Aid and complex systems cont’d: timelines, incubation periods and results

I’m at one of those moments where all conversations seem to link to each other, I see complex systems everywhere, and I’m wondering whether I’mstarting to lose my marbles. Happily, lots of other people seem to be suffering from the same condition, and a bunch of us met up earlier this week with Matt Andrews, who was in the UK to promote his fab new book Limits to Institutional Reform in Development (I  rave reviewed it here). The conversation was held under Chatham House rules, so no names, no institutions etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: more thoughts from Matt Andrews on his blog

How to Plan when you don’t know what is going to happen? Redesigning aid for complex systems

They’re funny things, speaker tours. On the face of it, you go from venue to venue, churning out the same presentation – more wonk-n-roll than rock-n-roll. But you are also testing your arguments, adding slides where there are holes, deleting ones that don’t work. Before long the talk has morphed into something very different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to end foreign aid and avoid a punch-up

An edited version of this piece appeared on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site on Saturday

The spat between South Africa and Britain over ending its (very small) aid programme has sparked another round of debate about whether British aidshould be going to middle income countries (the last round was over aid to India, which seems to particularly rile the Daily Mail).

But whatever the rights and wrongs of ending aid to South Africa (whose economy is growing slowly, but with sky high levels of inequality and 10 per cent of all the world’s people living with HIV and Aids), aid agencies are inevitably going to have to shift money around as the world changes. Countries rise and fall, aid priorities change and new opportunities (like the opening up of Myanmar) will arise, to which aid should of course respond.

That churning process is accelerating as more and more countries reduce their dependence on aid thanks to economic growth, rising revenues from oil and gas and surging remittances from their migrant workers overseas. Those upward curves contrast with falling aid volumes.  Total global aid flows have been falling for the last two years as, with the sole glorious exception of the UK, the ‘Austerians’ in what are sometimes known as ‘the formerly rich countries’ take the axe to aid spending.

What’s more, many developing country governments can’t wait to end aid – it affronts the dignity of the Big Men (as they usually are) in charge to be seen as asking for handouts. As two Ugandan ministers once proudly told me ‘when 60% of our revenues came from aid, we had to go to the World Bank on both knees. Now we’ve got it down to 30%.’ (Unfortunately, I blew it by joking ‘ah, so do you just go on one knee now, then?’ They were not amused.)

So the issue is not whether aid partnerships sometimes have to end, but how. Oxfam has some ideas on that – several pages of guidelines on ‘exit planning’ in fact. They are about ending funding to particular grassroots organisations, but they offer useful lessons for DFID and others contemplating exits from entire countries. Talk to the partner from the outset, help them fill any organisational gaps and weaknesses before you go; agree (don’t impose) a clear timetable for phasing out funding and crucially, agree what kind of relationship you want once the cash tap has been turned off. Because as one Oxfam partner from Pakistan put it, ‘We want to be treated as a “relationship” and not just as a “partner”’. Partnerships are for projects, but relationships go beyond that. We should have a relationship in the future, even if there is no project money.’‘ Sadly, the unpleasantness over DFID’s exit from South Africa means that remaining relationship has got off to a rocky start.

I imagine DFID has similar guidelines, but those can’t legislate for ministers shooting from the hip (or if conspiracy theorists are to be believed, throwing a bone to the Tory right ahead of local elections last week). Still, if civil servants in the land of ‘Yes Minister’ can’t manage their political masters, what are we coming to?

Joking aside, this matters. Aid agencies need a clear understanding of what constitutes a responsible exit. After all, aid should bequeath a legacy of trust and friendship between the UK and the rising powers of Africa and Asia, (who incidentally, we are going to need in future), but in this case that legacy has been (temporarily, I hope) squandered. Ending the aid relationship should be a moment of mutual celebration, not public mud-slinging.

Update: and here’s a new report on the subject of responsible exit

The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development: a big new book by Matt Andrews

There’s nothing like an impending meeting with the author to make you dig out your scrounged review copy of his book. So I spent my flight to Boston last week reading Limits (sorry the full title is just too clunky).  And luckily for the dinner conversation, I loved it.

