Two Cheers for (Development) Anarchism

Katy Oswald

I went on holiday last week and it rained, a lot, so I had plenty of time to read. One of the books I read was ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism’, James Scott’s latest book, and it really got me thinking. First, it resonates strongly with the work the Power, Participation and Social Change team at IDS has been doing on Unruly Politics, and second, if we are to take Scott’s argument seriously, it has huge ramifications for the ‘development project’.

So what is Scott saying? He isn’t saying we should get rid of all governments and become anarchists, but he is saying that if we see like an anarchist, or adopt an ‘anarchist’s squint’ as he calls it, we will see the history of social change differently. We will see that change happens through messy political contestation and perpetual uncertainty, it is not organised, it doesn’t happen through institutions, and it often occurs through unruly acts that do not have clearly articulated demands attached to them. He acknowledges that such acts can lead to an increase in state repression, and therefore do not automatically lead to progressive social change, but his basic premise is that ‘extra-institutional protest is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for major progressive structural change’. And many of these protests will constitute illegal acts, violence and, by definition, be uncontrollable.

So what does that mean for those of us, like the researchers here at IDS, who try to not only understand social change, but somehow to influence it too? Does it mean we should all quit our jobs and go out and start a riot? Maybe, but even then we can’t be sure that it won’t mean we end up in prison and the government introduces more draconian laws against protest. But, as a researcher, it got me thinking about why Scott’s argument makes me, and many others, feel uncomfortable. Intellectually, I get it, I agree with it. But practically, and personally, I find it difficult. I find myself returning to Lenin’s question, ‘but what is to be done?’ I want to be able to know that I can act, and organise with others, and that this will make a difference, it will contribute to social change. And this made me think back to another book I read not long ago, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, by Alain de Botton. He talks about the idea of ‘meaningful work’, where someone can make an imaginative connection between what they have done and their impact on others. Of course, what counts as meaningful will depend upon the values of that person and the society they live in, but my values tell me that meaningful work for me is one where I can ‘make a difference’.

The challenge Scott poses us, is that this desire to know whether or not one has ‘made a difference’, is precisely what takes the all important politics out of social change. Our desire to ‘objectively’ measure whether or not a development project has been successful, for example, deprives us of the important political debate about what assumptions underlie the supposedly objective definition of ‘success’. Our desire for clear, uncontested narratives, that explain how social change happens, make us impose causation where perhaps it didn’t exist, and blind us to the disorderly, unplanned, and unpredictable acts that disrupt order and drive progressive social change.

Katy Oswald is a Research Officer at the Participation, Power and Social Change team at IDS. She can be found on Twitter: @ogmog

A bold and practical proposal for the post-2015 framework

Joanna Wheeler

This post previously appeared on 22 March 2013 on the Participate blog. Subscribe to their blog for regular updates on the Participate initiative.

At the opening of the Advancing the Post‐2015 Sustainable Development Agenda conference in Bonn last month, Horst Kolher noted wryly in his opening remarks that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon asked the High Level Panel (HLP) to be ‘bold and practical’ in its recommendations for the post-2015 framework.

So far, it would appear that many of the proposals circulating are neither. Many are extremely technical, and seem disconnected from the realities of people living with extreme exclusion and marginalisation.

As the High Level Panel prepares the report of recommendations for the post-2015 framework, due to be finished at the end of May, it is an important moment to critically reflect on what these bold recommendations might look like.  One of the civil society declarations from Bonn aimed directly at the High Level Panel called for structural transformation that addresses ‘the failure of the current development model, which is rooted in unsustainable production and consumption patterns and exacerbates inequality as well as gender, race and class inequities.’ This is certainly bold in comparison to the current MDG framework, which leaves inequalities largely untouched.

Whilst the panel appears to be listening to civil society’s recommendations – for instance the recent Bali High Level Panel Communiqué released after the HLP meeting at the end of March, refers directly to the civil society declaration in Bonn, around the need for a new framework to ‘manage the world’s production and consumption patterns in more sustainable and equitable ways’ -  there is still too little being said about how to achieve the massive changes that would be required for sustainable development and social justice to be achieved on a global scale.  Skepticism and wariness characterize the views of many in relation to what is likely to be a protracted inter-governmental negotiation process. These have not had a good track record lately.

