Resilience: too accurate to be useful?
Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.
Resilience is not necessarily a good thing, of course. Patrimonialism and corruption can be resilient to change, as can power dynamics which sanction the marginalisation and harm of women, children or vulnerable people. American academic Andrew Nathan writes of the Chinese Communist Party’s “authoritarian resilience”, i.e. its ability to adapt and continue to thrive despite its authoritarian, undemocratic approach to power. But most often resilience is used to describe positive and useful features of society.
International Alert is a peacebuilding organisation. We say peace is when people anticipate, manage and resolve the inevitable conflicts which arise in and between societies, and do so without violence; and we describe communities and societies as resilient when they do so. Their resilience in the face of stress is largely due to the nature of relationships and institutions, which provide them with tensile, rather than brittle strength. Freedom and equality of opportunity are key indicators of relationships and institutions conducive to peace.
Organisations and thinkers in the humanitarian sector have long seen resilience as a quality to be sought after by communities vulnerable to natural disasters: the storms, droughts, floods and famines after which they need to bounce back. Resilience is central to the idea of Disaster Risk Reduction. My colleague Janani Vivekananda, in her research in South Asia over the past couple of years, has looked at how households and communities respond to environmental stress linked to climate change. She finds that communities those most able to cope with stress are resilience in terms of their economic and physical assets, but also their range of opportunities and choices, their access to social capital, their links to relatives elsewhere; and in terms of the quality of governance. Good governance is good for resilience.
The 1990s vogue for livelihood security among international development organisations also made a great deal out of the need for resilience. Economic assets, knowledge, access to services, good governance, gender equality and social capital were all seen as elements of resilience to insecurity.
Meanwhile the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, a club of rich and poor nations and intergovernmental organisations, identifies reducing fragility and promoting resilience as key to the emergence of peaceful and developmental states and societies.
Nassim Nicolas Taleb (e.g. Anti-fragility – things that gain from disorder; published last year by Random House) explains that resilience is demonstrated best in decentralised and organic societies which can flex and respond locally to stress, and least in over-centralised and rigid societies where individual and local initiatives are discouraged. This is no doubt one reason why, as Andrew Nathan recently wrote, “the resilience of the authoritarian regime in China is nearing its limits”.
So, resilience is not merely a useful metaphor, but one which expresses a powerful idea which we would do well to try and understand. If societies resilient to stress are less vulnerable to disaster and violent conflict, and if critical factors in their resilience include freedom and equality, then building resilience to stress must presumably be an ambition worthy of us all.
Even so, resilience seemed to go into hibernation among international development actors a few years ago, before coming back in to fashion again more recently. And last week an article published by IRIN pointed out that it is fading out of fashion again. Resilience, as an idea, seems to lack resilience. Or perhaps in Darwinian terms its own resilience resides in its ability to hunker down or hibernate from time to time…..
If resilience is such a useful analytical concept, and such a critical feature of human security, why is it going out of fashion again, just at a time when international discourse implies there ought to be a growing consensus on the need to promote resilience as an antidote to the fragility and brittleness which – it is widely agreed – affect too many countries and regions and blight the lives of those living there?
The IRIN article implied some development experts feel resilience is too plastic a concept to be relied on. Others were concerned that ‘resilience’ in the wrong hands can be applied at too coarse a scale of analysis, and give rise to programming which is insensitive or blind to the vulnerability of some members of society, and which may thus unintentionally reinforce their vulnerability or marginalisation. An example was given of a family’s coping strategy in which a daughter is married off at a young age.
These are valid points that require a response. To my mind they are a good reminder of the need for accuracy in describing analytical concepts, and the need to combine values with intellectual tools. If actual coping strategies have a negative impact on vulnerable people, then policy and programme responses can seek ways to mitigate or prevent that outcome.
But if “resilience” is indeed headed for another period of hibernation, I suspect there is a deeper reason why. It is a very powerful conceptual approach and analytical tool, allowing a broad, comprehensive analysis of the extent to which households, communities, regions, countries, societies or states are able or unable to deal with, survive and bounce back from natural or man-made stress. For those with patience, the concept lends itself to participatory approaches to identify factors which increase or limit resilience (or, for those who prefer the glass half-empty approach, factors which increase or reduce fragility and brittleness). So far, so good.
The problem is, those seeking levers through which to make significant changes which can be measured in terms of the typical lifespan of development projects, are unlikely to find them easily in a resilience analysis. Resilience is – almost by definition – not something that can easily be “built”, and certainly not built to order. The clue is in the word itself – resilience is something to be found in the nature of societies, hence a quality which grows organically. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains, it is the effect of finely woven networks. Resilience comes from education, and especially the kind of education which helps young people develop their curiosity and ability to adapt and continue to learn. It is to be found in networks of diverse reciprocal relationships between individuals and groups, on which they can draw to get ideas, help, resources in time of need. It is to be found in the freedom of men and women to make their own informed choices, and to participate in politics. It is to be found in competent and accountable governance, in a free, functioning press, in fair-systems of justice, and so on…, and from the interwoven combination of all of the above.
