Robert Chambers on the Fifth Power (the power to empower)

Some thoughts from Robert Chambers, from whose wonderful new book I recently posted several excerpts.

People tease me for being pentaphiliac.  They notice that I love fives of a thing.  Well, it’s true.  If there are six, I boil them down to five.  If there are only four I rack my brains to find a fifth.   So the four types of power have been a challenge:

Power over      needing no explanation

Power to          agency, meaning being able to decide to do something and then do it

Power with      collective power when people come together

Power within   self-confidence or something like that

There had to be a fifth.  Power to Empower, linking some of these? Can people be empowered to gain power within and power with which then combine as new power to?

In workshops I have invited participants to put some flesh on this power to empower.  They brainstorm lists of verbs to complete the sentence

As an ‘upper’, to empower ‘lowers’ you can  ………..

Uppers includes people who are dominant or powerful in a situation or relationship , with power over and power to, and lowers means people who are subordinate and relatively powerless in a situation or relationship.  There are innumerable upper-lower pairs (parent-child, teacher student, …..).  So what can uppers do to empower lowers?   You may want to make you own list.

Some verbs come up again and again- listen, respect, trust, inspire, coach, mentor, give responsibilities…

Some are behaviours from the PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) tradition

• Sit down, listen, learn
• Facilitate  (fundamental to good management behaviour, to transforming relationships…?)
• Hand over the stick (or pointer, baton, marker pen, chalk, powerpoint clicker, microphone…even megaphone  -yes really, with large groups….)  (Duncan wrote to me that he still feels funny inside when he does this – a mixture of excitement and reluctance! I know the feeling.  It is also often relaxing as you hand over responsibility).
• Ask them!  – as an upper, ask lowers what they know, their priorities, their ideas, advice and views.   Often they come up with ideas new to the upper.  Power relations are reversed or levelled.  Uppers discover that ‘They Can Do It’ – that lowers have unsuspected capabilities.
• Shut up!  The empowering power of silence – surprisingly hard to practice – ‘suffering the silence’ but worth a try

Other less obvious ones don’t always come up:

• Make simple empowering rules.  Take codes of conduct for a workshop, for instance.  These can give voice to those who hold back and restrain and limit the big talkers.   With ‘Senior Silence’ no senior person or upper is to speak.  Lowers come into their own and uppers are sometimes amazed at what they know and say.

A neatly self-regulating  system comes from Nepal.  Every time a person speaks a sweet is put in their mouth.  Sucking only – no high-speed crunching allowed.   The Director of an NGO was so frustrated that he crunched, and became known as ‘our sweet-crunching friend’.

• Convene  -  invite people to come together and share knowledge and ideas, co-generate knowledge and gain solidarity.  This happens again and again with women’s groups, leading to Power To and action
• Broker             act as mediator, intermediary, conciliator…
• Ask empowering questions.

Here’s an example. The Country Director of an INGO on arrival sent a message to all 150 or so of her staff.  She asked them what they would like her NOT to do.  Wow!  It paid off, and how.  She received guidance from over a hundred responses.  And now that INGO has for two successive years received the award for the best managed organisation in the whole country, beating all competition in the private sector!

Is there a synergy here?  Can these behaviours by uppers balance or reverse power relations, generating a synergy of power with, power within and power to?

So can power to empower be a win-win?  Used well, can it liberate uppers, reducing the stresses of responsibility and control?  And can it lead to better ideas, better performance, better management, a better life?

Pie in the sky?  Or realism?  What is your experience?  What do you think?

Paradigms, lock-ins and liberations: Robert Chambers on rice and shit

 Following my review of his new book, and Robert’s thoughts on immersion programmes (which generated some great comments), here is a third and final piece from Provocations for Development

A lock-in is a paradigmatic syndrome in which there is strong mutually-supporting inflexibility. Let us examine two examples of paradigmatic lock-ins which have been comprehensively turned on their heads to create new counter-intuitive, counter-commonsense, syndromes of startling potency. They raise questions about what Donald Rumsfeld famously described as ‘unknown unknowns’. Looking back at the lock-ins which they have transformed, they can be seen as liberations. The first liberation concerns rice cultivation and the second rural sanitation.

The rice plant can tolerate flooding, but grows better in mainly aerobic conditions. Farmers flood their fields to control weeds, substituting water for labour. Scientists have taken this as a norm. Conventional paddy growing practices are relatively management sparing. Seedlings are grown in a flooded seed bed, uprooted quite roughly when 21-40 days old and transplanted by being pushed down in clumps of 3, 4 or more into flooded, puddled soil, either in lines or at random and close together. Fields are then kept flooded throughout the growing cycle.

