‘Bricifying’ international NGOs is hard work: the challenges facing Oxfam India

I spent last week trying to understand an intriguing experiment. About five years ago, Oxfam GB’s ‘white men in shorts’ left India, alongwith all the other Oxfam affiliates, and a new, completely Indian-run Oxfam India took over. All part of ‘Bricification’ within the Oxfam family (there’s an Oxfam Brazil in the pipeline too).

So what’s changed? After a period of reflection Oxfam India has opted for a strategy combining programming with increased levels of advocacy in areas such as smallholder agriculture & climate change, natural resource management, right to education and health, violence against women and women’s empowerment, along with a hefty dose of emergencies work and disaster risk reduction. Its two ‘emerging themes’ are urban poverty and ‘India and the World’ – for example the impact of Indian investment in Africa, or India’s role in the G20.

But it hasn’t been easy. The apparently unanswerable political logic of ‘Indianizing Oxfam’ has faced some pretty steep challenges, as I found out in a consultation with partners from Indian civil society. These come in two broad areas: political and financial.

Financially, Oxfam is struggling to crack how to fundraise from India’s rising middle class. Many Indians prefer to give via their religious affiliation, or to more old school NGO activities such as child sponsorship, which we avoid.

Politically, there is real concern that Oxfam India will take up space from other organizations, especially grassroots ones. Does its dual role of funder and activist give it undue influence? Is it importing a foreign model of advocacy (eg an individualist online campaigning

model, dominated by paid activists, project cycles that abandon communities after 3 years, private sector models such as independent boards – as one activist half-joked ‘if Gandhiji had had a board, we’d probably still be waiting for independence’). Is the rise of professional NGOs leading to a ‘Gatesization’ that is alien to Indian traditions?

And what does Oxfam add, given the enormous size, experience and sophistication of Indian CSOs? International links are as often a liability as an asset in India, allowing you to be caricatured as a foreign meddler in internal affairs.

On a more mundane level, will the indianisation of INGOs distort the domestic scene via a brain drain and pressure on salary structures? Oxfam isn’t the only one doing this, by the way: other INGOs including Plan, Care and ActionAid are all trying to position themselves in India, seeking different locations on the service delivery-to-grassroots campaigning spectrum.

Now I think a pinch of salt is warranted here. Most of the large networks in the room already have their boards, most of them follow project cycles, they hire staff who do activism, maybe on lesser salaries, but hire nonetheless. And many of them are far ahead of Oxfam in doing online individual campaigning via Facebook and e petitions. Their anxiety may be less about Oxfam India somehow changing the rules than ‘we have struggled for years to become ‘professionals’ like you and now you want to muscle in and become Indian to take that space’.

It’s also worth noting that this was very much the national conversation in Delhi – at state level in Uttar Pradesh, things seemed less problematic, with Oxfam more confident of its role and partners less concerned.

What to do? I know even less about fundraising than I do about everything else, but I did wonder if we are falling into the trap of trying to import Western approaches, rather than exploring how these things work in India. Rather than sponsored walks and standing orders, why not start from where Indians are at? If they give money to temples or mosques, we could either campaign to make sure that money is well-used (code of conduct, transparency, best and worst practices, league tables and the rest), or even work with religious institutions to help improve the effectiveness of their charitable work (although that would need to be sensitively managed in a religiously polarised context like India).

On the political side, it all comes down to what Oxfam India can add to the country’s vibrant civil society sector. Several suggestions, most of them tricky:

• Bringing in campaigns and programming expertise on ‘new issues’ such as climate change
• I suspect we might have something to add on research for advocacy, eg in terms of communications, killer facts and the rest, or in including India in cross-country research programmes like our food volatility work
• Given the level of hostility among Indian CSOs to working with other sectors, we could specialize in convening ‘vertical alliances’ of unusual suspects – progressive fractions of the middle class, religious institutions, private sector etc, although that might well further complicate our relationships with CSOs who ‘don’t talk to the enemy’.
• Be a critical friend of Indian CSOs, raising issues of eg their own levels of internal representation of minorities such as tribals and dalits (again, not likely to win us many friends)
• The India in the world area is only going to get bigger, definitely an ideal place for Oxfam to engage.

Any other suggestions?

It will be interesting to see how many of these conversations are replicated in Brazil or Mexico (where Oxfam has also gone local).

What can we learn from a really annoying paper on NGOs and development?

