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.

How to build local government accountability in South Africa? A conversation with partners

This is what a good day visiting an Oxfam programme looks like. I skim the interwebs (and this blog) to put together some thoughts on a given issue from our experience or what others are writing (‘the literature’). Then sit down with local Oxfamistas and partner organizations (who are usually closer to the grassroots than we are) to compare these bullet points with their reality. Last Friday it was ‘how can NGOs build the accountability of local government.’ My ten minutes covered:

• Supply (training officials) v demand (strengthening civil society) v building collective trust in fragmented societies
• The importance of identifying and working with insider champions within the state – no good shouting at the gates if no-one inside is willing to listen and work with you
• It can be risky – make sure staff and partners have support if the state officials lash out
• Often need to pursue deeper culture change on officials’ attitudes to excluded groups
• Need to choose between focussing on the broader ‘enabling environment’ of access to information, respect for the law, exposing corruption etc or more specific campaigns for housing, electricity, schools etc
• Some interesting examples of text-based complaints mechanisms (India) and name-and-shame league tables (Vietnam)

A lot of this resonated with the South African experience. Some thought-provoking additional points included:

The SA implementation gap between ‘first world norms and standards’ and an underfunded and often chaotic/corrupt corrupt administrative reality is so wide it may even be counterproductive (no point in acting because however hard you try, you can never comply). Local government is hobbled by lack of cash, capacity, and officials’ inability to understand ‘perfect’ guidelines and standards drawn up by distant consultants.

The political incentives are all wrong. Patronage is as big a problem as corruption – party hacks get parachuted into senior administrative jobs, lacking the capacity or interest to perform them properly. ‘People in positions feel very powerful’, and their power springs from playing the political game within the ANC, fighting the internal turf wars rather than doing right by the people.

Despite this, there are officials and politicians willing to do the right thing, either because they are politically progressive and committed (this is the ANC, after all), or because more self-interested political incentives are temporarily/accidentally aligned with those of the popular movement. A huge element of civil society advocacy is built around identifying and building relationships with such individuals. Finding backing for local insider champions (eg from higher tiers of government and politics, or international bodies) can make a real difference in strengthening the hand of the good guys within the state.

But that can be very exhausting: ‘you look at the giant that is Government and it’s so difficult to navigate. You never quite know where to push, (and nor do the officials!). You invest hugely in building intimate relationships only to find they’ve moved department and you have to start all over again.’

Civil society (including Oxfam) don’t always do themselves any favours: ‘CSOs go with the attitude ‘you’re paid to do this, and you drive a 4×4. Why should I congratulate you when you actually do your job?’ So they get nowhere.’

Options include:

• Judicial activism, but there is little cash to support it, and it is very slow.
• Changing norms: At present ‘there’s no corruption, no shame’ among officials. CSOs could go for broad public awareness raising and pressure along the lines of ipaidabribe.com, ‘they work for us’ websites on the performance of politicians or civil servants, ‘slowest response of the year’ competitions etc. But those in the room thought this would be very risky indeed, given the ANC’s hostility to public criticism.
• Broaden alliances beyond networks of CSOs (which seems to be the default model), not least because civil society currently has access to political leaders (they were often in the anti-apartheid movement together), but little real traction. Partners thought the private sector offered more promise than faith-based organizations or traditional leaders.

We finished by asking everyone to suggest something new to try. Here’s what they came up with:

• Invest much more in ‘positive reinforcement’. Find champions, publicly support them. Build relationships.
• Do more long term awareness-raising  with communities about what the government ought to be doing for them
• Think about a South African ipaidabribe.com
• Budget tracking/ ‘follow the money’ watchdogs to ensure that money allocated arrives intact and is then actually spent (a scandalous amount of health and education money has to be returned to central government because local officials fail to spend it on time).

But in the end, several partners thought that only an increase in political competition, with the ANC facing a genuine chance of being voted out of municipal governments, would shift the behaviours of most officials. Given the state of the opposition, that doesn’t look likely, but I’ll speculate on that in a future post.

And if you happen to be in Cape Town today, why not come along to the Sustainability Institute at 12 to discuss ‘Creating a Just Food System through Active Citizenship‘? Some good panelists (and me).