Limits is about why change doesn’t happen, and how it could. It synthesizes the ‘groundswell’ of disquiet about the failure of the governance and institutional reforms that have been promoted for many years now by aid agencies like the World Bank. And it’s not just a whinge – there are plenty of ideas for how aid agencies can do better. The book is particularly useful for those working on fragile states – lots of the positive examples (as well as some failures) come from Afghanistan, Ivory Coast and elsewhere, although there is a bit of ‘why can’t everywhere be more like Rwanda?’ in there too.

Overall, the approach reminded me of Dani Rodrik’s great book, In Search of Prosperity, and Matt says Rodrik (a fellow Harvard prof) was influential in pushing him to nail down the always-elusive ‘so whats’.

Limits summarizes research and thinking from disparate disciplines, with lots of fascinating case studies (he’s put in the legwork to build a serious empirical basis for his conclusions). His big idea is captured in a new acronym, PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation), which, as he pointed out, is similar to the Participatory Institutional Appraisal idea I raised in a recent blog. I’m not sure if PDIA will catch on – it could have done with a snappier title, as could the book – but the content is really important if you are interested in aid, institutions or governance.

So what does it say? Firstly, that we have a big failure on our hands. The spate of projects and programmes around institutional reform has at best a mixed record of success; in many countries institutions have actually deteriorated in terms of effectiveness, corruption etc.

Limits argues that governments’ real motive for committing to reforms is often not about improving performance, but is actually about ‘signalling’ a willingness to ‘modernize’ (which usually means move power from state to market, deregulation and privatization, increase budget controls and  accountability and reduce debt). It often involves ‘isomorphic mimicry’ – if poor countries mimic the institutions of rich ones, then – voila! – they too will become rich. The trouble is that the current aid system rewards such signalling. When the reform fails, a new government typically introduces a new round of signalling and off we go again.

Uganda is the Daniel Day Lewis of isomorphic mimicry: according to the think tank Global Integrity, it has the best anti-corruption laws in the world, (it scores 99/100), but came 126^th in the 2008 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Oops. More generally ‘developing countries are now more likely than developed countries to boast systems that resemble international best practice.’ So if laws and best practice were decisive, Uganda would rapidly be overtaking Norway.

Such reforms as do take place happen on the fringes of real power ‘in areas that are externally visible and where reform is influenced by concentrated sets of reform champions.’ Eg the ‘ceremonial’ world of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Or perhaps (at the risk of sounding like a bad loser) the MDGs…..

Aid agencies often focus on identifying and supporting a small number of champions, but Limits debunks such ‘decent chap-ism’ as an ‘illusory promise’. He quotes Brecht’s ‘Life of Galileo’: ‘Unhappy is the land that has no heroes….. No. Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.’

If not single heroes, then what kind of leadership is needed for genuine reform? ‘Institutional entrepreneurs’ are essential, but there’s a paradox – those in power benefit from the status quo, so are unlikely to support change. That can change ‘when something creates a bridge between these highly embedded agents with power and low embedded agents with new ideas.’ And they often need convenors and brokers to help them overcome barriers of distrust and status.

But there’s a further group – the ‘distributed agents’ that are required to implement what the entrepreneurs come up with. And for ownership and relevance, they need to be engaged from the outset, not as ‘adopters’.

Otherwise, ‘reforms often progress well when under the control of champions in concentrated agencies directly involved in designing change, but falter when deconcentrated agencies must implement what these agencies design.’

The book examines the broader contexts for institutional reform, pointing out that there are always ‘multiple logics’ that govern how people think and act. Sometimes one logic is dominant, at other times there are strong competing alternative logics. The job of change agents, whether internal or external, is to back the good guys when there is genuine competition, but otherwise incubate alternative logics to challenge a damaging status quo. Either approach needs a deep understanding of what is there, rather than an imported blueprint for best practice.

Matt recognizes that shocks are important drivers of change, but the argument goes into much more interesting terrain than the standard spiel. Shocks disrupt, weakening the dominant logic and testing the viability of alternatives. That creates the conditions for change, but the change process itself needs to be broad and incremental – how do discontinuity and gradualism fit together? I think the idea is that shocks create the conditions for reform, but reform itself can’t be sudden.