I’ve got a paper I want you to read, particularly if you work for an NGO or other lobbying outfit. Not because it’s good – far from it – but because reading it and (if you work for an NGO) observing your rising tide of irritation will really help you understand how those working in the private sector, government or the multilateral system feel when they read a generalized and ill-informed NGO attack on their work.

The paper in question is from a reputable institution (Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty Institute) and authors (Nicola Banks and David Hulme), and is about ‘the role of NGOs and civil society in development and poverty reduction’.  Here’s the abstract:

‘Since the late 1970s, NGOs have played an increasingly prominent role in the development sector, widely praised for their strengths as innovative and grassroots-driven organisations with the desire and capacity to pursue participatory and people-centred forms of development and to fill gaps left by the failure of states across the developing world in meeting the needs of their poorest citizens. While levels of funding for NGO programmes in service delivery and advocacy work have increased alongside the rising prevalence and prominence of NGOs, concerns regarding their legitimacy have also increased. There are ongoing questions of these comparative advantages, given their growing distance away from low-income people and communities and towards their donors. In addition, given the non-political arena in which they operate, NGOs have had little participation or impact in tackling the more structurally-entrenched causes and manifestations of poverty, such as social and political exclusion, instead effectively depoliticising poverty by treating it as a technical problem that can be ‘solved’. How, therefore, can NGOs ‘return to their roots’ and follow true participatory and experimental paths to empowerment? As this paper explores, increasingly, NGOs are recognised as only one, albeit important, actor in civil society. Success in this sphere will require a shift away from their role as service providers to that of facilitators and supporters of broader civil society organisations through which low-income communities themselves can engage in dialogue and negotiations to enhance their collective assets and capabilities.’

A fairly standard critique, and one with which I have some sympathy (apart from the unforgivably long paragraph). So why is it so annoying? (and I realize I will probably come across as just another thin-skinned NGO prig, but what’s the world coming to if you can’t indulge in cathartic rants on a blog?). Here are some of the irritants that I think we NGO types should note and avoid in our own work:

Sweeping generalizations: there’s a standard couple of paras on ‘hey they’re all different!’, but from then on it’s NGOs are this and NGOs are that, with evidence-free assertions across geography, scale and role. No acknowledgement of differences in approach, of some NGOs being better/worse than others. From NGI (non-governmental individual) to large transnational organizations like Oxfam, NGOs are just one amorphous blob (cf ‘the private sector’ in NGO diatribes). The authors’ defence is that this is just a chapter for a student textbook and so has to be a very general ‘synthesis of syntheses’. Just as long as you don’t expect it to describe reality, I guess.

Teaching grandmother to suck eggs (yes, for non English readers, that is one of our weirder sayings): nothing more irritating than having an academic, in ringing tones, telling you the blindingly obvious like ‘while NGOs comprise part of civil society, they are far from synonymous with civil society’ – NSS (no shit, Sherlock). The authors pull the student textbook defence again on this one – it makes me rather worry what our students are being fed (but at least explains why several have come up to me after talks to say how confused they are because they like what I’ve said, yet have been previously taught that all NGOs are evil/incompetent pawns of imperialism).

Argument by assertion, rather than evidence: if you repeat often enough that ‘concerns of financial sustainability and organizational

survival drive the erosion of an NGO’s original values and mission’, maybe the reader will eventually swallow it, despite the lack of nuance or evidence. The authors’ defence is that the paper summarizes ‘the best elements of an enormous academic literature’. The trouble with that is that, like an NGO writing a paper based exclusively on other NGO reports, the process acts as a huge echo chamber, magnifying normative assumptions and prejudices, and bidding farewell to any dwindling link to reality.

Dodgy stats: Citing secondary sources from 2000 and 2006, ‘NGOs depend on donor funds for around 85-90% of their income’. What, all NGOs? (certainly isn’t true of Oxfam). To be fair, the authors promise to sort this one out (but what if I hadn’t bothered to write this? Those poor students again.)

Assuming all NGOs are either venal (endlessly pursuing their own expansion and ‘professionalization’ – which apparently is a Really Bad Thing) or stupid (not realizing that they can’t succeed): Nothing alienates more than a truly condescending tone based on very little actual knowledge. Over the years, I’ve seen some spectacular NGO finger wagging alienate potentially sympathetic politicians – this is right up there.

No sign of them actually interviewing anyone who’s worked for an NGO in the last 5 years. The authors’ response was that both authors had worked with NGOs over the years, and they’d drawn on writings by ex-NGO ‘practitioner-scholars’. So if you’ve worked with government/private sector, no need to check your analysis with them before slagging them off? Interesting. Get ready for my paper on ‘academics’…….. The authors pull the standard ‘it’s just a working paper and can be fixed’ defence. Sorry, but if you’re serious about feedback you have to actively go out and ask for it.

