What questions help us understand how change happens?

How do we analyse the stories of change that we all use in development? Such stories shape narratives, illustrate approaches and enrich our understanding of how change happens. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a running theme, but I’m now about to step it up, working with colleagues across Oxfam and beyond to collect and use case studies of change to sharpen our thinking and practice.

What emerges when you do this is the problem of ‘retrospective coherence’. Asked to remember what happened, people rearrange and reinterpret a change story. Typically they downplay the importance of failure and unexpected events, and the role of individuals (eg champions within state institutions). They also tend to minimize the role of actors outside the civil society-state interaction – faith leaders, academics, media, private sector, traditional leaders. What remains is a smooth, well-planned and executed project that bears little resemblance to the messy reality faced by people working in real time. So part of the effort in collecting such stories is to recapture what actually happened.

I’ve got case studies coming out of my ears at the moment – working with Oxfam Novib, in East Asia, and with the campaigns and advocacy team – and will be blogging about them as they develop. But in the meantime, here’s the latest version of the guidance questions I send round to kick off the process – I would really appreciate any suggestions for sharpening them up, references etc. They’re also available as a Word document here.

Starting Point

What change did Oxfam seek? Where/how did the idea originate? Was it specific (eg improving livelihoods for X women) or systemic (changing government policy, prevailing norms)? Was it primarily economic, political, social or a combination?

The remaining questions help you work your way round the power and change cycle, which helps in analysing a wide range of change processes (see graphic)

Power Analysis

What was the nature of the redistribution of power involved in the change? Was it primarily about ‘power within’ eg empowering women to become more active social agents, ‘power with’ (collective organization) or ‘power to’ (e.g. supporting CSO advocacy)?

What was the power analysis of the key forces driving/blocking such a change? What economic or political interests were threatened/promoted by the change? Which groups were drivers/blockers/undecided? Was their power formal (eg elected politicians) or informal (traditional leaders, influential individuals)? Was it visible (rules and force) or invisible (in people heads – norms and values) or hidden (behind the scenes influence)

Which individuals played key roles, either as allies or opponents?

Change Hypothesis

What aspects of (or changes in) political, economic, social context made the desired change more or less likely (eg functioning institutions, political leadership, new technologies, new threats or opportunities)

What was the hypothesis for how the change was likely to come about? What alliances (eg with sympathetic officials or politicians, private sector, media, faith leaders or within civil society) could drive/block the change? What tactics were likely to work best (cooperation v conflict, research v street protest)?

What were the pivotal moments/windows of opportunity (eg new governments; changes of leadership; crises and scandals; election timetables)?

Change Strategy

What was Oxfam’s role in promoting change? As an active player or supporting partners? One programme approach, or advocacy/programme only?

Who were our partners – were they ‘usual suspects’ (local civil society organizations and NGOs), ‘unusual suspects’ (private sector bodies, local/national government, faith leaders) or a mixture of both? What was Oxfam’s contribution eg helping them develop a clearer theory of change; bringing partners together with other actors to build alliances; building particular aspects of their organizational capacity; funding?

Implement and Evaluate

What did we/partners actually do (as specific as possible, please!)

What was unexpected? Few change processes go according to plan (although we often rewrite them to make them look that way!) What unforeseen events or realizations (e.g. that something wasn’t working) led to a change of approach? How did the original plan change as the work developed? Were there unintended outcomes and impacts?

Were there early wins that helped build confidence and momentum in the work?

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

How did you monitor and evaluate impact? What evidence can you provide to persuade someone who questions whether your actions actually led to the change described?

What are the top lessons you would draw from this experience for development workers in other contexts?

From superstorm Sandy to climate solidarity: How extreme weather can unlock climate action

From a battered New York, Oxfam climate change policy adviser Tim Gore (right) considers the wider impact of major ‘weather events’ on the climate change debate

I live in New York, half a block outside Evacuation Zone A on the East side of Manhattan. My partner and I, like many others, had our quick-run bags packed as the power went off on Monday evening (which is yet to be restored) and the storm surge grew. In the days since, we’ve been struck by the messages of good will we have been sent from all over the world. One of the first was from a friend and colleague who two years ago took me to visit the hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis living on mud embankments shattered by Cyclone Aila.

Could such disasters, wherever they hit in the world, offer opportunities to build a global solidarity movement for action on climate change? They could, if we are smart about it.