But there may be trade-offs, as the appetite for reform may fall away soon after a shock, so the question (which the book doesn’t answer) is what do reformers need to put in place before the window of opportunity closes, to pave the way for that longer, more inclusive process? I’ve got a horrible feeling the rise of Thatcherism may provide the perfect case study here…..

What happens after shocks is a five stage process (this is new to me, from the literature on institutional change):

• Deinstitutionalization: encourage the growing discussion on the problems of the current model
• Preinstitutionalization: groups begin innovating in search of alternative logics, involving ‘distributive agents’ (eg low ranking civil servants) to demonstrate feasibility
• Theorization: proposed new institutions are explained to the broader community, needing a ‘compelling message about change.’
• Diffusion: as more ‘distributive agents’ pick it up, a new consensus emerges
• Reinstitutionalization: legitimacy (hegemony) is achieved. We all go off to the pub.

As to what outsiders can do, again he has some sensible recommendations, while desperately trying to avoid creating a new blueprint of his own:

• Focus on identifying, highlighting and exploring problems, but leave solutions to local players. Accept that this process may take time
• Provide opportunities for local actors to reflect on problems – convening and brokering
• Focus on clearing out the obstacles to new approaches (deinstitutionalization)
• Fund flexible learning-by-doing approaches to finding solutions

Specific suggestions include Cash on Delivery Aid, stringent tests for all ‘manifestations of good, better or best practice’ and creating institutional reform trust funds that can disburse smaller grants fast in response to evolving local processes.

At those happy moments when governments buy in to the need for reform (he cites Rwanda’s decentralization and Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (right) as examples), Andrews proposes ‘purposive muddling’ – slow, experimental and incremental approaches. Outsiders can contribute by exposing decision makers to experiences elsewhere, helping them develop hybrids best-suited to local contexts, and then test them. They can also capture and publicise successes to build momentum and buy-in.

Outsiders should also look beyond champions in positions of authority, and try and cultivate ‘mobilizers’ who connect different constituencies and spread ideas. An interesting survey of those involved in 12 different reform processes showed that leadership was far more dispersed than is customarily assumed – multiple leaders, often non-usual suspects (no-one in Afghanistan cited the president), such as those behind the scenes who brought people together and acted as catalysts.

The survey did identify external agents like aid agencies as important leaders, but only their locally-based staff, who are embedded in national contexts; no-one cares about visitors from HQ. Outsiders are more important at the start of reform processes (their influence tends to diminish after that). Not surprisingly, providing funding is their key role, with the key proviso that the funding is open ended and flexible, not tied to the ‘roll out’ of ‘best practice’. Overall however, outsiders are bit parts in the reform drama.

Discussing all this over dinner, Matt thinks we have arrived at a ‘moment’ – a coming together of dissidents from numerous disciplines to reject the logframe/best practice culture and push for something more rooted in reality. Political science, complexity theorists, aid veterans, Cash on Delivery proponents, the Development Leadership Program, the Africa Power and Politics Programme and many more are all challenging linear/blueprint thinking and proposing new and (hopefully) better alternatives.

In a nice twist, he applies PDIA to the task of persuading the aid agencies to adopt, erm, PDIA. He thinks the level of disruption to the signalling model is high, driven by growing evidence of failure. I’m not so sure. To steal from Robert Chambers ‘whose reality counts?’, for many aid donors right now, reality feels like political and financial siege, and that is fuelling the pursuit of a divisive emphasis on ‘results’. I’m not sure there will be much appetite for a movement, however well grounded in evidence, which says that the way to achieve change is to make it up as we go along (a sceptic’s version of PDIA) rather than to pursue short term, attributable results.

