Education wonkwar: the final salvo. Kevin Watkins responds to Justin Sandefur on public v private (and the reader poll is still open)

The posts are getting longer, so it’s probably a good time to call a halt, but at least you have the weekend to read Kevin Watkins‘ response to Justin Sandefur on private v public education provision (and to vote – see below). If you have even more time, it’s worth reading (and relishing) the whole exchange: Justin post 1; Kevin post 1; Justin post 2 and now this.

Dear Justin
Thank you for the response. I’d also like to thank Duncan for setting up the discussion, along with the many people, on both sides of the debate, who have contributed their ideas and experiences. Whatever our differences, I think all of us share a conviction that decent quality education has the power to transform lives, expand opportunities, and break the cycle of poverty. There is no greater cause, or more important international development challenge, than delivering on the promise of decent quality education for all children.

Before I forget, let me add one personal note. Just between you and me, I never really suspected you of being a fifth-columnist for the Pearson Corporation, though you were a little over-exuberant in your treatment of their private school program. I also never had you down as chapter head of your local Milton Friedman revival society. My criticisms were directed at your advocacy for an education reform model based on vouchers, the transfer of public funding to for-profit private providers, and charter school-type arrangements for poor countries.

Unfortunately, your response reinforces many of my initial concerns.

Same goals – different roadmaps
You start by setting out three areas of agreement on goals and values. I’m happy to sign-up on all counts. Like you, I believe that governments have a responsibility to ensure that every child has an entitlement to free basic education and a chance to learn.  I also believe that equality of opportunity matters as an end in itself. What children are able to achieve in school should depend on their efforts and talents, not on the wealth of their parents, their gender, where they live, what language they speak or the color of their skin. In the 2010 UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report we made the case for introducing equity based-targets into the Millennium Development Goal framework  – and I’m glad to say that this idea is gaining some traction.

Where we differ is on the means to our shared ends. Like our blog contributor Ruth Nyambura from Kenya,  my starting point is that we should be focusing on how to improve the quality of provision in the public education system. Your starting point is that for-profit, low-fee private providers are a cost-effective alternative. While I recognize the critical role that these schools play in delivering education for millions of poor people, I see them as a symptom of state failure – not as a foundation for the reform of national education systems. We may agree on the destination, but we have different road maps for getting there.

Before turning to what I see as your misreading of the evidence, it strikes me that there is a wider question that we both need to reflect on. Much of our debate focuses on school management. Of course, the issues are important. But I can’t help wondering whether the endless dialogue on ‘public-versus-private’ provision is diverting attention from far more important themes that affect education and learning outcomes – and from the policies that can make a difference.

Let me give a few examples. We know that one-in-every-three children in low income countries reach school age having experienced extreme malnutrition, most of them before the age of two. This has devastating and largely irreversible consequences for cognitive development of learning achievement in school. This largely ignored crisis can be tackled through early childhood interventions – a point underlined by a recent randomized trial survey from a Save the Children program in Mozambique.

If we want to get all children into a learning environment we need to reform public spending programs that skew resources towards schools in wealthier regions; and we need demand-side financing interventions – incentives for keeping girls in school and getting kids out of child labor – that break down the disadvantages associated with poverty, gender and other markers for disadvantage.

If we want to raise learning standards, surely the discussion should focus on how to recruit, train, remunerate and support teachers. One of the reasons that so many of the children in school are failing to learn is that teachers are ill-equipped to develop basic literacy and numeracy skills in the early years, setting the scene for failure.

Without wanting to develop a shopping list, I would add the accountability dimension. From central ministries down to classrooms, public sector education providers in poor countries are for the most part notoriously unaccountable to parents. So are their low-fee private sector counterparts: the idea that a shift from public to private provision brings greater accountability is naïve. Civil society coalitions and non-government organizations have played a positive role in challenging the culture of impunity among education providers. In some cases – like UWEZO in east Africa and Pratham in India – they have done this by making available information on learning. In others they have supported the development of parent-teacher associations and used social accountability tools to hold providers to account. And it strikes me that this empowerment aspect of reform merits greater attention.

The narrow focus of the private-public debate in low income countries has a parallel in the United States. Here the ‘school reform’ movement appears to attribute 90 per cent of the crisis in public education to teachers, the absence of school choice, and school management issues, with 10 per cent attributed to poverty, social breakdown, and social disadvantage. As Dianne Ravitch has powerfully argued, they have the numbers back to front.