Unfortunately, those in power in more fragile, less resilient societies often see these kinds of features as good in theory, but unwelcome in practice. Rather like St Augustine who prayed for chastity – ‘but not yet, O Lord’ – they’d often prefer to enjoy the spoils of power for now. Meanwhile those in international development organisations who support these kinds of features in principle, are unable to promote them because they simply do not lend themselves sufficiently to logframes, short-term projects, and the like. Our development institutions and organisations may not be adequate to the task of promoting resilience in fragile societies. And so ‘resilience’ may be destined to pass back into hibernation. That would be a shame. Because ironically, it describes the problem of underdevelopment, human insecurity and inadequate governance too accurately to be useful.
Kenya elections: good for justice?
To many disinterested observers last week’s Kenya elections seem like a victory not only for President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta, for his Jubilee Alliance, and for the Kikuyu and Kalenjin tribes represented by Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto. But also for impunity, because both Kenyatta and Ruto are indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and – while they are presumed innocent until proven guilty – such overwhelming support for two people in their situation must surely be interpreted partly as vote against international justice.
Perversely though, this might be a good result for justice both in Kenya, and internationally as seen through the prism of the ICC,and for democracy in Kenya. Because with this result, things have become more complicated, with justice and politics intertwined in a complex tangle. It is when dealing with such complexity and disentangling the various elements that one gets to the nub of and internalises the real meaning of justice in the real, political world.
- For the ICC and its international backers, dealing with the President and Vice-President of a sovereign country and signatory to the ICC’s Rome Statute will force it to become less lazy than in the past. Slogans will certainly not be enough to disentangle this knot.
- Kenyatta and Ruto – assuming they have at least some desire to rule with legitimacy (and knowing that many of their supporters and opponents will make ruling difficult for them if they don’t) – will need to take the ICC indictments very seriously as part of their political discourse, as well as how they deal with it as indicted individuals.
- Kenyan institutions – Parliament, judiciary, churches, civil society, etc. – and their leaders will be forced to consider how to deal with the fact that their president is both democratically elected and a possible human rights violator. Complicated and, again, needs more than slogans.
- The African Union and other regional and international bodies will also need to work out how they approach this delicate situation in which the head of another Member State is facing trial at the ICC.
All this is going to generate tremendous debate. Much will be biased, ill-informed and ill-judged. But however events unfold, the accompanying public and private debate has the potential to deepen some Kenyan future voters’ understanding of democracy and its choices and challenges; and to deepen the comprehension of us all as to how international mechanisms of justice interact with national political and justice mechanisms. Because we’ll largely have to fall back on first principles. I have written in an earlier blog post that the democratic pendulum swings long and slow – i.e. our innate understanding, as electors in a democracy, of how our democracy system works, is built over time by observing out of the corner of our eye, how the votes we collectively cast in the past lead to often long-delayed and often perverse outcomes and implications. Voters in the UK had to come to terms with extreme implications of earlier voting decisions, under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, which was painful, and we are no doubt learning something now, subliminally, from our current experiment with coalition politics. This may also be such a moment in Kenya, and provided Kenyans in the elite and at grass-roots avoid letting the complications they will now face, lead to violence, I see the outcome of this election as potentially laying another strong foundation layer for democracy there. Because democratic values emerge from difficult times, not easy ones.
Value for Money: a very simple idea
There has been a great deal of noise, confusion, and at times sound and fury, over Value for Money (VfM) among overseas development NGOs based in the UK, of late. This is because so many of us depend on UK government funding from DFID, which has been taking VfM more seriously since the last election – and not surprising it has, given the degree of scepticism about overseas aid among UK taxpayers, some MPs, and journalists.
We in the NGO community are a bit scared because many of us:
1. lack confidence that others feel as strongly about our work as we do
2.don’t understand VfM very well, and we get confused messages from different DFID staff we encounter (many of whom don’t seem to understand it very well, either – indeed a senior government economist said publicly at a meeting I attended at the end of 2011, that if he were to name a single government department not well-set up to integrate VfM it would be DFID, because of the nature of DFID’s work and the professional and ideological profile of many of its staff…)
3. fear that VfM analysis will somehow demonstrate that what we are doing is not valuable enough
4. don’t have strong enough design, monitoring and evaluation, and so aren’t clear enough about the results of our work, nor about the degree to which those results can be attributed to our contribution
5. imagine that VfM is something so complicated that we won’t be able to understand, much less use it
6. fear that somehow the VfM agenda will result in our sources of funds drying up.
I work for an NGO partly funded by DFID, and by other donors who are paying more and more interest in VfM. So I am scared too. On the other hand however, VfM surely isn’t all that complicated, at least conceptually?
Definition
What is VfM? As far as I can see, at base it’s just a simple fraction which expresses the outcomes of a project in terms of their value, as a ratio of their cost:
VfM = Value/Cost
To do this, the cost either has to be translated into the currency in which the outcome has been valued, or the outcome has to be assigned a monetary or economic value, so they can be compared. Not surprisingly, the former is usually easier than the latter. (E.g. in an education project it is easier to assign a monetary value to the outcome of 100 children educated to grade 7, than to convert the project budget into “educated children” units. The great advantage of money as a concept being its fungibility).