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) simultaneously changes all these practices. Seedlings when still very young and small, 8-12 days old, are transplanted carefully (the principle is TLC – tender loving care), 1-2 plants per hill and widely spaced in a square pattern: this reduces plant population by two-thirds or more. The paddy soil is kept moist with mostly aerobic conditions, with intermittent applications of light irrigation. Manual push-weeders control weeds and churn up and aerate the soil. There are many benefits and few disbenefits from this set of practices: plants are supported above ground by more extensive longer-lived root systems, are stronger and healthier and more resistant to pests and diseases and to drought and storms, and produce many more tillers (each of which bears a head of grains) which also give better outturns in milling.  Across many rice varieties, on-farm evaluations in eight countries found yields raised by an average of 47 per cent, with water savings averaging 40 per cent. Costs of production per hectare were reduced by 23 per cent and farmers’ net income per hectare was boosted by 68 per cent.

Traditional rice research, notably that of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has been locked into a paradigm of crop improvement through breeding higher-yielding varieties, responsive to chemical fertiliser, and dependent on large amounts of water for flooding. This genocentric strategy led to the Green Revolution. There have been other successes particularly with some disease resistance, and recently with developments in GM breeding for beta-carotene (for Vitamin A). But despite huge investments there have been no broad improvements which work with all varieties equivalent to those with SRI management. Nor which bring such multiple benefits. SRI is a green revolution of a different sort.

Turning to rural sanitation, the conventional approach worldwide has had two thrusts: first, to teach and educate, seeking to induce changes in behaviour (software); and second, to subsidize the installation of facilities (hardware) designed by engineers. The reasoning has been that poor people need to be taught the importance of hygienic behaviour, and that they deserve decent sanitation but cannot afford it. However, didactic strategies of behaviour change have had rather limited effect, and the commonsense approach of hardware subsidies has not worked: the experience in many countries, with both Government and NGO programmes, has been that many of the toilets constructed are not used or are used for other purposes.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), like SRI, turns conventions on their heads, with radical, simultaneous, mutually-supporting changes. Instead of teaching people, there is facilitation of people’s own appraisal and analysis of their own open defecation and its effects. Instead of subsidies for hardware for individual households, people dig their own pits and construct their own latrines. Instead of being handed down engineering designs, people make their own designs. Instead of outside interventions for those least able to construct their own latrines, community members are encouraged to help them. Instead the number of latrines constructed, the focus is more on how many communities have been verified as open defecation-free.

SRI and CLTS have met with similar resistances from the respective professions. Both confront the stasis of accepted commonsense conventions: these stem from and are locked in by professional training and norms – of rice research scientists and of engineers and others who promote rural sanitation. The lock-ins are reinforced by funding.

Both SRI and CLTS entail multiple simultaneous changes of concepts, principles, methods, behaviours, relationships and mindsets. Both are, in a full sense, shifts or flips of paradigm taking us into new spaces with dramatic new potentials. Neither cost much to develop. Both were evolved by doing, hands-on, in local conditions. Both are close to the lives and realities of poor rural people. Both were discovered by remarkable innovators – Father de Laulanié with SRI in Madagascar in the mid-1980s, and Kamal Kar with CLTS in Bangladesh in early 2000. Both have been spread internationally by champions fired with well-informed enthusiasm – Norman Uphoff with SRI, and Kamal Kar himself with CLTS, both of them quickly joined by many other champions energized through the wonder and excitement of ‘seeing is believing’ personal experience of dramatic transformations.

These two movements are unstoppable and spreading on a remarkable scale. The governments of China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, where together two-thirds of the world’s rice is produced, are promoting SRI methods, based on their own evaluations and results. Worldwide, the number of farmers benefiting from SRI practices in over 40 countries is in the range of 2 million and growing rapidly.

In mid-2011, CLTS practices are also found in over 40 countries. Spread has been most extensive in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, with other African countries following hard on their heels.  It is increasingly endorsed by governments as policy or approved practice. As of mid-2011 well over 10 million people lived in communities that had been declared open defecation free, while millions more should be benefiting in communities which are not yet ODF.

Both SRI and CLTS have discovered principles with wider applications. SRI principles and practices have been applied to sugarcane, wheat, finger millet, teff and other crops. Some have renamed it SCI, the System of Crop Intensification. CLTS principles and practices have been applied also to solid waste management, for example in Cairo, and to sanitation in urban slums.