Bad Governance leads to bad land deals – the link between politics and land grabs

Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right) and Marloes Nicholls (left) crunch the numbers to find that big land investments sniff out countries with ‘weak governance’ – aka no accountability, no regulation, no rule of law, and a green light for corruption.

If you had bags full of money and wanted to buy land, where would you go for a good deal? If you’re only looking for ways to make a good profit and control your risk exposure, surely you would look for a place where you can influence the terms of the deal. This is the intuition behind the analysis published yesterday by Oxfam

The results of this analysis show that the global rush for land is mostly taking place in countries with weak governance.  We analysed the link between national governance and large scale agricultural land deals by combining information from two important databases – the Land Matrix[i] and the World Governance Indicator (WGI) Project. To do this, we cross referenced Information on over 200 countries and territories from the two databases. Using the Land Matrix we aggregated the total number of deals reported in each country and their average size; from the WGI, we used estimates of Voice and Accountability, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. Once the two databases were merged, we analysed the link between the countries where large-scale land deals were – or were not – taking place and the four governance indicators for the period 2000 – 2011.

The results reveal a strong and significant link between land deals and weak governance. The majority (78%) of the 56 countries where land deals are taking place have below average WGI, and on average the pool of countries where land deals take place have 30% lower indicators than those without. These results are consistent over time.

A quick comparison between two countries shows that the land availability does not appear to be a significant factor in investment decisions. Guatemala, which scores below average on all four World Bank Governance indicators, has seen an estimated 87,000 hectares of land under deals between 2000 and 2011 despite high levels of hunger and malnutrition in rural areas. This is in stark contrast with Botswana which has a similar area of arable land per person (.11 and .13 hectares per person in Guatemala and Botswana, respectively) but which scored well above the average on World Bank governance indicators and did not record a single large-scale land deal in this period.

These results are hardly surprising. Other studies have found similar results. Researchers at the IMF ( here and here), using a different database and methodology, have previously found that “countries with weak land sector governance are the ones most attractive to investors – at least as gauged by the number of land-related investments.” They suggest that investors might pick countries with weak governance because “it is easier to obtain land quickly and at low cost where the existing protection of land rights is weak, given that public protection may not matter to investors who can muster their own resources to defend their property rights.” Research by the World Bank found that deals were often formulated for the benefit of investors rather than the countries involved. They report that “in many cases the nature and location of lands transferred and the ways such transfers are implemented are rather ad hoc – based more on investor demands than on strategic considerations.”

Why Might Weak Governance be Good for Business?

The story behind land deals and weak governance is one of power imbalance and destitution. It’s a story where the interests of local communities are set aside to promote the interest of large investors.

There are usually three actors in any land deal – the investor, the local community who owns or uses the land and the government.  The national government often acts as the intermediary (in wonk parlance, the government is the agent for the local community or the citizens, who are the principals). Weak governance – which basically reflects a gap between the interest of citizens and governments – enables investors to sidestep costly and time consuming rules and regulations, which for example, might require them to consult with affected communities. In countries where people are denied voice, where business regulations are weak or non-existent, or where corruption is out of control it might be easier for investors to design the rules of the game to suit themselves.

This analysis is only the first step towards a more in depth research project. Next steps include a more in depth analysis on the determinants of the number and location of deals (a double-hurdle estimation? suggestions appreciated from econometricians out there). We will also look at the geographical distribution of deals within countries to see if there is a link between the location of land deals in countries and socioeconomic indicators in those areas.

Land is such an important element of millions of people around the world that any issue related to use, access and ownership of it should be carefully analyzed. Agricultural investment is sorely needed but it should not be at the expense of people’s rights and access to land. There are potentially catastrophic implications of bad land deals. Poor accountability and regulation only means that people affected by land deals have fewer tools to defend their livelihoods and rights.

And if this all sounds a bit abstract, here’s what we’re talking about

Civil Society, Public Action and Accountability in Africa

An important new paper from some big development names – Shanta Devarajan and Stuti Khemani from the World Bank, and Michael Walton (ex Bank, now at Harvard Kennedy School) – directs a slightly fierce (but welcome) political economy gaze at donor efforts to strengthen civil society (one of the more recent developmental fads). As with most such papers, after a monumental literature review, one of the striking conclusions is how little we really know, but it gropes gamely through the fog of ignorance and confusion and arrives at some interesting conclusions.

