting new (and inherently unpredictable) trends as soon as possible and reacting to them. Better real-time data on everything from nutrition to levels of popular discontent is important, but so is creating the right set of incentives and mindsets to ensure that organizations actually respond to the data and see the patterns within it.

Monitoring and Evaluation: in complex systems, trying to attribute an outcome to a particular activity is often a fool’s errand. But that doesn’t mean you give up on measurement altogether. One method focuses on the use of journals, diaries and looking for patterns in what Jean calls ‘narrative fragments’ which can all help detect impact in complex systems, even if they don’t provide the illusory certainty of ‘intervention A is 36% more effective than intervention B’.

Judging the context: Jean is keen on this one. Not all situations are endlessly uncertain and fluid. We need to make some judgements – what parts of our work and context are relatively stable – and the task is to do well what we are doing; what parts are very unstable and the focus is on agility and adaptation; where do we experience rigidity and ‘lock-in’ and the task is to challenge and disrupt?

This week Jean is in Northern Kenya, exploring what her ideas can bring to our work with pastoralists there – should be a fascinating example of theory meets practice.

By the way, regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Eric Beinhocker and was blown away by his book arguing that evolutionary theory was a much better model for the economy than the 19th century physics of equilibrium. Turns out that Thorstein Veblen got there a bit earlier: in 1898 he wrote a paper ‘Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science’. Sorry Eric.

INGOs in Economic Diplomacy – adapting to a new world order

One of the lectures I most enjoy giving is to the LSE course on Economic Diplomacy, (part of its International Political Economy MSc), where most years I trot along and ramble on for half an hour about International NGOs (INGOs) and advocacy. The questions and discussion that follow are invariably fascinating (for me anyway). The course has now been turned into a book, The New Economic Diplomacy, with chapters from negotiators  and academics on the theory and practice of economic negotiation. If you’re involved in advocacy, it’s well worth taking a look. Here’s some excerpts from my chapter, co-authored with Phil Bloomer, which used Oxfam’s climate change campaign as a case study.

There are a number of doubts and ‘challenges’ (as problems are now known) about the evolution of INGO advocacy work. The shift to a more variable geometry of campaigning, combining shifting combinations of national, regional and global advocacy, is a proper response both to the increasingly multipolar distribution of power, and the recognition that national decisions continue to dominate many development issues (the importance of global processes has sometimes been exaggerated in the past).

But it also creates some real tensions: global campaigns move rapidly from one event or policy target to another. In contrast, national campaigns often move to a slower rhythm, spending years painstakingly building alliances between dissimilar groups. Such tensions were epitomised by the 2005 ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign, which declared victory and closed down after some significant achievements on aid and debt relief at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, even though the anti-poverty coalitions it had worked with in many developing countries saw their jobs as very far from over.

Most effective INGO campaigning either involves asking for more money (aid, debt relief, climate finance), or is focussed on ‘stopping bad stuff happening’ (e.g. premature trade liberalization via the WTO). Often, it follows a basic campaign recipe of clearly defined ‘problem, solution and villain’. Positive, propositional campaigning is much harder – alliances easily fragment over what level of reform is sufficient; political and ideological differences surface over what kind of world the INGO seeks. Nowhere is this starker than on climate change, where huge differences persist on the kind of ecological, economic and political models required to avoid catastrophe.
 
Despite the recognition of the reality of multipolarity, the 1970s division of the world into rich ‘North’ and poor ‘South’ remains deeply rooted in the hearts and minds of many INGO staff, as well as in the rhetoric of developing country governments. This makes it particularly difficult for INGOs to speak out over conflicts between developing countries, where disparities of power and influence can lead to deeply lop-sided agreements on a range of issues. In the case of climate change, Oxfam struggled with divisions within the G77 umbrella group of developing countries, a problem that will only grow greater as the emissions of emerging countries such as China grow, along with the damage to the most vulnerable countries.