SRI and CLTS raise acute questions. I pose these as challenges to you and to all development professionals:

• Are we disabled by lock-ins to paradigms and mindsets which narrow, focus and frame our vision so that, as with traditional rice research and rural sanitation, we fail to see and find breakthroughs?
• Are there other development liberations from lock-ins waiting to be discovered and promoted?
• If there may be, how should we set about looking for them? How in other words can radical, revolutionary, innovators and disseminators – de Laulanié’s, Uphoffs, and Kamal Kars – be found, supported and encouraged?
• Do we need to take more risks and to celebrate failures in development, as Engineers Without Borders do? Should we judge harshly any organisation that cannot boast of the risks it takes, and of its failures to prove it? Is lack of failures itself a failure?

There may be clues in the commonalities of SRI and CLTS. Both were counter-intuitive. Both confronted and upended unquestioned commonsense and conventions of deeply rooted neo-Newtonian best practice. Both originated from grounded hands-on innovation, observation and awareness. And both followed many years of applied experimental experience – de Laulanié’s growing rice and Kamal Kar’s in participatory facilitation and development. Does this mean that such people and such conditions should be sought out and supported?

So finally – are these transformative international movements of SRI and CLTS one-off phenomena? Or are they forerunners of much else waiting to be discovered and spread? Are there similarly paradigmatic flips lurking latent in other improbable domains? And will future generations look back and marvel at how we could have been so timid, unimaginative and lacking in hands-on creativity, that none of us discovered them earlier?

See also Robert’s guest post on CLTS , or this three minute intro video featuring Kamal Kar

 

Robert Chambers – why don’t all development organizations do immersions?

Following on my review of Robert Chambers’ new(ish) book, ‘Provocations for Development’, I’m posting a couple of edited-down excerpts that caught my eye. Today, immersions –  written in 2007 and a nice illustration of how Robert combines both the politics and practicalities of aid work.

Immersions can take many forms, but an almost universal feature is staying in a poor community, as a person, living with a host family, helping with tasks and sharing in their life. The overnight stay is vital for relationships, experience, and relaxed conversations after dark and talking into the night. There may be activities like working with and helping the family, listening and dialogue, learning a life history, keeping a reflective diary or trying to explain your work and its relevance, but the essence is to be open much of the time to the unplanned and unexpected, to live and be and relate as a person. The unplanned incident is so often the most striking, moving and significant. Much is experienced and learnt, but what that will be is hard to predict.
 
Agreement seems universal that immersions give insights and experiences that are not otherwise accessible. Those who participate learn in a personal way about people’s lives, livelihoods and cultures and the conditions they experience. The world can be seen the other way round, from the perspective of people living in poverty.
 
Quite often there are stark and startling insights and impacts. Ravi Kanbur had an immersion with SEWA in India as part of the preparation for the World Development Report 2000/2001 for which he was Task Manager. He spent three days in a remote village, Mohadi. Parents were keen for their children to learn to read and write but the schoolmaster only came once a month. But he turned up on the second day when he had heard there were visitors. He launched into a litany of the difficulties of teaching the village children whom he described as ‘junglee’(from the jungle). This “Master of Mohadi” incident, Kanbur wrote, ‘encapsulated for me the gap between macro-level strategies and ground-level realities’.

All this is enough to justify immersions over and over again. If this were all, the case would already be overwhelming. But people repeatedly say they gained much more than just useful insights and knowledge. They stress, and often give more importance to, the experiential learning, the personal and emotional impact. Fred Nunes writes that [former World Bank President] Jim Wolfensohn “wanted managers who had heart as well as intellect”. The aim was to “rekindle the staff’s passion for poverty reduction”. For Taaka Awori:

“All of me was learning, not just my mind, as is usually the case. The immersion allowed me to stop analysing people living in poverty as objects of development, but rather just to be with them and allow the learning to emerge.”

Why did immersions not take off earlier?

If these experiences mean so much, and can make such a difference, why have they not spread more and been more widely adopted? They cost less than going to a workshop. They take little time – usually not more than a week. It is not as though most organisations lack money: training and capacity-building funds for professional development are frequently underspent.

Three clusters of forces stand out.

The first is personal. It is easy to make excuses, especially being too busy with important work. There is time for a workshop, within our comfort zones, but not for an immersion which is outside, unfamiliar, threatening. For myself, I am reluctant to give up what is known, cosy, and controllable for the unknown, perhaps uncomfortable and uncontrollable. I fear behaving badly and making a fool of myself. And here I and others must thank Ravi Kanbur for his “I don’t think I want to go to that temple any more”: he asked twice to visit an inviting-looking temple before realising that his host family were excluded from the temple because they were lower caste. This makes it easier for me to acknowledge my own shameful mistake, so hurtful to our host lady in Gujarat, of going to bed instead of meeting the people who had come across the desert to meet us. And then there are other arguments that can be mustered: ‘I know all about that. I grew up in a village (or slum). I don’t have anything to learn about that’.

