‘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.

Witty White House; denial pie; Delhi reflections; spooks and vaccinations; a big year for UK aid; walk or run in the rain? Links I liked

I’ve more or less made the transition to using twitter for sending round links, but here are a few recent highlights for the untwittered, or those who follow thousands of people and so never read most of their tweets:

‘This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For’: Witty White House response to an online petition that the US should ‘Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016’ [h/t Tim Harford]

What % of peer reviewed climate papers reject global warming? Not many (see pie chart).

The two best things I’ve read so far on the Delhi rape case. A brilliant reflection from Naila Kabeer on why it has caused such anger, when so many other attacks are ignored and ‘What If We Responded to Sexual Assault by Limiting Men’s Freedom Like We Limit Women’s?’ Brilliant, almost Swiftian, satire from Amanda Taub

Why President Obama should sign an Executive Order banning US intelligence services from using vaccination campaigns

It’s going to be a big and controversial year for the UK aid budget as Britain hits 0.7% despite cuts in domestic spending. The Guardian’s Larry Elliott looks at the pro/anti aid arguments and comes down on the side of the angels.

And finally, the answer to that eternal dilemma: ‘Is it better to walk or run in the rain?’ [h/t Chris  Blattman]

‘Resource Futures’: good new report on how to confront resource scarcity and conflict

Looks like this is going to be crystal ball week on the blog – must be the time of year. Just read Resource Futures from Chatham House (inventors of the ubiquitous Chatham House Rule). The analysis is pretty good, but it really raises the bar on communication, with great interactive infographics and killer facts. Advocacy wonks everywhere, take note.

The paper summarizes the key trends and flashpoints in global resource use, including:

• Resource trade has grown nearly 50% from a decade ago in weight terms owing to expanding trade in oil, iron and steel, coal, oilseeds and cereals
• Large-scale resource extraction remains concentrated in a handful of countries (China, the United States, Australia, the European Union, Brazil, Russia, India and Indonesia)

And then boils it all down into 5 ‘key findings’:

Volatility is the new normal

Volatility (see graph), driven by shrinking ‘buffers’ (eg reserve stockpiles) is spurring resource nationalism and needs to bedampened down by government and international action. The report has some clever ideas on how to design price smoothing mechanisms for oil, food and metals.

Environmental change and degradation are challenging traditional approaches

Environmental boundaries are starting to bite, notably climate change and water scarcity. Not much new in the way of ideas here (remove fossil fuel subsidies, improve water-sharing agreements etc), more ‘just do it’.

Trade as a frontline for resource conflicts

‘Trade is becoming a frontline for conflicts over resources’. Interesting – trade wars on the way back, eg over unilateral export bans by food producers, but in a different guise from the old WTO style struggle over import liberalization

Resource politics matter

‘Resource politics, not environmental preservation or sound economics, are set to dominate the global agenda and are already playing themselves out through trade disputes, climate negotiations, market manipulation strategies, aggressive industrial policies and the scramble to control frontier areas.’

Likely flashpoints that will need international action include resource production in highly eco-sensitive areas like the Arctic and ‘extreme engineering’ such as weather modification. The report picks up Alex Evans’ suggestion for a high profile annual ‘State of the World’s Resources’ report.

Collaborative governance is the only option

The report’s main big idea, in terms of policy proposals, is to set up a ‘new club of the world’s principal resource-producing and -consuming countries to fill existing governance gaps on resource and scarcities governance. This ‘Resources 30’ or R30 grouping, conceived as a ‘coalition of the committed’, would comprise leaders and officials from thirty countries of systemic significance as resource producers, consumers, importers or exporters.’