First, let’s be clear – as CNN, Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Bloomberg have all been in the last days – that Sandy was another clear cut case of climate change in action. With increasing rigour (as I described here), scientists can now show that global warming driven by excess greenhouse gas emissions, either makes extreme weather more likely or more severe, or both. Bloomberg Businessweek’s front cover on Sandy should surely be a contender for headline of the century.

This increased confidence in attributing climate change to specific impacts on people’s lives, and on the bottom lines of businesses and entire countries, means weather extremes like Sandy should now be treated as major opportunities to leverage political action on climate change. It’s an idea that has gained increasing attention in recent years, from Alex Evans to David Attenborough (and in Oxfam, Duncan Green’s been haranguing us about getting better at seizing “windows of opportunity” for years).

In the context in which an abrupt change of course is needed to address the climate crisis – one some have compared only to mobilisation for war – crisis moments can create unique windows of opportunity for non-linear political change. That is precisely what we need. They can catalyse clear shifts in the values and priorities of citizens, business and political leaders around the world. Climate disasters in the global North and South alike are reminders of the common threat we face, and of the need to act collectively and urgently to avert yet greater harm.

While no-one could wish for a future disaster, the science shows events like Sandy and this year’s US megadrought are the new normal. So it makes sense for Oxfam and many of our partners in civil society to try to put this approach at the heart of our climate change advocacy and campaigning. To do so, we must get at least a couple of key things right.

First, we must recognise that while we are all now increasingly affected by climate change – rich and poor, in the global North and South alike – we are not all affected equally, and our struggles to fight climate change are not all the same. In fact, our common enemy of climate change will further exacerbate the inequalities between us. Sandy showed again that New York is highly vulnerable to climate change, but I was still thankful to be facing a hurricane there rather than in Haiti, Bangladesh or the Philippines. The US farmers who saw their crops devastated this year – sending world food prices rocketing – had losses tempered by access to drought-resilient crop varieties, investment and insurance mechanisms that could have saved lives and livelihoods amongst their counterparts in the Sahel in recent years.

It’s the poorest everywhere who are hit hardest. But we’ll only build a movement of global climate solidarity if we recognise these

Fire damage at Breezy Point, NYC

inequalities and differences up front, and make sure they are at the heart of the responses and solutions we demand. That’s how our campaigning can be inclusive, ultimately reaching more people, and building more power for action.

Second, we must assert that global climate solidarity goes beyond charity and stands for justice – it must link our basic humanitarian impulse to help those in need to passionate political action. This means knowing who or what is the source of climate injustice, who stands in the way of redress and how they can be moved. This week our friends at 350.org are doing a fine job at showing how that can be done. Their rapid response webpage helps concerned citizens donate to help those hit by Sandy, while putting the energy companies – who have kept climate change out of this year’s Presidential debate – in the frame, and demanding political action from whoever wins the White House next week.

Expressions of global solidarity in the windows of opportunity following climate disasters will likely not be the only approach we need to jump start climate action. But we can’t just rely on incremental strategies either.

What does Tolstoy’s War and Peace teach us about Causation, Complexity and Theories of Change?

Just finished reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an amazing work, which quite possibly justifies the blurb’s ‘greatest novel in any language’

Leo Tolstoy, development guru

claim (who on earth decides these things and how?). I read it 30 years ago, but to be honest, I’m not sure I understood much of it then.

Tolstoy manages to combine the enthralling human saga of Russia’s experience of invasion by France under Napoleon, and the French’s subsequent retreat, with a profound meditation on the nature of history and change. I started it as holiday reading, supposedly time out from the day-job, but I couldn’t help wondering what Tolstoy would say about some current development debates. At times it feels as if in his frustration with the causal explanations of the day, he is banging on the doors of complexity theory. Some choice quotes, mainly from the concluding meditation on the nature of history at the end of Book Two:

Tolstoy on causation and attribution (are you listening, MEListas?)

‘It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man’s very nature. And so the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of circumstances conditioning an event, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the reason for it, snatches at the first most comprehensible approximation to a cause and says ‘There is the cause’……

There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event save the one cause of all causes [i.e. God}. But there are laws governing events: some we are ignorant of, others we are groping our way to. The discovery of these laws becomes possible only when we finally give up looking for causes.’