The second cluster of forces is institutional. These are so many: values and incentives that reward writing good memoranda and reports and speaking well in meetings with important people; and the low value given to listening to the unimportant poor. There are senior staff who regard immersions as frivolous, useless or voyeurism, and/or feel personally threatened by them. There are normal pressures of work and other perceived priorities. Bureaucratic culture looks inwards and upwards, not downwards and outwards.

A third force is rhetoric about development relations. For staff of lender and donor agencies, there has been the convenient political correctness of government ownership. For international NGOs there has been increasing reliance on the insights of partners who are supposedly close to poverty. To seek direct personal experience through immersions could then be thought of as untrusting and interfering.

These personal, institutional and rhetorical forces combine. Any organisation or individuals who want excuses for not pressing for immersions have no difficulty finding them. It is not difficult, then, to understand why until recently effective demand for immersions has not been strong.

Why now?

The case is stronger now than ever for three reasons.

First, the conditions, awareness, priorities and aspirations of poor people are changing faster than ever before. There is a continuous and intensifying challenge to policy makers and practitioners to keep in touch and up to date.

Second, a new simplistic certainty has been infiltrating development thinking and practice. The downside of the Millennium Development Goals and of the inspiring movement to Make Poverty History, has been the belief that ‘we know what needs to be done’ (especially on the part of non-Africans about Africa) – and that the solution is more money. The issues are not so simple; nor in most cases are the solutions. Immersions provide one means of checking against the complex and diverse realities of poor people.

Third, the grip of the urban offices, capital traps and elite activities has tightened – for government, aid agency and NGO staff alike: more and more emails, meetings, negotiations, reports, often with fewer staff; participation in the pandemic of incestuous workshops, many of them about poverty; donors’ budget support, sector-wide programmes, and harmonisation on policy issues, all of this in what Koy Thomson calls our “self-referential universe.” Qazi Azmat Isa speaks for other agencies too when he notes that ‘increasingly World Bank staff are confined to government departments in capital and provincial cities, removed from the reality of poverty and from our ultimate clients – the poor of the country’.

Immersions are means to offset these biases and trends: to keep up to date; to be in touch; to escape the self-referential trap. It is fitting and fortunate that they are rising fast on the agenda. They are now better understood, more talked about and easier to arrange. More organisations – EDP, SEWA, ActionAid International, Praxis, Proshika – are providing them for others. More people and more organisations are setting them up for themselves. The increasing numbers of those who have experienced immersions and the conviction, commitment and authority with which they can speak, encourage others. We appear to be approaching a tipping point of a critical mass of stories, buzz, communications and enthusiasm.

What would those living in poverty want us to do? Would they, as Koy Thomson has asked ‘express their amazement that people who are experts in poverty don’t even bother to spend time with them’. As he observes ‘For a development organisation to see four days simply being with people living in poverty as a luxury is a sign of pathology’. The question is not whether the direct experiential learning of immersions and reality checks can be afforded. It is whether anyone in any organisation committed to the MDGs, social justice and reducing poverty, can justify not affording and making space for them.

Well that was written five years ago, and there doesn’t seem to have been an immersion tipping point since then. Any thoughts or personal/organizational experiences from readers?

Provocations for Development: Superb new collection of Robert Chambers’ Greatest Hits

This is not an impartial review – Robert Chambers is a hero of  mine, part development guru, part therapist to the aid community. His ideas and phrases litter the intellectual landscape. Or ought to: if you don’t recognize some of his major contributions to the development lexicon – ‘hand over the stick’, ‘uppers and lowers’, ‘whose reality counts?’, participatory research methods or seasonality, (there are dozens of others) you have seriously missed out, and Provocations for Development, a greatest hits collection of his speeches, writings, reflections and one pagers should definitely be on the top of your reading pile.

Chambers is also playful. ‘Fun is a human right’ he announces in the foreword, and the book duly starts with a beginner’s guide to bullshit bingo, that essential way to survive particularly mind-numbing meetings. He even provides handy photocopiable bingo tables for you.

His more serious intent in this first section is to highlight the power of words in development. Treacherous, slippery jargon that embodies and transmits certain views of the world, power relationships etc, often subliminally (think about the implied power relationships in the phrase ‘capacity building’). He sees words as being used to legitimize actions (‘partnership’), maintain dominance through obscure jargon (‘disintermediation’, ‘conditionalities’), camouflage realities (‘defence spending’; ‘donors’ rather than ‘lenders’) or sanitize, stereotype and stigmatize (‘freedom fighter’ v ‘terrorist’).

