Are we ready for an “academic spring”?

Danny Burns

The Wellcome Foundation recently announced that it would be taking steps towards open access to information. It is unhappy about the dominance of three academic publishers who according to the Guardian account for 42% of journal articles, and it proposes to set up its own online journal. It is also keen to ensure that research gets out within six months avoiding the absurdly long lead times of some academic publishers. Harvard University is “encouraging its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls”.

These are important steps from large and influential institutions, and I applaud them, but this is only the start of a much bigger revolution in knowledge generation and dissemination that needs to happen.  The model of knowledge that is represented by academic journals is outdated, exclusive and ineffective.

Innovative and creative thinking is most likely to emanate from diverse collaborations. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) pushes academics toward the production of single authored papers in elite journals. Stephen Curry quoted in the Guardian says that although the adjudicating panels have been instructed to ignore the impact factors of journals, no one believes that “it is remotely possible to do so”. Journals are largely disciplinary and yet most real world problems are inter-disciplinary. It is really hard to get good cross disciplinary reviews of research.

Even the idea of peer review needs to be challenged. Who are the peers? Are they affected in any way by the research?  Even if we accept the legitimacy of academic ‘peers’, their insanely busy lives mean that they are usually reading these articles on the bus or the train, or crammed in between other things that they are doing. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this is the elite talking to the elite.

While peer review is supposed to ensure good scientific method, the controversies over scientific climate change research clearly show how the perspectives that people bring to these analyses fundamentally impact on their assessment.  When it comes to complex social issues, interpretation and sense making are critical.  Knowledge that is co-generated and critiqued by those people that will be affected by it, is likely to be much more robust than knowledge extracted by external researchers; Knowledge that can pass freely across the internet can be interrogated and subjected to a much more diverse arena of scrutiny; Knowledge that is written in straightforward language that is meaningful to more diverse populations will be triangulated by a far more diverse community.  Knowledge that is generated iteratively and continuously, and tested in action, is likely to make a far greater impact on complex social problems than knowledge crystallised in journals long after the event.

The internet provides other ways of validating research. As the Guardian points out downloads, numbers of bookmarks on social networking sites etc may much better indication of research quality than where it is published. Similarly initiatives like Google Scholar which can track who has cited or used work across a much wide range of outputs offer exciting possibilities. I want to know if my work appears in policy documents, books, pamphlets, films etc. I want to know how it is being used is to impact on poverty and vulnerability. I don’t want to know if an elite journal thinks that I am worthy of publication, and I don’t believe this serves society.

Academics have long assumed the position of “experts” in our society because they have had unique access to information and intellectual argument. This is no longer true. The internet makes access to information ubiquitous and opens that information up to the many different expert voices that have a right to reflect upon it. The more that we open up the knowledge that we generate the more society can benefit from the many views and perspectives which can give it meaning. It will not be an easy journey to find new models of knowledge distribution which allow real access and interaction. These will inetivably evolve rather than be constructed, but many people are starting to think about this and many initiatives are already well underway http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/. 

There are clear implications for me. We should not stand on the sidelines and say that while we believe in new ideas about knowledge, we will continue to participate in the old system and legitimise it. We should stand up for a new vision of open knowledge generation. Many academics might not want to walk this road because to threaten the status quo might threaten their career progression. But if we believe in the social change that we espouse in our writings, this is exactly what we should be prepared to do.   

Danny Burns is the Team Leader for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Ensuring those who are ‘last’ come first: using Reality Checks to inform post-MDGs

Robert Chambers

The MDGs picked low hanging fruit.  To achieve them,  the incentive has been to go for those who were closest to thresholds or easiest to help, for instance people close to the poverty line, those who are most accessible and so on.   But this precisely leaves out the last, those who are poorest, least able, most marginalised, women most vulnerable to maternal mortality and babies most likely to die.  What this has meant can be shown by UNICEF’s diagram of sanitation in India.  The  Total Sanitation Programme of subsidised toilets was meant for those below the poverty line, roughly the bottom two quintiles.  But they hardly gained at all.  The biggest gains were by those already better off, the third and fourth quintiles.