And here’s report co-author Bernice Lee introducing the findings

Global Trends 2030: top report from US intelligence

My inbox regularly receives the latest ‘global trends 20XX’ reports from thinktanks and futurologists, and a lot of them are pretty bland, and the scenarios they describe threadbare and unconvincing. The new ‘Global Trends 2030’ report from the US National Intelligence Council shares the usual flaws on its scenarios, and is understandably US-centric (the NIC is a US government body), but its description of trends feels spot on, albeit a bit cursory on climate change. In Rumsfeldian terms, it summarizes the known knowns – ‘megatrends’, reflecting underlying ‘tectonic shifts’, but adds in a discussion of known unknowns, both long-term processes  - ‘game changers’,  and (mainly negative) discrete events – ‘black swans’. But you can be pretty sure that Rumsfeld’s final category, unknown unknowns, will mess up this nice arrangement. Here are some of its summary tables:

Megatrends and Game Changers

Tectonic Shifts

Black Swans

The most novel aspect for me was the focus on the political implications of demographic transitions – NIC reckons aging populations will encourage liberalization and democracy, and reduce levels of conflict. Plausible given the age range of most fighters, but a bit reductionist?

Should men speak on all-male panels? Summary + time to cast your vote

Right, I have now waded through dozens of comments, tweets and my own tangled thoughts on Monday’s post. What stood out?

Boycott v constructive engagement: is it better to politely push conference organizers, suggest female panelists, and express ‘strong disinclination’ to take part in testosterone-fests, or to play hardball with a blanket ban? And is the crime less heinous for a three man panel than a six man one?

Should this approach be extended beyond gender, especially to having representation from developing countries?

Pressure during the event itself: questions from the floor and from panelists should ask organizers to explain themselves and/or panelists should make the effort to ask for female colleagues’ input to the debate and pass it on (duly credited).

Should we add a ban on all-female panels on gender issues?

Don’t blame the event organizers when the real problem is broader – the lack of women at top level in a number of development-related institutions (yes, but a combination of conscious effort and affirmative action by event organizers can be part of redressing the wider problem).

For the moment, I’m coming round to the following position: When asked to participate on a panel, right-thinking men  should

a)      Ask about the current make-up of the panel

b)      If it’s devoid of either women or people from other relevant population groups (depending on the topic), both express serious reservations and try and suggest some names

c)       If they think the organizers are not serious, they should decline, but if they seem to be really trying, it’s OK to say yes

d)      Before the panel, try and get input from colleagues to fill in any potential gaps in the panel‘s analysis due to its grotesquely distorted composition

e)      When speaking on the panel, mention the disparity, and try and ensure a fair spread of questioners (male domination applies to questions at least as much as it does to panelists)

And of course, none of this applies if the panelists are Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Jim Kim, but Christine Lagarde is not available that day.

There, that should ensure I never get invited to speak at a panel again. Result.

And since everyone likes voting (judging by last year’s top ten), please could you tell me whether I’ve got it right? The Poll will remain open for a few days. The question is

When asked to appear on panels, men should

a)      Simply refuse to appear on male-only panels

b)      Constructively engage with organizers in the way set out in the blog

c)       Just be grateful, say yes and abandon all this pitiful liberal self-doubt

What’s New in Development? Introducing the Second Edition of ‘From Poverty to Power’

Here’s what the new edition of FP2P adds to the first (in case you want to save yourselves a few quid). This was recently published by the UN University as part of its ‘WIDER Angle’ series

Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose theweaknesses of any text. Even more so with a book like ‘From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World’ (henceforward, FP2P), whose second edition has just been published. In trying to present an overall NGO narrative on development, it offered a particularly rich variety of hostages to fortune.

FP2P’s core argument was that the driving force behind development (understood in the Sen formulation as ‘freedoms to do and to be’) is a combination of active citizens and effective states. Why active citizens? Because people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, fighting for rights and justice in their own society, and holding the state and private sector to account. Why effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process in terms of infrastructure, rule of law, human capital and industrial upgrading. In addition, the first edition stressed the importance of inequality and redistribution, both in terms of social and economic waste, and social justice.

The three shocks, and a slow-motion train wreck

What’s new in the second edition? An update chapter covers the main events of the intervening years, which it identifies as three shocks: the global financial crisis; the food price spike(s) and the Arab Spring; and a slow-motion train wreck in the form of climate change.