The book’s second section covers perhaps his most significant contribution to development thinking – participation. Robert’s work was central to developing methodologies such as Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) and Poverty Assessments (PPAs) and highlights the uncomfortable reality of the disparities in power within the aid industry. ‘Whose reality counts?’ Aid workers are in a position of power, but they can do something about it, starting by ‘handing over the stick’ to poor people (to point out things on a blackboard, not to beat each other). I have consciously had to tell myself to hand over the stick on numerous occasions (and I’m still rubbish at it – handing over the powerpoint is even harder).

One of his major contributions was through his involvement in the ‘Voices of the Poor’ study, a watershed piece of World Bank research in the mid 90s, led by Deepa Narayan, which interviewed thousands of people in dozens of countries to try and grasp the complex multidimensional nature of poverty as experienced by poor people themselves (rather than defined by outside ‘experts’) (see diagram – compare that to the empty precision of $1.25 a day).

Chambers’ work has certain recurring themes, in addition to the power of language. Turning the tables (as in the subtitle of one of his most influential books, ‘Putting the Last First’); a complete absence of cynicism (even his bullshit bingo is somehow turned into a positive learning experience); an unquenchable curiosity about the lives of poor people; the use of visuals, diagrams, do it yourself methods with stones and sticks to reflect those lives; an honest appraisal of the lives, work and career paths of development professionals – he’s one of the few to address how people actually feel when they are ‘doing development’. And he is relentlessly quirky – the one part of his work that I really struggle with is his fondness for dashing off some pretty dire rhymes about the aid business.

Chambers’ abiding interest in excrement, for example (graphic accounts of his first disastrous encounter with a high tech Japanese toilet – he pressed all the buttons) has found its outlet (sorry) in his most recent enthusiasm, the Community-Led Total Sanitation movement. It’s a brilliant participatory, human, low tech response to the all the high tech magic bullets that hog the headlines.

Given all this, Chambers could be forgiven for being a bit pompous, but he isn’t. Not even slightly. He’s great company, a mischievous zen master to the aid community. I could go on. And I will – I’ll post on a couple of particularly resonant chapters in the next few days.

Inspiring action on shit (getting rid of it) – guest post from Robert Chambers

Robert Chambers is a participatory development guru with a nice line in modesty. The one line bio he sent for this post reads ‘Robert Chambers is a research associate at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, currently working on Community-Led Total Sanitation’. Well OK, but he’s also author of books that have changed the way we see development, such as Whose Reality Counts? and Revolutions in Development Enquiry. In his late 70s, he remains an extraordinarily energetic and influential voice across the development world, his achievements discussed in a new book about his work  ’Revolutionising Development‘. So I was excited and honoured when he agreed to write this:

“CLTS is Community-Led Total Sanitation. It does not sound such a big deal, but it is revolutionary.  Hype?  We have so many ‘revolutions’ in development that only last a year or two and then fade into history.  But this one is different.  In all the years I have worked in development this is as thrilling and transformative as anything I have been involved in.  Let me explain.  

First, sanitation and scale.  2.6 billion people today lack improved sanitation.  1.1 billion defecate in the open.  The MDG for sanitation is badly off track in most countries. All the other MDGs are affected.

Second, sanitation and hygiene matter much more than most people realise. Where they lack, the effects are horrendous.  Faecally-related infections are many.  Everyone has heard of the diarrhoeas and feels outrage at over 2 million children killed by diarrhoea each year. We hear about cholera outbreaks.  But  who hears about the guts of 1.5 billion people hosting greedy parasitic ascaris worms, about 740 million with hookworm voraciously devouring their blood,  200 million with debilitating schistosomiasis or 40 to 70 million with liverfluke? And what about hepatitis, giardia, tapeworms, typhoid, polio, trachoma…?  On top of all these, many millions are likely to be affected by tropical enteropathy with damage to the gut wall reducing nutrient absorption (in effect wasting food) and diverting nutritional energy to make antibodies. All these can be dealt with through safe disposal of excreta and hygienic behaviour.  We give undernourished children more and better food.  Let that continue.  But we can reasonably ask whether attacking undernutrition through sanitation and hygiene may not in many cases be more effective and more lasting?

