Why don’t people in power do the right thing – supply, demand or collective action problem? And what do we do about it?

My last few days have been dominated by conversations around ‘convening and brokering’, including an exchange between assorted ODI wonks and a bunch of NGOs on the findings of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and a ‘webinar’ (ugh), with our Latin American staff on the nature of ‘leverage’ (a closely associated development fuzzword). Yesterday I set out the best example of this approach that I’ve found to date, the Tajikistan water and sanitation network. Today it’s some overall conclusions from the various discussions.

David Booth from ODI described the question he is trying to answer as ‘why don’t people in power do the right thing?’ He thinks aid agencies (both official and NGOs) have moved from thinking that the answer is building capacity in government (supply side) to strengthening the voice of citizens to demand better services (demand side), but argues that both approaches are wrong.

The mistake, he argues is seeing power as a zero sum game, whereas often the barrier to progress is better seen as a collective action problem: ‘doing the right thing involves cooperating with others and people aren’t prepared to take risks and bear the costs of working with others, unless they believe that everyone else will do so too.’

That requires a different approach, getting everyone into a room to build trust and find joint solutions to a common problem.

ODI argues that on the ground, a lot of aid agencies realize this, and are doing it already. But the official line (often driven by donors’ funding decisions) is that they are exclusively building demand-side accountability, so their reports and narrative airbrush out all that ‘collaborationist’ activity with local government officials, politicians etc. That’s a problem because it inhibits their ability to share experiences and learn how to do things better.

As evidence, ODI cited an evaluation it did for Plan of a ‘Community Scorecards’ project in Malawi that was proving remarkably successful. The programme design was classic demand-side: entitlements, rights, holding duty bearers to account etc. But when ODI investigated, they found that reality involved brokering local-level reform processes and working with local officials to help them raise concerns with central government. Solutions included communities agreeing to help with school construction. In agriculture, problems included fertilizer subsidies being traded on secondary markets, sometimes for sex. The project brokered contacts with police and the courts to help sort it out. Little of this appeared in the official project narrative.

All well and good, but Oxfam’s Jo Rowlands argued that the NGOs’ approach is different to ODI’s in one important aspect. While ODI argues for ‘going with the grain’ of existing institutions and traditions, the NGOs are more normative – going with the grain but at the same time seeking to change it, through a kind of ‘affirmative action convening and brokering’ that ensures the voices of previously excluded groups are at the table. So for example, our work with protection committees in the DRC involves helping them build trust with local government and ‘armed actors’, but also ensuring the committees have an even gender balance, which has transformed the confidence and self-perception of many women participants.

would they get more results from a meeting?

This kind of transformative approach usually involves something additional to just convening and brokering (Tajikistan is a bit of an exception). In livelihoods it involves investing in technical assistance and building organizational capacity so that smallholder assocations can benefit from value chains. In women’s rights it involves building ‘power within’ as well as brokering the kinds of discussions the protection committees have in the DRC. Elsewhere it may involve running pilot programmes to demonstrate new solutions around which the discussions can take place.

Which leads me to a key dividing line between two kinds of convening and brokering. The more innovative kind involves acknowledging that there is a problem, but admitting that we don’t have a solution, and want to get everyone in the room to try and find one. That’s the Tajikistan model, but is still something of a rarity (NGOs often think they know the answer, even when they don’t….). That is very different from merely trying to build an alliance around a predetermined policy demand (a much more common approach).

Which all left some important questions and dilemmas hanging in the air. They include:

• Given that social change often takes place through a cycle of cooperation and conflict (see diag), when and where is the ‘problem-solving approach’ the best answer? Just during the kiss and make up phase, or more generally?
• Is this approach easier in some sectors (children, water) than others (taxation, livelihoods)? Or is it easier in service delivery work (more pragmatic) than influencing (more normative)?
• ODI argues that the trick is to pick the moments when the stars are aligned for some kind of collective action breakthrough, but how do you recognize such moments, apart from in hindsight (not a lot of use for practitioners)?
• What kinds of people are good at this, and do they work for aid agencies? In my experience, lovers of ambiguity, policy entrepreneurs willing to take risks, and networkers happy to talk to people they disagree with or even dislike are in pretty short supply in the aid world
• David Booth argues that ‘meetings are of the essence’, but what distinguishes useful convening-type meetings from pointless NGO gabfests. (JAM – Just Another Meeting)?
• Which brings us to the role of donors. To what extent can they cope with the uncertainty over attribution and the long timescales involved in this kind of work? How do we take them with us?