First, the authors find that something significant is going on among Africa’s citizens: “a large shift in Africa in organization among citizens. Village-level group formation in Africa increased dramatically over the 1990s when participatory approaches were emphasized in international development paradigms, promoted through aid, and adopted deliberately by country governments to deliver projects to communities.” Interestingly, that increased participation applies to both democratic and less democratic systems. The question is in what situations that upsurge in civil society has impact, and how (if at all) aid agencies can help.

The paper adds its support to the growing demand that aid interventions abandon futile searches for ‘best practice’ in favour of understanding what are the ‘best fits’ for any given context:

“In general, aid is most likely to be effective if it essentially organic, in the sense of (a) supporting existing domestic initiatives and pressures for change, and (b) in ways that are consistent with the initial state of the polity.”

But with that caveat, the authors give the thumbs up for some particular kinds of intervention. Italics in square brackets are my attempt at translating the rather academic language.

“There are a number of areas where there is a good prima facie case for support. This will typically be a function of the nature of overall polity. For example, there is the largest range of potential action for democracies with real political competition, albeit of a competitive clientelistic form, whether the regime is consolidated or fragile. [to have impact civil society needs to be able to get traction on the political process, and find potential allies within the state] Here are some categories.

• There is a strong case for general support on information-related initiatives—from information on politician performance, to school test results, procurement processes and so on.
• There is also a contingent case for support for local organizational initiatives that are working with and processing information that the evidence base suggests has potential in solving accountability problems. This domain can include NGOs working with right-to-information laws, think tanks analyzing budgets or regulator behavior, or service delivery outcomes, etc. [no point in supporting access to information if organizations aren’t able to use it or the information is not relevant to poor people]
• A related area concerns support for information for benchmarking of performance of local levels of government, e.g. municipalities; or across local service providers (schools; electricity and water supply), where service quality can be measured and compared [league tables can be effective in naming and shaming officials and politicians and otherwise galvanizing action]
• It often makes sense to support local client-power-related initiatives, but these are only likely to be fruitful if linked to broader change over the long route. [Bottom-up initiatives are good, but only if they can get traction on wider political process]
• Support for the strengthening of compact mechanisms is highly desirable if this has domestic political and technical support. [You need political leadership and/or influential allies within the state apparatus]
• There are two kinds of roles for civil society in the business sector.

o Support for processes that provide mechanisms for both identifying and resolving conflicts between business investment and social and environmental concerns, especially in mining and urban development. [Dispute/conflict resolution]

o Support for business associations working for public goods for business, e.g. agencies such as IFC that are concerned with private business, with the important concern that this needs to take account of conflicts of interest in aid, since such agencies are also often engaged with particular investment projects and firms. [Enabling environment]

Finally, in all cases, there is a need to base any support in an analysis of the nature and functioning of civil society. Civil society can be a force for pressuring the state to be more responsive to citizens and more equitable, or can be a source of exclusion and the reproduction of inequalities. Civil society will also typically work very differently under more and less democratic regimes. [Power and context analysis has to include the power and politics of civil society itself – there are few selflessly altruistic Robin Hoods in real life]

In general, aid should not be focused on “money”. This can be counter-productive. Rather, external partners can provide technical assistance in designing locally-grown interventions; they can play a role in financing information-gathering by local NGOs; and can finance experimental interventions (and their learning). Most valuable is likely to be support for a domestic process of innovation and learning involving a generalized approach of experimentation—of which RCTs are one, but only one, component. [Chucking big money at civil society initiatives is a good way to destroy them. Aid needs to be smart, and about ideas. Trial and error is a better way to pursue success than trying to roll out best practice at large scale.]

Can aid ever lead to transformational changes in accountability relations? Almost certainly not, if designs are hatched and brought in from outside. However, aid can potentially provide a supporting role if it is aligned with the flow of internal initiatives, is consistent with domestic political strategy, and supports greater accountability at the margins of major projects. An aspiration to effect some form of system change is admirable, for both internal and external actors. But for donors this needs to be blended with humility over the limits and unintended consequences of external action, and a central focus on helping domestic actors learn by doing.” [Domestic politics rules. Aid is a bit player, for good or ill. Get over it.]