Tolstoy on Command and Control and the fallacy of hindsight (cf Ros Eyben’s work on aid)

‘History shows that the expression of the will of historical personages in the majority of cases does not produce any effect – that is, their commands are often not executed and sometimes the very opposite of what they order is done…. Every command executed is always one of an immense number unexecuted. All the impossible commands are inconstant with the course of events and do not get carried out. Only the possible ones link up into a consecutive series of commands corresponding to a series of events, and are carried out.

Our erroneous idea that the command which precedes the event causes the event is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of thousands of commands, those few which were consistent with that event have been executed we forget about the others that

were not executed because they could not be.’

Tolstoy channels Amartya Sen on Freedom and Wellbeing

‘All man’s aspirations, all the interest that life holds for him, are so many aspirations and strivings after greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subjection, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.’

And finally, I’m definitely with Tolstoy on the meaninglessness of free (read ‘political’) will:

‘In history, what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown we call freewill. Freewill is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.’

It’s 1500 wonderful pages – get stuck in. As for me, the boxset of the 1972 TV adaptation with Anthony Hopkins has just arrived (see pic). Good times.

Can theories of change help researchers (or their funders) have more impact?

Got dragged into DFID this week for yet another session on theories of change. This one was organized by the DFID-funded Research for Development (R4D) project (sorry, ‘portal’). A lot of my previous comments on such sessions apply – in DFID the theories of change agenda seems rather dominated by evaluation and planning (‘logframes on steroids’), whereas in Oxfam, it is mainly used to sharpen our work in programmes and campaigns. But the conversation that jumped out at me was around ‘how do we influence the researchers that we fund to use theories of change (ToCs) to improve the impact of their research?’

It’s risky to generalize about ‘academics’, but I’m going to do it anyway. Let’s apply some ToCs thinking to academia as a target. Applying ToCs to try and understand why academics don’t use ToCs may feel a bit weird (like the bit in Being John Malkovich where Malkovich enters his own brain), but bear with me.

Let’s start with the 3i model – processes and decisions are influenced by institutions, interests and ideas. Because academia is largely non-profit making, institutions and interests are pretty much the same thing, and come down to incentive and career structures. Here I think DFID has a problem in getting researchers to be more concerned with impact - whatever favourable ideas are around in terms of academics wanting to change the world are likely to be neutralised by the institutional culture:

Career progression takes place largely through peer approval rather than through any ability to influence the world outside (in fact, being dubbed a ‘media don’ can damage your promotion prospects).

One of the big risks for an academic is being rubbished in public for being wrong, naive or insufficiently nuanced – academics love snark and gossip (not like NGOs then…) and that kind of kicking can damage your reputation for years. So there are strong disincentives to set out clearly your assumptions about how change happens (especially if they’re really naff, like ‘all you need is robust research to convince grateful-but-dim policy makers to change their misguided ways’, which I suspect is actually the theory of change behind a lot of research).

That fear of clarity may explain why when I worked as a publisher, I watched how perfectly good, clear writers started a PhD and were lost to me, entering into several decades of inaccessible post-modern gibberish before emerging blinking into the light as self confident, respected professors once again able to communicate in normal English (e.g. talking to a potential young author on Mexico. Me: ‘so who has the guns then?’ Author – light dawns after baffled look – ‘Oh, you mean the repressive apparatus of the state!’)

What other ideas might ToCs suggest? That you need to reward and build alliances among the drivers of change (eg encouraging young Blattmanesque bloggers who ‘get’ communications and influencing, while doing your best to neutralise ‘blockers’ – custodians of the peer-reviewed flame, perhaps?).

Or that you need to spot and capitalise on windows of opportunity, since change is seldom smooth and continuous. In the UK, one such window of opportunity is the new version of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the enormously influential scheme by which UK universities are assessed for state funding. The next round of the RAE, now renamed the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ concludes in 2014. Importantly, it will allocate 20% to impact, defined as ‘reach and significance’. Could DFID and other funders pick that up and use it in their own assessments?

How else could DFID help turn this around? It has a lot of clout, largely coming from its sizeable research budget (about £200m a year last time I looked). Here’s a few ideas, in no particular order and mixing up sticks and carrots.