Of course in practice this is complex, and especially so if the project is a complex one and its outcomes are qualitative in nature; even more so if one decides to include the costs (including opportunity costs) of other project stakeholders and participants. But all that can be handled with the right skills, methodology and with that important economist’s tool: assumptions.
The purpose?
I like to think that the purpose of VfM can be boiled down to two essential scenarios. First, when comparing different possible outcomes which could be achieved with the same amount of investment, it is useful to have a tool to aid the comparison. Especially when the two outcomes are different – as different as apples and pears at least, but perhaps as different as apples and, say, lightbulbs. And more especially when taxpayers’ money is being used and so an attempt at objectivity is essential for accountability purposes. So, for example, if for a given sum of money we could achieve 100 children educated to a certain level in Uganda, or stabilise 100 km of sand dunes menacing an irrigated plantation in Mali, which should we choose? Of course we will use non-VfM criteria too, but VfM can help compare these alternative investments.
Second, when comparing two different ways to achieve the same outcome, then a value for money assessment helps decide which is the best approach. If we can help rival communities in Sierra Leone resolve a land dispute peacefully for either £50,000 or £60,000, then – other things being equal – we should opt for the £50,000 project.
The common feature here is comparison; so the key point to bear in mind is that VfM is and can only be a relative measure. Once the comparison has been done, the monetary value assigned to the apple or the lightbulb no longer has any relevance or meaning, and is discarded, as it is merely an artefact of an economic comparison methodology. No more. No less.
The advantages
The advantages of VfM if used appropriately and skilfully are clear:
- It encourages – even requires – rigour and clarity about costs and outcomes
- Ironically it makes very explicit, for those in doubt, that development outcomes come in all kinds of currencies – economic, environmental, social, political, security, and so on. The clearer we are about these outcomes, the clearer everyone will be that development – human and societal progress – is not just about economic growth or schools or health, but about a complex mix of inter-related factors. “Value” is a powerful non-jargon word with an intrinsically powerful meaning in normal speech: it focuses attention on how valuable, how important it is for individuals, communities and society to improve the way they live.
- It helps maximise value for public money (duh!)
The difficulties
But there are real difficulties too:
- Not all NGOs have (or have easy access to) the skills and capacity to do VfM analysis
- As Andrew Natsios (ex-head of USAID) so eloquently said, the most effective development initiatives are the least easily counted and measured, while the ones most easily counted and measured are often the least effective; so VfM may be hard to apply to the most effective initiatives
The risks
The risks of adopting VfM in the overseas development sector have been well-rehearsed. Ironically, it adds to the cost of designing and implementing projects, as it is time-consuming, and thus may detract from other critical aspects of design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, lowering quality. And there is a real risk, as outlined by Natsios, that VfM (mis)applied over time will create incentives for donors and the recipients of their money to drop the less countable (and thus more effective?) interventions in favour of the more countable (and less effective?) ones. A further risk is that because VfM is driven by donors, it will be focused mainly on their costs – or the costs they fund – and will therefore fail to capture the costs including opportunity costs incurred by others, even when these costs are not justified by the project outcomes as seen through others’ eyes.
So, what to do?
NGOs with sufficient access to alternative sources of funding can of course decide that applying VfM is not worth their while. But for most of us, we simply have to work out how to integrate VfM into our project planning, monitoring and reporting cycles – but in a way which works best for the kinds of interventions that work best. That means we have to be as clear as we can about the costs and outcomes of our projects, and become as adept as we can at applying the simplest VfM methodologies available to them, so we can confidently demonstrate to donors and potential donors that their investment of taxpayers’ funds in our projects is a good one.
Meanwhile we need to remind ourselves and anyone else that VfM is just a tool for comparison – nothing more, nothing less. No-one should be praising or criticising the value of a particular outcome or set of outcomes merely in monetary terms, unless they are doing so with reference to an alternative.
And finally, let’s not make VfM into something bigger than it deserves to be or – by its own logic – more costly than the benefits it brings.
Ungoverned space?
A good corrective to the lazy and usually inaccurate concept of “ungoverned space”, by Yvan Guichaoua. It links nicely to my previous blog post on the use of inaccurate language and of how lazy language can lead to misdiagnosis and wrong approaches.
E.g. it always puzzles me that the Taleban are described as insurgents by foreign armies who invaded the country and drove them from power. I hold no brief for the Taleban but is “counter-insurgency” the right way to describe the ISAF approach towards them? Likewise, are the areas of Pakistan where the Taleban is, “ungoverned”? I think not.
This is the first part of a two-part analysis of the present situation in Mali. Part II, entitled “Mali: toward a neo-trusteeship?” will explore the responses to Mali’s crisis.
Repeatedly in the past weeks, UK Prime Minister David Cameron called northern Mali an ‘ungoverned space’, indulging in the classic intellectual shortcut used by those looking for easy explanations of the territorial entrenchment of irregular armed groups, including Al Qaeda-affiliated ones, in Africa and beyond. Such an assumption leads to dangerous misconceptions of political and social realities of Mali.
Crucially, it suggests that terrorists have established their stronghold in a political vacuum. The implication is that those who have shaped the political environment leading to the resumption of a separatist Tuareg insurgency in January 2012 followed by its replacement by a coalition of Al Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafist Tuareg, are automatically exonerated from their responsibility in Mali’s present state of…
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The emergence of political order: how can we foster it?