What does a ‘rights-based approach’ look like in practice? A new Oxfam guide

Sometimes it seems like the devil has all the best tunes, while the angels struggle to get their message across. In development, some of the most interesting and important concepts are rendered impenetrable to non-specialists by a morass of jargon.

Take human rights for example. Today is International Human Rights Day, but I for one, find that the dry, legalistic and jargon-filled language of the ‘human rights community’ often seems depressingly, well, inhuman. One example is, alas, Oxfam’s new ‘Learning Companion to the Right to be Heard Framework’, published today to coincide with this year’s International Human Rights Day’s focus on ‘voice’.

But please read it, because under all the jargon-laden sentences about ‘governance components as mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability in delivery of quality essential services’ there is some real and useful substance. Trust me.

What the document is really about is how to render power visible – sprinkling magic dust over a community or a process to reveal their underlying power relations – the alliances and coalitions the keep the haves in the driving seat, and keep the have nots in their place; the hidden and invisible forms of power as well as the more obvious kinds; the discontinuities and moments of opportunity for rapid change (whether good or bad). Only when you can ‘see’ power can you really start thinking about how to help poor people redistribute it in their favour.

Oxfam’s framework for doing so is summed up in a simple diagram, (above) covering accountability’s supply (strengthening institutions), demand (strengthening people’s organizations) and supporting people’s movements to demand accountability from the state.

The learning companion then spells out just how to go about that, with lots of case studies from on-the-ground accountability work around the world, plus guidance on how to conduct a power analysis and signposts to the best sources of further info (even if – shock – they’re written by other NGOs).

The companion is part of a welcome move to publish more of Oxfam’s internal thinking (stylistic warts and all). We’ve done the same thing with our internal research guidelines, which are proving a minor download hit. If you’re interested in how Oxfam goes about its work , or in making human rights a human reality, take a look.

More background from Oxfam governance guru Jo Rowlands here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can political economists tell us about Africa, aid and development?

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces, Deliberation’ governance blog

There’s a clutch of different research initiatives trying to understand Africa’s political economy and its impact on development and aid. Often, the tone of the political economists can be quite discouraging – Alex Duncan gives a tongue-in-cheek definition of a political economist as ‘someone coming to explain why your aid programme doesn’t work’. There are few practical ‘take aways’ either for large bilateral aid agencies, or NGOs other than ‘give up and become a researcher’.

And that’s pretty much the tone of a logotastic ‘joint statement’ from 5 research programmes based (loosely) in the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands (The Africa Power and Politics Programme, Developmental Leadership Programme, Elites, Production and Poverty: A Comparative Analysis, Political Economy of Agricultural Policy in Africa, Tracking Development). Here’s some highlights:

From the summary:

“African countries badly need to embark on processes of economic  transformation, not just growth, and they are not helped to do so by insistence on  prior achievement of Good Governance, meaning adoption of the institutional ‘best  practices’ that have emerged in much richer countries.”

From the full statement:

“Our single most important message is that development outcomes in poor countries depend fundamentally on the political incentives facing political elites and leaders….. Because of the way democratisation affects politicians’ incentives in poor developing countries, the introduction of competitive elections is a mixed blessing for achieving the economic transformation that Africa needs.”

“The reasons [a number of South-east Asian countries] achieved sustained, pro-poor growth [and Africa has not] over the 50 years since 1960 are mostly about policy differences. During the early decades of the period, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam invested heavily in rural development, driven by urgency, outreach and expediency. They did so under a variety of political regime types, none of which were free of major corruption. They made some progress towards democratisation only after achieving  substantial economic  transformation.”

The paper’s ‘big idea’ is that “What shapes the ability of policy to drive economic transformation is the extent to which mutual interests, cooperative relations and synergies emerge between three  large groups of actors. [see diagram] [Usually] the relationships are not mutual, cooperative and synergistic, but antagonistic, exploitative and perverse. [But the key to improving aid practice is] understanding exactly how and why exceptions occur.”

“Because politicians are typically constrained to generate and use rents to cement their alliances,  ‘good politics’  can  result in ‘bad economics’” Elites need cash to funnel to their supporters and so have to milk the state for short-term rents, rather than investing in the future, as the Southeast Asian elites did, (supporting pioneer firms, building roads, providing health and education etc). The trouble is that in such a system “the introduction of formal multi-party competition into such an environment does not alter the basic logic. Clientelism in Africa is to a greater or lesser extent competitive under both authoritarian and more democratic regimes…. Typically, multi-party elections formalise and sharpen this competition with often mixed results for development.”