Finally, we agreed to ask for your help. David Booth reckons we need a good snappy name for this new approach – open-minded on solutions, trust-building, convening and brokering, problem-solving etc. Any ideas?

And since ODI is funky and digital these days, here’s my 3 minute download, which they filmed straight after the meeting

‘Convening and Brokering’ in practice: sorting out Tajikistan’s water problem

In the corridors of Oxfam and beyond, ‘convening and brokering’ has become a new development fuzzword. I talked about it in my recent review of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and APPP promptly got back to me and suggested a discussion on how convening and brokering is the same/different to the APPP’s proposals that aid agencies should abandon misguided attempts to impose ‘best practice’ solutions and instead seek ‘best fit’ approaches that ‘go with the grain’ of existing institutions in Africa. That discussion took place yesterday, and it was excellent, but that’s the subject of tomorrow’s blog. First I wanted to summarize the case study I took to the meeting.

The best example I’ve found in Oxfam’s work is actually from Tajikistan, rather than Africa, but it’s so interesting that I wrote it up anyway. Here’s a summary of a four page case study. Text in italics is from an interview with Ghazi Kelani, a charismatic ex-government water engineer who led Oxfam’s initial work on water and is undoubtedly an important factor in the programme’s success to date. Ghazi is currently Oxfam’s Tajikistan country director.

Water is a key resource in Tajikistan, providing energy, irrigation and drinking water, but its management is chaotic, characterized at both national and local level by paralysis, multiple institutions with overlapping mandates and a state of disintegration in much of the supply network. In many communities, people have reverted to taking water directly from irrigation canals and rivers, and diarrhoea is the most common disease in the country.

Oxfam began working in Tajikistan in 2001, in response to 2 years of drought. Water and sanitation (WatSan) formed an important part of its programme. Concerns over sustainability prompted a review of the work after five years, producing dismaying findings. Oxfam decided to publish these and organized a conference at which it became clear that INGOs, state and private sector providers were all struggling to manage the institutional chaos.

People were knocking on Oxfam’s door saying ‘your water system is broken, please come and fix it.’ That prompted us to ask why they were still saying ‘your’. It raised issues of sustainability. Publishing the findings of the evaluation was the big moment – our own doubts resonated with others.

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the leader in the WatSan sector in Tajikistan, got involved, calling in its experts to check Oxfam’s research and develop a plan for how to address the issues raised. SDC asked Oxfam whether we would be interested in running a 3-5 year project, but Oxfam persuaded them to extend this to 10 years, due to the scale and nature of the challenges.

The resulting project (TajWSS) developed a theory of change that would now be described as ‘convening and brokering’.

The network meets every two months. We always have guests, and hot topics, keep it dynamic – a full afternoon, 1.30-4.30pm, and then an extended coffee break so people can network. We get a minimum of 55 people from different sectors – 17 government ministries and agencies; the UN family; INGOs; academia; the media; Tajiki civil society organizations; the private sector; parliament. Now the ‘big questions are flowing’. Lots of other stuff emerges from the side conversations, the coffee breaks. For example, private sector companies working with network members to develop local chlorination, or getting local banks to help communities with finance for investment. Maybe we should add vodka to the menu to keep people there a bit longer!

Central to the new programme is that its work is not framed as a project, but rather about building sustainable institutions. Improving the communications between government actors and other stakeholders in the water and sanitation sector all contributed to building a better environment on decision making.

This approach is not as easy as it sounds, and requires a particular skill set from the facilitator:

Everyone agreed with the overall idea. Of course, when you raise issues that affect the pocket, for example proposing tax exemption for investment in infrastructure projects, the Ministry of Finance gets irritated and opposes. There are always winners and losers and the losers try to push back by any means they can. Some Ministers get pissed off and try to make trouble. We deal with it case by case – we have to be patient, diplomatic, absorb their anger. We try to keep everyone calm! We use participatory techniques, task groups to help on this. Sometimes the best solution is to ignore someone; sometimes to go to them twice a day and explain we are doing this for Tajikistan. By creating forums to tackle contentious issues, TajWSS has become the only well-functioning game in town.

Project Impact

The initial impact was institutional, with more practical impacts following later. TajWSS helped set up an Interministerial Co-ordination Council (IMCC), established by presidential decree, with membership from 14 ministries and government agencies. This meets four times a year to discuss policy and make decisions. TajWSS facilitates the meetings and helps the Chair (who is the Minister of Water). (Without our facilitation it wouldn’t happen).