Worldwide the traditional approach to hygiene has been education – people have to be taught, and hardware subsidy – poor people cannot afford toilets and have to be given them. Rural areas in developing countries are littered with the results: toilets not used, put to other purposes as stores, hencoops, a shrine and the like, or dismantled and the materials used elsewhere. Or the toilets go to those who are better off, not the poor.  The dollars wasted must run into billions; and in some countries like India very large sums continue to go, so to speak, down the drain. 

CLTS turns these failed approaches on their heads.  There is no standard design, no hardware subsidy, no teaching, no special measures for people unable to help themselves, and no use of polite words – shit is shit.  India leads in the international glossary of words for shit with Kenya runner up.  Communities are triggered, facilitated to do their own analysis of their behaviour – through making their own participatory social and shit maps, inspecting the shit in the areas of open defecation (OD), and analysing pathways from shit to mouth.  Often children are facilitated in parallel with adults and then present their findings to them.  Throughout, there is a cocktail of embarrassment, laughter and disgust.  When people realize that ‘We are eating one another’s shit’ it can ignite immediate action to dig pits and construct latrines with their own resources. 

A follow up of encouragement, emphasising handwashing and hygiene as well as construction, is important.  Ideally and often, those unable to dig and build for themselves are helped by others. It is in the common interest.  When a community can declare itself ODF (open defecation free), external verification takes place, with subsequent celebration.

CLTS was pioneered in 2000 by Kamal Kar in Bangladesh.  Since then he and now many others have been energetically spreading it round the world.  Plan International, Unicef, the Water and Sanitation Programme of the World Bank, and Water Aid are among the organisations behind it.  It is happening in over 40 countries.  In a few it has stalled, but in most it is spreading, even exponentially. It is widespread in parts of South and Southeast Asia. In Africa, Sierra Leone, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia and Malawi stand out.  The scene changes fast.  In more and more countries CLTS has been adopted as Government policy and hardware subsidies to individual households have been stopped, sometimes facing down donors.  Worldwide, after discounting heavily for misleading reports of targets achieved, probably over 10 million people are now living in communities that have credibly been declared ODF.

CLTS is not a magic wand.  It faces serious obstacles – entrenched (and large) budgets for hardware subsidies; professional and bureaucratic sceptics and vested interests; training facilitators in classrooms when it needs to be hands-on in real time in communities; programmes with targets that are then reported ‘achieved’;  myths of success; donor and lender agencies insisting on subsidies; and the corruption that so often goes with hardware programmes.

But it is driven by passionate champions. And they multiply.  They emerge at all levels.  Once they have experienced the power of CLTS, many become energetically committed.  They realise how it enhances human wellbeing.  They see what a difference having a toilet makes to women and girls in particular – issues of privacy, menstrual hygiene, self-respect, and the bodily wellbeing of being able to defecate during daylight, which is such a transformation for women in South Asia.

CLTS has spread initially in rural areas.  But in India, Kenya, Mauritania and Nigeria it has been pioneered in urban slums. Watch this space.  And it has applications too for solid waste and liquid waste management, and perhaps other domains.

So, yes, it is thrilling.  It is an international movement, itself a community of like-minded people who are inspired by what they recognise as a vast potential.  The MDG for sanitation is badly off-track in almost all countries.  With CLTS it need not be.  After a slow but steady start, Kenya is rolling out a big programme and has set itself the target of making all rural areas ODF by 2013.  Others are doing likewise.  The questions now are how well it can be taken to scale, and whether enough people at all levels – from policy-makers to local leaders and facilitators -  have the vision, guts and commitment to make it happen widely and well. 

By 2020, say, could it be not ten million but hundreds of millions who benefit? Is it hyperbole to say that the opportunity is brilliant?  What do you think?”

And here’s the 3 minute intro video featuring Kamal Kar (many more videos from Mali, Mozambique, India etc here)

So the world is complex – what do we do differently?

Spent yesterday discussing the implications of complexity theory for development (previous discussion on this blog here) at a seminar organized by the UKCDS, a body that promotes interdisciplinary research on development. It was totally gripping, not least because two of my gurus were there – Eric Beinhocker, whose brilliant book on evolution and economics, The Origin of Wealth, you absolutely must read (it took me three posts to review, here, here and here), and Robert Chambers of IDS.

The purpose of the day was not to bury old thinking (linear change, the economy as a system of static equilibrium), although Ben Ramalingam did that in passing: ‘the linear Newtonian model is staggering around the global stage like a mortally wounded Shakespearean actor’ – nice. Rather it was to delve into the ’so what’, or as Eric Beinhocker put it, the journey of complexity theory from a ‘Sunday morning’ idea that shapes the way you see the world, to something that makes you do things differently when you get to work on Monday morning.

