How can development NGOs go urban?

Just spent a fascinating week in Nairobi, taking part in a review of our three-year- old urban programme there. Like many large development NGOs, Oxfam’s traditional remit is deeply rural – goats, irrigation, drought, that kind of thing – but the world has gone urban, and so in a few countries, we are dipping our organizational toes in the water. Some impressions on the challenges of urban work:

Perhaps most striking are the multiple centres of power and association compared to the rural world. Tier upon tier of government, dense networks of clubs, traditional and tribal structures and militia, social and community organizations, churches, ‘merry-go-round’ savings and loans groups, youth groups, sports clubs, cultural groups – the list is endless. Power is dispersed and often hard to map or even detect. How to chart a way through the forest of organizations and identify potential partners and targets for influence?

A lot of official aid goes to the ‘capacity building’ of officials and promotes legal reforms to improve the ‘enabling environment’ for business. The assumption is that the state wants to help, and just needs more support. But what if the disabling environment matters more? Street traders say that when you try to start a business, a previously absent state appears, and not in a good way: ‘suddenly, all the officials arrive, asking for bribes’. Every bylaw is an excuse for graft. ‘You need a lot of blessings to open a kiosk, our elders need to be smiled at’- Kenya is full of euphemisms for graft.

Once you set up your market stall, you face arrests, confiscations, fines and sexual harassment. The key seems to be organization, so Oxfam is funding an ‘access to justice’ programme that builds small trader associations, and works to improve relations between them and the local authorities and police. Experiments like ipaidabribe.com may also be worth trying, although no Kenyan activists I spoke to had heard of it.

There is a wider point here. When the authorities are seen as a threat ( ‘I can’t remember a time when they came and said ‘we want to help you’’) there is a temptation for donors, NGOs and community organizations to seek to build movements that bypass the state, emphasising self-regulation and ‘popular justice’. But that is probably short sighted – state-building will eventually have to take place, and there is a window of opportunity for that in Kenya right now. Following the appalling violence that took 1,500 lives after the 2007 elections, a new constitution was overwhelmingly approved in August 2010. According to one optimistic community organizer in the Mukuru slum this is a turning point ‘before it was all ‘once I’m elected, I’m the boss – I don’t have to listen to anyone’. Now that’s changing, knowledge of rights scares the people in power. The rule of law is getting better.’

But patronage is deeply rooted in Kenya, where every conversation rapidly morphs from challenges to policies to politics to personalities – who you know, who’s doing what to whom, who controls which fund. Gossip, scandal and politics are inseparable. More concretely, getting policies implemented, or changing them, is all about working connections and building alliances. Grassroots leaders rapidly enter that world if they want to deliver any progress for their supporters.

After 2007, few think overtly confrontational approaches such as street protests will bring anything but disaster, and any idea of building up an autonomous change movement outside this system seems very implausible, so how can the new constitution be used to create space for citizens (especially marginalized groups such as women and youth) to organize around collective issues? How far can they go before the system discerns a threat and cooption, corruption and repression ensue? These are legitimate worries, but for the moment, changing the system from within to build something approaching an effective state seems both more promising than a more outsider approach and less fraught with danger. So it seems likely that over the coming years, we will devote more of our limited resources to seizing the opportunities presented by the new constitution. If that fails, then I guess we’ll have to rethink.

Finally, people seem confident that the upcoming elections (scheduled for March 2012), won’t lead to a repeat of the post election violence (often referred to simply as PEV) that took place in 2007/8. They trust that a ‘never again’ sentiment and the optimism surrounding the new constitution will prevail. I hope they’re right. A kind of semi-spontaneous segregation has taken place in many slums, as people have chosen to move to areas where they feel more secure because their own tribe is in the majority. There has even been a revival in ethnic identity, as shown by the increased prominence of vernacular radio stations. People seem uncertain whether this makes conflict more or less likely – much will depend on whether the presidential candidates stoke up ethnic tensions to improve their prospects in the run up to the elections. The role of the media, which inflamed tensions last time around, is also important – maybe worth doing some advocacy, perhaps get them to sign up to a code of conduct in advance?

Several other country programmes in Oxfam are developing urban work. Based on this visit, the key to success seems to lie in developing an acute awareness of the multiple locations of power, political agility in seeing where and how to intervene, and a readiness to constantly re-examine our work in response to the constant political and social turbulence of the urban world. Exciting stuff.

A shorter version of this post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation blog

10 Challenges to ‘business as usual’ for development agencies: FP2P flashback

OMG, nearly three years on and almost everything on this list would still be on today’s version. But at least I could point to progress, in the shape of specific bits of thinking, reseach and/or programming. on nearly all of them. What new additions would go on today’s list, I wonder? Domestic taxation; resource scarcity and planetary boundaries; the damage wrought by an excessively large and powerful financial system – any other candidates?