A similar tension occurs on naming key southern governments that are failing their poor people. INGOs like Oxfam are adept at criticising rich-country governments for their failings on climate, aid, trade, debt, but often shy away from criticism of other governments’ appalling record on poverty reduction or climate adaptation. This is partly because of issues of legitimacy, partly due to sensitivities around not occupying the space of national allies and partners, but also partly because of concern about the future of Oxfam’s country programmes, which rely on government acceptance. Nevertheless, this can lead to INGOs not being effective in challenging the greatest blockers to poverty reduction at a national level.

A further consequence of multipolarity is that INGO tactics that have evolved to influence largely open, accountable governments may be of little value when targeting more closed systems, especially those in countries where space for civil society is limited. How to influence Chinese policy in Africa, or Gulf countries that fund land grabs in Africa?

INGO campaigns continue to privilege the economic and the technocratic, over the political. Insufficient attention is given to power analysis, with many campaigns instead exhibiting ‘if I ruled the world’ advocacy, divorced from real world distribution of power, and decision-making processes. There are institutional reasons for this – an overly political stance carries high risks for many INGOs, whether legal, financial and physical, as well as the more subtle reputational risk of losing the ear of decision makers.

Linked to this focus on the economic and the technocratic is a weak understanding of models of change. Pushed partly by the world of fund-raising and programming, large INGOs inhabit a ‘planners’ world’ of 5 year strategic plans and continuous and predictable change. The larger the INGO, the more Byzantine the processes for adapting and changing those plans. This can lead to a degree of inertia that makes it hard to react to opportunities for influence, such as events, shocks, changes of government etc.  A good example of this was the lack of agility many organisations, including Oxfam, showed in moving fast to link the global financial crisis with the need to promote a transition to a low carbon economy, the so-called ‘Green New Deal’. There were a small number of fleet-of-foot organisations that were capable of making this rapid shift. But for many larger organisations, it took too long to turn the super-tanker around.

Of course, agility is now facilitated greatly by digital communications technologies. These offer both opportunities and challenges to large INGOs. Viral campaigning and communications offer massive potential for citizens’ empowerment and participation, but compared to the past, these are much more on citizens’ terms than Oxfam’s. This demands that INGOs like Oxfam reduce control of their campaign messaging and let their constituencies play with and adapt the campaign to suit themselves and their on-line communities. This implies a profound shift in its campaigning approach, away from one of ‘pushing’ campaign messages out to supporters, and ‘giving’ them campaign actions to take; towards ‘facilitating’ supporters to campaign in their on-line networks and for them to design how they want to go about it.

Where is the world of INGOs headed? The growing obsolescence of the North-South frame will only deepen. INGOs must adjust if they are to be capable of persuading the G20, rather than the G8, of their cause.

The sustained rise of citizens’ power and digital communications means that INGOs must work in effective networks and coalitions across countries and regions, supporting national voices that relate to their campaigns. The rise of continental organisations like the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) and other international networks of like-minded NGOs, along with agile, global, digital organisations like Avaaz challenge the financial and political dominance of their large northern colleagues.

With growing maturity, recognition, and influence will come greater demands for public scrutiny. INGOs that get involved in campaigning need to ensure they are transparent and accountable, something that is only fitfully occurring at the moment in many organizations.

Finally, the recessions in many of the richest countries mean that INGO income is down or flat, either through less generous public donations, or through cuts in government funding. For INGOs that became dependent on the latter, the implications can be severe, though perhaps healthy in the long term. Either way, fiscal austerity will restrain the expansion of INGOs, and perhaps the civil societies of the BRICs and similar will grow to take some of that space. In the long term, that is surely inevitable anyway. 

But overall, INGOs and other non-government actors will continue to complicate and complement (though seldom compliment!) the work of diplomats and decision makers, who will need to invest in both understanding them and learning how to work together for common goals.

Advocacy v Service Delivery in Russia: FP2P flashback

Next up in this holiday week selection of largely unread posts from the early days of the blog, a story from Russia

Contrasting case studies from Oxfam GB’s Russia programme, which has tried different ways of supporting Russia’s estimated 5.6 million disabled people. Traditionally, we have run a microfinance programme which has benefited a total of 40,000 people – 5,500 recipients plus other beneficiaries, such as family members. Total expenditure to date some £2m ($3.1m and falling…..). Recently, however, we tried something different – advocacy.