Here are some of the suggestions that surfaced in the discussion (other participants, please add the ones I missed):

First, the purpose of development interventions, whether by states, companies, civil society organizations or aid donors, must move from deluded attempts at ‘creation’ of development from blueprints, first principles etc to acceleration of the evolutionary process that drives development in the real world. One way to think about that shift is to look separately at the three processes that constitute evolution – variation, selection and amplification (see Beinhocker posts for more on that).

Variation: facilitate, encourage and if necessary, fund emergence of new ideas, institutions and approaches e.g. from private sector, CSOs. The legal system and other institutions can help or hinder.

Selection: Academics, media or NGOs can identify new variations, study them and spread the knowledge, acting as a lubricant in the selection process. Deliberately looking for outliers, both of success and failure – known as positive deviance – is one way to promote this within development institutions.

Amplification: Too big for most development actors, but they can do advocacy to larger bodies (states, companies) to replicate success.

Second, we need to ‘wallow in failure’ – Beinhocker’s description of the US military’s determination to learn from past defeats. Failure is the essential engine of evolution, as much as success. We need to admit it, study it, learn from it (but then stop funding it….). Lots of kudos for Engineers Without Borders for introducing a website where NGOs can discuss their failures.

Third, we really need to improve the sales pitch, starting with the word ‘complexity’. Geeks revel in using the word, but it’s toxic for politicians and normal people (not the same thing), who usually want simple messages and ‘what do I do’ checklists. Beinhocker talks to them about real world economics, evolution (at least everywhere except Kentucky), adaptiveness, resilience – anything but call it complexity.

We also need to boil down some simple rules of engagement in working in a world of complexity, equivalent to the US marines combat instructions of ‘take the high ground, stay in contact, keep moving and improvise the rest’. The Santa Fe Institute, which gave birth to a lot of this thinking, has a rather more sedentary set of rules – study whatever you want, but you must attend lunch at 12 and tea at 4, where you will interact with other members. Robert Chambers reckons that participatory, bottom up approaches are a perfect response to a complex world (he promised to write something on this for the blog – v exciting.) He also suggested the System of Rice Intensification as a model – a few basic rules, but the rest depends on responding to local conditions.

Finally, we need case studies – of success and failure, both of responses to complexity and what happens when you ignore it. Hopefully Ben Ramalingam’s forthcoming book, with the same title as his blog, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, will include a lot of these.

Back in 1997, Robert Chambers asked if the new physics provided ‘a deep paradigmatic insight, an interesting parallel, or an insignificant coincidence’ for development practitioners. He now believes the answer is that this is a new paradigm. Got a feeling I’ll be posting more on this in the coming months.

And just in case this is all too abstract, and because it’s a really cool video, here’s some bouncing jelly (jell-o if you’re the other side of the Atlantic). There is no way to describe this or predict the movements with linear, Newtonian or any other maths – we need to change our thinking.

Newton v Complexity: Robert Chambers on competing aid paradigms

This is taken from a longer two part piece by Robert Chambers on the excellent ‘Aid on the Edge of Chaos’ blog. Worth spending some time studying the diagrams.

“Today we can see two broad paradigms at work in international development. On the one side are Neo-Newtonian practices – those processes, procedures, roles and behaviour which emphasise standardisation, routines and regularities in response to or assuming predictabilities. On the other side, we can see what I call adaptive pluralism, which demands creativity, invention, improvisation and originality in adapting to and exploiting change.

The diagrams below build suggest some of the ways in which  different elements of each paradigm are mutually reinforcing.

Elements in a Paradigm of Neo-Newtonian Practice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elements in a Paradigm of Adaptive Pluralism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two points to make. First, it is not an either-or. These ways of thinking about the world need to co-exist in a much healthier manner than they do currently. Rosalind Eyben has written about how the formal, reductionist side of the aid system often overlays the adaptive side of the system, resulting in cognitive dissonance. It must be possible to get a better, more honest, and realistic, balance between the two.

Second, and to build on this, establishing a better balance needs to be grounded in the challenges we face right now, otherwise it is likely to be abstract and meaningless. Let me ask for suggestions of approaches, things we know that can be done better, where we might attempt paradigmatic win-wins. Maybe it is about furthering the results agenda through participation and local ownership. Perhaps it is developing more socially grounded alternatives to the logical framework. Maybe it is about how large databases and social networks can be developed in tandem in order to enhance aid transparency. Perhaps it is about how uncertainty and context can be better addressed within aid bureaucracies. In the wider world, areas come to mind where bridging the paradigms may be increasingly essential: climate change, urbanisation, HIV-AIDS, and the link between farming and animal health immediately come to mind.