No case studies of NGOs doing the things they are being accused of. Not one. I asked them about this too. Response? Weirdly, the authors argue that eschewing case studies (in favour of slagging off all NGOs indiscriminately) is somehow an act of kindness. Not sure I follow that one.

I could go on – ubiquitous aunt sallies, lazy use of the passive tense (‘it is argued that….’) – but you get the picture. As far as I can tell, they have not solicited, or read, any internal or published NGO work on these issues (and boy, there’s plenty of it – we agonize constantly about effectiveness, accountability etc). Nor have they sent the draft to any NGO people to review (unlike this blogpost, which both authors have commented on).

Gosh I feel better for that…….. But back to my main point. If you work for an NGO and want to influence, rather than irritate, read this paper and monitor your reactions.

I think I may be hearing from the authors……

How can INGOs improve their work in fragile and conflict states?

There’s nothing like the impending threat of giving a talk to make you mug up on an issue, usually the morning before. Today’s exercise in skating on thin ice (the secret? Keep moving. Fast as possible) was a recent talk to some Indiana University students studying the developmental role of the state while enjoying our splendid British summer (ahem).

I gave them the standard FP2P spiel on Active Citizens and Effective States (powerpoint here - just keep clicking), but then got into the different roles INGOs play in countries with different types of state. The big distinction is between stable and unstable states, but there are lots of subcategories (middle v low income; democratic v autocratic; willing (nice) v unwilling (nasty); centralized v decentralized; aid dependent or not). But my recent crash-and-burn experience of trying to come up with a typology was salutary, and I won’t try and repeat the exercise.

Stable states are in many ways the easy ones: we can help with civil society strengthening, some state-building at local level (especially in decentralized states), or play a convening role to help bring state, civil society and other non-state actors together to find solutions. Even in stable states, change is often a cycle of conflict and cooperation (see diagram), something we struggle to navigate. See this post for more findings from some interesting research on what works by John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee.

But the more substantial bit of my talk was on Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FRACAS – my best acronym in ages). These, if you believe the new numbers from the ODI, are where the majority of poor people will live in 15 years time and that’s a real headache for aid agencies and NGOs: without a well-functioning state, everything gets more difficult. For starters, you need to send your best, most politically astute staff there, but FRACAS are not always the most desirable place to live, raise a family etc, so recruitment can be a ‘challenge’.

As prep for my session, I read two recent Oxfam papers: Programming in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries: A Learning Companion (June 2011) and Within and Without the State (Research Report, February 2012). According to these, some of the key features of working in FRACAS are:

With a weak/absent state, more power lies in the hands of multiple non-state actors, including faith-based organizations, private sector (think money lenders in Somalia), traditional authorities, and (increasingly) well organized, educated and funded Diaspora networks. INGOs have to learn how to engage with all of these in rapidly mutating coalitions.

With the state not delivering, there is always a temptation to start building parallel systems to provide health, education etc. But in the long term these can actually get in the way of building a viable state (see my critique of Paul Collier’s Independent Service Authorities). The trick is to ensure that service delivery work also builds long-term state capacity.

Even in apparently dysfunctional states, there may be ‘pockets of functionality’ with which INGOs can engage, (the papers point to education in the DRC). This both delivers services now, and can act as a nucleus for longer term state-building.

In FRACAS, the situation is always likely to be complex, unpredictable and messy. As aid agencies increasingly concentrate their operations there, there is going to be a fascinating conflict with the rising demand for tangible, measurable and attributable impact.

And what of future directions for INGOs in FRACAS? Within and Without the State makes some tantalisingly general, but interesting suggestions. Some should be familiar to regular readers of this blog, e.g. learn to work better with non state actors such as faith groups, and to respond better to shocks. Others are less familiar:

Focus on building legitimacy/trust/social contract between citizens and state (accountability comes later). In FRACAS, the standard INGO repertoire of supporting demands for greater accountability may be premature: the state may simply lack the capacity to deliver, rather than the will, while citizens may have had such a negative previous experience of the state that all they want is to be left alone. So the first priority is to help build the social contract in terms of trust and supply (capacity), before moving on to demand.

Civil society organizations are often atomised and inexperienced in engaging outside their sector or locality. Helping to convene ‘local to national’ conversations for them with national players (both state and non state) is one possible niche for INGOs.