Let me propose, and add my voice to others who are proposing, that post-MDG the great need and opportunity is to think and act from the other end, with those who are poorest, weakest, and most excluded and marginalised, those who are disadvantaged and lving with physical, mental and/or social disability.  It means aiming to level up from the bottom with equity as the goal and a radical rethink of policies and priorities.

It also means reviewing and focusing systems of monitoring and learning.  Policy-makers need to be closely in touch with what is happening on the ground to those who are worst off, the conditions they experience and their changing realities. It means finding ways in which there can be flows of honest, accurate, insightful and credible information to those in positions of power. This matters more than ever given the rates of change for all people living in poverty, not least with the rapid transformations of global interconnectedness, the mobile phone revolution, and accelerating changes in social conditions and relationships.   Being out of touch and out of date has always been a problem, and has repeatedly led to misfits between policy and field realities.   More than ever before, those in capital cities are finding it challenging to keep up with developments and changes at the grass roots,. This can be expected to be even more pronounced after 2015.

Fortunately, we have a new means for being in touch and up-to-date.  An approach has been pioneered which all countries can and should adopt.  This is the Sida-supported Reality Checks pioneered in Bangladesh.  This is a brilliant and extraordinarily successful innovation.  Many have still not heard of it, but it is beginning to be recognised and spread.  

The Reality Checks are conducted annually at the same time of year by the same teams.  Outsiders spend several days and nights staying in the homes of people living in poverty. Each year they stay with the same families in the same nine representative areas.  The brief for those who take part in Bangladesh is to listen, observe and understand the perspectives of their host families and others in their communities. The focus has been primary education and primary health care, two sectors which Sida supports, but a great deal else has come to light.  The approach lends itself very well to learning about the realities of those who are poorer, weaker and most marginalised.

The insights repeatedly surprise, not least people’s changing experiences, behaviours and priorities. Unrecognised policy issues are raised. Much more is learnt than just about education and health.  The teams have been struck, even astonished, by how much has changed and how fast it has changed since the first Reality Check was conducted in 2007.   The people who live in poverty in all countries deserve that their governments keep themselves in touch in this sort of way. 

A bottom up focus on equity and on those who are ‘last’, and the approach of Reality Checks, combine and support each other well. Emulating Bangladesh, they could and in my view should be adopted and adapted by all governments.  David Cameron could set an excellent and early example by starting Reality Checks in the UK. Though his stay was brief, the Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, can testify to the value of staying overnight in a community from his own experience with a poor family in Ethiopia.

We do not need to wait for 2015.  We could start now.  Experience could then be gained across a range of countries and conditions, ready to inspire and inform extensive adoption post 2015 and to make it more feasible for equity and the wellbeing of those who are ‘last’ to come first.

Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

The 0.7% target debate should not distract us from considering the quality of aid

Rosalind Eyben

Last week the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords published its report of an enquiry into the economic impact and effectiveness of development aid. The headline recommendation was to abandon the 0.7 per cent GNP target for aid. The Committee concluded that increasing the spend has undermined quality. I tend to agree. There is a disincentive to fund the relatively low cost interventions through small grants and technical co-operation assistance that may have disproportionately significant impacts. And the pressure to spend may distract from the construction of the effective relationships necessary for sustainable poverty reduction. When I was first working in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in the late 1980’s a reduction in the aid budget certainly did improve the quality of the programme; we had time to build relationships and think about how we went about our work. However, cutting staff puts this in peril. The House of Lords got this one right when warning about the risk to quality of such cuts.

But the main problem has been DFID’s response to the Daily Mail newspaper and the rights wing of the Conservative Party in defending their increased budget at a time of general cuts. Ministers are seriously undermining DFID’s potential to support equitable and sustainable development. The drive to demonstrate to the British taxpayer how every penny is spent ironically risks these pennies being ill-spent just because the donor is trying to be in control. Here are four lessons about effective aid that both DFID and the House of Lords appear to have over-looked.