The paper identifies two broad kinds of exceptions to the clientilist rule:

Big-picture exceptions: In a somewhat desperate search for developmental states in Africa, the paper comes up with “the early-independence regimes of Houphouët-Boigny (Côte  d’Ivoire), Kenyatta (Kenya) and  Banda (Malawi) [and today,] Ethiopia and Rwanda.”  These have all “achieved centralised rent-management [thus freeing them from the distractions of competitive clientilism] and this led to significant economic transformation and social advance for a period.” Ah, so the best way to improve on competitive clientilism is to eliminate the competition, not the clientilism.  Oh dear.

Small-picture exceptions: successes in Asia were in many instances the result of breakthroughs in particular sectors or commodity chains which only later became generalised… [African examples include] sugar in Mozambique and dairy in Uganda.”

What does all this mean for aid donors (the authors are basically talking to the big money donors, not relative minnows like Oxfam)?

“The central message that needs to be got across is that the conditions which keep the African masses in poverty are the result of decisions by politicians who are responding to incentives  that change slowly and are not in the  short  term very  favourable to development. More immediately, they stem from the inability of sector actors to overcome their collective action problems in the face of unsupportive if not predatory state behaviour. They cannot, therefore, be addressed by merely transferring economic resources from the global rich to the global poor. Indeed, such attempts can make matters worse, by further weakening those political incentives that work in favour of domestically driven economic transformation.

If this is true, aid needs to become far less supply-driven and more focused on supporting processes that show real promise, based on an informed assessment of the local situation and the lessons of history. In particular, there should be no implication that donors know best what institutions poor countries need.”

The political reality check is excellent, but the lack of genuine ‘so what’s’ (despite the paper’s protestations to the contrary) is a real problem. As is the casual abandonment of human rights, democracy, citizenship and social struggle. Citizens, social movements, the Arab Spring (see left) barely get a condescending mention in all this high level grown-up talk of governments, elites, donors and political settlements.

Still, for NGOs who usually prefer Gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will’ to his accompanying ‘pessimism of the intellect’ (this paper suffers from the opposite problem),  it should be at least food for thought that a cold-blooded look at Africa’s recent history persuades a group of serious academics that the best Africa can hope for is benign dictatorship, epitomised by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, which delivers “social provision under a centralised rent management regime [and] illustrates how a  powerful upward accountability of public service-providers and local administrations  to the national political leadership can remarkably improve service quality, more  than adequately substituting for the downward accountability to users that tends to  be stressed in donor rhetoric.”

What’s more, I think that a more progressive reading of this work is possible – outsiders must give up trying to impose blueprints, and concentrate on spotting and supporting positive developments as they emerge (with many of them coming from the very social movements that this group ignores or dismisses). But that will be of little comfort to the big official agencies, which are too big and too politically constrained to pursue that more entrepreneurial approach. They are left with what I’ve previously termed the ‘decent chap’approach – picking political winners by “focusing  particularly  on sectors  or areas  where  government  attitudes are positive for  political reasons and  sector  actors have  revealed a collective ambition to move ahead.” Shame Paul Kagame says he doesn’t really want more aid.

How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries.

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces. Deliberation‘ blog

Oxfam is publishing a fascinating new series of papers today, drawing together lessons from our programme work on local governance and community action. There are case studies from Nepal (women’s rights, see photo), Malawi (access to medicines), Kenya (tracking public spending), Viet Nam (community participation) and Tanzania (the ubiquitous Chukua Hatua project), and a very wise (and mercifully brief) overview from power and governance guru Jo Rowlands. Here are some highlights:

“Governance is about the formal or informal rules, systems and structures under which human societies are organised, and how they are (or are not) implemented. It affects all aspects of human society – politics, economics and business, culture, social interaction, religion, and security – at all levels, from the most global to the very local.

Most people experience the most immediate impacts, fair or unfair, of governance at a very local level. It is where women experience gender inequalities most keenly, for example in the way that issues that particularly concern them tend to get de-prioritised and their participation obstructed. In most political systems, it is also the place where ordinary people should, in theory, be best placed to participate in governance, for example by voting for their local councillors, taking part in local committees or protesting against laws or actions that they don’t think are fair.

