Perverse Payment by Results: frogs in a pot and straitjackets for obstacle courses

Robert Chambers

Perverse  adj. deliberately deviating from what is regarded as normal, good, or proper (Collins English Dictionary)

The Department for International Development (DFID) claims to be a world leader in developing results-based aid, and now Payment by Results (PbR).  PbR means that recipients will have to show results before they are paid. It will help to share risk, we are told, and radically re-balance accountability.  It makes sense for DFID ‘to take a tougher, more business-like approach by requiring results up front before payment is made.  Better sharing of risk in this way will drive value for money as partners become more incentivised to deliver’.

The drift of the past two decades away from participation and towards top-down controls and upwards accountability has been continuous and gradual, a heating of the water in the pot. The logframe, results-based management, upwards accountability, delivering value for money, business cases… these are motherhood and apple pie words with their mantras and procedures.  They have to be good.  More of them has to be better.  But what has been happening to the frogs in the pot as these procedures intensify and heat it up?

Inside the DFID pot, am I right? More managers have been recruited who have no experience of development. Total staff numbers have been reduced while budgets have increased! (Before he became Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell said in public on two separate occasions at the University of Sussex that to do this would be ‘ridiculous’). But it is worse than this.  The staff to funds ratio has declined while in the name of accountability and value for money internal procedures have become more and more laborious and staff intensive.  Not least of these is making the business case for a project, which is much the same time-consuming effort for £500,000 as for £50 million, 100 times as much.  So staff are more tied than ever to their headquarters and offices, have less and less time for ‘the field’ and actually grounding and learning the truth for themselves of what is going on, at a time when aid is going out in bigger dollops.  Value for money? The DFID frogs in the heating pot have forgotten (or the recent tadpoles never knew) what it used to be like. The frogs already there socialise them into acceptance. And how can they jump out?  They need the water – work, careers, and (unspoken) the power that comes with increasingly stringent upwards accountability.

Realities beyond the pot

And outside the DFID pot, the recipients or would-be recipients are facing obstacle courses of complexity, emergence and unpredictability.  This applies markedly with NGOs and with research – NGOs work in highly risk-prone environments, research would not be needed if the results were known – but  DFID funding has increasingly become a dysfunctional demoralising nightmare with escalating risks and transaction costs. Goals and targets have become more rigid, measurement has taken over from judgement, linear Newtonian thinking and action denies and obliterates non-linear realities, motivation has to be ‘incentivised’ by carrots and now with PbR the sticks have no carrots at all, relationships have become distant, trust, discretion and flexibility have gone out of the window and reporting becomes more of a misleading nightmare.  And as aid monies go in larger lumps to consortia so transaction costs are transferred from inside to outside DFID, and unsuccessful bidders suffer disappointment, distress and costs…  Am I wrong?  I invite rebuttal.  Let’s be evidence-based.

Take rural sanitation.  We have learnt a lot in the last decade:  the top-down building of toilets for people doesn’t work as CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) has shown – people have to want to end open defecation, have to want toilets, and have to use them, keep them clean, and maintain and improve them; the astonishing spread of CLTS in African countries and elsewhere and its adoption by over 20 governments is evidence enough – despite problems common to all programmes that go to scale it is dramatically more cost-effective than earlier approaches, and this is well known in DFID.  But we all know that with good and enduring participation, you cannot predict speed.  Perversely there are evidently now targets, paid by results, for toilets.  Forced to achieve targets for payment after results, organisations may have to choose: abandon participation and do what they know won’t work, or go bankrupt, or lie (well, massage facts, gloss realities, mislead, report on what was planned not learn from what happened…).  I know a participatory organisation with an excellent track record which is being bankrupted through one of these contracts: the senior management have had no remuneration for six months.  If it goes under, this will be a result of PbR, evaluators please note, and please ensure, DFID, that negative externalities like this will be identified, costed and reported in all evaluations of PbR.

The rise of PbR – to what end and at whose cost?