I recently read volume one of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (Profile Books, 2011) in which he explores how different models of governance have emerged and decayed “from prehuman history to the French Revolution”. Volume two is forthcoming, and will bring the story up to the present day. As someone who works in peacebuilding, which is largely about fostering good governance today, I have a keen interest in how different governance regimes have emerged and decayed in history, if they provide us with clues for the present. So does Fukuyama have lessons for us today?
In line with much current thinking – for example from DFID and the OECD-DAC – about statebuilding, he identifies three key elements of well-governed societies. The first of these is that governments are held accountable by at least some of their citizens for providing good government. The second is the emergence of effective states – effective, that is, at promoting and protecting their own interests and providing services to their people – and autonomous institutions. Institutions are defined following Samuel Huntingdon as “stable, valued recurring patterns of behaviour”. The third is the rule of law, i.e. the existence of rules, ethics or norms which even the highest in the land – king, emperor, president, whatever – is required to follow.
Cause and effect
There are many routes through which countries at different times and places have arrived at different mixes and balances of these three factors, and insufficient space here to summarise the various historical pathways he describes. It is worth noting the role religion seems to have played in establishing rule of law: he explains how Hinduism in India, Christianity in Europe, and to some extent Islam in the Middle East, all helped establish rules to which even rulers were beholden. Whereas China, from ancient times to the present, never seems to have established them, meaning that emperors and modern leaders alike are in some respects above the law.
Fukuyama is clear that circumstances matter – so for example the English were well-positioned by circumstantial factors to enjoy the kinds of freedoms and liberal institutions which emerged. But he’s equally clear that societies can copy and have copied the good institutions which emerged elsewhere. He identifies critical hinge moments in history as turning points, such as the standoff between Pope and Holy Roman Emperor – the Investiture Controversy between Henry IV and Gregory VII in the 11th Century, when the Emperor backed down, and thus laid the seeds of an independent judiciary in Christendom. Another hinge moment was Japan’s adoption of “western” governance models in 1868.
The Investiture Controversy was just one of many events whose unintended consequences may have been critical for the emergence of better governance. E.g. the mediaeval Church in Europe pushed to allow the alienation of land, and the inheritance of land by women, because both suited its own financial and economic interests. But in so doing it helped strengthen the rule of law and – eventually – helped promote more equal treatment of women, neither of which it intended.
Changes that do occur are those in the interests of those in positions of power. The English magna carta met the common needs of all who signed it – rather than being forced on the reluctant king as history often portrays.
Even if not a historical determinist, Fukuyama does caution that those who borrow ideas and institutions from elsewhere are perforce laying them on top of their own institutions and norms, and there is no such thing as a blank slate. So courts and parliaments grafted onto patrimonial societies may give the look of liberal institutions, but they will not automatically take root and undermine patrimonialism; in fact the reverse is just as likely. Peter the Great’s attempt to graft foreign political systems and culture onto Russian systems and culture was ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming the patrimonial political economy there.
Obstacles
The obstacles to emerging “order” and good governance are many, and in particular he singles out the normality of violence and patrimonialism (the natural result of kin selection and reciprocal altruism), and the innate conservatism of humans due to our propensity to create and follow norms. Not only do these factors block the emergence of good governance institutions. Crucially, they are also waiting in the wings to undermine progress when opportunity arises – especially when conditions change and institutions fail to evolve, often because of failures of collective action because out-of-date incentives prevent people from working together in their common interests. The Hungarian barons signed a similar agreement with their king, to what the English nobles signed with King John (both were called magna carta), and at around the same time, but a failure of collective action and a resurgence of patrimonialism meant they frittered away the rights they had thus gained, and Hungary failed to evolve and effective and accountable state as England did.
So what are the lessons for today? What can we learn from Fukuyama to help know how to deal with the situation in Mali, for example, where a weak state is vulnerable to capture and where institutions may be in decay because no longer fit for purpose?
No prescriptions – emergence, not creation
Unfortunately, Fukuyama offers no prescriptions. Indeed, he goes as far as to say that since so many different factors have influenced political evolution, and since political evolution has happened differently everywhere, there is no way to isolate the most influential factors in order to know how to play history in the present, and liberalise the political order anywhere. There is no “way to go about it”. In fact the only thing he prescribes is a great deal of humility in anyone working on “institution building”. And he is very clear that many “rule of law projects” such as those promoted by donors and the UN around the world are wrongly-defined, since they often aim to create or transplant the institutions of law, rather than foster the conditions in which rule of law might emerge. Clearly he is sceptical of donors and UN officials whose mandates require them to seek statebuilding levers, and who thus see such levers where none exist. He draws analogies with Darwin’s theories, and I think he’d agree with my own argument that a liberal political order emerges and evolves, rather than being built or created.