The global financial crisis was a watershed event, triggering historic geopolitical change, including the shift from G8 to G20 and the rise of the emerging powers. It drew attention to the risks of an excessively ‘financialized’ global economy, but failed to lead to a reining in of the excessive size and volatility of ‘hot money’, condemning us to future financial crises, possibly starting with Europe in the coming months. More broadly, the advent of the G20 has failed to re-energise the multilateral system, with global talks on climate change, trade and arms control all paralysed. Some commentators are even talking of a ‘G zero’, with no one in charge.

The food price spike, which in many countries traumatized the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the financial crisis, reversed a decades-long trend of low and falling prices, thus threatening the long-term progress on hunger and nutrition.  This has led to renewed attention to food security worldwide, but with some unfortunate side effects such as ‘land grabs’ across the developing world by investors from rich countries.

The Arab Spring confirmed the importance of active citizenship in processes of change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in Islamic contexts, along with the granular and complex nature of social movements.

But an even more intriguing aspect of updating the book has been trying to identify how these events, along with the research and ‘public conversation’ of the development world, have changed the way we think about development.

Taken together, the three shocks, along with the growing frequency of extreme weather events, have made us much more aware of the impact of volatility, risk and vulnerability on the lives of poor people. That leads both to a focus on building resilience, and trying to dampen or prevent them in the first place. Shock absorbers, from social protection to food reserves to ‘circuit breakers’ in financial markets, have become a much more central part of the development debate.

Accounting for complexity: shifts in thinking and communicating

But it goes deeper than that. The unpredictability and systemic nature of the shocks has driven home the inadequacy of development thinking predicated on linear processes of change. That raises real challenges for traditional systems of planning and measuring results. Oxfam recently sent a complexity physicist to visit its programme in northern Kenya, and the insights from this kind of interdisciplinary work are likely to play an important role in transforming our thinking in coming years.

A further consequence of systems thinking is that we are trying to work out the implications of seeing the world’s ecosystem as a closed system, operating within clear planetary boundaries. Kate Raworth’s work on how to combine these planetary boundaries with a ‘social floor’ has great promise in this area.

Over the last five years, the nature of authorship itself has been transformed by technology. The From Poverty to Power blog, initially launched to promote the first edition, has rapidly acquired a life and readership of its own. It has also provided the first draft of many of the updates incorporated into the second edition. Twitter has only added to the daily churn of links, ideas and opinions. Wrestling to impose a coherent narrative on the greatly increased information flood is one of the growing challenges of authorship.

So how has the first edition survived the assault of history?

I think the central argument still holds—that development happens primarily through the interaction of citizens and states, with aid and the global system playing only a second order role. However climate and finance are two examples of collective action problems that cannot be resolved at national level. The paralysis of international action in those areas is perhaps the darkest cloud on the development horizon, threatening to reverse sixty years of unprecedented human progress.

Inequality and redistribution have become far more mainstream debates, with even the IMF weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. Tighter constraints placed by ecosystem boundaries (for example on the right to pollute), further heighten the importance of who gets which slice of the pie.

Many people, both inside and outside Oxfam, have questioned the absence of the private sector from the citizen-state binary. My response has been that an effective state creates the enabling conditions in which private enterprise can flourish. However, I now think that I, along with many others, confused and conflated the roles of private sector, markets, and economic power. The lacklustre response to the financial meltdown has demonstrated the central role of economic power, and we do need to make the visibility and regulation of economic power a more central part of our narrative.

Finally, one area of the first edition has expanded enormously in the last five years, its focus on ‘how change happens’. Better understanding of processes of change, and the accompanying analysis of the distribution and redistribution of different kinds of power within change processes, is rapidly becoming a central component of development thinking at Oxfam and many other development agencies. It is also the subject of my next book—now there’s a hostage to fortune!

And in case you missed it, here’s me coveringe the same ground on video, reading an autocue, waving my arms and looking slightly deranged

Development optimism from Justin Lin: review of ‘The Quest for Prosperity’

‘Every developing country has the opportunity to grow at over 8% a year for 20-40 years, and to get rid of poverty within a generation.’ There’s something very refreshing about listening to East Asian development economists, in this case the prolific Justin Lin, a former World Bank chief economist, launching his new book The Quest for Prosperity, at ODI just before Christmas. The contrast between his can-do optimism and the dark clouds of Eurogloom and Afropessimism could not have been greater. But is he right?