Here’s a bold and practical suggestion for the High Level Panel (and all those involved in trying to influence the post-2015 framework): citizen participation.  Not just citizen participation as in asking people living in greatest poverty to tell people in the UN what they want, but citizen participation as in creating opportunities for people to have a real say in the decisions that affect their lives. Not just citizens as in people holding passports for a particular national government, but people everywhere with the right to have rights, irrespective of their official status, gender, sexuality, disability, age, race, or religion.  Citizen participation is a bold approach for the post-2015 framework, because it turns much of received wisdom about ‘aid’ and international frameworks on its head:  it is not just about a small global elite ‘hearing the voices of the poor,’ but about creating sustainable and long-term mechanisms for citizens to be involved in decision-making at all levels (from local to global).  What is missing from all the talk about how to make the new global framework tackle the big problems facing all of us, is a focus on who needs to lead that transformation: citizens, themselves. Early findings from the Participate initiative show that top down policies and interventions frequently fail to respond to the everyday realities of those living in poverty, and increase their sense of powerlessness.

If it is done well, citizen participation would shake the very foundations of the current global power structure, getting to the root causes of poverty rather than just the symptoms.

Citizen participation is also practical in that there is already a long-track record of a range of approaches and mechanisms to citizen participation, and a large body of research that points to some clear ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ if you want meaningful citizen participation.  Consider where democracy is really flourishing at the moment:  while the US and many countries in Europe face financial crisis and political apathy, Brazil, India, South Africa, the Philippines, and others have been at the forefront of innovations in citizen participation.  There is a lot of evidence about how citizen participation can deliver better outcomes, in terms of citizens more capable of claiming their rights, states that are more accountable and responsive and societies that are more cohesive and inclusive.

According to the Participate initiative, the global framework could do at least two things to encourage meaningful citizen participation: strengthen the capacities of citizens to claim their rights (and of institutions to respond); and build in citizen-led processes of regulation and monitoring to really hold governments and agencies to account for their commitments in the post-2015 framework. (See Chapter 5 of ‘What Matters Most’ report).

This is not to suggest that citizen participation is a silver bullet.  It comes with its own potential problems and draw-backs, not least of which is the risk that it is used to keep people busy participating about relatively inconsequential questions, while the real power is exercised elsewhere.  It must be adapted to the particular circumstances and power dynamics in which it is used.  No global framework can really achieve a context-specific approach to addressing entrenched problems.  But a global framework can enable more opportunities for citizen participation that others can take up at local, national and regional levels.

The most compelling reason for taking citizen participation seriously in the post-2015 framework is not the view of a researcher at IDS (or anywhere else), but rather that it is a demand being made by people living in extreme poverty and marginalisation in over 100 countries. The Participate initiative has found that many of those living in the greatest exclusion and marginalisation believe that their meaningful participation can make development more inclusive and sustainable. People want to have a say in the actual decisions that get made about them.  If the international community were to listen, it would be truly bold.

Read other recent blog posts from Participate:

• What matters most? Participate Initiative presents research to post 2015 High Level Panel
• ‘Share an idea so that you and I can change tomorrow’
• Post-2015 civil society consultations: our shared perspectives
• Participatory visual processes in Nairobi’s margins

Bangladesh: Rana Plaza is a parable of globalisation

Naomi Hossain

The garment factory collapse in Savar in Bangladesh is a parable of globalisation. The visceral images needed to make world headlines are there, as dead and broken bodies are pulled from the rubble for a fourth and fifth day. If there are any more survivors, as the tapping sounds of life fade out, they will have endured 100 hours trapped under the concrete and steel of the profit machine of a political youth leader – which description, by the way, translates in Bangladesh as ‘thug’.

Stories of heroism and agony and the criminal apathy of officials stirred up yet another round of mass violence in Dhaka. Factories were attacked and inevitably, someone died. This is with the secular-Islamic clash surrounding the Shahbag movement for justice for war crimes still bubbling in the background. There is a domestic politics angle to Rana Plaza, including the political lessons of the 2011 minimum wage struggle, and acute pressures on garments factories to deliver after political unrest slowed production and delivery since March. Yet the story outside Bangladesh, complete with labels from the Spanish chain El Corte Inglés dangling over the rescue teams’ heads, is all about how globalisation did this. Brand globalisation has been permanently damaged.