Local people may face barriers of language, ethnicity, gender, class, poverty, access to information, or simply lack the confidence to speak out. They face the visible formal and informal structures of power, such as village or neighbourhood committees, service user groups, tribal councils, dominant families or castes, and formal structures of local government. They also face power dynamics such as business interests or patronage relationships based on debt and obligation.

It is essential for anyone working on governance to make a thorough analysis of local power relations, drawing on history and culture, specific economic realities and the interests of different groups of people. This analysis can then shape the options and approaches that a development programme uses, informed by how change has happened in the past and might happen in the future.

Oxfam differentiates between three key aspects [see diagram, below]: people claiming rights, institutions willing and capable of delivering rights, and people in positions of power with the will to make it happen.

When you deliberately address these relationships and processes, i.e. the arrows in the diagram, interesting things happen to the way issues are tackled in practice. For example, in Kenya, very high levels of mistrust existed between local community members, local councillors and local authority officials. Although there were institutional structures of decentralisation for local decision making, neither community members nor local authority officers knew enough about them to successfully implement them. The tools of social auditing provided a mechanism to address the knowledge gaps and rebuild damaged relationships.

All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya.

A recurring theme across the individual stories is the importance of focusing action about local governance on the real, tangible interests of local people – health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation. Women in Nepal moved into participation and leadership in committees and user groups on these issues; in Tanzania, communities became organised around setting up new market spaces for local women to sell produce, or around land rights.

Anyone working on local governance needs to be aware that in many contexts where there is not a culture of speaking out, individuals may be putting themselves at risk if they confront authority.  It is vital to ensure first that individuals who want to take that risk are supported, both from inside and outside the community, and that ideally the demands come from a group that has built the strength, skills and confidence to demand the changes they want to see. In Nepal, women did take a number of risks – facing opposition from husbands, and senior community members – but the support they received allowed them to prove themselves and to join with others in becoming change-makers within their villages.

Accountability and transparency are proving useful entry points for engaging the various actors and processes to help navigate the minefields of power relations. It is also clear that people who take on official responsibilities do not necessarily have the competency to carry out those roles. Therefore, well-targeted support and training for office-holders can go a long way in building better governance relationships.”

Jo identifies some particular ‘issues and challenges’, including:

Culture change: Making change in local governance often requires culture change as much as a change in structures, processes and representation. (particularly true on gender rights and women’s voice).

Access to information: As Maimuna says in the Tanzania case study, “Ignorance is a killing machine”.

Things can take time: Some changes can happen quickly, but the changes in culture and in deeper attitudes required to ensure system and process changes stick can take much longer (decades).

Risk management: Local and national governance are both about political processes, and carry significant levels of risk. This risk can include violence, fear, crack-downs on individuals or groups and a closing of space to operate for particular actors.

Areas where we need to do more thinking? How to deal with patronage systems, corruption and decentralization; improving our understanding of urban governance (the examples are all rural).

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

“As well as being informed by good analysis, [future governance work] will also be informed by serendipity – watching for the chance combinations of the right person/people, the right moment, the right focus, the right alignment with other events – requiring good judgement and probably inevitably, whatever the expectation about how change will happen, a certain amount of sheer luck.”

Building accountability in Tanzania: applying an evolutionary/venture capitalist theory of change

A version of this post appeared yesterday on ‘People, Spaces, Deliberation’, the World Bank’s clunkily-named but interesting governance and accountability blog.

I’ve been catching up on our accountability work in Tanzania recently, and it continues to be really ground-breaking. Rather than churning out the standard logical framework of activities, outputs and predicted outcomes before the project even starts, the programme, known as Chukua Hatua (Swahili for ‘take action’) uses an evolutionary model of change (try out numerous approaches, drop the less successful ones, scale up and develop the winners). It’s more like a venture capitalist backing ten start-up firms knowing that most will fail, but some will win big. This has been possible partly because DFID has been willing to fund such an experimental approach as part of its Accountability in Tanzania (AcT) programme  (props to them).

18 months into the programme, it’s good to see that Chukua Hatua is, errmm, evolving, according to programme coordinator Jane Lonsdale, who I caught up with recently. The first phase piloted six approaches:

1) Election promises tracking – training of ‘trackers’ in 36 communities prior to the 2010 elections. They recorded rally promises on voice recorders, took them back to the communities to agree priorities and are now following up progress against the leaders’ promises.