Standing back, let’s ask:  what is going on?  How far will this go?  At what gratuitous cost to people living in poverty, and diminished cost-effectiveness of our tax payers’ money?  Is this what we had in mind when we campaigned for 0.7 per cent?   For the obstacle course of development, are straitjackets now to be de rigueur?  Brave new world.   And who is accountable to whom?  There isn’t the faintest whiff of accountability to poor people.  Has that been utterly forgotten?  And how many aid managers have development field experience (and by field I don’t mean in other capital cities)? Do they confuse accountability – the words are similar – with accountancy?  DFID is proud of meeting its spending targets!  Who in DFID recognises that not spending budgets can be an indicator of participation and empowerment?  That it is good to save money? Who rewards those who save money or spend it slowly because they are empowering people through participation?

The perversities of PbR and related approaches are set to diminish value for money:

• Misfit with complexity. PbR and fixed goals, targets, milestones misfit complexity, unpredictability, flexibility, adaptability. Strait jackets for obstacle courses? Less that is good will be achieved. The Secretary of State has claimed that ‘DFID is … becoming a world leader in pioneering innovative Payments by Results programmes for tackling complex development problems’ (my italics) It is precisely with complex development problems where PbR’s misfit is most stark and tragic, and worst value for taxpayer’s money.
• Misleading reporting.  Incentives can be perverse incentives to report results. Shoddy work: do what the numbers demand, never mind sustainability, ownership, empowerment – you can’t measure those so easily.  Bias to the measurable. DFID  ‘ …being paid by results… (drives up) performance standards, management and measurement {sic]’.  Yet Andrew Naitsios, former head of  USAID said ‘ …those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable’ (No surprise that infrastructure is so much the rage – it can be measured)
• View of human nature.  ‘Incentives’, ‘incentivise’ – in PbR there is an unspoken implication that people working in ‘aid’ are doing it for the money  (an insulting view of what drives people in development NGOs and research).  That is not what motivates the vast majority of the people I know.  They work in development because they actually care and want to make a difference
• Disbursement targets.  It is a matter of pride that DFID is ‘meeting its spending targets’. Spend the budget by the end of the financial year.   Get the money out of the door in time.  Tick.  But too much aid too fast is a widespread complaint from recipients.

I could go on. In the world of NGOs and research at least, and probably much more widely, the effects of PbR seem set to be cruelly perverse.

In any case, where is the evidence that PbR is better than alternatives? Until PbR is soundly evidence-based, while DFID may  be a world leader in payment by results, for aid to be cost-effective, and for the sake of people living in poverty, let there be no followers.  If DFID want to be a world leader, perhaps this could be in honest, insightful evaluation of PbR which goes deep into its externalities and  the realities of all who are affected.

Alternative paths to the PbR highway

And let us note that outside the DFID pot, there is another, thrilling, world evolving.  Last month I was at the biennial Development Cooperation Forum in New York, convened by the Economic and Social Council of the UN.  There was talk there of ‘trust-based inclusive partnerships’ ‘horizontal relationships’, ‘South-South collaboration’ and the sense of a new dawn, a re-recognition of the vital significance of relationships which are not distorted by power.

So in PbR, where is the understanding of people, of communities, of participation, of complexity, where is the listening, where are the relationships in this world sanitised of humanity, and of people, of the personal?  Read the wonderful book Time to Listen: hearing people on the receiving end of international aid (Anderson et al 2012) whose researchers listened to almost 6,000 recipients of aid.  And what did they say? They said they appreciated aid but would prefer not to need it.  They said it comes too much and too fast.  They said they want and need relationships with donors, face-to-face, but contact is rare, if ever, and then rushed. They said they had to divert time and energy from action to demoralising and misleading reporting and upward accountability.  Again and again, they point to hidden transaction costs….  And the Time to Listen researchers found that wherever there was a good initiative or project there was always a person.

To conclude:  To give better value for money, please DFID

• radically simplify and streamline your internal procedures and free up staff time,
• recruit many more staff with grassroots field experience and who understand development realities, and free them to be in touch with the rapidly changing realities outside their pot, and
• put PbR on hold until a few examples can be evaluated in depth over time.

If you did these three things, you would indeed, truly, be leading the world.  And there is one more thing.  To deliver astronomical value for money (and without a business case) the Secretary of State could authorise the purchase of 2000 copies of Time to Listen and send them to all DFID staff.  As a starter, I am mailing her a copy.