The facts are plain enough. Young women on low pay sew clothes in a poor country to sell to young women on low pay in a rich country. The key factor is the lowness of both their pay, which fuels the ease with which safety is sacrificed and the relentlessness of the demand for cheap clothes in a world society with powerfully consumerist values. The case is testimony to the effects of globalisation:

• Demand for cheap new fashion
• Regulations ignored because of pressures to deliver goods in time; ‘lead times’ are long in Bangladesh compared to China or India, so there is a premium on speed and volume. (Not all businesses in the building made their staff come in that day: BRAC Bank, the formal banking arm of the Bangladesh-owned BRAC group, did not open because of the warnings)
• Tough times, with austerity in the North and world prices high and rising; people cannot afford not to work, is the message from the Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility research project which includes research in garments workers’ communities in Dhaka: workers would have had no real choice but to show up[1]
• Low pay and poor safety records, reflecting that the Bangladesh Readymade Garments (RMG) industry is not very productive: it has been competitive because protected by preferential trade agreements and profitable because of the large amounts of surplus labour in the nimble fingers of young women.[2]

The lesson here is that there is ultimately no accountability in the global economy. The factory owners have been arrested and may do a little time. But this is unsatisfactory, when Primark and others gain the benefits of these pressures on workers’ lives, without paying the costs. When workers in the global export chains, mostly young women, have serious grievances about their work conditions, who is listening? How can working in the global market mean you lose your inalienable human rights to safety? How then can the human rights of global export workers be assured? ‘Compliance’ is not enough; there must now be enforcement. Until the public authorities can supply this, the workers will continue to revolt.

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[1] First year results from Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility, Squeezed, is out on May 14^th.

[2] See Mushtaq Khan, ‘Vulnerabilities in Market-led Growth Strategies and Challenges for Governance’, 2008. http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/PDF/Outputs/Nem_Misc/Growth-Vulnerabilities.pdf. This is common enough in the global export sectors; see Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, ‘“Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers”: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review, 7 (1981), 87–107.

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

Read other recent blog posts by Naomi Hossain:

• I’m (still) hungry mum: the return of Care
• Bangladesh is revolting, again
• Prices that bounce
• No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit

Find out more about the Politics of Evidence

Susanne Schirmer

Yesterday a conference on ‘The Politics of Evidence’ got underway. It is convened by the Big Push Forward Initiative and hosted here at IDS, welcoming about 110 participants for two days.

For all those who haven’t been able to make it to the conference, the final plenary session will be live streamed at 15.45GMT this afternoon (Wednesday 24^th April). This final session aims to bring together and synthesize the conference debates in generating ideas for collaborative efforts in tackling the drivers as well as the consequences of the current politics of evidence with respect to supporting transformative development.

You can find out more about the conference proceedings on the Big Push Forward website where Brendan Whitty has been blogging with reflections on the first day of the conference and Rosalind Eyben has outlined the conference aims and provided two papers prepared in advance of the conference.

Alternatively, follow the conference on Twitter (#evpolitics).

Sue Schirmer works as Communications Coordinator for the Participation, Power and Social Change team at IDS.

Storytelling in Development Practice

Hamsini Ravi

‘Reflective Practice and Social Change’ is one of the modules on offer to MA students here at IDS , convened by the Participation team. The course offers a stimulating weekly space to try out and reflect on practices that can potentially make us better development practitioners. In the session on storytelling and narratives, we reflected on the number of ways stories can be used in development practice.

We unanimously agreed that stories are a powerful, yet underrated medium. Humans are socialised through the myriad of stories, bonds are created, history is relived and lessons are learnt through stories. The non-profit sector is a treasure chest of humbling and powerful stories of men and women, seeking and braving change. Stories have the magical power to liven up a 500-page annual report that no one wants to read; they can foster a shared organisational spirit in a room full of people working in different contexts and capacities; as well as lend depth and meaning to an evaluation study.

In the context of a development organisation, stories and storytelling can be used in:

• Research
• Monitoring & Evaluation (M & E)
• Communications/ Advocacy
• Organisational learning.

Research

Storytelling works wonderfully well in research studies and investigations, and can be an effective prompt, when asking people about personal moments in their lives. It also enables the storyteller, as well as the listener, to be reflexive  about the topic in consideration. For a researcher, it can help unpack their positionality in the research process and allow them to confront and work on their biases upfront. As a research tool, stories are accessible, account for cultural diversity and require no reading or writing skills. As useful as this may seem, there are some ethical considerations, viz, ownership, use of data, confidentiality, placing the story in its respective cultural context. These can be navigated by acquiring informed consent, and constantly reflection on use and interpretation of other’s stories by the researcher.

Monitoring and Evaluation

As a tool used in M & E, storytelling can challenge our linear thought processes, giving space for non-linear relationships in interventions. They enable a more holistic understanding of people’s lives, dismissing the categories that funding and donor agencies tend to box beneficiaries into. The politics of using storytelling in monitoring and evaluation of development projects is that the evaluator may not always hear the things he/ she wants to hear. It is therefore necessary to constantly negotiate expectations of community reviews with the donor.