Our biggest victory so far is the Water Law.  We didn’t draft it – it has been there for years in somebody’s drawer. The network raised the importance of having a law, and someone dug it up, and we decided it was good enough for a start.

Why does a water law matter? Previously there were laws on water and agriculture, water and energy, but not on drinking water. This creates chaos, everyone claiming water supply rights, providing without any quality control. The law frames the issues, establishes who’s in charge, who regulates, who is the service provider and targets monopolies. It is bringing order to an important subsector.

Our other major breakthrough is on construction permits for rural infrastructure. Currently it is really unclear, even for the biggest company. Getting a permit takes a minimum of 2 years and needs 3 separate permits for land acquisition, the license to exploit natural resource and the license to build infrastructure. And people in rural areas have to go to the capital to get the permit, because local government is not empowered to make decisions. So we found some nice work from USAID and the World Bank on ‘single window reform’, proposing a 200 day maximum for approval, and we used that as the basis for our proposal. We mapped 72 procedures and started to cost each one and weed out the unnecessary ones. It’s now down to 19 steps, and 180 days, and we’re still trying to simplify further, e.g. a fast-track procedure for small scale infrastructure. The inter-ministerial council has already approved it and the president has signed off (presidential decree no. 282.)

These institutional breakthroughs are now starting to deliver concrete results, according to Ghazi

We have now got the government to co-fund the water infrastructure programme. The Minister of Finance wrote to the president saying ‘we will support the Oxfam initiative and contribute 30% of capital costs’. The other 70% is SDC money channelled via Oxfam. The first 3 constructions were finished in December 2012 and handed over to communities for service provision (operating and maintaining) and making an income. Three more are in the pipeline. The water has started flowing – initially to 9,000 people in 7 villages. By August 2013 at least 30,000 people will get access to sustainable water provision.

Lessons

• It’s comparatively rare for NGOs or aid agencies to adopt the approach of ‘we all see there’s a problem, but we’re not sure how to fix it, let’s work something out together’. In this case, though, that seems to work better than either service delivery, or advocacy based on a shopping list of ‘policy demands’.
• In this area, for credibility, being operational as Oxfam is really important
• Acknowledging failure, and going public with it, created the basis for a coalition to find new solutions
• Oxfam’s role in convening/brokering has managed to bring players together and build trust, leading to an emerging set of initiatives, both in public policy, and partnerships. Part of that is Oxfam’s international brand: ‘The reason we can convene is our credibility and knowledge but also our international brand. Before meetings people go and google Oxfam and when they see what we are doing, it gives them confidence. It also matters that as Oxfam we are not vulnerable to political pressure, whereas a local NGO might be.’
• Building on existing legislation (e.g. the shelved Water Law) can often be a faster route than starting from scratch.
• Good research and killer facts (eg on permit procedures) can create conditions for policy change.
• Synergise and build on others projects rather than re duplicating or re-inventing the wheel
• I learned that facilitation and support of a network means taking care of each member organisation separately and in some cases individuals inside the member organisation.

I’m keen to collect more examples of this ‘problem without solution’/convening and brokering approach from NGOs and others – if you’ve got any, please let me know. Part two of this post tomorrow will report back on the ensuing discussion.

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

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

Leo Tolstoy, development guru

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

were not executed because they could not be.’

Tolstoy channels Amartya Sen on Freedom and Wellbeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous thoughts on getting research into policy here and here.

Other thoughts from the workshop here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theories of (climate) change and a nice song about complex causal chains……

Spent a happy half day with the climate change team at IDS last week, at the invitation of the team leader Matthew Lockwood, who besides being a climate change star (see his Political Climate blog), wrote The State They’re In, a brilliant book on the politics of African development. We were exploring the theories of change (explicit and implicit) that underpin their work, and the conversation reminded me of similar discussions in the NGOs (only with a bit more Foucault). A few observations:

The discussion was useful because although research is undoubtedly essential in improving our understanding of climate change, its impact, how people are adapting, new ideas for mitigating carbon emissions etc etc, if that research is to influence policy, researchers need to think hard about the political environment and the complex transmission belt that determines whether research findings do or do not influence policy.

The IDS team  seem to have three main targets in mind for their research and advice – donors, states in developing countries and social movements. But thinking on the donors and social movements is much more developed than on the state, with some real ambivalence about whether they see the state as part of the solution or the problem (as you’ve probably worked out by now, I definitely think it has to be at the heart of any long term solution on both development and environment).