Support from international agencies is more likely to be effective when harnessed to already initiated, locally-owned processes.
Findings from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Consortium (Pathways)  illustrate this point. Women’s political organising is key to securing government policies and private sector practices that make a difference to women’s lives. Today, however, by insisting on time-bound and pre-set objectives which treat such women’s organisations as contractors rather than innovators, donors are putting at risk their own gender equality objectives. DFID and other donors must realise that social change is contested and messy, requiring aid agencies to be flexible and responsive to rapidly changing local contexts. They should not seek to be in control of the agenda.

Value for Money means designing and adapting interventions that reap long term and sustainable development dividends.
Investing in mutually satisfactory relationships with partners makes possible the establishment and implementation of integrated financial and programmatic monitoring, evaluation and learning processes that enable all involved together to review progress and consider the value for money being achieved. Ensuring that budgets reflect the real costs of an intervention thus means including what is required to implement an adaptive learning strategy within supportive relationships with partners, characterized by respect, solidarity, responsiveness and helpfulness. For more about value for money, go to the Big Push Forward.

Modesty makes aid more effective.
Women’s rights organisations in Bangladesh highlighted to Pathways researchers that donors’ negative qualities were: being top-down; not giving the organisation a “decent hearing”; no transparency in decision-making; wanting too much publicity; imposing their decisions; being bureaucratic and inflexible; and thinking too much of themselves – for example, by insisting on ‘badging’ their work, as the House of Lords mistakenly recommends, rather than staying modest and in the background.

Aid agencies should develop a sound understanding of their power, position and biases
Power has an adverse effect when we impose our own point of view. Alternative ways of understanding and tackling problems are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant; those putting them forward feel disempowered and will drop out of the conversation. Organisational and individual critical self-reflection delivers benefits for donors as well as the others they seek to help. Like them, donors also will learn and think differently, to imagine new possibilities and to debate alternative choices.

Rosalind Eyben is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Developmental hackspaces: Fostering a meta-participatory ethos for Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Hani Morsi

The program for the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development Conference includes a paper session titled “Expanding Participation”, which invokes thinking about the clearly rising convergence of many conceptual and practical repertoires of development research, practice and emerging information and communications technologies (ICTs). The sustained interest in participation (as a large and diverse set of methodologies, practices and frameworks) and how it continues to inform the general developmental zeitgeist is paralleled by the steady evolution in technologies and technological practices that have their own embedded manifestations of the participatory ethos. Technically-focused communities such as the open source movement and technologies such as crowdsourcing, with characteristics of openness, social collaboration, and unrestricted information flows mirror the inclusiveness inherent in participatory processes in development work.

With such a similitude in the participative and increasingly democratized cultures characterizing the current evolution in development and technical communities, an important question arises: Are we, as development researchers and practitioners, adequately capitalizing on the potential opportunities created (as a result for such a convergence of shared values) for collaboration with our technical counterparts? Are we able to reimagine development within a context of the accelerating rate of change that the increasingly rapid rate of technological advancement brings about? How are we able to reconceive our ‘traditional’ ways of thinking about the global developmental priorities in a world characterized by such an accelerating rate of change?

The purpose of this blog post is not to offer any adequate answers to these questions, but to present a call to action on an issue with direct bearing on formulating these answers. How can development practitioners and technology professionals capitalize on shared values, more effectively collaborate on solving complex developmental issues and foster a reciprocal cross-pollination of ideas that is mutually valuable in finding practical and sustainable solutions in an increasingly dynamic global environment?  The collaborative spaces already exist, considering the multitude of cross-disciplinary conferences, research programs and development interventions that combine input from and invite partnership between those working in both realms of development practice and technological innovation, as well as local stakeholders and institutions. That is, the attention to inclusiveness and participation as central notions of collaborative efforts across joint undertakings between the development and technology domains is already extant and arguably on the rise. What needs more attention is factors affecting the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of collaboration between those working in development practice and their opposite numbers in the technology and innovation world, and this is what is meant by ‘meta-participatory’ in the title of this post.