Up until this year, disabled people in Russia had to register every year in order to be entitled to work and to receive benefits from the Russian government. This proved to be both time consuming (up to six months of every year), humiliating and sometimes ridiculous. Someone with an amputated leg had to prove every year that the leg had not magically grown back over the intervening twelve months. And only then would it be possible to get entitlement to benefits.

Natalia, the leader of a self help group for disabled people in Russia, supported by Oxfam, told us what this meant for her, “I am permanently disabled, and yet every year I have to go through a six month process to prove to the government that I am disabled – this process is humiliating and tiring. You go back and forth and back and forth to the doctors and go through so much bureaucracy. I am young and fit so I am able to do this process but imagine if you are a pensioner in an isolated village – it is impossible. Those who have been injured and have lost limbs, still have to prove every year that they are disabled – it is a degrading system!”

Working with the Global Call to Action on Poverty (GCAP) coalition in Russia, Oxfam staffer Vitaliy Kartamyshev included the issue of registration for disabled people in a more wide-ranging report on healthcare in Russia. The report proposed a change to the regulation so that people who are permanently disabled only have to register once in their lives.

In March 2008 the report was launched at a national press conference. This was followed by intensive lobbying of senior government officials at the Ministry of Health and the parliament (Duma). The regulation № 247 on “introducing changes in the rules of recognizing disability” was passed on April 7, 2008 by the Ministry of Health . The government adopted the precise change in regulation concerning disabled people proposed by GCAP.

Total cost of the campaign, in terms of Oxfam spending? About £100,000 ($155,000). This change will affect tens of thousands of people, including an unknown number that have simply given up registering because of the hassle, and may now be persuaded to claim benefits.

It’s hard to compare the two approaches – service delivery is pleasingly concrete, and so it is easier to assess its impact. Advocacy work often suffers from issues of attribution (did the Russian government change its law because of the campaign, or would it have done so anyway?) and impact (how do you measure the impact on people’s wellbeing of not having to waste six months a year wrangling with officialdom?) Advocacy more closely resembles a venture capitalist approach – of ten such campaigns, maybe only one or two will achieve their aims, but they will ‘win big’, whereas service delivery appeals more to the predictable world of logframes and planners. What’s clear from this example, though, is that both have their place in the NGO armoury, which is why, over time, advocacy has become more significant in Oxfam and other NGOs’ work (though it still remains a small proportion of the total spend).

This post was first published in October 2008

Making a difference in Indonesian cities – new research on NGO advocacy

Another fascinating study circulated by the Development Leadership Program.  As its title suggests, ‘How civil society organizations work politically to promote pro-poor policies in decentralized Indonesian cities’, published by the Asia Foundation, analyses CSOs’ impact in two cities in Central Java where policies were passed that expanded health insurance coverage for the poor: Semarang (pop. 1.5 million) and Pekalongan (pop. 300,000).

The cities’ all-important mayors couldn’t have been more different – a corrupt businessman in Semarang; a charismatic medical doctor committed to the poor in Pekalongan. Yet in both, CSOs led by an impressive NGO called Pattiro were able to make a real difference. The paper argues that this explodes the received wisdom on Indonesia – that progress depends entirely on being fortunate enough to have enlightened and non-corrupt political leaders. Some highlights:

“Civil society organizations are increasingly skilled at influencing local policy outcomes, regardless of the leadership qualities among elected officials. We argue that as Indonesian CSOs take advantage of opportunities to access local policy-making processes, it is their ability to navigate the political landscape and “work politically” that primarily determines their success. By “working politically” we mean that CSOs are able to identify allies and opponents within and outside the government, mobilize constituencies and engage in coalitions for change, and use their political power to negotiate agreements with elites on resource utilization that promotes development. In this process, CSOs are more and more shaping how Indonesia’s State institutions govern at the local level.”

Conclusion?