Evidence and ideology

Let’s get back to the evidence.

You spend a fair bit of time defending your claim that charter schools, free schools and vouchers are delivering impressive results and contesting my counter-claim.

Justin, let’s face it, you are scraping the barrel. A few weeks back The Economist ran a major piece claiming that charter schools in the US were dramatically out-performing public schools. They also have over-exuberance issues. Like you, they challenged the methodology of the Stanford University CREDO survey – the one that found charter schools were twice as likely to under-perform as out-perform a matched neighborhood. And like you they allowed ideological preference to override the evidence. An independent review of the methodology found the CREDO study sound – and other robust research exercises for the United States broadly reflect the findings.

What about the wider evidence from developed countries on private schools? One survey from the OECD shows that some three-quarters of the learning achievement associated with private provisions disappears once schools are controlled for the socio-economic intake of pupils. The rest of the disadvantage disappears when public schools are allowed space for innovation, including some autonomy over the curriculum.

Rather than go around the houses swapping evaluation references, I invite readers to look at the sources we have provided on charter schools, private providers, Swedish free schools, and vouchers and make up their own minds.

Whatever their take, I would make one cautionary observation. This is an area in which context and capacity matters. It is one thing to expand school choice within a high performing public system and a highly egalitarian society like Sweden, but the same policies are likely to produce very different outcomes in Nigeria or Ethiopia (or, for that matter, the United kingdom). Bear in mind also that no major developed country has resorted to voucher programs on any scale.

Back to Kenya
Having initially told us that poor people are readily able to afford low-fee schools, I’m glad that you now recognize this is not the case. I notice also that you do not contest the very low levels of learning achievement registered by for-profit, low-fee providers.

As you know, several studies have looked at the underlying sources of the lower per pupil cost of running low fee schools, and at the underlying sources of their relative performance. Almost the entire gain can be traced to two sources: lower teacher salaries and lower rates of absenteeism. Apart from the work of Jishnu Das and others in Pakistan and India, there is a dearth of research comparing low fee private school results with matched public schools (controlling for socio-economic background).

From a public finance perspective there are two relevant questions that have to be addressed. The first, as you say, is whether low-fee private schools deliver equivalent or better results at a lower cost. The second concerns the capacity of low-fee schools to scale-up provision.

You cite your co-authored paper on Kenya to answer both questions in the affirmative, claiming that presents decisive evidence of a low-fee school advantage.  I doubt it.

Your data are from 2005. Most low-fee private schools operating in Kenya’s informal centers at this time were unregistered. Their pupils took exams in public schools – and they were reported as public school scores (I stand to be corrected on this). Moreover, your median student was paying US$40 a year at a time when, according to the same Kenya Household Budget Survey that you use, half of Kenya’s population was living on less than US$38 a month. At this income level, sending two kids to a low-fee school would have cost 20 per cent of an adult income, before counting the costs of uniforms and books. How many people living below that threshold were paying US$40 a year for private education?

Bear in mind also, that most of the 2 million new entrants into Kenya’s education system since 2003 have been absorbed into the public school system. Given that these children come from the most disadvantaged homes in the country, there are inevitable consequences for learning achievement levels.

In the UK, DfID is considering supporting low-fee private schools in urban slums. My hope is that they will review carefully the underlying evidence on cost and performance. I hope that they will look also at evidence on the condition of low-fee private schools in informal settlements. Some of the schools I have visited in Kibera and Mukuru lacked toilets and clean water, along with textbooks. Moses Oketch and his colleagues have provided a detailed – and disturbing – assessment of learning conditions in low-fee schools in informal settlements.

As I understand it, the DfID view is that the Kenyan government is unable to scale up provision of public education in informal slum areas – hence the decision to support low-fee providers. Sorry, but I just don’t buy it. Kenya’s failure to deliver decent quality education to slum dwellers and poor rural areas in the north-east has nothing to do with capacity or financing, and everything to do with political leadership.