And (and this gets politically tricky for me), both the volume of aid and its management may also be obstacles to realigning it. Matt cites the World Bank’s ‘Learning and Innovation Loans’, which have been largely ignored, mainly because they are too small – an average of $5m, compared to $150m for other investment projects. As long as Bank staff are promoted on the basis of banking-style rules that reward the volume of aid they move, who is going to waste their time on LiLs? Then of course there is the ‘pre-programming’ model epitomised by detailed logframes and other project documents that require a pretence of predictability and linearity – all of it toxic to a PDIA approach. The increasing influence of governance indicators like the

CPIA that themselves enshrine ‘best practice’ at the heart of what we measure closes the conceptual circle and makes it even harder to conceive of new approaches.

As you may have realized from the quotes, the book’s language is pretty dense and technical. That, plus being published as an academic hardback, could easily reduce the book’s audience and impact. Any publishers willing to back a more popular version should beat a path to Matt’s door.

Finally, there is lots of overlap with my own work on power and change – the importance of power analysis/understanding local context, seizing critical junctures, convening and brokering rather than trying to go it alone, evolutionary learning-by-doing rather than single grand plans. Over dinner, we kicked around some exciting plans for working together in future – watch this space.

Matt is launching the book in the UK (London – ODI and CGD – and Manchester) from 20-22 May. Details here.

Is it time for a rethink on the definition of aid?

Crushed by my humiliation at the hands of Claire Melamed, it would just make matters worse to come back for another round of post-2015 jousting, so let’s move on.

I actually quite like blogging about meetings held under Chatham House rules, as they allow me to write about the discussion without worrying about who said what. And to take the credit for anything clever, of course.

So last week, I found myself in a heated debate on the future of aid, with a bunch of NGOs and aid boffins. The topic was ‘is it time for a re-think?’ Why? Because the aid world is changing:

-          New donors, such as foundations, philanthropists and emerging economies such as China and India are starting their own aid programmes, often outside the traditional donor club of the OECD DAC

-          Increasing diversity of sources of ‘financing for development’, from domestic taxation to remittances to private investment

-          Austerity driving many traditional donors to cut aid, either overtly or sneakily, by trying to count lots of non-aid flows as aid, or both (see FT letter here). A reminder that in terms of its increasing aid budget, the UK is really an outlier these days – ‘we are talking in the vicarage, here’.

-          The post-2015 discussions raising lots of questions about sustainable development goals and collective action on everything from climate change to tax havens, which have been traditionally fenced off from the aid discussion.

Underlying all this was a sense that the definition of aid corresponds to an old order (rich northern countries give cash for big push in the South to get public services functioning and the economy humming). That world has little to do with many of the preoccupations of modern development – fragile states and conflict, climate change, leaky financial systems, migration etc etc.

But does that mean aid needs to be overhauled? All were agreed that the current levels of aid, running globally at around $130bn a year, are a precious achievement, the only flow of resources aimed specifically at helping poor people, with a reasonably tight definition, making it easier to defend from dilution. Lots of talk of not throwing babies out with bathwater. (And tanks on lawns, heads in sand – mixed metaphors threatened to get seriously out of control.)

Which brought us to the political context – the march of the Austerians means that any decision to open up discussions on the definition of aid (which governments such as Netherlands and Germany are already doing) is much more likely to lead to a watering down/dilution of aid, with lots of other stuff being included – I pointed out that, in contrast to Pandora’s Box, the nasties will fly in when this one is opened.

Broadly, aid donors will want ‘what allows you to reach your aid target without spending any more money’, while aid recipients will want to keep everything separate, so additional cash for things like climate finance is not counted as aid. One old hand said ‘and the donors will win.’

Which made me line up on the ‘conservative’ side of the table – the risks are largely downside, so try and resist efforts to redefine aid and defend what you’ve got. Others felt that the debate was already happening, and we had no option but to engage.

Everyone was for improved data and transparency (who isn’t?) on non-aid flows, so that donors, governments and others could see what is already happening before allocating their cash (lots of praise for the new DFI/Oxfam Government Spending Watch database of how much poor countries are spending on the MDGs, with seasoned aid officials saying they had spent years trying to get this data out, without success). Another piece of good news is that Development Initiatives are working on an annual report on Investments to End Poverty, which documents all resources available for poverty eradication – watch out for it in September and see some of the material here.