While others in development wonkland are increasingly scathing about blueprints and best practice guidelines, Justin is unabashedly a man with a plan. The book takes his paper on ‘Growth identification and facilitation’, (see my earlier review, and Justin’s reply), and boils his thinking down into what he calls a ‘six point recipe’ for developing country governments.

1. ‘Choose the right target’:  find a country that looks like you in terms of ‘endowments’ – geography, natural resources, markets etc, but that is doing much better, with a per capita income that is, say, double yours. Then imitate it. This is a straight lift from Asian ‘flying geese’ story.
2. ‘Remove binding constraints’: identify which of your own industries look like those in the target countries and find out what’s holding them back (infrastructure, credit, red tape etc). Sort those things out first. Justin draws heavily on Dani Rodrik and Ricardo Hausmann’s work on growth diagnostics.
3. ‘Seduce and attract Global Investors’: Justin goes for Washington Consensus-style openness to FDI, along lines of Bangladesh or Singapore rather than the more protectionist route followed by South Korea and others
4. ‘Scale up self-discoveries’: But he also thinks governments need an active industrial policy to spot and support local innovation and technological upgrading (eg Indian IT or cut flowers in Ethiopia)
5. ‘Recognize the Power and Magic of Industrial Parks’: he won’t make many friends among the trade unions on this one, but (drawing on China and Vietnam), he sees export-processing zones as the best way to overcome dilapidated infrastructure and get exporting quickly
6. ‘Provide limited resources to the right industries’:  a tentative support for an activist industrial policy

What this amounts to is an attempt to mash together elements of the structuralism of the 1950s, the East Asian experience, new thinking from people like Rodrik and Hausmann, and the Washington Consensus of the 1980s, not so much splitting the difference as combining the best bits of all of them. It’s politically cautious, trying to play to both sides of the aisle (for example, he says his recipe is ‘consistent with The East Asian Miracle’, the World Bank’s notorious and largely discredited attempt to rewrite the East Asian tigers as a neoliberal success story).

The ensuing discussion at ODI was pretty critical, although Justin defended his recipe with passion. ODI’s Dirk van de Velde argued that it’s no good having a good recipe if you don’t have any cooks. Justin is much stronger on the economics than the politics, and ‘assumes a tin opener’ in the shape of an effective state both willing and able to implement his recipe. That’s a big assumption. When challenged he is pretty naive on the politics, arguing that leaders will be motivated to do the right thing because they want ‘a good name in history’. Yeah, right.

Kunal Sen from Manchester argued that the political economy of growth accelerations is very different from growth maintenance. Lots of political regimes produce growth spurts followed by busts, very few can keep it going for Justin’s ‘20-40 years’ and we need to understand better why that is.

Sheila Page stressed the limits to imitation: as the technological product cycle grows ever shorter, it is becoming less viable to rely simply on imitation, because the technology will already have moved on by the time you have absorbed the knowledge. No good arriving ten years late with a really cheap fax machine.

What about finance? I wasn’t clear from Justin’s presentation what role he sees for financial integration, given that financial markets are sources of huge volatility, put pressure on economic policy-makers to follow a more free market route, and often don’t lend to the right people (eg small and medium enterprises).

Is this a genuine recipe, or does it always rely on hindsight? I asked Justin if he would have predicted in the 1960s that South Korea had a ‘latent comparative advantage’ in iron and steel. He said yes, but I have my doubts.

Beyond these concerns, I applaud the intention, but worry that the attempt is flawed on two fronts. Firstly, I share the general scepticism on blueprints, and secondly, I’m not sure it’s actually possible to mix and match such opposing schools of thought in this way.

As for the book, it’s very sweetly written, and dotted with great quotes. My favourite is from Einstein, ‘Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works, but nobody knows why. We have put together theory and practice: nothing is working, and nobody knows why.’

Should men boycott all-male panels at conferences?