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

Read other blog posts from Robert Chambers:

• World Development Report 2015: Congratulations so far. Can you go further?
• Participation for Development: Why is this a good time to be alive?
• Sanitation and Hygiene: Undernutrition’s Blind Spot

 

Participatory Action Learning on Gender Mainstreaming in Kenya – Reflections from the Field

By Patricia Njoroge

A little while ago, Robert Chambers blogged about a conference ‘Engaging with Crisis-affected People in Humanitarian Action’ that he attended. Robert reflected on the change from top-down measurement towards accountability to the people he has witnesses over. Patricia Njoroge, who met Robert at the conference got in touch afterwards to share about a Participatory Action Learning project which illustrates the difference a participatory approach can make to people affected by crisis.

In 2013 the World Food Programme (WFP) and IDS launched a Participatory Action Learning (PAL) project ‘Innovations from the Field: Gender Mainstreaming from the Ground Up’. The project is funded by USAID and is being piloted in five countries: Kenya, Malawi, Lesotho, Senegal and Guatemala. The project’s objectives are to learn and sharewhat already works to mainstream gender equality in WFP field programmes. And to apply the lessons to strengthen gender-sensitive practice within WFP.

In Kenya WFP staff identified four themes they wanted to research through the PAL process. In December 2013 the ‘Deepening Understanding of Gender Relations’ and the ‘Communicating with the Field’ PAL Teams undertook a field study at the coastal region, using participatory tools to engage with communities involved in WFP Kenya’s Cash for Assets (CFA) programme. As well as talking about a range of benefits associated with the programme, several programmatic issues were raised by the affected communities. The best we could do was to record these on small hand held video recorders – this had a great impact! On returning from the field these issues were shared with management and steps were initiated to resolve them.

Providing feedback to the communities
In March 2014, two members of the PAL teams returned to the study communities and provided feedback on actions taken. Community members very much appreciated that action had been taken on the issues they had raised and also that the fact that the Team was able to visit them again and provide them with feedback. Often researchers collect community members’ views but not all are able to return and give feedback on actions taken with the information provided. The team showed those interviewed a video developed with their recording/contributions. The joy of having a team listening to them, and taking their concern to management, action taken and then going back to give feedback was immense. They said they appreciated that the organisation was now listening to them. They were happy to see themselves on film, with one person commenting about one of the women shown in the videos ‘she is now known across Kenya!’

As part of the analysis of findings, the PAL teams reflected on the use of different participatory tools during the study.

Time Line (12 hour clock)
This tool helped to highlight how men and women spend their time in a day. Where there was a member in the Focus Group able to write, the team guided the discussion and the members would discuss freely and write on the manila papers provided. This was an ice breaker, often causing laughter as participants reflected on how men and women spent their time differently, as well as creating space for discussion on how WFP can engage more men in project activities to reduce the burden on women.

At the end of the session, the list of what men do and women do was distinctive with men having a shorter list while the women’s list was far longer. The men all acknowledged that women do a lot more than men in a normal day and are the first to wake up and last to go to sleep.

When I used this method I found it is very engaging, there’s a relaxed atmosphere and participants don’t focus on themselves but rather discuss and agree on a common general activity to write down. Also, as a start I tell them I want to learn from them (they have the power to teach me about their lives) – all in all a very rewarding and satisfying experience.

Gender Participation in Productive Activities
With the help of this tool participants mapped five main daily activities and through proportional piling they showed how many men and how many women participate in each activity. This was a very participatory exercise as it involved drawing signs of men and women on a manila paper to represent proportions of engagement in various productive activities. It elicited some interesting, and sometimes conflicting, results. For example, in one community a group of women concluded that for four out of the listed five activities (CFA, farming on own land, paid labour, charcoal burning for sale) women represented eight out of ten people doing the activity, while for the remaining activity – drinking boko,(the local brew) – men rated ten out of ten. This resulted in a hilarious moment as one woman tried to point out that there are a few men who look for paid work. Yet in a discussion with young and older men, while they agreed that men’s participation in CFA activities was low at a mere 1 out 10 men, they said they participated more than women in casual labour and equally in charcoal burning. However, they did acknowledge that women’s contribution to income generation on top of their participation in CFA activities meant that in general women were doing more than men.

Problem Census in Communication Tool
The tool helped to clarify how affected communities usually communicate between each other, how they receive information about the CFA project and how information is relayed through different sources and means. The tool also helps identify the preferred/ideal information-flow, including what channels to use in order to ensure communities receive information about projects effectively. This information is not always easy to capture through just verbal focus group discussions, neither is it easy to make people understand what information you are trying to obtain from them. Hence, using this tool to engage people helps both the participants to understand the information they should try to give as well as it assists the facilitator in her/his task to guide the conversation and map out the issues in an easier way.