Their theories of change seemed attuned to a steady state world – a steady accumulation of evidence, research and nifty policy papers will lead to incremental but in the end transformative (whatever that means) change. Wrong. In reality, most such evidence and research will be ignored until moments of opportunity arise (probably linked to massive natural disasters in powerful countries, but also elections, changes of leaders etc etc). So you need a mechanism to identify those moments, drop everything, rehash and update existing research and advice, and get your thinking rapidly into the hands and heads of post-shock policymakers desperate for answers. That is not going to be achieved through the usual slow grind of journal articles and academic seminars.

The approaches also seemed based on the assumption of positive change, when climate change in particular is currently marked by stasis rather than change – I would have liked to hear more about how IDS is trying to understand why things aren’t changing (north and south) and how research could perhaps help unblock the sources of inertia.

As always in these discussions, success partly comes down to what kind of people we need to be to ensure research has some influence. A lot of what makes research successful in influencing policy is down to networking skills and influencing. But as Malcolm Gladwell so graphically describes in The Tipping Point, we are not all natural networkers, and I’ve met a fair few academics who really struggle with that kind of interaction. In particular, if you’re going to influence elites and governments, you’re much more likely to succeed if you can like and empathise with them, rather than say through gritted teeth ‘OK, I’d much rather be down with the grassroots, but I am now going to engage with the enemy.’ For some reason the enemy in question doesn’t find that very appealing…….

The change processes being discussed often seemed largely linear and purposive rather than complex, random and chaotic – but at this point I will leave it to team member Tom Tanner and his memorable song on the traumas of proving impact.

If you want to check the references in Tom’s song, they are:

1.     Mitchell, T., Tanner, T.M., and Lussier, K. (2007) ‘We know what we need’: South Asian women speak out on climate change adaptation. Institute of Development Studies and Action Aid International, Johannesburg.

2.     Bahadur, A., Ibrahim, M. and Tanner, T.M. (2010) The Resilience Renaissance? Unpacking of resilience for tackling climate change and disasters. Strengthening Climate Resilience Discussion Paper 1. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK.

3.     Tanner, T.M. and Allouche, J. (2011) ‘Towards a new political economy of climate change’, IDS Bulletin 43(3) pp1-14.

That’s academia for you – even the songs have footnotes…….

How can theories of change help in working with the private sector?

As regular readers will know, I’ve been doing some thinking on ‘theories of change’ recently. A few people have asked me if the change in question is mainly political/social change, or whether it applies to economic developments too. I think there’s a high degree of commonality, so at last week’s discussion on working with the private sector, I took the set of ‘change archetypes’ and strategies below and tried to apply it to Oxfam’s work on livelihoods. 

Here’s what jumped out in terms of our current work on the private sector:

Active Citizenship: Four Powers
What is it? Focusing on redistributing power within society, starting by supporting poor people to build their ‘power within’ – a sense of dignity, agency and rights, then ‘power with’ – collective organization around common goals, before moving on to ‘power to’ express demands and ‘power over’ those in authority.
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of work on strengthening producer organizations to improve their bargaining power in markets, and brokering relationships between them and more powerful actors in supply chains.

Elites: Enlightened leaders
What is it? Kind of obvious
How does it apply to private sector work? Direct networking with captains of industry at places like Davos to persuade them to overhaul their business models and practices

Elites: Appealing to technocrats
What is it? Forget the leaders, we need to work directly with the officials who actually do stuff, and show them how being pro-poor can help them achieve their organizational objectives
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of conversations with mid-level executives about the business case for doing good stuff – staff morale and retention, reputational risk, positive brand image etc

Cross-class Coalitions
What is it? Often more effective to work in coalitions of dissimilar organizations than to put 100 NGOs in a room to negotiate a joint communiqué.
How does it apply to private sector work? Teaming up with progressive sectors of business and others to lobby governments and less forward-thinking firms on everything from ethical trading to ‘publish what you pay’ to climate change.