While we are on the subject of Kenya I was struck by your comment about the government’s decision, in your words, to ‘penalize private school graduates in secondary school admission’. I assume that you are referring here to the law requiring that a majority of the places in Kenya’s elite national secondary schools must go to students from public primary schools. As you know, entry to National schools, which are public, has traditionally been dominated by pupils from high-cost private schools. Private schools accounted for 120 of the top 130 schools in the last Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) results, and for over half of National School entrants.

This is an arrangement that has served Kenya’s elite very nicely thank you. The ability of rich households to pay for good quality private primary education has provided their children with access to high-quality, public-financed secondary education. Incidentally, per pupil expenditure in Kenya’s secondary schools is seven times higher than in primary education. While I also have some reservations about the design of the quota policy, surely some affirmative action is consistent with a commitment to equal opportunity.

The road ahead
As I said earlier, this is really a debate about pathways to the shared goals that you outline. You start from the premise that private sector provision can provide a powerful impetus for reform, while recognizing the need for caution and making it clear that you do not favour ‘mass privatization’. I accept that the private sector and non-state actors have a critical role to play in education – but question the degree to which low-fee private schools can deliver the results we both want to see.

Some of the comments on our posts were a bit over-polemical for my taste. In your sign-off you pick up on a somewhat eccentric offering from James Stansfield, a member of the Adam Smith Institute and lecturer in education at Newcastle University (as you probably know, he and his colleague James Tooley do not share your reservations about mass privatization).  Mr Stanfield appears to believe that private education is a fundamental human right – and that states have a commensurate responsibility to protect that right. Rising to his theme,  you cite the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (no less) to imply that I am bent on ‘taking away kids’ human rights /to education/ based on an ideological opposition to the private sector’.

Call me defensive, but I think this is getting a bit desperate. I hope that we can agree that, whatever our differences over approaches to reform, we are both committed to the right to education.  For the record, I have no reservations about supporting the right of parents to send children to whatever school they choose. The real debate here is about whether transferring public money to for-profit private providers will help or hinder the development of education systems that offer all parents the freedom to choose schools to deliver decent learning. When public provision fails, middle-class households can opt-out and exit to the high-quality private sector. That option is not available to the vast majority of poor households – and vouchers will not change this picture.

Does this rule out partnerships between state and non-state providers? Of course not. In some contexts – South Sudan and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are cases in point – non-government, not-for-profit providers provide the backbone of education provision. Donors should be supporting them far more actively. In Pakistan, state failure in education is so pervasive and low-fee private schools are so prevalent, that there are obvious efficiency and equity gains from ‘buying-in’ delivery while fixing the underlying failure.  Every situation is different. And governments and donors need to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of the non-state delivery options available.

Optimists and pessimists
You suggest that I am overly-optimistic about the scope for reform of under-performing education systems. Maybe you’re right. Then again, maybe you’re too pessimistic.

You are certainly too selective in your reading of the evidence. I cited the McKinsey Report because it provides examples of countries which, from a very low base, have simultaneously improved access, raised learning achievement and enhanced equity. For some obscure reason, you decided to focus on the parts of the report covering Lithuania, England and Singapore, which are all irrelevant in the context of our debate. The case studies on Ghana, Madhya Pradesh and Western Cape illustrate the types of reform that have delivered results.

The real starting point for a debate on the learning crisis in low-income countries should be teachers and teaching. Few of the teachers that I have met in developing countries choose to be ineffective. They are products of the education systems in which they operate. Many have the weak subject knowledge and learning skills that come with a poor quality education. They are poorly trained. They frequently have limited access to information to assess what their children are learning against benchmark standards; and they seldom receive in-service support to help them improve their teaching methods. In many cases, they are also poorly paid and living in challenging environments. And all too often teachers are unaccountable to parents.

The institutional failures behind these and other problems can be addressed – but not through the type of model favoured by some advocates for low-fee schools. Much of the per-pupil cost advantage in these schools comes from the far lower levels of teacher remuneration they provide. Scaling up this model implies cutting average teacher salaries. Adopting this approach at a time when governments need to increase teacher recruitment, raise the quality of new entrants to the profession, and improve learning standards is surely self-defeating.

I suspect that everyone who has participated in this debate shares a sense of outrage and frustration at the state of basic education in developing countries. Every time I visit a slum or a poor rural village in Africa or Asia I’m struck by the level of ambition, resolve and commitment demonstrated by desperately poor people trying to get their kids a decent education.  And I leave wondering what we have to do to get their political leaders to demonstrate similar qualities.