Many of the attributes that both groups have in common have already been discussed. What about divergences? What stands in the way of a more vibrant alliance between development and technology? In many cases, it all about finding the right balance. Here are two key observations:

• Disparate views on the role of technology for development: this is an elementary – even obvious – observation, but remains fundamental to bridging gaps in conception of technological tools and processes for development. Without risking treading into territory mined with multifarious and often polarized debates on the subject, and for the purpose of the main thrust of this post, it would suffice to say that development practitioners need to adopt a little more techno-fetishism, while technologists would probably do well to accept an additional degree of practical conservatism. In other words, we need to balance long-term, futuristic outlooks on the possibilities of what technology can (or cannot) do for development with short-term, pragmatic focuses on specific interventions. An equilibrium of far-sighted vision and effective action cannot exist otherwise.
• Conflicting working ‘tempos’: technologists often have a ‘keyed-up’ working pace. Prototypes are built, deployed, tested and improved upon in a cycle that is analogous to but much faster than the slow-paced, deliberative, power-sensitive process that lies at the core of participatory methodologies. In collaborative projects, finding a practical balance of pace is difficult, but achievable.

The late Steve Jobs, one of the technological icons of present times, once said “…innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem”. Sudden moments of clarity and late night phone calls aside, if we are to truly co-construct knowledge about how find technologically-catalyzed solutions for global development challenges, we need to break out of our respective disciplinary silos and start reciprocally but constructively shooting holes in our preconceived notions about how to find these solutions. We need to open source development by building upon the shared values of participation and inclusiveness and promoting a joint discourse of ideas at the intersection of practical intervention, technological innovation and ethical considerations.

Hani Morsi is a PhD candidate within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Spring uprisings calling spring academics: #bring books out to the streets!

Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere

Born the 15^th of May 2011 until forced eviction from the symbolic Plaza del Sol on August 18^th for Pope Ratzinger’s visit to Madrid, the Spanish Revolution is now back in the streets. The 15-M Indignados Movement spark was lit this time in a secondary school, the Instituto Lluís Vives, seated just beside the Town hall of Valencia, the third most populated city in Spain.

Facing months of delay in payments by the regional government, the school management could not face heating costs any longer. Lluís Vives students then decided to go out to demonstrate against public education cuts seven days ago. With the school strategically located in the city and students blocking a central street, police acted rapidly. They charged against 12 to 16-year-old students and detained some of them.

Technologies, mass-media and a feeling of being part of a bigger, global ‘spring’ served to ignite action. First, against gratuitous police aggressions: footage from TV cameras and mobiles demonstrated, once again, how violence is systematically applied by the police corps against the simple right of demonstrating in a so-called democratic society such as Spain – including an illegal and premeditated lack of identification by police officers (with velcro covering their uniform numbers), as part of a normalised police culture sidestepping further legal responsibilities for their violent acts.

Second, action against the education cuts that many public schools have suffered. Students brought their own blankets, toilet paper and parents helped with the school clean-up on Saturdays, something uncommon in the Spanish context. Meanwhile, the regional government has spent millions on gigantic tourist and propaganda projects that only benefit the few, not to mention the many cases of unveiled corruption.

With books about law and rights held in the air, a mass of secondary and university students, teachers and students’ families joined the march two days ago. Solidarity demonstrations have taken place in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid singing #WeAreNotAfraid, #ValenciaEscuchaMadridEstáEnTuLucha [Valencia, listen Madrid is in your fights], #Here,here,hereThereIsAlsoRobbery [when passing by the Bank of Spain]. Students have created the trending topic #ValencianSpring for communicating and organising in humble honour to their Arab predecessors and linked it to the existing #SpanishRevolution.

In Senegal, at the beginning of this month, citizens in the Mouvements 23Juin and Y‘n a marre [That’s enough] demonstrated and sang rap (and died) against the constitutional change enacted by President Wade to pave the way for his possible third electoral mandate. So did Senegalese immigrants in Paris in solidarity. And so the list goes on: Egypt, Greece, Syria, UK – a climate of international links, resistance and possibility.

As Mariz Tadros urges us to think in the latest IDS Bulletin, what can this tell us as development academics? What can we offer and take from these uprisings?