But he does give clues. He’s clear that whiggish history and “modernisation” theory are both wrong, i.e. there is no inexorable certainty that economic growth, economic openness, effective states and liberalism always go together. China exhibited many aspects of a modern state over 2000 years ago, but still resists liberal democracy to this day. Rather, the different aspects of development need to be separated out. If I read him right, Fukuyama says the data from history show that effective states have tended to enable economic growth, but there’s less clarity about whether economic growth leads to effective states. Economic growth also seems a relatively good predictor of democratisation, but the reverse is less clear. Economic development seems to foster social development and a dynamic civil society; while an increasingly civil society appears to promote democratisation; which in turn helps to foster liberal rule of law in ever-widening circles. Further, as economic distribution widens, under democratic politics, it tends to legitimise democracy, thus creating a virtuous circle. If I represent those views graphically:
Effective states → Economic development
Economic development → Democratisation
Economic development → Social development and civil society
Civil society → Democratisation
Democratisation → Liberal rule of law
Liberal rule of law → Democratisation
Economic distribution + Democracy → Democracy
While it is tempting to turn these into a single causal line or set of lines, but this would not be consistent with Fukayama’s own finding: he is clear that there is no single origin or theory of political development. These are but rough sketches of possible causality drawn as lessons from the past, not prescriptions for the future, and there is no obvious or common linear sequence which emerges. Fukayama’s is not a teleological view, in fact he even questions whether liberal democracy will survive the rigours and stresses of coming ages – ironic for a man who once wrote that in the end of the Cold War we witnessed “the end of history”. Indeed, Fukuyama seems to have evolved his thinking considerably since his Neoconservative days.
Lessons, then?
In the end, then, Fukuyama’s lessons seem to be simple ones:
- Sustained good governance in the past depended on the emergence of accountable states and the rule of law
- These depended on autonomous institutions; whether they emerged from within society or were borrowed from elsewhere, they have only worked as well as the conditions allowed, and they inevitably interacted with pre-existing institutions and norms, which often undermined them
- Changes occur when they are in the perceived interests of those in positions of power
- Better governance has to some extent been created by purposeful decisions or hinge events, even though it was very often an unintended consequence rather than planned as such
- There are few levers; but dimly visible opportunities, and all is context specific
- The risk of confusing goals (the rule of law, for example) with strategies for how to attain them
- The need for humility in the face of the challenge of institution building, and especially by outsiders and those wanting quick results.
It’s not really such a great aid mystery
The latest edition of The Spectator carries an opinion piece by Jonathan Foreman entitled The Great Aid Mystery http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8808521/the-great-aid-mystery/. In a diatribe laced with rather tired tropes, and whose style undermines the argument he makes, Foreman’s main points when stripped of rhetoric can be summarised quite simply as:
- The domestic politics of foreign aid are complex and at times seem rather contradictory
- The UK’s growing aid budget is suported more by the elite than by the rest of the electorate
- The size of the UK’s aid budget bears little relation to either the scale of the problem, or our proven ability to achieve successful, sustainable development progress; indeed, it is unclear that enough effective mechanisms exist to deliver the rapidly increasing aid budget successfully
- The UK’s aid sector is dominated by white and middle class people
- Some non-white people don’t support all of the claims being made for aid by aid’s proponents
- Some Conservatives see support for aid as a useful way to detoxify their party’s reputation, while some British people and politicians see UK aid as a way to overcome guilt at aspects of our national past, like slavery and empire
- Much UK aid expenditure happens in places where corruption is quite normal, and much aid is thus lost to corruption and theft
- Aid is to a large degree faith-based, i.e. we have faith it does good, but we can’t be sure
- Some aid workers are seeking a bit of adventure through their involvement.
Therefore he’d like to see:
- A review of the 0.7% target
- A retying of UK aid so more of it is used to buy UK goods and services, thus helping us while we help others
- Better convergence between aid and other aspects of UK foreign policy
- More honesty about aid’s strengths and weaknesses
- Cutting aid from incompetent and/or corrupt recipients and delivery organisations
- Investment in (UK military) logistics capability, so it can be used in delivering emergency aid
- A royal commission into how best to give overseas aid.
Strange that when you strip away the rhetoric, most of what he says makes pretty good sense, even to supporters of overseas development aid like myself. Indeed, apart from one or two of the less useful bullet points in his first list, and the idea of using aid money to build UK military logistics capacity in the second, I think I have made pretty much all the points he makes in the past, either here or elsewhere. And I’m a supporter of (good) aid. But because of all the offensive rhetoric, his cogent points risk getting lost.
Foreman’s article reminds me of three things. The first is that by over-hyping the benefits of aid, and not being completely open about its defects, aid supporters have over the years laid themselves open to just this kind of attack. We really must stop being defensive about aid, and admit its limitations. Margot Asquith’s comment that “it is the height of vanity to suppose you can make an honest man of anyone” is partly apropos here: there is a certain degree of vanity in thinking that the problems of underdevelopment elsewhere can be solved by outsiders. But it is only partly apropos: we may not be able to fix other people’s problems for them, but we can certainly offer to help. We must however stop pretending, as happened at Gleneagles, that poverty reduction is a direct line result of just writing bigger cheques. Because it isn’t, and saying it is ultimately discredits aid when people find out they were sold a pig in a poke.