Promote ‘community conversations’: in the chaotic unpredictability of FRACAS, the usual pieties about not trying to impose blueprints are even truer than ever. There is no substitute for having ‘embedded’ conversations, without a prior agenda, with as many people as possible. Only that way will you detect new currents of power and thinking, and react promptly to such changes.

Any other advice to INGOers working in FRACAS?

When does accountability work have an impact? The importance of Implementation Gaps

I’ve been reading the set of papers Oxfam recently published on local governance and community action (see previous blog) and was struck by how central the issue of ‘implementation gaps’ is in our work.

An implementation gap arises when a set of institutions (often via decentralization), policies or budgets (or all three) exists on paper that should benefit poor people and communities, but is having almost no impact on the ground.

Such a situation provides a particularly good entry point for an INGO like Oxfam because it reduces the political risks of being accused of being a politically interfering foreigner (you are supporting the implementation of what the state has already agreed). What’s more early wins are likely to be easier to achieve and can have a galvanizing effect – plucking a few low-hanging fruit is great for morale and motivation. In terms of power analysis, this is about making the most of ‘invited spaces’ rather than creating new ones.

If the state is particularly effective, then a lot can be achieved through evidence and reason, perhaps facilitating dialogue with excluded minorities, as we did in Vietnam. Or through helping poor people gain access to their legal rights, for example through legal aid – I’m often struck how much of this kind of work we do, and yet it features fairly low down in our wider communications.

If the state is more chaotic, then a greater level of activism and confrontation may be required to get official attention, as in our campaign on access to medicines in Malawi. In South Africa, I have seen our partners organizing ‘toyi toyis’ – a very loud and musical form of war dance – outside the courtroom to pressure the judges to act.

In either case, as Jo Rowlands points out in her overview paper on the country cases studies, there is a need to balance both the supply and demand side of the accountability equation, supporting officials to respond to growing citizens demands, and working to prevent conflicts and breakdowns breaking out between the two sides. Always recognizing, that many activists cross the border between supply and demand, moving from jobs in the state to activism in their communities.

The time horizon for such work is relatively short – this is about lots of mini-victories through which poor people and their communities begin to make the most of their invited spaces and legal rights. It’s not about maximalist demands for total revolution that, to be honest, hardly ever prosper.

In most cases, the right place for an INGO is behind the scenes, supporting local civil society with funding, capacity building, access to information etc. Where civil society is particularly weak, INGOs may have to be more of an actor (as in the Vietnam case).
I guess this is an example of what I meant when I wrote recently about the potential progressive interpretation of the political economists’ insistence on ‘going with the grain’ of local contexts, rather than seeking to impose outside blueprints.

But the programmes go well beyond merely ensuring that governments implement their laws and policies – the trick seems to be to combine working on the implementation gap with something more (to use the fuzzword du jour) ‘transformational’, i.e. helping to unleash the agency and organization of hitherto excluded groups (on the basis of gender, caste or ethnicity) as part of the project. That seems to combine the benefits of lasting change, with the morale-boosting effect of quick (or fairly quick) wins.

As a reminder, the five case studies are:

‘Nothing is impossible’: Women’s rights in Nepal

‘Missing medicines in Malawi’: campaigning against ‘stock-outs’ of essential drugs

‘Where does the money go?’: citizen participation in Turkana, northern Kenya

‘No longer sitting quietly’: building community participation in Vietnam

‘Citizens Wake Up’: The Chukua Hatua programme in Tanzania

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

Wrapping up the great Nairobi guesthouse pool debate

Wow. Hit a nerve there. I’m both gratified and slightly appalled by the level of interest generated by Wednesday’s post on the development-critical issue of whether Oxfam should keep the pool at its Nairobi guesthouse shut. For those people without the time or inclination to trawl through over 60 comments, here’s a summary.

First the voting – deeply unscientific, self selecting, but at least the software doesn’t let you vote more than once from the same machine. Of the 654 votes cast to date:

• ‘Open the pool, provided it operates at zero cost to Oxfam’ gets 59%

• ‘Open the pool right away’ gets 26%

• ‘What are you wasting space on the blog on such a trivial issue?’ gets 8%

• ‘Keep it shut’ gets 7%

Now for the comments: I read through everything up to number 60, and got the following approximate breakdown:

• Open the pool: 20

• Open the pool + lateral thinking (open it to the public, charge other NGOs, privatize it etc): 11

• Humorous (at least in intent): 9

• Completely random and hard to categorize: 9

• Keep it shut: 6

• Other stuff Oxfam does is much worse: 3

• Why not just go to a pool somewhere else? 2

The lateral suggestions are interesting and creative, but they are only worth considering if they fulfil one overriding criterion – Oxfam is in the middle of a major emergency, helping some 3 million people get through the drought in the Horn of Africa and Nairobi is the headquarters of that effort. So if anything distracts one iota of management attention from that effort, forget it, at least until the drought is over.