Dynamics: Power of example
What is it? Seeing that something works in practice is more convincing than a thousand policy papers
How does it apply to private sector work? Lots of pilots, which we then document and publicise

And what does the table suggest might be missing from or weak in our current work on the private sector? Some thoughts (we may be doing some of these already, but they certainly weren’t prominent in last week’s big cheese discussion)

People in the streets: Outsider strategies such as protest movements or working in coalition with trade unions

Democracy works: Campaigns through parliaments or local governments on issues such as access to finance for small producers, the ‘enabling environment’ – infrastructure etc, labour regulation, competition policy or public procurement policies (e.g. the work on smallholder supply chains in Bogotá)

Shocks and tipping points: Hurricane Katrina is credited with transforming Walmart’s attitude to social and environmental responsibility. How many U-turns in corporate practices are down to similar shocks, whether external like Katrina, or internal, like corporate scandals or financial meltdowns? Should we focus more on spotting and seizing those moments of opportunity rather than more linear advocacy strategies?

Evolution: If we were to take evolution seriously, we might try and ‘see like a venture capitalist’, spotting new and emerging ideas in the private sector, supporting and publicising them, spreading them to new geographies and situations, accepting (and learning from) much higher failure rates. We would act as amplifiers rather than do-ers.

So yes, I still think theories of change are useful, and yes, that includes private sector work.

What does a theory of change look like?

I’ve been working on ‘how change happens’ for a few years now, as regulars to this blog will know, but in the last few months, ‘theories of change’ has gone viral as a new development fuzzword. In meetings and documents, people earnestly enquire ‘what’s your theory of change?’ and you’re in trouble if you don’t have an answer. (Quite a good answer is ‘could you just explain what you mean by theory of change?’ – people often have no idea).

So it’s time to ride the wave and speed up the ‘theories of change’ work programme, and last week I spent some time at IDS and with Oxfam big cheeses thinking through what a joint IDS-Oxfam work programme might look like. Here’s what I’m currently thinking, with a plea to others to comment, send sources and otherwise give me a hand. Hat tips to Thalia Kidder and Jo Rowlands for their suggestions.

Firstly it’s ‘theories’ not ‘theory’. When people talk about a single ‘theory of change’ (ToC from now on), alarm bells should ring – in the worst case it’s just a new jargon for old-school linear change, impact chains, logframes etc. Instead of a deluded search for a single grand theory of everything, we need to learn to recognize and manage a range of theories, throw them at a problem, and see which ones are helpful (see my recent experience of doing this in Tanzania). Yes folks, we’re talking practical post modernism….. Surfacing our deeper, buried assumptions about the motors of change can also help us understand why we keep disagreeing with each other, a crucial skill in coalition-building.

Being able to acknowledge your own ‘preferred ToC’ and yet have the ability to stand outside it and understand those of others is really hard to do – an emotional and intellectual stretch – but it’s an invaluable skill. I think a lot of the practical impact of any ToC workplan is going to lie in helping build such capacities.

To do that, you need some rules of thumb – NGO types are mainly doers and activists, impatient to get on and change the world. They need practical tools to help them apply ToCs in their work. So I’ve been building on some work on ‘archetypes of change’ by Chris Roche and ‘meta-theories’ from Ros Eyben, to come up with this rough typology.

There are three categories, with some overlap between the categories, but broadly they are:

1. ‘Systemic meta-theories’ (apologies – please suggest a less pretentious alternative!), describing the underlying way you see the world and its motors of change. They may lead to particular change strategies, or simply underpin the overall analysis.

2. Archetypes – more specific snapshots of how change happens in a given place and moment. I’ve provisionally grouped them into four clusters: active citizenship, elite-driven change, cross-class coalitions and what I’ve called ‘dynamics’ where the focus is on the rhythm of the change itself, rather than specific drivers. Not sure if the dynamics actually belong in a separate column.

3. Change strategies, adopted by would-be ‘change agents’ to bring about good change/ prevent bad change

Category 1 is free standing; while categories 2 & 3 go together, i.e. the change strategies follow from the archetype of change in the same row. None of these lists are exhaustive, and some overlap with each other – I hope to reduce the level of messiness as the work proceeds, but here it is, warts and all.

Systemic meta-theories

• Rational Choice: change is unintended outcome of individual choice
• Environment/techno determinism
• Long term shifts in deep underlying  norms, values and beliefs
• Purposive individual/ collective action
• Marxist/Structuralist: changes in relations of production and economic power structures key
• Evolution (variation/selection/ amplification)
• Shocks and wars drive change by transforming social, political and economic relations

And here are the more specific archetypes and their associated change strategy:

Clear as mud? I’d welcome all thoughts, especially on clarifying and improving the typology. Next steps are to start identifying case studies, plan some desk reviews, design some training modules and raise some research funding (do get in touch if you want to fund it!) I’ll keep you posted as plans develop.