How to get researchers to understand the minds and lives of the non-researchers they hope to influence? How about insisting that any recipient of a DFID research grant not only identifies the non-academic targets of their research, but gets credit if they manage to arrange to shadow these targets for a few days to find out how they absorb and use information (I learned more about advocacy from shadowing a UK Development Minister for a day than from dozens of workshops).

Publish (and require recipients to publish) stats on blogging, citations in the media (not just journals) and any other indicators of communications and/or impact, by named academics, in order to generate some positive competition. Let the league tables commence….

Start ‘a window of opportunity fund’ that specifically excludes new research in favour of funding previous or actual research recipients to rapidly repackage existing research in response to major new opportunities in terms of demands for new thinking – e.g. change of leadership in target institution, scandal, external shock etc.

In funding applications, insist on a proper power analysis/theory of change, including which target institutions are to be influenced, what the opportunity timetable looks like (eg new legislation or drawing up manifestos). If anyone limits their ToC to ‘changing the discourse’, they should probably be taken out and shot (unless they can plausibly suggest how they aim to achieve that).

Ask researchers to explain how they will involve both influencing targets and communications people in the governance of their research from the outset (rather than completing the research and then saying, ‘oh blimey, how do we communicate this to keep DFID happy, we’d better organize a seminar and send a copy to the Minister’).

There are also risks here – people are sometimes scarily ready to blur/erase the boundaries between advocacy and impartial academic research – more on that to follow.

I’m sure there are lots of other ideas – please send them in

Previous thoughts on getting research into policy here and here.

Other thoughts from the workshop here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theories of change = logframes on steroids? A discussion with DFID

‘Theories of Change is just the latest attempt to shine a light on what lies behind, what makes everything work or fail. We constantly reach for new tools, but we keep alighting on small islands and losing the big picture.’ Jake Allen, Christian Aid

I recently spoke at a half-day DFID seminar discussing a draft paper by Isabel Vogel – ‘Review of the Use of Theories of Change in international development’. The draft is here (keep clicking) – Isabel wants comments by this Friday 18 May, either on the blog, or emailed directly to info[at]isabelvogel.co.uk. She is particularly looking for examples of documented theories of change (ToCs) originating in developing countries (as opposed to donor-funded programmes).

The level of interest was impressive – 40 DFIDistas in the room, plus 7 country teams via videocon and sundry NGOs and consultanty types. My overall impression was that Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) is driving the ToCs discussion in DFID, and not always in a good way. So in my allotted 5 minutes, I stressed that ToCs should not become a ‘logframe on steroids’ (a phrased nicked from Alfredo Ortiz) and the importance of power analysis and ToCs as a permanent aspect of the planning cycle - and not just for programmes but for policy and campaigns work.

Plus their usefulness (albeit in different ways) in all 4 quadrants of the Cynefin framework(Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic – see graphic), rather than just in the simple/complicated quadrants preferred by development types. I also said we should throw away those horribly complicated ToC diagrams once we’ve finished them (lest they terrify those that follow).

The discussion confirmed these concerns. Lots of people (including many of the measurers) are fully aware of the risk and want to avoid it, but are struggling against powerful incentive structures that make it happen anyway (principally the results agenda, but also the difficulty of using non-linear ToCs in practice). Hivos, a wonderfully cerebral-but-practical Dutch NGO that has done a lot of thinking on this, talks about a broader range of ‘ToC thinking’ as a useful way to prevent it all being turned into just another toolkit (‘ticking the ToCs box?’). Rick Davies recalled that the logical framework approach was originally a separate exercise to filling in the logframe table, but they collapsed/reduced into the table due to the structure and working practices of the aid business. Might the same fate await ToCs?

What of the benefits? In addition to those discussed in previous posts, Joanna Monaghan of Comic Relief (a funder), sees ToCs as making explicit the hypotheses underlying funding decisions – ‘the rules of thumb we all carry around in our heads’. That allows partners to challenge them, if they think the funder has (gasp!) got it wrong.

People also saw ToCs as making people look at the evidence and identify what is known/unknown (that rather alarmed me – what were they doing before?), but also helping programmes adapt more quickly as new evidence emerges. From the MEL end, an explicit ToC also allows a discussion with beneficiaries on what indicators to measure progress against (rather than the funder just imposing them from outside).