If our shared goal is to deliver quality and equitable basic education for all, transferring responsibility and public finance to low-fee and, for the most part, low quality private providers is not the answer.

And that, for the moment, is it, with huge thanks to Justin and Kevin for a really top quality debate (even if they can’t write to anything approaching blog length). Keep voting, and if the authors want to slug it out for the last word, they will have to join the rest of you in the comments section.

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Private schools or public? Justin Sandefur responds to Kevin Watkins (and this time you can vote)

Everyone enjoyed last week’s arm-wrestle on public v private education, so in a titanic struggle for the last word, Justin Sandefur (right, in the private corner) and Kevin Watkins (in the public one) are back for another go. And this time, you get to vote – tick as many options as you agree with on the poll below. Seconds out, round two…..

Dear Kevin,

Thanks for your reply. You are of course quite right that I wear a Pearson corporation logo on a chain around my neck to ward off evil spirits, I can’t stand (or understand) solutions with multiple steps and regularly visit my local medium to have a chat with the sadly departed Milton Friedman.  But despite all that, I want to contend that we agree on almost all the necessary ingredients for a constructive policy discussion.  I’ll end with where I think our core disagreements are.

Evidence over ideology
First, we agree the debate should be based on empirical evidence, not ideology.   In an essay entitled “Policy Analysis with Incredible Certitude“, economist Charles Manski re-examined Milton Friedman’s dubious advocacy for private-school vouchers in the U.S., noting:

“Friedman cited no empirical evidence relating school finance to educational outcomes.  He posed a purely theoretical classical economic argument for vouchers…”

“Rhetorically, Friedman placed the burden of proof on free public schooling, effectively asserting that vouchers are the preferred policy in the absence of evidence to the contrary.  This is the rhetoric of advocacy, not science.  An advocate for public schooling could just as well reverse the burden of proof, arguing that the existing educational system should be retained in the absence of evidence.”

What Manski calls a purely theoretical argument was, in effect, just an expression of faith and political ideology.   I think we both agree that the wisdom of investing in voucher programs or similar schemes should hinge on evidence and facts.

Shared values

Second, I’m going to venture we agree on the underlying goals or values that should guide our evaluation of the evidence.    I’d list three.

#1.Access.  Primary schooling should be free, always and everywhere.
#2.Quality.  Governments have a responsibility to ensure quality education for all children.
#3.Equity.  Equality matters in and of itself, beyond mere improvements in, say, average learning outcomes.

A good expression of these values came from Pauline Rose via twitter.

If there’s any disagreement between us on these three values, I suspect it’s on the definition of “ensure” in point #2.  I’m happy for it to mean “pay for”.  But I noticed that when the UNESCO Education for All report discusses public-private ventures, it states in bold, colorful text:

“The bottom-line obligation for all governments is to develop publicly financed and operated primary schooling of good quality for all children”

This a priori insistence that governments not only finance, but directly operate primary schools essentially cuts off any evidence-based policy debate on public-private partnerships before it can begin.  (Friedman was never quite this bold!)  It also suggests that we artificially limit the tools at our disposal to pursue our core goals of access, quality, and equity.

Growing empirical consensus

Third, we agree on most, though clearly not all, of the relevant empirical facts.  Let’s see if we can hone in on where we disagree by revisiting the three issues I started with in my first post.

The crisis.  I think we’re in full agreement that the current state of education in many developing countries is unacceptable.  I focused on low learning levels, but you’re right that there’s a long way to go on enrollment in many countries, not least Pakistan.

Affordability.You noted that it costs about 1/10th the minimum wage to pay for a low-fee private school in Lagos.  In the blog comments, Ruth Nyambura did similar calculations for Kenya, showing that even low-cost schools are very expensive for typical Kenyan households.  This is all sadly true, yet potentially irrelevant given we agree that primary access should be free.

Parents should not be paying these fees.  If a country decides to pursue any form of public-private partnership for primary schooling, we agree that the state should, at a bare minimum, foot the bill for school fees.   The relevant point here is that fee levels in low-cost private schools are much less than the cost (to the state) of operating public schools.   From a public finance point of view, private schools cost negative money if the alternative is state provision.

Public vs. private performance.   This is where we disagree on a few matters of fact:.