From Poverty to Power is explicitly not official Oxfam policy, but its combination of literature review, programme experience and extensive discussions, both within Oxfam and beyond, highlights a series of challenges to ‘business as usual’ in the development sector. In response to a number of requests, Penny Lawrence (OGB International Programmes Director) and I put together this initial short-list.

1. What difference does inequality make? Using inequality, rather than poverty, as your starting point takes you in different and potentially more interesting directions. Inequality is about relationships – within households, communities, countries. Reducing inequality by rebalancing power, opportunities and assets is central to development. But how different is that from what we are doing already? If we applied an ‘inequality lens’ to our work, what would we do less/more of? Progressive taxation? Land reform? Birth registration?

2. Do we have a religious blind spot? Religion is a key driver of active citizenship (both good and bad) in many communities. While many believers work in development agencies, and figure prominently among their supporters and overseas partners, the development industry remains largely secular. How could we improve our understanding of the links between faith, religion and development, and engage more constructively with different faith groups?

3. Is it time to go urban? For the first time in history, the world’s population became majority urban in 2007. Burgeoning shanty towns are home to a billion people now, rising to 2 billion by 2030. Yet a glance at their websites will show you that many development agencies continue to focus on rural areas. They argue that this is because most poor people still live in the countryside (and are predicted to do so until 2040). But the shanty towns will probably be home to the new social and political movements in the years to come: urban change is a messy affair, involving some familiar issues – water, education, health and some unfamiliar ones – housing, crime and property rights; do rural-centric development agencies need to follow the migrants into the shanty towns?

4. Is building effective states part of our remit? What is the role of international NGOs in building states (identified in the book as critical to development success)? Do NGOs have an anti-state bias – how many staff see the state as part of the problem, not part of the solution? In both effective and ‘fragile’ states, do we need to work with local government institutions, often following decentralization processes? Where has this been successful? Or should NGOs stick mainly to supporting active citizenship, and their ‘convenor’ role, facilitating dialogue between citizens, states and other actors, such as the private sector?
 
5. Are we biased against waged labour? Experience suggests that what poor people often want more than anything else is a regular wage: job creation is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty. Yet NGOs can often be ambivalent about labour markets – they support (and campaign for) modern, formal, unionised labour, but in other situations, seem to prefer peasants to casual labourers. Would we rather have no jobs or bad jobs? What determines our view? How much are we listening to the communities we work with?

6. How do we integrate humanitarian and development work better? The book gives added urgency to this organizational chestnut, stressing the role of shocks in driving long-term social and political change and pointing out that many of the emerging issues in development (climate change, social protection) sit between the two camps. These may eventually prompt a wholesale restructuring away from separate ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ departments, but in the meantime, perhaps the best way forward is to identify the best forms of integration across different types of emergency and at different stages of the humanitarian cycle. These would require incorporating issues such as partner strengthening, social protection, institutional and policy reform into our humanitarian work as an emergency develops.

7. The future of INGOs: Although the book avoids large doses of navel-gazing on our role, it does raise some difficult issues on accountability (why have agencies often demanded less of themselves than they have of many corporates?) and political engagement (we need greater clarity on e.g. what it means to be ‘impartial but not neutral’; the difference between becoming more politically literate, and becoming political actors)

8. National v global: The book argues that development remains primarily a national process, born out of the interaction between citizens and states. Global forces, including rich world activists and INGOs, can help or hinder, but they are not the main actors in the drama. That analysis holds implications for how we design both our national programmes and our international campaigns (e.g. Make Poverty History), where big “global” messages can seem incompatible with the analysis of where change really happens.

9. We need a better way to analyse change: Oxfam, along with many other NGOs, describes itself as a “change agent” – but agreeing and making explicit our understanding of how change happens is difficult. From Poverty to Power’s annex on change builds on DFID’s ‘drivers of change’ work and proposes an analytical framework covering both drivers (context, institutions, agents, events) and dynamics (e.g. path dependence, lightbulb moments, alliances), which it applies to eight case studies from individual grassroots struggles to the Gleneagles G8 Summit. However it is still pretty abstract and needs to be refined through experience.

10. And finally, (cheating on the ‘10 challenges’ format here…) three other candidates for the short list:
· Migration: we need to understand better its role in development (both internal and international migration) and what policy or programme actions can increase the benefits to both sender communities and migrants themselves
· Democracy: we have a default preference for democracy, but how central is it to development? Does it distort our understanding of active citizenship and development in countries like China and Viet Nam?
· Technology: critical to development, yet many NGOs are instinctively ‘anti’ – stressing issues of risk and control over access to knowledge, and seldom supporting any new technologies (except renewables).