A conversation on twitter this weekend triggered (yet another) ethical dilemma. Gosh it’s exhausting trying to be a do-gooder. Claire Melamed started it by sending round a link to an article arguing that men should sign a pledge stating publicly that they will refuse to take part in all-male panels at tech conferences (which are regularly men-only affairs, apparently). As a regular token NGO speaker at various talkshops, would I make a similar pledge, she asked? Owen Barder is already signed up, she added.

They may not be as extreme as geeky tech events, but lots of development gabfests do indeed feature men on the panel talking to women (and men) in the audience. That violates basic fairness, inhibits the profile and (possibly) career development of half of the potential talent pool, and is likely to distort the agenda and resulting discussion (less focus on care economy, women’s rights etc). So obviously, the answer is yes to a boycott, right?

Except…..

Most people who contact me don’t know the final panel line-up yet. They are in the process of contacting a range of potential speakers, both men and women. Prominent women in the development debate (like Claire and her outgoing boss at ODI Alison Evans) are in huge demand, so presumably have to say no quite a lot of the time. Should I say ‘provisionally yes, but if you end up with a male-only line-up, I’ll withdraw at the last minute’? That seems to me to cross the line from principled to prima donna – pretty unfair on already stressed-out conference organisers who may be trying ever so hard to ensure a balanced line up. Or should I say ‘are you committed to inviting a decent number of women speakers to ensure a gender balance on your panels?’ – everyone is going to say yes, but how do you measure how serious they are?

Then of course there’s the organisational profile thing. In fantasy mode, suppose I get a call saying ‘Barack Obama, David Cameron and Jim Kim are speaking on development, and need a token NGO person, could you do it? Christine Lagarde is busy that day, sorry.’ Am I really going to say no?

And what about a panel with all male speakers and a woman chair (a pretty common occurrence)?

And why privilege gender over eg ethnicity – what about all-white panels on development (which are even more common than all-male ones)?

Oh dear. The torments of the self-obsessed liberal.

Tell me what you think, and depending on the response, I may well set up another online poll to help solve my dilemma. Meanwhile, the interns poll is still getting votes (see right), and the agnostics (NGOs should decide for themselves whether to pay interns) has overtaken the ‘pay all interns’ lobby and is drawing away. Unexpected result – love it.

Civil Society, Public Action and Accountability in Africa

An important new paper from some big development names – Shanta Devarajan and Stuti Khemani from the World Bank, and Michael Walton (ex Bank, now at Harvard Kennedy School) – directs a slightly fierce (but welcome) political economy gaze at donor efforts to strengthen civil society (one of the more recent developmental fads). As with most such papers, after a monumental literature review, one of the striking conclusions is how little we really know, but it gropes gamely through the fog of ignorance and confusion and arrives at some interesting conclusions.

First, the authors find that something significant is going on among Africa’s citizens: “a large shift in Africa in organization among citizens. Village-level group formation in Africa increased dramatically over the 1990s when participatory approaches were emphasized in international development paradigms, promoted through aid, and adopted deliberately by country governments to deliver projects to communities.” Interestingly, that increased participation applies to both democratic and less democratic systems. The question is in what situations that upsurge in civil society has impact, and how (if at all) aid agencies can help.

The paper adds its support to the growing demand that aid interventions abandon futile searches for ‘best practice’ in favour of understanding what are the ‘best fits’ for any given context:

“In general, aid is most likely to be effective if it essentially organic, in the sense of (a) supporting existing domestic initiatives and pressures for change, and (b) in ways that are consistent with the initial state of the polity.”

But with that caveat, the authors give the thumbs up for some particular kinds of intervention. Italics in square brackets are my attempt at translating the rather academic language.

“There are a number of areas where there is a good prima facie case for support. This will typically be a function of the nature of overall polity. For example, there is the largest range of potential action for democracies with real political competition, albeit of a competitive clientelistic form, whether the regime is consolidated or fragile. [to have impact civil society needs to be able to get traction on the political process, and find potential allies within the state] Here are some categories.