• You insist there’s no evidence that charter schools in the U.S. are working, despite multiple randomized trials showing significant gains.  These trials show charter schools are most effective for non-white pupils in disadvantaged urban areas who are low-achievers at baseline, but less effective for suburbanites.  Instead you cite a Stanford report (CREDO) that has come under considerable methodological attack for its reliance on observational data and potential methodological flaws.  Even so, CREDO  notes that “For students that are low income, charter schools had a larger and more positive effect than for similar students in traditional public schools.”  CREDO also argues against attempts to cap charter school growth.

• My fault for introducing Sweden to the discussion, which is probably of limited relevance to the countries we’re debating, but the blog post you linked to on the Swedish model states unequivocally, “There is no question that, at a system-wide level, the presence of free schools improves outcomes.”  The equity effects here are more complicated, though your link cites research showing, “students from low-income families benefit more than those from high-income families”.   I’m not sure either of us wants to rest our case on Sweden.

• More relevant is the Kenya example, where you worried that the results in my co-authored work showing higher performance of private schools were driven by elite academies.  There’s ample evidence this isn’t true.   Two-thirds of private schools operate on lower budgets than the median public school, while roughly 85% of private schools score higher than the median public school.

• Finally, you shouldn’t have to take it from me.  Let’s turn to South Asia, where the UNESCO EFA report (p. 166) sums up the empirical debate:

“There is evidence that in many contexts private schools are outperforming state schools. In parts of India and Pakistan, children enrolled in low-fee private schools perform better, on average, than those in government schools, once adjustments are made for socio-economic status and other variables (Andrabi et al., 2008; Aslam, 2007; Das et al., 2006; Muralidharan and Kremer, 2006; Schagen and Shamsen, 2007).”

There is increasingly little wiggle room for debate on this.  So, where do we go from here?

Fixing failed states

Picture a village in rural Kenya with two schools: one government school with multiple classrooms but chronically absent teachers and abysmal academic performance; and one private school with motivated staff, involved parents, and an accountable management structure producing higher scores.  But the private school charges fees that impose a serious economic burden on poor families.

What’s the right response here?  Whoever runs the Labour Campaign for International Development twitter feed picked one of the more popular lines from your post:

I can’t help wondering who this imperative is directed at.  If the “fix the state” message is directed at the parents in my hypothetical village, it seems like a cruel, Marie-Antoinette-esque joke.  And if it’s directed at DFID or any foreign donor, well, Matt’s response seems appropriate.

The proper audience — though I doubt many are listening to us — may be national governments and Ministries.  I’m just not convinced we have clear solutions to offer them.  My co-authors and I spent years working with the Ministry of Education in Kenya trying to identify what works, and we’ve pretty much failed so far.

I know you’re more optimistic.   You mentioned a McKinsey report (co-authored by none other than Pearson’s Michael Barber — he’s everywhere!) as providing powerful examples of how investing in state systems can improve learning.  But it’s not clear this report is relevant to rural Pakistan, India, or Kenya.  The full sample of  McKinsey’s “sustained improvers” consists of England, Hong Kong, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Ontario, Poland, Saxony, Singapore, Slovenia, Boston, and Long Beach (USA).

I’m left sympathizing with Claire Melamed from ODI.

What if we can’t fix failed state systems anytime soon, as most evidence would seem to suggest.  What do we do in the interim?

First, we should be trying as hard as possible to come up with solutions that provide affordable, equitable quality education across the world –and that is going to take a lot of experimentation and monitoring.

But, second, we should avoid the urge to squash the private sector.  This urge is reflected in Kenya’s decision to penalize private school graduates in secondary school admissions, and in some of the more controversial pieces of India’s Right to Education Act.  Private schools are laboratories for approaches that can be applied in the public sector, and can be an important tool in extending access to quality education.

No one is calling for mass privatizations, whatever that means.  I don’t think we currently have a sufficient evidence base on the impacts of vouchers in low-income settings to even justify rapid expansion of these programs.  But the UN Declaration says everyone has a right to education.  Sadly, in many parts of the world today, send your kids to a government school, and they won’t get educated. We shouldn’t be taking away kids’ human rights based on an ideological opposition to the private sector.