Benefits of using participatory tools in the project
To sum up, these participatory tools helped in engaging with community members, creating an open friendly learning atmosphere with them educating the team and clearly bringing out issues for discussion. The participatory tools bring the participants closer to the subject and elicit rich discussions on the subject matter. It also holds the participants’ attention and the moderator has less fear of losing their audience.

In the course of the discussion, interrelated problems are discussed and causality factors identified. This provides a good opportunity for those involved to identify measures which can redress the weak points. By using the tools the beneficiaries felt they were in control of the process, telling their story in their own words.

Patricia Njoroge is a Gender and Protection Advocate with the World Food Programme (WFP) in Kenya

Read Robert Chambers’ blog post:

• Who engages with whom? Who is accountable to whom? Can the development sector learn from the humanitarian sector?

What does it mean to be an explorer in development? Review of Robert Chambers’ recent book

Pauline Oosterhoff

It is rather rare these days to find optimistic books on development. Robert Chambers’ latest book is a welcome change. Into the Unknown: Explorations in development practice does not shy away from sharply critiquing development paradigms that have proven ill-suited or counter-productive over the past five decades. This includes, Chambers ruefully acknowledges, some of those he has been part of himself, in his nearly half century in development work. But he remains enthusiastic about the capacity of development initiatives to succeed when they avoid being co-opted by powerful gatekeepers, and incorporate the knowledge and agency of poor people themselves.

‘Written in the spirit of exploration’
In the preface, Chambers modestly introduces himself as someone who learned -during an exercise managed by a student- that he mainly sees himself not so much as a researcher but as an explorer. With that he sets the tone for a book ’written in the spirit of exploration.’ The book contains some older already-published articles, and some new more recent work. The first part of the book critically explores Chambers’ professional experiences, starting as a colonial field administrator in Kenya; the second contains reflections on learning and teaching as individuals; and the final section explores the future of development in a digitalized world.

Chambers is hopeful about poor people’s abilities to improve their lives, and sceptical about privileged people’s willingness to recognise the distorting effects of power. A recurrent theme is the system of incentives for framing the realities of the poor in ways that suit the powers that be. The book details many examples of perverse incentives in the development sector. In Chapter 3, which focuses on irrigation in South Asia, Chambers explains how a water distribution project with context-specific

requirements only available in the Northwest of India was nonetheless sold as an India-wide solution, ignoring farmers’ knowledge and needs. Chambers harshly criticises the use of research to document the ’successes‘ of such projects. Badly-designed large projects continue to be authorised, he argues, because ’on a personal and social level there [is] a self-sustaining nexus of professional, social and personal relations, with a political economy linked to careers and income.’ Donors and recipients have a common interest in approving large loans; national officers stand to gain secondments to international organisations if they approve their projects; development workers hope to win well-paying consultancies; and expatriates especially tend to be part of social networks  with shared schools, swimming pools and other recreations. Designing good projects takes time to explore, listen, and learn through open-ended consultations with the poor, time that career-driven development professionals often do not have. The next section of the book focuses on acknowledging failures, reflexive learning, and how it can be promoted among institutions, groups and individuals.

A stimulating read
Chambers writes with humour, wit, and a real verve for telling stories, including unflattering ones about the author for the benefit of the reader’s education. (This is part a deliberate tactic; what sticks in people’s minds, Chambers writes, is ’telling stories, best against yourself‘.) There are lots of other plusses in the book – tips for individual learning and self-reflection, activities to plan, organize and conduct large participatory workshops and co-generating knowledge (ensure people have time to meet in well-set up coffee breaks, neutralizing dominators, finding out experiences and resources in the group). It clocks in at a very readable 130 pages, structured into 3 parts and 7 chapters with key lessons learned over a career in development that spans almost half a century on exploring experience and learning on development. This manageable size, clear language and the light tone make it a stimulating read.