• There is a strong case for general support on information-related initiatives—from information on politician performance, to school test results, procurement processes and so on.
• There is also a contingent case for support for local organizational initiatives that are working with and processing information that the evidence base suggests has potential in solving accountability problems. This domain can include NGOs working with right-to-information laws, think tanks analyzing budgets or regulator behavior, or service delivery outcomes, etc. [no point in supporting access to information if organizations aren’t able to use it or the information is not relevant to poor people]
• A related area concerns support for information for benchmarking of performance of local levels of government, e.g. municipalities; or across local service providers (schools; electricity and water supply), where service quality can be measured and compared [league tables can be effective in naming and shaming officials and politicians and otherwise galvanizing action]
• It often makes sense to support local client-power-related initiatives, but these are only likely to be fruitful if linked to broader change over the long route. [Bottom-up initiatives are good, but only if they can get traction on wider political process]
• Support for the strengthening of compact mechanisms is highly desirable if this has domestic political and technical support. [You need political leadership and/or influential allies within the state apparatus]
• There are two kinds of roles for civil society in the business sector.

o Support for processes that provide mechanisms for both identifying and resolving conflicts between business investment and social and environmental concerns, especially in mining and urban development. [Dispute/conflict resolution]

o Support for business associations working for public goods for business, e.g. agencies such as IFC that are concerned with private business, with the important concern that this needs to take account of conflicts of interest in aid, since such agencies are also often engaged with particular investment projects and firms. [Enabling environment]

Finally, in all cases, there is a need to base any support in an analysis of the nature and functioning of civil society. Civil society can be a force for pressuring the state to be more responsive to citizens and more equitable, or can be a source of exclusion and the reproduction of inequalities. Civil society will also typically work very differently under more and less democratic regimes. [Power and context analysis has to include the power and politics of civil society itself – there are few selflessly altruistic Robin Hoods in real life]

In general, aid should not be focused on “money”. This can be counter-productive. Rather, external partners can provide technical assistance in designing locally-grown interventions; they can play a role in financing information-gathering by local NGOs; and can finance experimental interventions (and their learning). Most valuable is likely to be support for a domestic process of innovation and learning involving a generalized approach of experimentation—of which RCTs are one, but only one, component. [Chucking big money at civil society initiatives is a good way to destroy them. Aid needs to be smart, and about ideas. Trial and error is a better way to pursue success than trying to roll out best practice at large scale.]

Can aid ever lead to transformational changes in accountability relations? Almost certainly not, if designs are hatched and brought in from outside. However, aid can potentially provide a supporting role if it is aligned with the flow of internal initiatives, is consistent with domestic political strategy, and supports greater accountability at the margins of major projects. An aspiration to effect some form of system change is admirable, for both internal and external actors. But for donors this needs to be blended with humility over the limits and unintended consequences of external action, and a central focus on helping domestic actors learn by doing.” [Domestic politics rules. Aid is a bit player, for good or ill. Get over it.]

Book Review: Knowledge, Policy and Power in International Development: A Practical Guide

This review appears in the Evidence and Policy journal, where it is now available free online (after I protested about the scandalous, rip-off $30 they were charging). Or you can just read it here. Note to self: in future, I will not write anything for journals that are not open access (thanks to Owen Barder for that suggestion).

In recent years, the public and policy debate over climate change, ‘climategate’, and the debacle of the Copenhagen Summit (and seemingly the wider UN negotiations) has brought home the tenuousness of the links between knowledge and public policy-making. ‘Do the research and they will come’ is clearly not a credible doctrine. Knowledge, Policy and Power, written by a group of researchers from the Overseas Development Institute, tackles some important aspects of these links, building on ODI’s strong track record on the interface between research and policy-making.

The book has good instincts – sceptical of all things linear, of researchers claiming to know more than they do, stressing the importance of values, beliefs, assumptions, taboos and other group pressures, hidden power  and in/exclusion in what are often portrayed as neutral processes of research and debate. There is ample discussion of the relative strengths and weakneses of different kinds of knowledge, whether derived from practice, ‘pure’ research or the people themselves.