As for going elsewhere – in Nairobi  anywhere further than walking distance seems to require an hour in a taxi stuck in traffic.

And here are three of my favourite comments:

Calvin: ‘Use the pool but don’t enjoy it’

Ros: ‘How we all agonize that we are not Gandhi’

But by popular acclaim, the prize for best comment goes to Matt for this gem:

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

So what happens next? Errrmm nothing, necessarily. I’m just a humble head of research and for some reason the big cheeses tend not to manage Oxfam via online referenda, but I think this exercise will eventually have an influence. Right now, those in charge undoubtedly have better things to do, but I know they read the blog (far more often than they ever read my emails….) and this exchange has definitely made a few waves. I’ll keep you posted.

And by the way, yes, this was an interesting exchange on a genuine dilemma facing an INGO, but if you want to read about a rather more pressing dilemma, try why everyone (including us) was late in responding to the drought and what we can do about it.

Right, now I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks (and yes, there will be pools involved). I’ve set up a bunch of roboposts to keep wasting your time while I’m away and Richard King will manage the blog. Anything goes wrong, it’s his fault.

Thick problems, thin solutions and the future of NGOs

Normally I avoid discussions about the future of NGOs like the plague – they either involve a bunch of academics with only the vaguest idea of what we actually do all day, or a lot of senior managers emitting sonorous pronouncements on how we need to be more agile in a multi-polar world and use twitter a lot. But every six months or so, I dip in to see what’s new, so this week I joined a discussion at Hivos, an interesting Dutch NGO that is doing some big picture thinking and producing some extremely funky materials on ‘digital natives’, among other things.

Hivos had commissioned a paper by Mike Edwards (development thinker and NGO watcher) to get the ball rolling. Mike’s core argument was that we face a disjunction between ‘thick problems and thin solutions’. Thick problems are ‘complex, politicised and unpredictable’, while ‘thin solutions’ are the preferred operating system of the aid industry, desperately seeking linear causation so it can ‘prove’ its impact (and justify its existence) with lots of monitoring, evaluation etc.

“The world of international development is excited by the power of markets and technology, but not by the slow arc of building better institutions or changing values and relationships; by the efficiency of Results-Based Management but not by the task of democratizing foreign aid; by the ability of Randomized Control Trials to forecast interventions that deliver the best returns, but not by debates about what this means for the deeper dimensions of wellbeing; by “value-for-money” among NGOs as sub-contractors, but not by the need to establish financial independence for groups that are rooted in the South.”

He adds some nice explanations for this trend, and argues that these solutions are ‘not going to get us anywhere near a sustainable human future’, and that the role for NGOs is to ‘act as bridges between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’, reintroducing ideas of transformation (of power, structures etc) back into development.

I buy some, but not all, of this. Real life (as opposed to the uncluttered conceptual landscape of the aid industry) has always been ‘thick’ – multiple factors, messy and unpredictable change, leaving leaders, citizens and social movements to navigate through the fog of history using a blend of values, instinct, opportunism and analysis. To my mind, Mike also gives too much importance to civil society organizations per se – his paper barely mentions the role of the state, democratic institutions, faith groups etc.

He’s too dismissive of the results agenda (he doesn’t think we can beat them, i.e. start measuring what counts, not just what can be counted – ‘quantiphilia is not a contest NGOs can win’ – and argues we shouldn’t join them in the first place.) And although I would personally love to heed his call to give up on international institutions and close our offices in Geneva, New York etc, I think he’s wrong to portray these institutions as on the way out. There are too many global problems that will (eventually) require global solutions/institutions, and we need to be engaged in that thankless task. Ditto his argument for leaving humanitarian response to ‘consulting firms and other specialists’, although we probably agree on the need to shift towards building national capacity to reduce risk and respond to disasters.

So much for the paper, what about the discussion? It was pretty ‘wide-ranging’, as they say, so I’ll just add a few observations on the subtexts to the conversation.

Firstly gloom – the Dutch NGOs feel under political and economic siege right now from government, right wingers and the media, attacking everything from senior salaries to aid effectiveness.