Lots of discussion on the 0.7 target, with the technocrats seeing it as arbitrary and weird, and the advocates seeing its use in driving government action, even in countries that haven’t endorsed it, like the US. Interesting suggestions that 1% of government spending (a penny in the pound) might make a more sensible and communicable target than 0.7% of Gross National Income.

As for the new southern aid donors, the wonks reckoned that they are not interested in targets, but are interested in what counts as aid – one cited Turkey which, when obliged to count it, found it was giving much more aid than it had realised, partly because it had assumed a narrower.

Other interesting discussions on ‘fair shares’ – how you could modify the 0.7 target to take account of a country’s stage of development, perhaps using the UN formula for assessing members’ contributions to its budget. Anyone done that?

Overall, I did feel that there is an institutional problem here – at some point the aid discussion needs to be taken out of the OECD, even though it’s been doing a pretty good job so far. Otherwise, it risks being seen as a project of the declining North, with minimal buy in from others. But would the UN (the obvious alternative) do a better job?

My conclusion? At this political moment, I think there is a real danger in trying to stretch the debate on aid to include everything that contributes to development (we wonks always like to do this – look at post-2015). Right now the test of any proposal should be ‘what is most likely to increase rather than reduce funds going from rich countries to poor countries for good purposes?’ For example, stretching ‘aid’ to include most peacekeeping fails that test badly  -   irrespective of all the good sense about security and development reinforcing each other. Better to try and keep the aid definition (and debates) tight and work on the rest in other fora – Government Spending Watch, tax havens, climate change etc. We won’t win them all – for example there is clearly substantial overlap between climate finance and aid, so insisting on ‘additionality’ is very unlikely to succeed, but I see little benefit in helping others prize open the Pandora’s Box of aid.

Learning the Lessons: Why is change NOT happening in the response to hunger crises?

I know I go on all the time about ‘how change happens’, but often in development the important question is ‘why doesn’t change happen?’, and we need to get better at answering it. On Tuesday Oxfam published Learning the Lessons, an analysis of the response to the 2012 Sahel food crisis, which affected some 18m people across 9 countries. It’s a serious piece of work, drawing on interviews with 30 external bodies – donors, governments etc, other published research, focus group discussions with affected communities and perspectives from civil society.

Compared to the ‘too little, too late’ response to previous crises in the region in 2010 and 2005, the report finds some improvements: early warning systems had improved and raised the alarm earlier, and governments in the region reacted in good time – Niger, for example, appealed for support six months earlier than it did during the 2010 crisis.

But there were still problems with governments, donors and the aid system. Governments in the region still lack the financial and technical capacity to really be able to lead. As for donors:

‘There was still disagreement about the likely severity of the crisis. Some donors, such as the European Community’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO), acted earlier than in previous years, but overall, donor funding was no more timely than before. By the beginning of July 2012 and the peak of the crisis, the UN appeal remained just under 50 per cent funded.’

This really matters: 5.6 million people didn’t get the seeds and tools they needed in time to prepare for the 2012 harvest cycle.

Interestingly, the report sees the roadblock as conceptual, and argues that this can be overcome by changing the way we think about such crises to emphasise the concept of ‘resilience’ – very much the current buzzword in a lot of development circles. ‘Learning the Lessons’ reckons a ‘resilience lens’ would allow donors to:

-          Develop a shared understanding of vulnerability to food insecurity so that support is targeted to the poorest and responses can be launched rapidly;

-          Break down barriers between humanitarian and development actors so that long-term and emergency programmes effectively support each other;

-          Invest in strengthening the capacity of national and local actors so that governments can deliver large-scale, sustained support to their citizens.

I must admit I was initially sceptical that the answer to such a profound failure is a new buzzword. But actually, I think the authors may be on to something.

The most useful framework I’ve found for understanding the roots of inertia (aka ‘why change doesn’t happen’) is the ‘3i’ model of ideas, institutions and interests. A combination of these three underlies the kind of paralysis we’ve seen in the Sahel response.

Institutions: there is still a deep division between the ‘humanitarian/emergency’ and ‘long term development’ wings of the aid business. This is reflected in funding structures, which are completely different for the two silos. The polarization makes it hard to take a long-term approach to reducing the vulnerability to the inevitable future crises.