I’m sure we don’t agree on everything here.  But I do hope we have real common ground about the terms of an evidence-based policy debate, the values we’re pursuing, and the kind of research that remains to be done.

Best,
Justin

Kevin’s already sharpening his pencil….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

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

Agricultural policy, poverty and the role of the state: the OECD responds

Today Jonathan Brooks author of the OECD’s new book on agricultural policy and poverty reduction, responds to my rather critical review. (For footie fans, the photo behind him is taken in a Brazilian bar, and celebrates the lobbing of the English goalkeeper David Seaman by Ronaldinho in the 2002 World Cup)

Duncan, Thanks for this review, and the opportunity to reply.

I wouldn’t make quite so much of the counterpoint with Ha-Joon Chang’s book, as we at OECD would concur on the general need for countries to be able to adopt agricultural strategies that are tailored to their structural circumstances and stage of economic development, and would agree that there is no one-size-fits-all development template.

In policy terms, our main point is that direct interventions in markets – be that through subsidies for seed and fertiliser or price guarantees – are not ideal in the long term, for precisely the reasons you quote. In that sense, you’re right that we see a narrow role for government in directing markets. However, we see a potentially much broader role in getting those markets to function properly. It is perhaps worth adding, for readers not familiar with OECD, that while we are direct in our policy advice, we have no formal powers to limit a country’s “wiggle room”.

In terms of broader strategy, I think there were more areas of agreement at the meeting than of controversy:

Because smallholder farmers dominate the rural economies of poorer countries, and because many of them are poor, raising their productivity is critical to poverty reduction strategies. I fully accept Michael Lipton’s point that smallholder farmers are operating efficiently given the constraints that they currently face. The key challenge is to ease those constraints. You can’t do many things better than build a road that enables the farmer to get her product – and the majority of them are women – to market.

Equally, I would endorse the view that there is a need to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture. The good news is that the potential for that investment to pay dividends is better than it has been for many years. High food prices have imposed real hardship on poor consumers, and on the large numbers of farm households who are net buyers of food. Yet our current Agricultural Outlook, which we produce jointly with FAO, projects that prices will remain strong for the foreseeable future. In the long-term, that has to be an opportunity for developing country farmers. For decades we have complained about the effects of low food prices on developing country farmers, and it is worth remembering that there were 850 million undernourished people in the world in 2006 – when world food prices were at an all-time low.

But our main message – and I think the discussion could have picked up on this better – is that focusing on agriculture is not enough. All countries that have developed and raised incomes from a few hundred dollars per capita per year to a few thousand dollars per year have developed their agricultural sectors, but they have also diversified their economies and created better paid jobs outside farming.

Much is made of the need for a Green Revolution in Africa, to follow the Green Revolution in Asia. This is absolutely necessary. If agriculture is the heartbeat of the economy and the heart is not working properly then you need to fix it. Yet forty years after its Green Revolution, much of India’s rural population remains mired in poverty and more than 40% of children are underweight. Although India’s economy is growing rapidly, and generating unprecedented wealth, agriculture has been effectively excluded. Indeed, the sector accounts for nearly two-thirds of all employment, yet commands just 16% of national income. And India is not unique: two-thirds of the world’s poor live in middle income countries where rural incomes languish. What we were suggesting – and this is something that agriculture specialists often accept grudgingly – is that in addition to raising agricultural productivity we need to hook rural populations into wider engines of growth. If we seek to generalise from the circumstances of the poorest agriculture-dependent economies, such as Ethiopia and Malawi where there are few sources of potential employment outside agriculture, then we risk missing a vital route to resolving the global poverty problem.

Steve Wiggins’ point is an interesting one. The difficult question – and we don‘t pretend to have all the answers here – is when do the investments that he describes smooth the transformation of the sector and when do they impede it? The package of investments he outlines – with roles for government, the private sector, donors and NGOs – can help broaden agricultural growth. But it is important that new development projects can survive the expiration of funding and that they do not deter farmers from seizing opportunities elsewhere.

To sum up, we need a broader strategy that widens opportunities both within and outside farming, and creates diversified rural economies, so that rural incomes catch up and we do not witness distress migration to squalid shanty towns.