Knowledge, Policy and Power argues that four key dimensions need attention in understanding how research translates (or doesn’t) into policy:  the political economy of the knowledge-policy interface, the actors who engage at it, the types of knowledge used and the role of knowledge intermediaries. It devotes a chapter to each of these, and concludes by summarizing its ‘core messages’ as:

1. Systematic mapping of the political context is necessary to improve the success of knowledge-policy interactions. Adopting the position that ‘it’s all down to political will’ is not only inaccurate but also counterproductive.
2. Understanding the role and behaviour of actors is not a simple matter of imputing self interest, but of considering the interplay of actor interests, values/beliefs and credibility and the power relations that underpin these.
3. Research needs to be complemented by other forms of knowledge, based on local conditions and practical experience.
4. Anyone working in this field as a ‘knowledge intermediary’ needs to think through a range of possible approaches to ensure their role is effective.

Along the way, it scans a vast literature to cull numerous useful typologies – of states, schools of thought, influencing factors, forms of knowledge etc, which can provide useful tools for those seeking guidance. The chapter on ‘facilitating knowledge interaction’ is the most practical and useful, setting out and discussing a spectrum of roles for ‘knowledge intermediaries’ (which I guess includes people like me), from low level ‘informing’ to ‘engaging’ to ‘building adaptive capacity’. With sensible guidelines on how do decide which approach to use in a given situation, it came closest to fulfilling the ‘how to’ promises of the book.

For the book claims to be a practical guide, which brings me to my first of three main criticisms. It isn’t very practical. The style doesn’t help: Firstly the language is variable, (chapters feel like they have been written by very different authors), but veers overall towards the opaque, with the verbiage of post-modernism (plural contexts mediated by contested discourses etc etc) scattered liberally over the text, seriously blunting its ability to communicate a clear message. Even the (very welcome) case studies seem too abstract! Example: ‘The difference between an informal designation process (Viet Nam) and a dual system where birthright and elected leaders share control (Morocco) is manifest in the degree of regulation and openness.’ Yeah, right.

That may be why, although I had regular glimmers of recognition and the odd wry smile, I had no ‘aha moments’ when reading this book. That is unfortunate– I think revelatory ideas are probably in there somewhere, but are so buried beneath the dense language, that several readings would be required to uncover the gems, and few people will have sufficient time or patience.

My second problem with Knowledge, Policy and Power is the alarming extent to which it blurs (or more accurately, ignores) the boundaries between research and advocacy. The book recommends that researchers consider ‘shaming techniques directed at veto players’ and ‘building wider movements’ as part of their day job.  It contrasts the Brookings Institution (high credibility, but limited advocacy role) with the much more overtly partisan and activist Heritage Foundation, and the authors seem to prefer the Heritage model, but don’t discuss the costs of doing so. The section on credibility is rather weak and ignores the issue of reputational damage.

I work for an organization which specialises in ‘research for advocacy’, but even I was alarmed by this – if research organizations veer too blatantly towards activism or ‘policy-based evidence making’ they risk reputational damage that can be close to permanent. Instead, I would have liked to see much more discussion on the kinds of alliances researchers can make to improve impact, while preserving their reputation, and the challenges they face in forming those alliances (for example NGOs typically work on much shorter timescales than researchers, resulting in much mutual frustration). The book seems to assume that researchers can do it all – they can’t, and nor should they.

My final point is that Knowledge, Policy and Power includes only passing reference to shocks, or ‘critical junctures’ as they are categorised in Why Nations Fail. The discussion portrays a largely steady state world of research, engagement with policy makers, and civilised debate, but in advocacy terms, readiness for such junctures is all. Very often, it is scandal, failure, crisis and disaster that drive change in policy, and that carries important implications for researchers and advocates. The most obvious is that when a shock hits, researchers should be repackaging existing research to show its relevance to the current crisis and making every effort to get it into the hands of policy makers, even if that means temporarily abandoning the cherished five year research programme. A discussion on the use of research before and after elections would have provided another excellent example of influencing in practice.

Overall, I think there is enough in here to warrant close study by researchers seeking to improve the policy impact of their work, but be warned – you will have to work at making this book produce practical guidance.