Interests: if you work in an aid agency, there are clear risks to responding early to a crisis – what if the rains come, you are accused of crying wolf etc? In any case, your political pay masters often only start banging the table when the grim TV images start to roll (by which time it is often too late, and certainly much more expensive, to respond). There is also still something of a macho ‘I’m here to save lives, get out of my way’ approach to humanitarian work which can all too easily brush aside national governments and local knowledge that are crucial to understanding the long-term roots of crises, and building institutions to deal with future ones. National governments need to be at the heart of efforts to address food insecurity, but that is likely to threaten the power relations of the status quo,

Ideas: The institutional silos reflect a crippling conceptual dichotomy. Cyclical crises such as those affecting the Sahel really can’t be described as ‘emergencies’, in that they are predictable and regular. But the underlying thinking in the aid business is still ‘is that an emergency, or is it long term development? Do we send in the engineers or the economists?’

One of the things I’ve noticed about climate change is that it is a ‘disruptive idea’. Disruptive ideas can’t be fitted into existing entrenched mental and organizational frameworks, and so often prompt violent rejection, but also the possibility of paradigm shifts. Because climate change doesn’t ‘belong’ to any existing camp, it makes it easier to bring people together (development and environment, for example) to think differently about how we respond to it without prompting accusations of turf wars and interference. Is ‘resilience’ also a disruptive idea, with the potential to bypass the humanitarian/development divide?

I’m sure there is a big literature our there about the characteristics and impact of disruptive ideas. Any links appreciated.

What can DFID learn from Chinese and Brazilian aid programmes?

IDS researcher Henry Tugendhat (right) wonders whether UK aid is following in the path of China and Brazil

Two weeks ago at the London Stock Exchange, Justine Greening announced her new policy of supporting UK businesses to invest in developing economies for the mutual benefit of both sides. According to the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development: “This is good for investors, who earn a financial return… [and] good for the poorest, who receive jobs and support”.

New as it may sound in UK development circles, this strategy sounds an awful lot like the “win-win” sound-bites we’re increasingly used to hearing from China among the other BRICS countries, who are meeting in Durban, South Africa this week. China and Brazil have both made efforts to leverage private sector investments as part of their aid/South-South Cooperation agendas, but problems have already arisen which the UK could usefully learn from.

Alignment of aid and investment efforts is a particular challenge. Business seeks profit, while aid is traditionally geared to humanitarian objectives, and they don’t always match up.

One example is the disconnect between the promotion of food security in Africa, and the agricultural interests of investors. The Chinese state has pushed for a serious engagement with food security issues affecting African countries. This is seen in everything from meetings in the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, to Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centres. Equally Brazil has committed to supporting agricultural mechanisation and technical support in a number of countries.

All such efforts are envisaged to link to private sector activity: to provide tractors, take over farms, or offer technical support. However, Chinese and Brazilian investors in Africa have predominantly invested in cash crops and large-scale farming, and even when smallholders are targeted, in many cases they have been those that are better off and already more commercially oriented.

New evidence from the Future Agricultures Consortium generated by research in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, shows that when Chinese companies do invest in local agriculture, it is predominantly in crops such as cotton and tobacco. Otherwise, additional investment has focused on surrounding infrastructure such as irrigation schemes and roads. Brazilian investments have predominantly focused on sugar-cane and ethanol production. However, when private sector investment has targeted food staples necessary for food security, there has been either little success, as in the Xai-Xai project in Mozambique; or only small-scale investments, as in the small farms in Ethiopia that supply local Chinese restaurants.

Adding to this disconnect between Chinese and Brazilian government statements and the behaviour of their companies, even Chinese state-owned enterprises at times flex their independence from state interests, as Lucy Corkin describes for Angola. But of course, Chinese companies in particular may be subject to more pressure than UK companies to invest in areas aligned with state interests abroad, as they are often supported by state policy and finance. Which begs the question: when financial returns are less obvious, what makes Justine Greening more able to leverage investment for development interests, where China and Brazil have failed?