Secondly, we kept skirting around one of the underlying questions in the evolution of the aid industry – what replaces market forces as a driver of change? Speakers contrasted the development scene with the Fortune 500, where big companies rise and fall from year to year. Not so the UN, aid agencies or NGOs. Does the lack of destruction also stifle creation, blocking the appearance of development Googles and Microsofts to break in, crush the existing powers and transform how we work or think? And does the absence of market forces to drive product differentiation explain why we all do the same stuff, herding after the latest development fads (value chains, microfinance, RCTs, whatever)?

In response some, like Owen Barder, think we need to find ways to introduce or mimic market forces in aid. But I think it’s also worth thinking about how other non-market institutions (governments, religious organizations, universities) improve their record on innovation, accountability and competition. In the world of INGOs, decentralization is happening fast, both internally and through the appearance of new start-up affiliates in the emerging economies (Oxfam India and the like) who will surely challenge for power within the NGO network. Maybe large NGOs should also get better at spotting, supporting and adopting innovation from its most likely source – new or smaller NGOs?

Thirdly, the discussion didn’t distinguish clearly enough between complicated and complex processes (and I’m not sure which of these constitute Mike Edwards’ ‘thick’ category). Complicated problems can be solved by thinking and studying harder. Complex ones are inherently insoluble – there is just no way of predicting that one man’s self-immolation will trigger a revolution. Complicated problems require NGOs to become cleverer; complex ones require them to think differently – to get better at spotting incipient big changes as early as possible, at finding ways to respond (promoting good change, preventing bad change), at learning how to take risks in a fog of rapidly moving events where we can never know enough to be absolutely sure.

There are also things we could do differently (or better) in response to complex processes. One is bearing witness – how is the latest shock hitting poor people, women in the informal sector etc? There is a huge gap in gathering rapid, realtime data on this that academics are not currently filling. We did it a bit on the financial crisis and food price spike and plan to do more of it in the future.

Finally, what is our role in a really big downturn and/or prolonged period of stagnation and austerity in INGOs’ traditional power bases – Europe and North America? One option is to hunker down, defend the gains (such as aid budgets) and seize the odd opportunity (like the Robin Hood Tax). Another is to say ‘there’s not much we can win here, and we have huge challenges coming down the track – let’s step back from the trench warfare of advocacy in Europe and America. Instead we should shift resources to the emerging powers (growing and changing fast, and so more open to influence) and/or long-term prophetic visioning on things like the future of economic growth, even if it damages our access to those in power today (second cartoon). As one person summed it up – do we want to be right or relevant? (And yes, in true NGO fashion, the answer is of course ‘both’).

This post also appears in an online forum hosted by The Broker. Feel free to join in the navel-gazing…….

Why do global campaigns succeed or fail?

Campaigning for International Justice is a new report by Exfamer Brendan Cox (left), who went off to work for Gordon Brown and recently became Director of Policy and Advocacy at Save the Children (incestuous, nous?). It covers two big areas: a retrospective ‘Learning Lessons’ study of eight global campaigns between 1991-2011, and a ‘Where Next’ bit of crystal balling for 2011-2015. I’ll focus on the first part, as I found the second fairly standard (multipolar world, go digital etc, top tips for good potential campaigns: inequality, women’s rights, social protection, ending poverty, democratization, trade or climate change). Apologies for a long post, but there’s a lot of substance in here.

Part 1 starts with a strong whiff of Make Poverty History nostalgia, arguing that ‘in the last five years the sector has been unable to replicate the scale of previous successes. This is due in part to a change in the international context, but it is also because the sector has become increasingly bad at learning the right lessons from its past successes.’ Brendan then tries to distil those lessons.

The eight campaigns each get a handy two page potted summaries. They are Make Poverty History (MPH), Jubilee 2000, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Publish What You Pay (PWYP), the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC), Trade Justice—comprised of the Make Trade Fair (MTF) and Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) campaigns, and the Global Campaign for Climate Action at Copenhagen (GCCA and TckTckTck).

The report distils the lessons of success and failure under: Collective Action, Structure, Campaign Objective, Leadership, Political Strategy, Branding, Celebrities, Internationalism and Funding.

His conclusions? My cut and paste may introduce a bit of incoherence, but here’s what jumped out for me:

“Coalition is king. The most successful campaigns are all coalitions— and generally big ones. However, effective coalition campaigns are harder to form by civil society because of their high transaction costs, the growing need for clear attribution and organizational differentiation, and the fact that many NGOs are now internal coalitions. A key consideration to ensuring effective coalitions is their structure. Three types of structures were identified as underpinning the coalitions studied: secretariat-led, collaborative and flotilla….. The recent trend toward lowest-common-denominator “coalitions,” in which groups loosely collaborate with each other but fail to align strategy, branding, or even policy, should be entered into only as a last resort.