It would be great to hear your views on these (whether you work for Oxfam or not). What stands out? What have I missed? Over to you.

This post was first published in December 2008

Why is humanitarian work so hard in cities?

By chance, the day before the Haiti earthquake, we were having a discussion at Oxfam about why, when it comes to feeding programmes, disaster relief etc urban work tends to be both harder and less attractive to NGOs than doing equivalent things in rural settings. This reflected an increasing conviction that we need to do more on urban issues. Although I’m no expert on Haiti, many of these issues have already emerged in the post-earthquake operation, so here goes.

Why does the prospect of working in urban settings make many NGO people very anxious indeed? In short, complexity and chaos.

1. Political complexity: there are many more players in urban settings. As one experienced aid

Where do you start?

worker said, you can’t just go in and say ‘take me to the chief’. Even in post-earthquake Port au Prince, with many of the formal institutions in disarray, there will be all sorts of centres of power, both formal and informal: churches, gangs, community organizations etc. That places a premium on political awareness and negotiation skills, but also on understanding the longer term political implications of your relief work – what institutions will be strengthened or weakened by a particular approach to emergency relief? How do you manage the risk of local politicians trying to coopt and capitalise on your efforts for political advantage (as some will inevitably do)?

2. Fluidity. People in urban areas have more ways of surviving, often producing complex livelihoods strategies that see them busy at all hours of day and night. So much harder to organize partipatory processes – people find it harder to come to meetings etc. Plus they don’t stay put. When we tried to identify ‘beneficiaries’ in shanty towns after flooding in a previous Haitian disaster, the faces were different the next time we went back to hand out emergency relief. Everything from damage assessment to needs analysis becomes more difficult.

3. Social cohesion. Some shanty towns are less cohesive, making it much harder to work with communities that are atomised, crime ridden and lacking in trust.

4. Security: in those slums that have crime problems, security jacks up the costs of operations (and slows up their speed). We’re already seeing signs of that in Haiti.

5. Not so relevant in Port au Prince, given the virtual absence of a functioning state right now, but in general there’s a tendency to think ‘Urban is for governments’: governments, both national and local, tend to be more present in (some) shanty towns, making it less clear what role exists for NGOs and raising both opposition from old hippies averse to working with the state, and concerns about setting up parallel structures that can actually undermine state provision.

6. Scale: we don’t do big infrastructure, but cities involve just that. Improving a dilapidated urban water system serving hundreds of thousands of people is very different to drilling a new borehole.

7 Space: when land is at a premium, there may be nowhere to locate evacuation sites or build the latrines or reservoirs.

Conclusion? The urban world is messy; an NGO will have to work in complex alliances and relationships with other bodies, in which political as well as engineering skills will be essential. It will have to be more agile and flexible; less command-and-control. One guy at the discussion commented wryly that he’d been talking about ‘going urban’ in various NGOs since 1987, which as well as being rather depressing, suggests there are some real institutional barriers to overcome. It’s difficult, but in most of the world, it’s a big part of the future. The Haitian earthquake may be extreme, but there will be more urban disasters in the decades to come.

Charter Cities – visionary, naive or bonkers?

Charter Cities are a proposal to build cities from scratch in the world’s poorest nations, outsourcing their design and government to rich countries. Visionary, naïve or plain bonkers? Probably a bit of all three.

They are the brainchild of US economist Paul Romer, who explains his idea on this (20 minute) video.

He’s serious – last year he gave up his professorship at Stanford to devote himself to selling his big idea. He argues that if poor people like the cities, they will migrate there, creating a ‘global archipelago of economic powerhouse city states’ in the words of a Boston Globe piece.

Here’s one example, from the Charter Cities website

‘For decades, the Unites States and Cuba have been parties to a treaty that gives the United States administrative control over a portion of Cuban territory straddling Guantanamo Bay. In a new treaty signed by the United States, Cuba, and Canada, the United States could give up its treaty rights, and Canada could take over local administration for a defined period of time.
An administrator appointed by the Canadian prime minister would be responsible for setting up and enforcing the rules that apply in this special territory. The legal protection and institutional stability that the Canadians provide would attract foreign investors and foreign citizens to the city.

As the city grows, the Cuban government would gradually allow freer movement of people and goods between the land it governs and the charter city. At the same time, supporting cities and suburbs would grow up on the Cuban side of the city’s boundaries. The charter city itself would eventually return to Cuban control.