However, here my own prejudices have to come to the fore. There is little doubt in my mind that the neo-Newtonian paradigm has become more and more dominant in development action, if not development thinking. It exerts a powerful influence – for better or for worse – on the way much of the system works. For balance, we need a countervailing pull. For the paradigmatic win-wins which I touched upon earlier to be recognised and acted upon, we need to understand better how adaptive pluralism can add value to development efforts, and how it can be accorded the status it deserves.”

 Aid on the Edge of Chaos also posted recently on positive deviance (see my post on that here)

How do you help people cope with shocks? A liquid brainstorm with Robert Chambers

At an IDS seminar last week, part of its excellent Crisis Watch initiative, Steve Wiggins from ODI argued that his research on the food price crisis shows that during an actual shock, state initiatives are much less important to poor people than their own social coping mechanisms as individuals, communities or through local institutions like churches. These mechanisms include borrowing money, sharing food, collective action etc. It’s what we called ‘resilience’ in our work on the global economic crisis, where a number of studies have identified similar patterns. But in any case, when a shock hits, governments ‘have to be seen to act’ and their actions can help (or hinder) this coping strategy.

If similar conclusions apply to other kinds of shock, then it leads to a slightly different way of looking at public action to reduce vulnerability. I spent dinner thrashing this out with the inspirational Robert Chambers (author’s note, Robert deleted ‘inspirational’ and substituted ‘inebriated and senile’, but I rejected his amendment):

The argument/hypothesis runs something like this

1. We acknowledge that ‘social coping’, rather than state intervention, is often the main way that poor people manage shocks in the short term
2. But coping carries heavy costs, depleting assets, energy, health and social capital if it is not replenished
3. Coping capacity can be strengthened through state or other public action, which can

1. Build it prior to the shock
2. Replenish it afterwards and
3. Support it during the shock

Off the top of our suitably lubricated heads, we came up with a list of possible practical policy applications of this approach

Before/after crises, governments and donors could focus on

1. Preventing shocks from happening in the first place (eg conflict prevention, prudential bank regulation, good macroeconomic management)
2. Make sure loan sharks don’t prey on poor people’s need for finance during a crisis (e.g. interest rates caps, support to microfinance for emergency loans)
3. Recognize the role played in disaster response by churches, mosques, temples and other community based organizations by investing in pre-shock disaster management training and capacity building (eg stockpiling relevant materials)
4. Prevail on all those sniffer dog/angel of mercy outfits to switch from arriving at the scene of a disaster too late to save anyone, to twinning with half a dozen vulnerable communities ‘in peacetime’, and help them build skills and resources to cope when a shock hits. Imagine if all those European firefighters could have built up stockpiles of pickaxes in Port au Prince ahead of the earthquake, rather than sitting around getting frustrated in airports after the event.
5. Encourage better off local people/businesses to provide informal guarantees to schools or clinics that they will pick up the tab for the cost of books, uniforms or essential drugs in the event of a shock to prevent people dropping out of the system when disaster strikes
6. Put in place a system to prevent debt foreclosures on homes, land or other crucial assets, for example through pre-agreed repayment holidays

During crises, they could support social coping by

1. Providing access to information (radio, speaker vans, billboards, texts) on sources of help and who needs what
2. Support connectedness and ‘moral messaging’ – respected local figures calling on citizens to visit 5 neighbours today, that kind of thing
3. Support asset prices – people sell low during a shock (lots of sellers, no buyers), then buy
   

   A new form of disaster response?

   high (if at all) when the situation is reversed during the recovery. Why not set up pro poor pawn shops where they get the same price at both ends, and so do not run down their assets?

To see if these ideas are barmy or brilliant, we need a better understanding of how social coping strategies actually work and could be strengthened. We could, for example, research areas of coping failure (comparable to market failures), that may require state and/or donor action.

So why not study how people cope in both normal and crisis periods, by accompanying a number of poor families to compile ‘coping diaries’, based on a similar methodology to the ‘financial diaries’ that formed the basis of Portfolios of the Poor? If we set up coping diaries in enough communities, they would tell us how people cope with idiosyncratic (i.e. individual or family) shocks, like a car accident or losing your job, and some communities would be struck by collective shocks, such as big price swings, weather events or earthquakes. Perhaps we could design it in such a way to rapidly scale up the number of diaries in the latter. If it was half as revealing as Portfolios of the Poor, which afterall is a study of financial aspects of coping strategies, it could be money well spent Anyone know if this has been done already? If not, any takers?