The model that appears best able to deliver multicountry campaigning is the one followed by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and Publish What You Pay (PWYP). The structure in both cases was based on a clear delineation of responsibility, with national coalitions joining an overarching central campaign that was responsible for the overall direction. [In contrast] campaigns that start as nationally focused and try to go international struggle to achieve the sense of ownership and clarity of structure needed to make international work effective.

One of the most contentious areas of political strategy is the balance between insider and outsider approaches and the risk of being co-opted, generally by government. The insider/outsider division also tends to mirror an incremental/radical divide. This divide has become artificially enhanced over time. What is clear is that more radical groups and campaigns have a strong record of trailblazing, shifting the political center of gravity, and investing in controversial policy areas and making them safe over time. However, it is equally true that the evidence strongly suggests that campaigns willing to balance ideal policy objectives with political strategy are the most successful in actually achieving change. The opportunity for complementarity between the different strands could be increased by an acceptance of their respective roles and strengths, increasing dialogue between the different approaches, and more radical groups focusing on longer-term policy objectives that they want to bring into the mainstream rather than short-term campaigns where their radicalism can be ineffective. It is also clear that there will be circumstances where the more radical groups are actively counterproductive or irrelevant, and if progress is to be secured the more mainstream groups will need to have the confidence to push on without them.”

Brendan gets particularly down and dirty on Make Poverty History, slagging off GCAP, War on Want, World Development Movement and Christian Aid for condemning the Gleneagles deal, while acknowledging the challenge of balancing access to governments with cooption by them:

“Overall, there was a strong symbiotic relationship between MPH and the U.K. government. The unspoken pact was that government would share information with NGOs about other governments’ positions to inform their lobbying and would spend political capital with core targets and build expectations around the summit in order to help the campaign in its objectives. On the other side, the campaign would push other countries domestically and create a constituency within the public that engaged in the political process and would welcome progress if it came.”

Then some thoughts on the campaigning nuts and bolts:

“The creation of a unified campaign brand helps the campaign have real impact, particularly in the case of mass mobilisation campaigns. Despite this evidence, civil society is increasingly averse to creating jointly branded campaigns, primarily due to concerns over individual brand visibility. It will take renewed leadership from the major players in the movement if joint campaign brands are to be built. In an era when those big organisations are facing budget pressures due to the financial crisis and campaigning competition from smaller, more agile Internet campaign groups that tend to be more brand precious, it seems less likely that this will be forthcoming without significant changes in the sector.

What all campaigns have in common is a need for resources. Perhaps surprisingly, none of the campaigns studied was initiated by an individual funder or group of funders. Many of those interviewed argue that this is critical to campaigns being seen as legitimate and ensuring that there is a group of committed people at the core of the campaign, rather than groups primarily interested in funding opportunities.”

He’s also interesting on climate campaigning, pointing out that what makes it different from other campaigns is the existence of a bottom line, in the shape of science.

“In the case of debt, landmines or conflict, the issues are moral questions, but the answers are subjective policies, so the asks that come from them can be fashioned by balancing the ultimate objective of the campaign with what is achievable and would have most political salience. In the case of climate change, most groups feel they do not have this flexibility because they see sticking to the science as critical to their credibility. As a result, the usually more moderate campaigners feel forced into more hardline positions. Campaigners feel that in many ways this is a strength; it gives their policy asks a basis in fact. However, several also accepted that it could also act as a constraint, making the movement unable to show flexibility or welcome incremental progress….. and thus build momentum.”

Overall, what comes across are the reflections of an astute practitioner on the tactics, tone, alliances, branding and inevitable compromises of campaigning. His grasp is less sure when it comes to the broader issues of political economy and shocks – the tides and events in public affairs that often play a huge part in determining whether a campaign succeeds or not. From the days of the anti-slavery campaigns of the 18th and 19th century, shocks such as war or economic collapse have been crucial to social change, but are systematically underplayed by campaigners. Just one example: the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London in the middle of the Gleneagles summit were a crucial reason why other leaders caved in to the British push for aid and debt relief, yet get no mention here. More generally, I have real questions about how the kind of giant, ramshackle campaign coalitions discussed in this paper can also be agile enough to react to the new opportunities presented by unexpected events, but Brendan, who seems happier in the steady state campaign planners’ world, doesn’t discuss this.