In this case, a treaty creating a special administrative arrangement already exists and Hong Kong provides a model for how a city might be governed. An interesting variant would be one in which several countries (e.g. Canada, Spain, Norway, Mexico, and Brazil) stand in place of Canada alone.’

To me, this all feels like part of an understandable but slightly alarming series of ‘lament of the technocrat’ calls for experiments in greenfield development. Politics, institutions and societies are messy, unpredictable and frustrating, so academics in particular come over all Founding Fathers and board the latest intellectual Mayflower in search of a nice ‘clean’ experiment: think Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Villages, or Paul Collier and Independent Service Authorities.

As for this latest grand vision.

Pluses:
The innovate, pilot and replicate model works in some cases (eg China)
Effective states are certainly needed at the city and local level, as well as national
To some extent the proposal recognizes the rise of subnational units within globalization

Minuses:
This is ahistorical: the key to China’s pilot/replicate model was an effective state. How would charter cities do anything other than suck talent and resources away from nation states?
Hong Kong is pretty sui generis – about the only example of success built on laissez faire. According to Ha Joon Chang every other country required hands-on industrial policy and state intervention to develop
Apolitical: Even if it works, you end up with some kind of modern city amid Mad Max chaos – does he really think the city can just build a wall and keep the chaos at bay? It’s a bit like Paul Collier thinking you can give the money to technocrats in ISAs to spend, and no-one will notice!

I’ve asked around, and had a few comments back. Becky Buell, an ‘exfam’ (former Oxfam) colleague who now works on urban issues at MIT’s Green Hub, has this to say:

‘It’s interesting to note a “back to the future” element to all this.  The idea that somehow cities can be planned at all was largely abandoned by the late 70s as urban growth and informality outpaced and out-smarted the urban master planner.  There seems to be a rebirth of attempts to come up with new forms of master plan that are ambitious in scope, but that are different from past efforts in that they see a minimalist role for government, and put the private sector at the center of planning and delivery.  The Charter Cities and the World Bank’s recent Eco2Cities concepts are examples of this, with differing degrees of government leadership and management in the two examples.  The most important gap in all of these is the absence of an analysis of power dynamics, and the likely failure of any attempt at planning that doesn’t recognize and work with this.  The other big gap, I think, is the lack of perspective on the informal sector, where the vast majority of people in developing countries live and work.  Any plan that does not consider this vast world will again repeat the structuring of fragmented, segregated societies.’

Tom Goodfellow, an LSE doctoral student, emailed this after a debate with fellow LSE urbanists:

‘At the moment it certainly seems like a recipe for the creations of islands of poverty or islands of wealth (depending on the country in which the charter city is ‘hosted’) which could not easily be integrated into the surrounding society even if they were to attract people and investment, as Romer assumes they would. On the one hand, the example of a city in Australia built specially for Indonesian workers sounds like labour migration designed in such a way as to maximise negative social consequences; Romer states that public services and welfare support in the city would be ‘comparable to those in Indonesia’ (i.e. considerably lower than for people in the rest of the country in which the city is located) and Indonesians in the city ‘would be subject to the same immigration controls whether entering Australia from this zone or from Indonesia’. This smacks of the deliberate creation of ghettoes and even echoes of Apartheid townships!
 
On the other hand the creation of cities in poor countries by rich governments such as Canada is no less dubious. Firstly it is very unlikely that any sovereign developing country will voluntarily relinquish sovereignty over a city of any size for both economic and political reasons. And even if this does somehow happen, the huge amounts of private sector finance necessary to get industrial cities of the kind Romer envisages off the ground would likely lead to protected pockets of wealth that largely flows out of the country generating little benefit for the host nation state. Moreover, given the weight of private interests involved the idea that the city would somehow naturally return to the control of the host nation-state after a period of time sounds highly improbable (not unlike the Marxian idea of the state ‘withering away’…)
 
Meanwhile, having highlighted the evils of slums as one reason for creating these new cities, Romer says of the Cuban example that ‘supporting cities and suburbs would grow up on the Cuban side of the city’s boundaries’…in other words, the presence of a wealth and employment generating city would create huge slums outside the island of great institutions, which doesn’t move us on very far at all. Don’t need to build a charter city to create gated communities surrounded by squalid slums, just go to South Africa, Nairobi, Brazil, wherever!’

Chris Blattman has also blogged on this, Paul Romer has responded to his criticisms here, and Chris, in determined search of the last word, has responded to Romer’s response here.

Reshaping Economic Geography – the latest World Development Report

A helpful summary from my colleague Richard King of this year’s World Development Report – the World Bank’s flagship publication. The title is ‘Reshaping Economic Geography’ and Richard found it ‘exciting’. But then he’s a geographer – I found it hard going and fell asleep several times, but maybe that’s the jetlag…..

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