The second issue is that many investments in Africa have led to harmful practices over the years, whatever the nationality of the investor. Even if investors are introduced based on the principle of “development assistance”, profits are still paramount. This can lead to unintended consequences. For example, Chinese and Brazilian companies have got mired in controversy in recent years, including accusations of ‘land grabbing’, even when such claims have been refuted.

One of the currently most contentious investments is the vast ProSavana project spearheaded by Brazil in a triangular agreement with Japan and

Mozambique. The aim is to bring about agricultural development in Mozambique’s Nacala corridor, transforming it into a bread-basket on the scale of Brazil’s Cerrado savannah region, the site of a “green revolution” transformation which began in the 1970s. Brazilian private investors are already, as well as Japan, and a ‘Nacala Fund’ expected to mobilise US$2 billion has been set up. Already described as an example of ‘Brazil’s neo-colonialism in Africa’ in the Mozambican press, the project has come under heavy fire from local civil society groups that criticise the secrecy surrounding the project and the risk of evictions of local smallholder farmers.

So will ‘land grabbing’ become an issue that UK businesses face if they follow Justine Greening’s recommendations? In her speech, she recognised this challenge, arguing that there is a need for transparency on investments, so as to expose “those who acquire land unfairly”.

As a final thought, we should also question whether this new policy could be a subtle re-introduction of tied aid practices, despite Justine Greening’s

strong assertions to the contrary. The political reality is that this would no doubt be an appealing means of defending the aid budget against current cuts, so it must be properly scrutinised to avoid to a return to inefficient aid practices.

Ultimately, overseas investment by private sector actors is open to many challenges and problems. As the UK adds this new facet to its aid programme,
lessons from Brazilian and Chinese experiences in Africa should definitely be heeded.

What if we allocated aid $ based on how much damage something does, and whether we know how to fix it?

I usually criticize development wonks who come up with yet another ‘if I ruled the world’ plan for reforming everything without thinking through the issues of politics, power and incentives that will determine which (if any) of their grand schemes gets adopted. But it’s been a hard week, and today I’m taking time out from the grind of political realism to rethink aid policy.

Call it a thought experiment. Suppose we started with a blank sheet of paper, and decided which issues to spend aid money on based on two criteria – a) how much death and destruction does a given issue cause in developing countries, and b) do the rich countries actually know how to reduce the damage? That second bit is important – remember Charles Kenny’s book ‘Getting Better‘, which argues powerfully that since we understand how to improve health and education much better than how to generate jobs and growth, aid should concentrate on the former.

If you followed this exercise, I think you would end up with a radically different aid agenda, with a whole bunch of Cinderella issues coming in from the cold (I’m also taking a break from not mixing metaphors).

Here’s the global death toll (from the new edition of FP2P, c/o indefatigable  number crunching from Richard King).

These are global figures, and I don’t have a breakdown by developed/developing. That would be important on obesity, but on other issues, the majority of impact is clearly in poor countries – alcohol, tobacco and road traffic for example. And they are precisely the areas where the rich countries have lots of experience in reducing the damage. It’s certainly a lot more straightforward than inventing/discovering new vaccines. When researchers put signs in Kenyan minibuses (matatus) urging passengers to criticize reckless driving, injuries and deaths fell by a half (for paper see here).

So how come such subjects are so seldom seen as development issues? Where’s the campaign on booze and fag dumping by large corporations in developing countries? Or international seat belt conventions, backed by technical assistance to help governments ratify and implement? Your thoughts please. Presumably some kind of campaigns exist on all these issues – please send links – but they could be a lot more prominent.

And for the truly wonky/medically inclined here’s a more sophisticated version from the Guardian – Disability Adjusted Life Years, which Claire Melamed and John Appleby reckon could be usefully mainstreamed in development. It shows which causes of global death and disability are up/down from 1990-2010. And if you don’t know what Ischemic or COPD mean, look them up.

Aid and the private sector: a love story

Oxfam private sector adviser Erinch Sahan (right) summarizes a critical new review of the growing interlinkages between aid and the private sector

Donors have a new love: business. And it will end poverty. Aid chiefs across the world have concluded that if we need growth to end poverty and the private sector drives growth, isn’t aid most effective where it focuses on the private sector?