I’ve never been to a Trotskyist meeting or belonged to a religious sect, but I agree that some of the discussion became a bit esoteric. I think that reflects the propensity of agricultural economists (and I confess to being a member of that particular sect) to become embroiled in technical questions such as the optimal farm size, and in some cases to view any wider discussion of multi-sectoral dynamics as somehow “anti-agriculture”. Agricultural development is necessary – but it is not sufficient.

Is this the UN’s most powerful critique to date of finance-driven globalization?

Ten years ago, Supachai Panitchpakdi was in charge of the World Trade Organization as it led a global push for the liberalization of trade, investment and just about everything else in the early days of the Doha Round. The talks ran aground (they still aren’t concluded) amid a big pushback from many developing countries (backed by organizations like Oxfam) against the free market fundamentalists. Now Supachai is in charge of UNCTAD and has just written (or at least put his name to) one of the most comprehensive critiques of the WTO model of globalization that I’ve seen from an official body. ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ is his report to UNCTAD’s upcoming meeting in April (UNCTAD XIII – they’re held every four years) and it’s a punchy, outspoken and well written document. From the UN. That’s correct. Some highlights:

On the role of the state: “When things fall apart, the state remains the only institution capable of mobilizing the resources needed to confront large and systemic threats. The idea that the nation state had somehow outlived its usefulness in a borderless world was never very serious. Since the state is pivotal to establishing an inclusive social contract and strengthening participatory politics, it is both imprudent and unrealistic to reduce or bypass its role in managing economic development and change. The more worrying trend in recent years has been the growing influence of financial markets in bending public policy and resources to their own needs and interests – leading a former IMF chief economist to warn of a “quiet coup” – including in the post-crisis period.” Further down Supachai “stresses the critical role of the developmental state”.

A sideswipe at the Washington-based institutions: “Neither IMF nor the World Bank, having abandoned their original raison d’être to the siren calls of unregulated financial markets, have been able to forge a vision of a postcrisis world economy consistent with changed economic and political realities.”

What’s the problem?  “I have chosen the term finance-driven globalization (FDG) to characterize the dominant pattern of international economic relations during the past three decades. This is intended to convey the idea that financial deregulation, concerted moves to open up the capital account, and rapidly rising international capital flows have been the main forces shaping global economic integration since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. Financial markets and institutions have become the masters rather than the servants of the real economy, distorting trade and investment, heightening levels of inequality, and posing a systemic threat to economic stability. The latest crisis has served as a further reminder that FDG is a political project and is, therefore, the subject of legitimate discussion and debate. To date, the response has largely been one of muddling through, with ad hoc measures to mitigate the damage from economic shocks, informal partnerships to tackle global imbalances, and impromptu alliances to push for greater market transparency.”

And the solution? “Finding the appropriate mixture of reflation, redistribution and regulatory measures to achieve these goals is now the urgent task of policymakers, at the international as much as the national level. I have chosen the term development-led globalization (DLG) to describe the principles, priorities and policies that need to be pursued to turn tentative recovery into an inclusive and sustainable future. Reforming the financial system is the place to begin. Even before the crisis, it was clear that stable and inclusive development was incompatible with speculative market behaviour, boom-and-bust cycles, and the austerity programmes to which they invariably lead. It is telling that the emerging success stories from the South have, in large part, pursued policies that have avoided these dangers. Finance needs to get back to the business of providing security for people’s savings and mobilizing resources for productive investment.”

But solutions go beyond economic policy:  “An inclusive development agenda cannot depend on economic policies alone. Under FDG, the stresses and burdens of unregulated markets have, all too often, been shifted to individuals and households and, in countries where social welfare systems exist, to government budgets. In many cases, unprecedented increases in income inequality have gone hand in hand with underfunded public services and rising levels of household indebtedness. The resulting cost to economic security and social cohesion has been enormous. Even when growth has accelerated, as it did in many developing countries between 2002 and 2008, too many people were left behind. A balanced economy depends on a strong social compact which, in turn, requires a range of universal and targeted social policies, tailored to specific circumstances, to ensure that the benefits of growth are widely enjoyed and its risks are shared fairly. The crisis has confirmed UNCTAD’s long-standing insistence on the importance of policy space…. Each country must be able to experiment and discover what configuration of institutions and governance works best in its circumstances and in line with the expectations of its population.”

Conclusion? “Rebalancing is not a narrow technocratic challenge.  A true break with the fundamentalist thinking underlying FDG will involve a change of attitudes, morals and values.”