ToC challenges
When it came to the challenges of implementing ToCs, the big headache is how to balance donor accountability (reflected in the pressure for measurement and results, and holding partners to account against pre-agreed plans), and the ability to use ToCs intelligently to learn and adapt to changing environments.

ToCs are about people engaging intelligently with the complexity and nuance of context and process. But how do you rigorously assess the quality of people’s thought? The development community usually focuses on process and outcomes, whereas ToCs may demand something more like academic assessment on how deeply people are thinking about things. ‘Accountability has to be about trying hard enough. We never ask questions about critical thinking, only about delivery on a set of results which 5 years ago we thought we would be able to achieve.’ Stand by for quasi-professorial marks for project proposals (‘beta minus, must try harder’).

The more practical types worried over how you can balance constantly revisiting/revising a ToC with the need to get on and actually, you know, do something. One answer: pre-agree circuit breaker reviews at e.g. one year, two years into the project, when everyone knows the ToC is up for grabs; another – test (and fund) a series of ToCs in a pilot stage before deciding on a final ToC – a bit like the DFID-funded research programme consortia, which include (and finance) an ‘inception phase’ during which the recipient is allowed to test and finalise their research plans for the subsequent years. Perhaps there also needs to be a clear process for designated people to have access to a ‘red button’ change of direction in response to major contextual shifts that require a rapid revision of the plan (‘Mugabe dies’).

If failure is indeed a source of ideas etc, we need to create a safe environment to recognize, communicate and learn from it. That requires a shift in culture and incentives – e.g. circuit breaker reviews must have a convincing discussion on failure and what we’ve learned – if a project can’t demonstrate failure as well as learn from it, it probably isn’t trying hard enough.

Another plea from the practical peeps – can we separate out communities of practice from communities of theory, otherwise the practitioners are cowed into silence by the theory wallahs sounding off (who could they be thinking of?)

One final random thought: Is this (i.e. funding projects with plural ToCs, greater appetite for risk of failure etc) a suitable role for philanthropic foundations who are more able to take risks on failure than publicly funded donors?

How Change Happens: Defeating Oil Exploration in the San Andres Archipelago

I recently gave a weekend ‘pro-seminar’ on ‘how change happens’ to masters students at Brandeis University in Boston. I’ll post the powerpoints separately. The students were from all over the world, many from activist backgrounds – a fascinating and fun crew, most of them on the ’sustainable international development‘ Masters. For their assignments, they had to apply HCH thinking to a case study of change and I promised to edit down and publish the best one – here it is, from Paula Garcia (right).

In November 2010, the Colombian government authorized the exploration of oil in the marine ecosystem of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina Archipelago. This decision threatened the island, part of a marine protected area and the Seaflower Biosphere Reserve, not just with pollution but possible catastrophic impacts such as those that followed the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of México. Yet less than a year later, in October 2011, on an official visit to San Andres Island, President Juan Manuel Santos announced the country was not going to carry out oil exploration or production in the Archipelago due to the risks to the marine environment. How did such a U-turn take place?

San Andres, Providence and Santa Catalina Islands form a Colombian archipelago located in the Caribbean Sea, 750 km from the mainland (see map). The Archipelago’s Old Providence barrier reef is one of the “largest coral reefs in the Americas” and  was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in November 2000. In addition, in 2005 the Seaflower Marine Protected Area (MPA) was created with the support of Coralina - the Corporation for the Sustainable Development of the Archipelago of San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina –. In 2010, Coralina was selected among 1,100 partners as one of the 20 best success stories in biodiversity conservation by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It won because it managed to combine environmental awareness with economic, social and cultural development.

Despite this level of international recognition, that same year the National Agency of Hydrocarbons (ANH) and the Ministry of Environmental, Housing and Territorial Development Affairs (MAVDT) authorized the exploration of oil in the marine ecosystem of the Archipelago. The companies in line for exploration licenses included Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos (Ecopetrol), Repsol from Spain and Argentina’s YPF.  While oil licenses for the Archipelago were given when Juan Manuel Santos was just starting his administration, these licenses were a continuation of a legacy left behind by former president Alvaro Uribe Vélez.