A first idea is to offer our present concepts on participation, power and change towards the understanding of these events. To try to grasp how a school director becomes unruly by taking her bit of power and saying ‘you police do not enter my school’; or how the public declaration by State Police chief in Valencia two days ago that ‘we were fighting against the enemy’ when referring to 16-year old students, was popularly re-appropriated by demonstrators in various cities of Spain with the creative slogan #MeTooIAmTheEnemy; or for governmental messages of ‘they are just 200’ to be met with counter-narrative posters saying ‘and they said we were few’. And so the list goes on. For each power over, there is a power with, a power to, a power within resisting and suggesting new perspectives.

Second, by updating concepts such as citizenship in the light of present events: how is it interplaying with our roles as consumers, as bank users, as family members? In contexts where repeated demonstrations may contradictorily become just part of the system (when is a demonstration unruly? when is it co-opted?), giving little or no effect, where participatory democracy simply does not apply, where representative democracy is a prison, where citizenship slips, and where the only thing people feel able to exercise activism as citizens over is the boycott of products, to move money into ethical banks, to change life-styles (with the hope perhaps that by impacting on the makers of real-politik – banks and multinationals – they might impact on their accomplice politicians). How is citizenship shaped, felt and reclaimed under these circumstances?

Third, we can engage with the new concepts presently living and breathing in the streets. One example could be that of glocal (‘think global, act local’), already present in the anti-globalisation movements and back again with the Spring uprisings. Demonstrators in these movements are used to see the global picture and then act locally, wherever they are. They sometimes unite too, as a colleague once said: ‘to make a global struggle of the many local ones’.

When I move from these activist spaces to the academic ones, I often feel a disconnection. I feel that we, as academics, can learn and be inspired much more by the way anti-globalisation and spring activists see things in the streets. In at least three manners: 1) in that all local spaces must be studied under equal circumstances: development discourse has long forgotten that there are local places here, in Europe (to the extent that in my local university in Valencia we would not be funded local development projects in ‘here’ because development funding was for local projects in ‘there’); 2) in that our local places are interconnected to other locals, in both positive or negative ways; and 3) in that the concept of global needs to be un-reified, un-packed. An activist friend used to tell me these global forces are ‘too big’, too difficult to fight against. They may. But this also means going to the roots of inequality. Academics can help here, as each global power has a local place, embodied somewhere (a country’s president bank account in a tax haven, a share-holder or G-20 conference, a small enterprise office taking decisions somewhere). Structured, academic analysis is needed to find those globalised locals, to make the global possible, both as power over analysis and as a space for resistance and action.

This video entitled ‘Three stories and a glass of milk’ [in Spanish, 3m] by the Catalan NGO Opcions is an analytical example of glocal interconnections in the international soya-production system. Tecojoja (Paraguay) and Cantabria (Spain) are the local producing places in the suffering end: Tecojoja sees thousands of farmers evicted from their lands for landowners to cultivate transgenic soya, and thus feed the industrial European livestocks; on the other side, Cantabria sees how in the past 12 years, 73% of non-industrial, cattle-farming family businesses have had to close down in face of industrial competition. The third and last local space analysed in the video (the localised, un-packed global space) is the harbour of Barcelona (Spain), the main entrance of transgenic soya to Europe. There, consumers and environmental activists demonstrate against meat made out of poverty and transgenic soya.

Glocal analysis can help both activists in their reflection of actions and development academics to get more politicised and go to the real roots of poverty and inequality. Many other concepts wait for our analysis in the streets. As for each library book on the shelf, ten newer versions are awaiting outside!

Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere is a PhD candidate working on the theme of popular education and social change within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Discrimination, duties and low hanging fruit: reflections on equity in CLTS

Robert Chambers

The equity day at the WSSCC Global Forum in Mumbai (October 2011) made a deep impact on me.  I am ashamed to admit this.  I should not have needed this. I have been banging on about ‘putting the last first’ for years, but the fuller implications of this with sanitation only came home to me on this day. Thank you those who came and shared their experiences with us –rehabilitated manual cleaners, slum dwellers, disabled, minorities… and Louisa Gosling, Archana Patkar and Nomathemba Neseni and who pulled scales from my eyes.