2) Farmer animators – training more than 200 farmers nominated by their communities, to understand principles of accountability, how to hold those in power to account, and how to share their knowledge and facilitate their groups to take action. (pic right shows some animators getting into the groove at a workshop)

3) Active musicians – training 42 musicians on principles of accountability to act as seeds of change through their music, which is widely listened to by communities.

4) Student Councils (see pic, below) – building the skills of leaders at primary school level; linking students with community ‘champions’ to help them raise issues with teachers and school management committees.

5) Community radio – creating a new space in Ngorongoro district to enable pastoralists to share information and debate.

6) In addition to the pilots, Oxfam also supported local campaigns where communities were already active, most notably in Ngorongoro.

Last September came the difficult bit – killing off the less successful experiments. We got all the partners in a room, plus a couple of other NGOs, the consultants, some Oxfam staff from outside Tanzania and KPMG (which manages the programme for DFID). The group came up with four basic criteria on which to judge the pilots:
- How much were they spreading awareness?
- How successful were they in mobilising people to take action?
- How effective were they at expanding ‘spaces’ in which people can claim their rights – this includes both taking advantage of existing ‘invited spaces’ and creating new ones
- How responsive was the government (either local or national)?

Overall, the farm animators came out best. The musicians were better at awareness raising and mobilisation, but failed to get a good government response. We dropped some pilots and merged others. The student council approach was dropped and spun off to another funder (one unintended consequence of the venture capital approach  – generating other fundable spin-offs).

What didn’t work and why?

Geography: The active musicians were not able to work well in Ngorongoro, because the communities were too widely dispersed to reach.

Government obstruction: The community radio never got off the ground because the government did not issue a licence.

Informal v formal power: The farmer animators’ work was unsuccessful in spreading awareness beyond the groups that the animators belonged to. This might have been due to their lack of a ‘formal’ position in community leadership.

Attitudes to youth: Students were able to make demands within their schools, but were unable to take this approach into the community– there was simply not enough respect for young people’s viewpoints. 

What have we learned for the next phase of the project?

Apart from the shake-out of pilots, a number of other issues have emerged:

• The programme needs to do more to prepare for negative responses, especially from local officials (interestingly, reactions from the state have been most hostile where local opposition parties are strongest, whereas in communities dominated by the ruling CCM, officials are more open to dialogue). These have included threats by village executive officers to community members for being ‘trouble-makers’, arrests for demonstrating for electricity and closing a school for 2 days after students demanded more say in their education. Dealing with these responses will require training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution and linking citizens and partners to national organisations such as the Human Rights Defenders Coalition. The cycle of conflict and cooperation recurs in many change processes, and is always a real headache for both participants and NGOs like Oxfam.

• In Tanzania, building ‘created spaces’ is much harder than helping citizens make better use of existing ‘invited spaces’ for consultation and accountability. In such fora, the main obstacle is often lack of capacity, so the next phase will continue to work with local elected leaders. The benefits of changing the behaviour and increasing the capacity of village leaders and ward councillors are two-fold – they are more likely to support citizens demands’, and they can be a key ally in taking citizens’ issues upwards to central government. 

• Although there have been some notable successes, gender bias in Tanzania is very entrenched and work with women needs to be strengthened, especially looking at women’s leadership, men’s attitudes to women and women’s participation in public spaces. 

Perhaps most interesting for me is the wider impact on how Oxfam is working in Tanzania. The team is getting much more expert in understanding who has power at local level, and in the next phase will involve key local players such as faith leaders, traditional birth attendants and healers. Over to Jane for the last word:

‘I can’t differentiate programming from power analysis – they go hand in hand. We’re doing something different now, not just rolling out a load of community scorecards, or public expenditure tracking – the usual kind of governance work. We’re pushing ourselves to really think through how change happens in Tanzania and try out different things. The whole team and partners are now talking in terms of power analysis. We’ve got the same language to describe what change looks like. Everyone is picking up trends and patterns – it’s a lot better than conventional indicators.’

And here’s a nice 14m video covering the first phase of the project. In the words of the commentary, ‘they all deserve a big-up’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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