Well, no. At least not usually. And a new report from Canada sheds light on why.

The Canadian Council for International Co-operation and the think-tank the North South Institute have assessed the policies of donors towards promoting growth and the private sector. They break down (very adeptly) what the OECD donors are doing, how they’re thinking about the private sector and where they are falling short. It’s not only a sorely needed assessment of the rise and rise of private sector-focused aid, it also reminds us that aid is increasingly promoting a very specific economic model (thy name is neo-liberal capitalism) with some questionable assumptions that should attract serious scrutiny.

You can read the report here but here are some highlights, along with a few thoughts from me.

Just feed the growth machine

Donors are focused on plain old growth. They don’t have a meaningful approach to improving the distribution or pro-poor impacts and too often merely pay lip-service to issues to do with the quality of growth. They’re not linking possible interventions; such as support to government capacity to protect labour rights, effectively collect taxes and redistribute the benefits of growth; with their private sector programmes. In addressing gender, too often they simply focus on getting women into markets, ignoring the social and political drivers of gender inequality. And direct support to the poorest and most marginalised is falling out of favour.

While the donors may differ on their rhetoric (some are good at sprinkling in buzz words like “inclusive” and “sustainable” when discussing growth), their private sector work ends up looking eerily similar. French and Belgian aid goes furthest in prioritising equality and accompanying growth with social services. However, for most donors, private sector programmes are effectively stand-alone growth feeders. The report reminds us that sustained growth in many developing countries (particularly in Africa) has failed to put a dent in unemployment. Growth driven by extractives is one such example that’s cited. So just feeding the growth machine doesn’t automatically mean the poor will benefit.

Can aid really drive growth?

The report finds that donors focus on interventions at the macro (e.g. business enabling environment and international CSR support) and meso (e.g. PPPs and financing investments) levels. However, it’s the micro-level programmes (e.g. training women farmers) that “have a much larger redistributive impact for poor and marginalized populations”. But can aid money really be a (meaningful) driver of growth? Why not focus on helping the most marginalised, rather than obsess over catalysing broader economic growth?

Win-win-win-win… always

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are the new black. For OECD DAC members, PPP spending has risen from US$234m in 2007 to US$903m in 2010. Donor strategies suggest they represent wins for everyone: recipient governments, business, donors and NGOs. But donors seem to ignore the complexity of interests and agendas among those involved in PPPs. The pitfalls and inefficiencies of PPPs are scarcely mentioned and the politics of the PPP negotiating process is swept under the rug. This, I suspect, comes from an ideological underpinning to private sector strategies, which holds that business interests are aligned with development interests. Donors need to be reminded that this is only sometimes the case.

Crony capitalism?

Donors are also looking to include their national firms in their private sector strategies. For example, Australia’s Mining for Developmentprogramme (AU$127m) partners with Australia’s mining giants on a range of projects in developing countries. Denmark’s Business Partnerships programme and the UK’s Food Industry Retail Challenge Fund are only open to national firms. This all seems dangerously like a veiled attempt to subsidise the foreign investment and CSR strategies of national companies – as long as some development story can come about. And isn’t this neo-tied-aid?  In the report’s own words “Donors sometimes favour their own commercial interests to the detriment of developing countries’ domestic policies for development.” Without more transparency around decision-making and a clear results framework for private sector partnerships (the report finds this is sorely lacking), we are left to interpret decisions and priorities as cynically as we’d like (I bags the cynical view).

The report makes a plethora of sensible recommendations, including the need to support democratic ownership of the growth agenda and ensure additionality in private sector development programmes (ie; that an investment, CSR approach or any job-creation wouldn’t have happened even without the programme). But what comes flying off the page is the need to question fundamental assumptions about growth and aid. Some questions that I’m left with are:

• What type of growth should donors be promoting?
• Can aid really drive growth?
• Are aid bureaucrats equipped to do business with business (e.g. through partnerships and PPPs)?
• Why doesn’t aid focus on building the rights and power of the most marginalised?

What do you think?

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.