I am not proud that when sanitation as a human right first came up, my enthusiasm was muted.  I was so imbued with the CLTS (Community-Led total Sanitation) philosophy of no hardware subsidy and of people digging their own pits and making their own toilets that I feared that a rights focus would encourage dependent attitudes and undermine CLTS.  People might demand that government provide them with everything. Well, how wrong can you be?  It depends how you see rights. Frame them differently and  you can see that poor rural people have a right not to be marginalised by top down standardised hardware subsidy programmes like the Total Sanitation Programme in India, in its usual and classic form. Instead they have a right to be facilitated, to be enabled to do their own appraisal and analysis and collectively come to recognise the gruesome reality that they are ‘eating one another’s shit’ and decide to do something to stop it.  Before the equity day, that was about as far as I had got.

What hit me on this day went further. The pieces were shaken up and settled to fit in a new pattern.  We have rights-holders, to be sure.  But we also have duty-bearers.  And we are duty-bearers. But how are our duties determined? They have been defined in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), of building up from the base, of filling the empty glass fuller, of achieving targets.  But even achieving the MDG targets would leave hundreds of millions of people still without even the most basic sanitation, still without hygienic behaviour, still suffering the multiple deprivations of Open Defecation (OD) and the horrendous and often cumulative debilitations and sufferings of multiple faecally-related infections.  Not only that, but what does striving for the MDGs in sanitation imply? It implies going for the easy ones, picking the low-hanging fruit. That’s how you achieve targets (or minimise shortfalls).  And that implies neglecting, leaving out, not serving, the more difficult, more challenging, and more deprived ‘last’ whose need is so often greater.  For achieving targets, those who are last are not cost-effective.

And who are these last?  Well, the UNICEF quintile bar charts show how the poor and rich compare: and among these, the charts for India are a stark and shocking indictment of a decade of programme failure on a mega scale: the last who were meant to be served –like the bottom two quintiles – have been barely touched. Then consider who these last are.  Someone said that half of humankind are in some way disabled or specially vulnerable.  I found that difficult to believe until I began to think it through.  Consider who they include: the very poor and destitute; those with the many forms of physical or mental disabilities; people living with HIV/AIDS; those who suffer discrimination – sex workers, LGBTs, low status minorities…; those exposed to and living in insanitary slums and other ‘places of the poor’;  migrant workers, refugees, internally displaced people, and other distress migrants; the chronically sick; and more and more, the infirm aged (unable to walk or walk far, unable to squat…) who are a growing proportion of humankind.  And then, what about vulnerable children?  And all this before considering discrimination against females, or menstrual hygiene. There are shocking answers to questions too, questions I had not asked myself.  How do blind people manage with OD?  Or people who have to crawl? Do they have to go where others go?  Do they get the stuff on their hands? How do they clean up?

As long as any of these ‘last’ are exposed or deprived in such ways, and lack proper access, are we as duty-bearers discriminating by default?  That was the question Archana threw out at the end.  And it will not go away.

So I am in a new space.  With renewed anger.  And asking what the implications are for CLTS. Two stand out straight away. First, with rural CLTS, triggering and/or early follow up must be facilitated so that people identify the ‘last’ in their communities and what needs to be done that they cannot do or be expected to do for themselves.  For the poorer and less able this is already standard good practice but it must go further, and identify those who face physical and other disabilities, encouraging local actions and innovations to provide what is needed.

Second, with urban  Citizen-Led Total Sanitation, when full or even partial self-provision is not an option, rights-based demands, mobilising to secure support and services from the authorities, has to be a major part of the way forward.

So thank you WSSCC for the equity day and for the whole Forum, and roll on the next; and by then let’s hope we will have seen big shifts with many actors and champions – in communities, in governments, in NGOs …- turning the MDGs on their heads to put equity first by starting with the last.

Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS. . This piece will feature in a forthcoming publication by WSSCC, entitled “WSSCC Global Forum on Sanitation and Hygiene: Insights on leadership, action and change”.