Advocacy and Communications

In advocacy and communications, stories can make up the oft-missing emotional link. It can also inform funders of realities on the ground and be used in promoting inter-cultural communication and understanding. While, a proportion of non-profits do use stories in their marketing and advocacy collaterals, it is apparent that this is often plagued with issues of manipulation, representation and dissemination. Stories could be tweaked and exaggerated to suit the needs of the organisation, and these issues can be overcome by strengthening consent processes and quality checks.

Organisational learning

Organisational change and learning can involve a healthy dose of stories and storytelling. From organising sharing sessions to using stories in induction programmes to integrating divisions within an organisation, there are a multitude of possibilities. For instance, each division of the organisation could narrate the intricacies of their project through a story to the marketing division to foster better understand.

While tapping into the collective processes of sharing and telling, storytelling can make the development sector as a whole more reflective in its approach and policies. It can bridge geographical and hierarchical divides and highlight the more humane elements of our work and personalities. Can we take this as a personal challenge to incorporate more stories in our work as development professionals?

Hamsini Ravi is an MA Development Studies student at IDS.

The MA Participation, Power and Social Change (MAP) at IDS is a unique 12-month course providing experienced development workers and social activists with the opportunity to critically reflect on their practice and develop their knowledge and skills through a work-based action research project.

What Matters Most? Participate Initiative presents research to post 2015 High Level Panel

Catherine Setchell

This post previously appeared on 24 March 2013 on the Participate blog. Subscribe to their blog for regular updates on the Participate initiative.

The High Level Panel (HLP) of Eminent Persons appointed by the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon met for the fourth time at the end of March in Bali, Indonesia to debate the future global development agenda after 2015, when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire.

The Participate initiative, co-convened by IDS and Beyond2015 was there to present the findings of its synthesis research report, ‘What Matters Most? Evidence from 84 participatory studies with those living with extreme poverty and marginalisation’

Participate presented the early findings of their research synthesis at the second HLP meeting in February in Monrovia, Liberia to panel members and their advisors. Since this meeting, Participate has completed the analysis of 84 participatory research studies, and aims to inform the post-2015 policy discussions with evidence from people living in extreme poverty. The findings will be shared with the High Level Panel, civil society organisations and policymakers as part of a ‘town hall’ session on Citizens’ Voices for the Post-2015 Agenda at the Bali meeting.

The key messages that emerged from the research include the following:

• In 83 per cent of the studies, social inequalities were identified as persistent and perpetuating exclusion at all levels of development.
• A recurring message appeared in 63 per cent of studies that the very poorest are unable to access the infrastructure, services, support and opportunities that others who are less poor can.
• 73 per cent of the studies identified the need for meaningful participation of marginalised people in development which will lead to local ownership and the sustainability of development approaches.
• 44 per cent of the studies highlighted that poor governance reinforces poverty for the poorest and most marginalised.

Based on the findings from the research, Participate will be highlighting to the HLP in Bali that the success of the future post-2015 framework rests on its ability to respond to:

• Highly dynamic contexts                     

The landscape of poverty is increasingly characterised by crisis, shocks, conflict, uncertainty and volatility. Policies and approaches need to be more adaptive to continuously changing environments and circumstances.

• Social norms that discriminate

Systems and institutions that support people’s claims to rights can be undermined by intolerance and prejudice. Challenging unfair power structures that entrench inequalities is critical for positive change in people’s live.

• Complex relationships between different problems.

Answering one part of a problem does not produce sustainable outcomes for the poorest unless all interrelated issues are simultaneously addressed. Policies need to be underpinned by a deep systemic understanding of people’s everyday lives. Agile learning and processes for generating feedback are required at local, national and global levels.

The research shows that people living in greatest poverty and those most marginalised want a different kind of development, where interventions and public policies enact principles that are inclusive and sustainable.

Participate’s key recommendations, based on the findings of the research are:

• The post-2015 framework should aim for the eradication of extreme poverty and reduction in inequalities.
• The post-2015 framework should strengthen the individual and collective capacities of people living in greatest poverty and marginalisation
• Participation should be prioritised throughout the post-2015 framework.

Read other recent blog posts from Participate:

• ‘Share an idea so that you and I can change tomorrow’
• Post-2015 civil society consultations: our shared perspectives
• Participatory visual processes in Nairobi’s margins
• Time to Listen