Second, it is really unhelpful when those who want to criticise aid (as much as those who want to protect and defend it against all comers), feel they can discuss all aid as though it were one and the same thing. UK aid covers a multitude of virtues and sins. It provides food and clean water to victims of disasters, education to young children, technical training and buildings for justice systems, and general budget support to poor country governments, to name but a few. Some of the food gets spoilt, while most gets eaten by those who need it. Some of the water remains polluted, while much becomes clean and safe. Some of the education budget goes to build ghost schools, while some goes to provide life-changing opportunities for boys and girls. Some justice systems remain unjust, despite the training and new buildings; in other cases incremental improvements are seen. And budget support to governments gets co-mingled with other aid and tax receipts, some of which are used to good effect, while much is not. This is the reality of aid in difficult environments, and it is good that a stronger light is now being shone on aid both at home and in the places where it is spent, by citizens there. But we should not draw conclusions – as some readers of Foreman’s article will likely have done – that because things aren’t working perfectly, we should stop the whole enterprise. Journalists should perhaps look at specific aspects of aid on their merits, not treat the whole sector as one. The education system in the UK has been dire for decades, but the response was to try and improve education policy, not stop education completely. Aid is imperfect, and can be improved – and in this respect I agree with Foreman that improvements should come before massive budget increases. 0.7% is certainly an arbitrary target, and in my personal view it can wait.
Third, I would add that we need to stop dealing with aid as if it were the only aspect of UK policy which impacts the lives of people in poorer and less well governed environments. David Cameron put it well in his recent letter to the members of the G8 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-ministers-letter-to-g8-leaders when he said:
“…in our partnership with less developed and emerging economies, I believe we must put a new and practical emphasis on transparency, accountability and open government. Too many developing countries are held back by corruption – and this can be reinforced or even encouraged by poor business practice and a lack of transparency from those that trade with them.
“Our collective efforts on international development over the years give the G8 both the legitimacy and responsibility to move the international agenda forward to focus not just on aid, but also on the underlying drivers of growth and jobs which will lift people out of poverty for good.
” …. The G8 can also support the underlying building blocks of growth, including the rule of law, the absence of conflict and corruption, and the presence of property rights and strong institutions – what I have called the “golden thread” that makes open economies and open societies the best foundation for growth. I hope our work will demonstrate that this is not just about what developing countries do themselves. We in the developed world need to work together with them to prevent money laundering and stamp out bribery and corruption….”
The conversation can no longer be about aid effectiveness, but about promoting effective development progress, and rich countries can offer a great deal more toward this than simply raising their overseas development budgets.
I think Edward Saïd wrote somewhere that the USA can never hope to contribute to sustainable peace in the Middle East until it is willing and able to describe the situation there objectively, comprehensively and accurately. Good advice for President Obama and his new Secretary of State as they embark on four challenging years in the region. And good advice meanwhile for anyone, be they doctor, secretary of state, international NGO staff member or anyone else, who takes on responsibility to help others fix their problems.
George Orwell, in his 1940s essay, Politics and the English Language (downloadable freely through Google), developed six golden rules for writing clearly about politics:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Both Orwell and Saïd offer important advice for peacebuilders, who need to be as clear and complete as possible in their description of the contexts in which they offer to help build peace, so as to avoid misunderstandings and misdiagnoses.
Of course we can’t always describe things publicly as we see them privately. For example, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) might not be in a position to say clearly in public what it thinks of governance in Zimbabwe, because Zimbabwe, as represented by its government, is a member of the UN and thus a master of the UNDP. But all the more reason for the UNDP in Zimbabwe to get its analysis right, and express it as clearly as possible internally.
The point of this preamble is to emphasise that there is a premium on clarity of description in peacebuilding. Nevertheless, most of us who work in the sector regularly find ourselves breaking Orwell’s rules and failing to reach Saïd’s bar. (I know I do.) It is normal for people working in a given technical area to develop a common shorthand for describing the kinds of phenomena they seek to change, and how they seek to do so. It’s an efficient way of working.
But it can also be lazy and dangerous – as demonstrated in James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine about lazy development thinking in southern Africa. With that in mind I list here as examples, five words or phrases in common use which are sometimes evidence of lazy thinking and incomplete analysis, and therefore to ill-fitting or inadequate programming. I have avoided the usual suspects like “empowerment”, which is frequently cited as an example of lazy writing – because often it’s the humbler, less intrusive words and phrases which quietly do most to undermine the argument for peacebuilding.
1. Weakness. Analysts commonly write about “weak governance”, “weak civil society”, etc. This is OK if the weakness is qualified, e.g. governance institutions which are weak because they fail to provide people with an opportunity to influence decisions which affect them, or because they exclude particular sections of society. But taken alone, “weak governance” is a more or less meaningless phrase – and often masks the reality that prevailing governance systems are actually quite strong in some respects, e.g. in repression. Civil society too can only be described as “weak” in regard to some specific function – such as delivering services, providing policy alternatives, etc. The point is, systems, bodies, organisations or people can all be inadequate vis-à-vis a specific standards or objectives, but to call them weak in general terms does nothing to improve the analysis, nor to change things for the better. Indeed, it may become a distraction and an obstacle to change. E.g. International Alert has argued that “weak governance” is an inaccurate and unhelpful description of the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which would be more usefully described in terms of a resilient and effective patrimonial governance system, which skews policies and decisions so they sustain continued instability and violence.