Minor quibbles – any campaigner should study this paper and reflect.

How can research funders work better with international NGOs like Oxfam?

I spoke recently to a meeting of the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences. It’s a great initiative, bringing together 13 UK funders and stakeholders with an interest in international development research, but is ‘collaborative’ really a noun? Anyway, the topic was how research funders (mainly state funded) can link up more effectively with large INGOs like Oxfam. Let me talk you through the powerpoint……

First, why do INGOs do research? Above all, to improve impact of programmes and advocacy in three broad areas, according to a nice distinction made by my colleague Kimberly Pfeifer at Oxfam America: ‘tactical research’ (reactive to broader events and policy agendas); formative research (setting new agendas and directions) and evaluative research (MEL, learning lessons). INGO people are doers and activists, with little time for theorising – they think in terms of guidelines and toolkits. That is probably why UKCDS wanted to talk to me, because government is increasingly demanding that researchers demonstrate the impact of their research, rather than the beauty of pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

But what do we mean by the word ‘research’? For INGOs it is often much more about a clear narrative than about data. The risk is doing violence to a complex reality, but the upside is that we tell stories that stick in the heads of policy makers and others. There is also a priority on case studies and bearing witness – exploring how large scale phenomena (climate change, food prices etc) affect the lives of people living in poverty. What some academics dismiss as anecdotes are for INGOs (and most normal people) closer to reality than some massive number-crunching exercise (though we still need to be careful about correlation v causation and attribution). For some examples, check out the Oxfam publications website.

What does good policy research look like, from an INGO standpoint? A clear story, bringing together a decent review of the academic literature with those real life stories; preferably relevant to what is on the agendas of decision-makers over the coming months; drilling down into the issues of power, inequality and social relations that often go missing in conventional research. For impact it also needs a sprinkling of killer facts, an answer to the inevitable ‘what’s new in this research?’ question, and clear and convincing recommendations and solutions.

Are INGOs any good at research, thus defined? Generalizations are perilous, but here goes:

Strengths: at its best INGO research is rooted in real life, the experiences of partners and communities (e.g. our work on the impact of the global financial crisis, or forthcoming stuff on food prices); INGOs have been pioneers on participatory methods; the research packs a punch both in content and in the ability of INGO media teams to make a media splash that gets it noticed. And they have a global constituency and reach that many academic researchers can only dream of.

Weaknesses: often stronger on qualitative than quantitative; sometimes a bit cavalier on methodology (although we outsource a lot of research to academics which, if they’re any good, should fill that gap); weak systems of peer review (and some confusion over what constitutes a ‘peer’); suffers from short INGO attention spans, so few examples where research builds up over time; patchy links to developing country research institutions and always short of cash and capacity compared to the formal research institutions.

How can funders improve the relevance and use of research by INGOs? Well, they could fund it directly of course, but that is often going to be difficult given the way they are set up, so here are some other ideas. Insist that research institutions work with INGOs to co-design research programmes (the norm is alas, for an institution to decide on a largely irrelevant agenda  and then approach the INGO as an afterthought to help with the communications, or ‘do the voices of the poor bit’.) Sure, we could (and do) take the initiative and approach research institutions with our own ideas, but the timescales, interests and approaches are often just too different to find common ground. Funders could provide incentives to help bridge the gap.

That means understanding what research INGOs are going to need over the next few years. Luckily the level of intellectual herding is pretty high, so if you get a bunch of them in a room, they will probably all come up with a similar set of priorities (current ones would probably include climate change, scarcity, food security, theories of change, measuring impact, multipolar world and the absence of gender and disaggregated data from most research questions).

And a few more specific suggestions for the higher education researches themselves, (and where prodding by funders can probably help):

If you want access to communities, the research had better be relevant to the people and partners (e.g. testing new approaches through action research). It needs to be properly discussed at draft stage and disseminated and discussed locally on publication. INGO staff time and direct costs (and those of their partners on the ground) should be properly funded. Finally, you need buy-in at country level, where harassed staff may have very different priorities from INGO HQ.

What is at stake is, I think, pretty important – building a regular and productive interchange between funders, higher education institutions, thinktanks and INGOs. Funders could help by creating incentives for better links between these groups, requiring researchers to demonstrate impact and relevance. They could also help create a space for collective reflection on research priorities among INGOs (that only happens in a very ad hoc way at the moment, for example by everyone commissioning papers from Alex Evans……) and build INGOs’ capacity to understand, commission and use existing research (as well as do a bit themselves).

Any other suggestions?