Once the communities of San Andres, Providencia and Santa Catalina Archipelago heard of the government’s decision, the reaction was swift. With the support of the Coralina and claiming violation of national and international laws related to indigenous people and community rights, in February 2011 a Civil Action (Acción Popular) was submitted. By not consulting the raizales before authorizing the oil exploration, the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples under ILO Convention 169 were not being enforced by the government. Likewise, articles 329 and 330 of the National Constitution, which guarantee the community`s rights to participate in the decisions related to the exploitation of natural resources, were being infringed.  Two days after receiving the Acción Popular, ANH suspended the exploration in order to carry out the proper consultation process with the Archipelago`s communities.

Oil exploration in San Andres became a subject of intense public debate, with the media lining up on both sides of the argument. The academic community produced multiple articles explaining the serious environmental, social and cultural implications of exploring oil in the Archipelago. On the other hand, the industrial and economic sector argued that responsible exploration would not hurt the environment and the revenues would especially benefit the communities of the islands.

The temperature rose still further in June 2011 when a corruption scandal engulfed the director of ANH, Armando Zamora. In September 2011, he resigned.

Meanwhile, Colombia had a new president, Juan Manuel Santos, elected in June 2010. It was his first visit as president to San Andrés Island in October 2011 that saw the announcement of an end to oil exploration in the Archipelago.

How did change happen in San Andres?
The U-turn on oil came about through multiple factors interacting with one another. These involved a combination of institutions, agents and events: on the institutional side, Coralina’s constant participatory work with local communities was essential in enabling the local community to exercise its rights, for example through the the Acción Popular (which also showed that the institution of the law can play a pivotal role in bringing change in Colombia). International recognition by UNESCO and IUCN helped to legitimate their actions. The role of media both in providing information and hosting the public debate was key to promoting cross-sectoral interaction.

Three events played a particular role: the Deepwater Horizon tarnished the image of deep sea oil extraction throughout the region; the corruption scandal at ANH was decisive in undermining the legitimacy of the licenses given to Ecopetrol, Repsol and YPF. Finally the transition from Alvaro Uribe to Juan Manuel Santos brought a change in government and a new receptivity towards biodiversity and social justice.

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’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If change requires both cooperation and conflict, can we really do both?

I’ve been thinking about my recent trip to Honduras, how change happens, and the discussions there (and with some other country teams since then) about what I am calling the ‘cooperation-conflict cycle’ (see pic). The default mode in Oxfam and most large NGOs is generally uncomfortable with conflict, but research by John Gaventa and others shows that conflict is an essential part of many processes of progressive social change.

This cycle is drawn from Jonathan Fox’s work on ‘transitions to accountability’ in Mexico. Fox found that progress depended on a cycle of conflict and cooperation – a conflict would break out, and then a more progressive section of local state officials would talk to more approachable protest leaders and a period of reform would ensue. When those reforms ran out of steam, or new issues emerged, conflict would reemerge and the whole cycle would start again in a process of ‘interaction between the thickening of civil society and state reformist initiatives’.

If true, and assuming that NGOs see their role as subsidiary, (i.e. they are not the main actor in the drama) this theory of change poses some serious challenges. If they want to be present and playing a constructive role over the whole cycle, NGOs may need to use very different tactics and language in the conflict and cooperation phases, and forge different alliances and partnerships.

In the conflict phase, the language and tactics will probably need to be more polarised and confrontational (us and them, good guys and bad etc), and the alliances are likely to be more horizontal – pulling together a large network of civil society organizations around some common aims, perhaps with some support from alternative media and radical churches.

By contrast, in the cooperation phase, the language and tactics will need to be more constructive and propositional, and avoid alienating potential supporters in other camps. Alliances will need to be forged with actors in other spheres (local state officials, politicians, private sector). Even media and church alliances may need to be different, pulling in more mainstream, conservative fractions than in the conflict stage.

But can the same organization really do both, moving coherently from one to the other and back again? Staff tend to opt for one or the other, and find it hard to change gears. Loyalty to allies in one phase will inhibit moving to the next. And life is of course a lot messier than the ‘cycle’ suggests, with conflict and cooperation both present at most points in a change process. 

What to do? In practice, I suspect a lot of NGOs and others tacitly opt for a division of labour – they either specialize in the conflict phase or the cooperative phase. But that may mean a lot of wasted effort when the cycle swings the other way.

Not sure if this is so abstract as to be virtually meaningless – do you recognize any of these issues from your own work?

Oops, just posted this by mistake. Sorry to post twice in a day – will take a day off tomorrow out of consideration for your inboxes.