2. Unaccountable. Analysts of governance often refer to leaders, governments, etc. as “unaccountable”. This is unhelpful, because few leaders are truly unaccountable – they are usually beholden to some group or other. By failing to capture this aspect of governance in our analysis, we fail to identify important obstacles and opportunities for change. When we describe leaders as unaccountable, it would be more helpful to explain to whom they are accountable, and for what. Typically, a dictatorial president is accountable to a faction or factions who help keep him in power, and is accountable for protecting the latter’s members while providing them with exclusive economic opportunities.
3. Youth, women – and other collective nouns for large groups of people. Programme analysis frequently includes broad statements about women (50% of the population, after all), or youth (frequently an even larger percentage). It is rare that all women or all young people are affected by the same factors in the same way, and even rarer for peacebuilding strategies or programmes to have an impact on all women or all young people. It is far more useful, for programming purposes, to say which women, or which young people are affected by the phenomena in question, and therefore which specific policy change might help to improve their situation. The words “youth” and “women” are probably the worst examples of this problem, but there’s a long list of other collective nouns which are similarly conducive to lazy thinking: young men, girls, the elite, the media, businesspeople, the private sector, civil society, and so on.
4. Community. Again, unless clearly defined, the word “community” often becomes quite meaningless. E.g. in the UK it became common in the face of Al Qaeda threats, to talk about the “working with the Muslim community” – when it’s hard to imagine there is a single community uniting all 1.5 million Muslims in the country. Labelling people as a community where there is none, can lead others to draw the wrong conclusions. Programme strategies often use the word as though “community” is an unalloyed good: as in community-level governance, community-owned solutions, and community projects. But as we all know, “community” often masks a great deal of inequality, with particular individuals and groups being excluded from decision-making, opportunity and rights, and it is important that peacebuilders understand the factors which perpetuate these problems, rather than ignore them and assume that community level solutions will always be good ones.
5. Conflict. A very basic word in peacebuilding which we often misuse. It’s fairly normal for peacebuilders to understand “conflict” in its broad sense, i.e. as a description of the unresolved differences between people and within society. That’s a useful definition, which allows us to identify the systems, skills and culture for conflict resolution and management as the bench at which we work. But even when the work parameters have been so defined, it’s still common for peacebuilding strategies to be defined and described in terms of “addressing the underlying causes of conflict”, rather than in more appropriate terms such as “addressing the reasons why conflicts become violent”.
No doubt there are countless other words and phrases whose misuse contributes to murky analysis and less-than-surgical programming. But I hope these five examples suffice to make the point. I doubt that a business marketing strategy defined at the level of generality all-too-common in peacebuilding, would convince investors to part with their capital. If so, then we should not get away with it in peacebuilding.
I am not claiming that one has to be able to describe everything with perfect accuracy and pinpoint precision, before embarking on peacebuilding in a particular context. But I do agree with Saïd that it’s important to describe things as accurately, objectively and comprehensively as possible if one is offering to help resolve complex problems. And I’d also suggest that Orwell’s six golden rules are useful guides to help us do so.
The swing of the democratic pendulum is slow and long
(A version of this post appeared earlier on International Alert’s website).
There’s been a lot of fairly superficial reporting of late about “anti-democratic” governments in Italy, Greece and elsewhere. By this, they often mean that Germany, Brussels and the IMF are calling the shots; and that “technocratic” governments have been imposed, etc.
First, there’s nothing necessarily undemocratic about having to go through some difficult times as a result of decisions to which electorates contributed by their voting and other behaviour. One of the main features of democracy is that it corrects in slow time. Corrections in Italy and Greece have included a certain degree of imposition from outside the country – from those to whom the citizens of Italy and Greece are in hock, i.e. to whom they have voluntarily mortgaged their assets.
In the UK, voters went along with a central planning, statist approach from 1940 until Thatcher came along. We then underwent a quarter century of Thatcherite correction, an era which probably came to an end finally in 2007. The pendulum often swings slow and far in democracies. So perhaps the Greek and Italian democratic cultures are being formed by the experience of the corrections they are undergoing now, by the slow and frustrating swing of the pendulum far out of reach. Perhaps in the future, Greek voters will opt for a less hollow state, and for a stronger sense of citizenship and a greater awareness of the Tragedy of the Commons. Perhaps it will become unfashionable to avoid paying taxes, so as to avoid the sense of disempowerment they are going through now.
But there is a democratic deficit within the EU: one that’s more deeply inlaid, and widespread. It’s commonly said, and I agree, that Europeans have become alienated from politics, especially young people. It’s partly because of venal and cynical politicians, sure. But political parties are likely to have less appeal in an era when which social class and which branch of the Church you belong to are far less divisive issues than they once were; when more and more people are educated to a healthy level of scepticism; and when the easy and rapid availability of data allowing us to judge the implications of policies means “think-tank driven” policy often trumps ideology. But we haven’t yet figured out how to replace political parties with some other vehicle for democratic participation. Crowd-sourcing doesn’t do it. Nor do social media quite fit the bill.
Alienated citizens are not what you need in a time of difficult choices. And this has been made worse by the structural dynamics of power within the EU.