Stirring stuff. The only shame is that these days UNCTAD, which in the 1970s and 80s led calls for a ‘New International Economic Order’, often seems such a marginal voice in the international scene. Yet in an era of FDG crisis, perhaps its hour has come again?

Ha-Joon Chang uncovers what’s worked in the history of agricultural policy

I vividly remember the impact of Ha-Joon Chang’s 2002 book ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’. At the time I was an NGO lobbyist on the WTO’s Doha round of trade talks, and Ha-Joon’s book showed how when they were still poor, today’s rich countries had systematically used the industrial policies and other forms of state management of the economy that they were now urging the WTO to outlaw. Within months the book’s expose of northern double standards was being quoted extensively by developing country delegates at the talks.

Now, he’s turned his historical attention to agriculture, in a study for the FAO that examines the agricultural policies of 11 now-developed countries, along with 10 developing and transition economies. A book will emerge eventually, but he’s summarized the findings in the Journal of Peasant Studies. Here’s a summary of the summary:

‘In the earlier stages of development, today’s rich countries had to grapple with the very problems that dog the agricultural sector of today’s developing countries – land tenure, land degradation, fragmentation of holdings, agricultural research, extension services, rural credit, irrigation, transport, fertilizers, seeds, price and income stabilities, trade shocks, agro-processing, marketing, and so on.

Many successful policy interventions have gone well beyond (or even against) the scope recommended by the New Conventional Wisdom (NCW), which has ruled agricultural (as well as other) policies in the last quarter of a century:

· Japan and other East Asian countries had a very successful comprehensive land reform that included strict land ownership ceilings.

· Virtually all of today’s rich countries used state-backed specialized rural banks and credit subsidies, state-subsidized agricultural insurance, public provision or subsidization of warehousing facilities, and input (e.g. fertilizers) quality control

· Denmark and some other European countries benefited from effective export marketing boards

· The USA and Japan successfully used price stabilization measures

The exact institutional forms of successfully delivering critical needs of the agricultural sector have varied enormously across time and space. There were successes with all forms of delivery in all sorts of countries – public provision (e.g. agricultural research in the USA, extension in the Netherlands, irrigation in Vietnam, seeds in Mexico, rural credit in Germany), private provision (e.g. marketing service through contract farming in Zambia, machinery services in Egypt), private delivery subsidized by the state (e.g. agricultural insurances in Chile, certain types of research in the Netherlands), public-private partnership (e.g. irrigation in Sweden), co-operatives (e.g. butter and bacon processing and marketing in Denmark, credit co-ops in Germany), state-co-operative partnership (e.g. rural banks in Ghana, export marketing in Denmark, fertilizer supply in Korea) – that suggests that the standard dichotomy between the public sector and the private sector is crippling our policy imagination. Moreover, none of these modes are invariably successful – failures occur in each.

Finally, the study shows the importance of active importation and adaptation of policy/institutional innovations from abroad as well as of policy/institutional innovations of one’s own.’

Conclusion? ‘History frees our “policy imagination” by showing that the range of policies and institutions that have produced positive outcomes for agricultural development has been much wider than any particular ideological position – be it the pre-1980s statist one or the pro-market NCW – would admit.’

This is dynamite. Kicking Away the Ladder led to us becoming friends and working together, and also provided me with a handy principle when considering different economic policy proposals – ‘more history, less maths’. The picture that emerges from this new paper may be more nuanced than the ‘industrial policy good, liberalization bad’ core message of KATL, but it fully confirms the relevance of history.

How are effective states going to emerge in Africa?

[Sorry to anyone who got a premature alert yesterday - hit the wrong button!]

There’s nothing like a visit to Africa – in this case ten days of book promo and financial crisis impact interviews in South Africa and Zambia, to get you thinking about the role of the state. In Southern Africa, as on earlier launches in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, discussions invariably turn to leaders – is it inevitable that even good politicians will betray us when they come to power? Where will the next Mandela come from? It brought to mind a quote from American Revolutionary Patrick Henry on the purpose of the US Constitution: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” A good constitution is designed not for good leaders, but for bad ones. State building is about the long dull slog of building institutions – perhaps in some ways Mandiba did Africa a disservice by encouraging its endlessly frustrating search for the providential leader. Read More …