“While many analysts of public expenditure suggest that eliminating user fees for basic services is mostly a matter of improved management of revenues and spending, these case studies suggest that technical solutions must be coupled with political positioning and lobbying by allies of reform, from outside and within government and the legislature. Civil society organizations in Indonesia are increasingly sophisticated political players who can partner with development programs to identify and mobilize coalitions for reform. These case studies demonstrate that CSOs can “work politically” while remaining relatively politically neutral.

Supporting non-State actors to conduct political-economy analysis, and to strategically utilize this information to expand their political capital, is an effective development investment. These cases show that a relatively small number of “champions” across civil society, the executive, the bureaucracy, and Parliament were able to utilize their agency to garner broader political support for reform by offering a range of incentives to politicians. When powerful agents were more oriented toward political patronage – as in the case of Mayor Sukawi [in Semarang] – civil society could resort to punitive action (such as reporting violations to the Corruption Eradication Commission) alongside providing political incentives (such as mobilizing Parliamentarians against the mayor). When powerful agents are oriented toward reform – as in the case of Mayor Basyir [in Pekalangan] – civil society effectively positioned themselves as political insiders, and significantly influenced how policy and spending were designed.’

The paper is far too rich to summarize properly, so please try and read it for yourself, but some other points that seemed to me as of wider significance include:

• The willingness (nudged by funding from the Asia Foundation) of NGOs to work with non-traditional religious partners, in the shape of Muslim mass-based organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), which has huge political clout (and 30 million members) in Indonesia.

• The close attention to individuals and relationships, using both formal and informal channels of contact to cultivate allies within the bureaucracy. One nice touch – hiring as consultants people the decision makers respected (and listened to).

• The importance of legal capacity – especially in drafting municipal legislation to lock in reforms and galvanize the bureaucracy.

• The importance of generating the right kind of information – Pattiro produced the most comprehensive budget analyses Indonesia has yet seen as the basis for its advocacy.

• Combining insider and outsider strategies, for example building coalitions of CSOs to hold the local governments accountable for implementing the reforms after they were approved.

• Working with the media (often an NGO strength).

• Seizing key moments – elections, corruption trials, changes in leadership or senior officials.

This is all very different from the damning critique of CSOs emerging from the Africa Power and Poverty Programme. That may say something about differences between African and Indonesian CSOs, but I suspect it says at least as much about the differences between the priors of the researchers involved.

The Policy Funnel – a way to sharpen up our advocacy?

We had an interesting blue sky session last week on the nature of campaigning, and looked at the ‘Policy Funnel’, an idea developed by Nick Mabey and Anita Neville at E3G. The funnel tries to capture the dynamics of public  policy formulation, whereby a generalised public concern turns into a debate, then particular policy proposals and finally a specific text or other kind of agreement.

Outside players (NGOs, businesses, academics etc) can influence at any stage, but they need to adapt their tactics and communications according to whereabouts in the funnel a given issue has reached.

For NGOs like Oxfam, when a new idea is still in the general  public debate stage, we can use our presence in developing countries to bear witness to the human impact (of food prices, climate change, user fees or whatever) and our media skills to make sure that message reaches a lot of people. A typical example would be the ‘climate change is about people, not just polar bears’ approach in the early stages of the current climate talks (see pic).

Once things start to funnel down into particular decision processes, we shift gear into advocacy mode, building coalitions of allies, targeting blockers, winning over waverers. It’s also important to find ways to express our concerns in ways that fit with the particular process – e.g. the UNFCCC agenda on climate, the Doha round on trade, or the G8 or G20 on aid and development. ‘Stop the world and start again’ is unlikely to get much traction, whereas ‘change the agreement on agriculture by adding this paragraph to allow governments to protect small farmers’ is more likely to get a hearing.

Once the negotiations are well advanced, that moment for initial framing disappears, and it’s about pushing particular text (e.g. more money, or a particular minor change of language). That means working closely with allies inside the room, but also using an outsider strategy with media and public to push good solutions and prevent backsliding.