National governments have handed over a portion of their power to Brussels. They in their turn have sucked up power from local councils, to compensate. This leaves local councils bereft – where can they suck up power from? Result: local politics have become unattractive and dull, and so young people in particular have no interest in engaging. And if politics don’t work, then where are conflicts anticipated, managed and resolved? Has the EU, famously said to be a glorious peacebuilding project, actually undermined the democratic mechanisms which are so essential to peace?
I don’t say that political power is a zero sum commodity, but it’s not infinitely elastic, either. More of it needs to be accessible to young people, which I think means more local decision-making about things that really matter – not just about how to implement directives from the capital, from Brussels and from other international rule setters.
The EU or The Cold War as Nobel Peace Prize winner?
Today the European Union receives the Nobel Peace Prize. I’ve suggested before, that this represents encouragement to do better in resolving the current conflicts dividing the EU. Such as those between north and south, between the generations, between citizen and state, and between state and sub-national entities/identities.
The EU grew out of a peacebuilding initiative which established the commodity communities of steel and coal. But has it really played such an important role in stopping the French and Germans going back to war as intended? Arguably it provided reassurance to France and others, that German reunification would not lead to a German military resurgence. Though ironically, it was Mitterand’s insistence on the Euro as the price of German reunification, which got us into the current mess.
I suspect that the EU institutions are nicely designed, intentionally or not, to prevent war. This is because they seem designed to prevent precipitate decisions and actions. The predominant image of the EU is of endless rounds of not-quite-entirely-fruitless meetings, which seldom reach agreement, yet are never quite frustrating enough to cause people to stop talking. Thus Churchill’s “jaw, jaw” rather than “war, war”.
I also maintain the UK’s and the Republic of Ireland’s respective membership of the EU was a more critical enabling factor for peace in N Ireland than is often credited. Getting rich perhaps became more important for Irish on both sides of the border, than righting historical wrongs. Financial transfers helped. And the current resurgence of separatism in Spain was perhaps earlier delayed by EU transfers and other support, post-Franco.
I can’t help wondering though, if the Cold War should not be receiving the laurels today instead of the EU. Surely superpower deterrence and the availability of places outside Europe where proxy wars could be fought, is what gave Europe time to get over the 1st and 2nd world wars, and grow up a little?
The end of Aid Effectiveness?
I took part in a round table discussion in a post-conflict country recently, looking at aid effectiveness there.
Among the salient details on the table, and which will be familiar from elsewhere:
- The political economy is a tangled web of patronage, linking government, parliamentarians, bureaucrats and some businesspeople, dominating and closing out political and economic space from others – ultimately likely to be a chronic obstacle to development, even if good for short term stability.
- The amount of “traditional” OECD and IFI concessional aid is reducing, when compared with the comparatively vast sums being invested by “emerging” players like China.
- Some of the aid from traditional donors is anyway in the form of instruments like loans and export credit guarantees. Is this really “aid” at all?
- The level of investment and support coming from “emerging” sources is impossible to quantify accurately, because not in the public domain. But it seems fairly clear that little of it is “aid” in the traditional sense of ODA. It’s certainly tied to the national strategic or commercial interests of the donors or lenders.
In our discussion, people were using the phrase “aid effectiveness”, but we ran into two problems. First, as alluded to above, were we really discussing “aid”, or something different, wider? Second, how to define “effective”? It became clear from the interventions of different people around the table that effectiveness was in the eye of the beholder, and that different beholders had quite different, sometimes contradictory definitions.
Simplifying this massively, for the traditional donor agencies, effectiveness was about logframe success: improved livelihoods, better health or education outcomes, higher GDP, peace consolidation, human rights, etc. For other parts of the same governments, as well as for some of the emerging players, it was about maintaining a geostrategic partnership in line with broader interests including their own domestic economies or their foreign policies. For the government, it was about getting resources and support for its own programme – through which inter alia it expects to consolidate its hold on political and economic power. For some beneficiaries, depending on their particular circumstances, it was about welfare or improved livelihood, health etc. outcomes. For others, it was about reinforcing their higher status in the community, and so on.
So it became clear that anyone using the term aid effectiveness would need to clarify what he or she meant by it a priori, to permit useful discussions with others.
But perhaps aid effectiveness is just a minor issue, anyway. In its place, ought we to be considering the intersection between two dynamics slightly differently defined? The first of these is planning and execution of “development” in the context. This surely will – and should – always be a contested notion. After all, defining what progress means has been at the heart of ideological debates for centuries. Let’s call this factor development effectiveness.
The second factor is the influence and involvement of outside agents on and in the development process, i.e. their impact on development and thus their development effectiveness. By this I mean the policies and actions of, for example, bilateral allies and donors, multilaterals, INGOs, international investors and businesses. These all, taken together, add up to a whole lot more than just “aid”.
So the task of those monitoring aid – locally, nationally, internationally – ought perhaps to be transformed into the monitoring of the effectiveness of all these different outside influences. Given that development is inescapably a contested notion, these monitors would have to judge effectiveness with reference to their own ideas (or ideology) of progress. To put this in peacebuilding terms, they would perhaps be monitoring the Conflict-Sensitivity of Outside Influences. (CSOI doesn’t really trip off the tongue though, does it?)
Phil Vernon 