I’d be interested in reactions to this model – I found it helpful but it doesn’t entirely describe how we work, in that we are often acting simultaneously at several points in the funnel – e.g. on climate change we are simultaneously bearing witness to human impact and arguing over details in the text. So maybe the funnel is conceptual rather than chronological.

It also doesn’t capture the importance of opportunism – spotting and reacting to windows of opportunity, eg picking up the Robin Hood Tax in response to the European and American fiscal crises.

Any thoughts?

How do NGOs work with the private sector?

Earlier this week I spent an intense two days discussing Oxfam’s private sector strategy with our big cheeses, joined by a variety of real live capitalists, whose views ranged all the way from ‘Oxfam is irrelevant’ to people who closely resemble NGOs in suits. Far too much to process into anything coherent, but here are some initial random impressions.

Is it ‘us and them’ or ‘we’? The underlying views of Oxfam staff are scattered along a spectrum from anti-capitalist watchdog to anti-poverty business partner. Where you sit depends partly on your job (campaigners tend to be more anti-, fundraisers more pro-), partly on your personal story and psychology. As an organization, we aim to play both roles – insider and outsider, but the centrifugal forces driving them apart are strong. It takes a certain kind of person to sit down and bond with a captain of industry one day, and then slag them off to the media the next. We have some of them, but for the rest, there is a tendency to opt for one or other camp, leading to some difficult exchanges.

What is the private sector anyway? We don’t have a ‘state strategy’ or a ‘civil society strategy’ so why have one on the private sector? I came to the conclusion that we were actually discussing something much more specific – a ‘large company engagement strategy’. It didn’t include structural discussions about how markets contribute to development (industrial policy and upgrading, taxation and social contract etc) or much on those parts of the private sector we probably know best – women in the informal sector, small farmers (except when they sell to big companies). It’s not easy to keep those on the agenda (I raised corporate taxation with a couple of the business reps and got a pretty frosty reception), so you need to make sure you consider them separately if they drop off your ‘private sector strategy’.

Even within this narrower definition, there are subcategories. We identified four:

· Corporate giving: orphanages and stuff – by far the most widespread. My favourite example of in-kind giving was persuading a mobile phone operator in Cambodia to equip women community leaders with mobile phones so they could stay in touch with each other (the few women leaders feel very isolated). The neat touch was making sure the phones were pink, so the men wouldn’t ‘borrow’ them.

· Value chain restructuring: bumping up the role of smallholders in supply chains, or improving labour rights

· Pro poor products and services – bottom of the pyramid business

· Social enterprises – the new boom of hybrid not-just-for-profit businesses

Why do companies talk to us? I think this is what is meant by the ubiquitous fuzzword ‘value proposition’. What’s in it for them? Setting our own bipolar combination of hubris and insecurity to one side, the reasons the business folk actually gave were quite useful and helpful to keep in mind next time we are pitching to a ‘corporate’, whether in insider or outsider mode. Firms talk to Oxfam/other large NGOs because:

· We are both ‘deeply valued’ and ‘feared’ (we are also apparently, sometimes ‘hated’ but I doubt that leads to much engagement)

· The level of public trust in an NGO is often higher than in a business, and so we can get people who would not normally talk to each other (hostility or different worlds) into a room and keep them there until they make a deal. This brokering, convening role feels like the way we will go in the future.

· We are useful partners in talking to third parties, like governments or funders, when they would not accept talking to business alone.

· We understand wider issues beyond the remit of business (what one exec referred to as ‘the poverty thing’)

If businesses have a higher opinion of NGOs than we sometimes have of ourselves, that might explain why, according to one business rep, we ‘don’t ask for enough’ – we should make bigger and more frequent demands of business. However, think hard about what you are going to ask for. If you say ‘we want you to do X’ and the reply is ‘OK, but we want you to help us do it’, will you be able to follow through?

Finally, getting symbolic action to influence other constituencies such as government or public opinion (e.g. persuading Nike to pull out of the US Chamber of Commerce over its stance on climate change) is likely to be easier than stuff that directly hits the bottom line.

Lots of other stuff, but that’s (more than) enough for one post.