But the book would have benefited from more detail on how to deal with gatekeepers to the poor who are less interested in learning than in keeping their privileged status. In development practice there are many hurdles, including visa procedures and travel restrictions that aim to deter explorers. What do we do with people in positions of power who are not eager to learn and discover? Apart from whistleblowing, what can we do to support good governance and effective development practices? This is one of the crucial battlegrounds in development work, and to be honest, I would have appreciated more stories about when to choose a battle.

On the other hand, the author is quite aware of his tendency to be optimistic. If you can accept that you will have to figure out yourself how to deal with gatekeepers and other authoritarian figures, the book provides a wealth of insights into development practices that are likely to deliver more sustainable results than narrow logframes.

Pauline Oosterhoff is Research Fellow for the Participation, Power and Social Change (PPSC) team at IDS.

 

Who engages with whom? Who is accountable to whom? Can the development sector learn from the humanitarian sector?

Robert Chambers

Wow! The 29^th Annual Meeting of ALNAP in Addis. This was memorable and eye-opening. But what is ALNAP? The Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action. Rather less memorable in full than as an acronym. But a vital orientation and a remarkable organisation. This annual meeting brought together for two intense days 170 people engaged in the sector. From a great range of over 100 organisations, with NGOs more than any other category, and international agencies, governments, universities, and the private sector in smaller numbers. An astonishing range of experience to have all in one room, and the largest ALNAP annual meeting so far.

And why was it memorable? For me it was one of those Rip van Winkle re-entries which for some reason seem to come my way more often these days. My time in the sector was long ago in UNHCR as its first evaluation officer in the mid 70s, and then in 1986 in a team evaluating the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies drought relieve operations in Africa in 1984-6. How radically things have changed since those days of relative amateurism and ignorance. In the mid 70s UNHCR was faced with many millions of rural refugees in Africa and did not have a single health, nutrition, agricultural, sanitation, water, settlement or other specialist. Though lots of lawyers, good at law. There were some large refugee settlements, but it was convenient to believe that most African refugees were best off left to fend for themselves. African hospitality would take care of them. Often not, I concluded, the case. And as for 1986 we wrote in our evaluation report that people had ‘a basic human right to be protected from incompetence’.

What a different universe it is now!
People in this conference were far, far more professional and experienced. Their concerns for accountability and performance have spread, deepened and evolved almost beyond recognition. There are now many guides, protocols, critical reviews and even organisations preoccupied with accountability to those affected by crises, outstandingly ALNAP itself.

The theme for the meeting was great – Engagement of crisis-affected people in humanitarian action. The overview and background paper by Dayna Brown, A Donini and Paul Knox-Clarke is excellent. The subject is vital because of the misfit and tension between urgent action to save lives and minimise suffering on the one hand, and listening, sensitivity, responsiveness, and supporting not undermining what people are doing and can do for themselves. And the many contexts and types of emergency or crisis challenge standard solutions. All this is pretty well known, so let me jump to what hit me in the face.

Top-down measurement versus accountability to people.
Paradigms are in tension. Underlying current debates and practice in the sector is a tug of war between the (Newtonian) paradigm of things, which is top-down with control, measurement, standardisation and upward accountability, and the (complexity) paradigm of people in which we find discretion, judgment, diversity and downward accountability. And there are contrasting concepts, language, values, methods and processes, relationships, mindsets and personalities that go with these. Top-down is driven and sustained by the real or imagined imperatives of crisis.

Take language. Beneficiary belongs to top down. It patronises. It begs a basic question, implying people do benefit. It ‘others’ those affected by crisis. It misfits equality, respect, listening and learning from people. Other words and phrases have been tried – crisis-affected people, and citizen (but this does not work so well for UNHCR with refugees). But again and again beneficiary is the word that is used. It is deeply, deeply embedded. And I dare say many see nothing wrong with it. One organisation has even appointed a Beneficiary Accountability Officer. Can’t we do better than this?

Then there are donors’ demands and ‘the system’. There was a view that to be ‘evidence-based’ the case for engagement and participation had to be supported by measurement. Others, myself included, felt the case was already overwhelming. When someone asked how many had read evaluation reports which blamed ‘the system’, a forest of hands went up. And participants lamented their experiences of how data demands forced them into gathering data for upward accountability at the cost of action, learning, adapting and accountability to affected people. Yes, a tragic trade-off, just as in the development sector.

Highlights and reflections

• To bypass recurrent rush. In sudden onset emergencies, many agencies carry out similar rushed and biased assessments (close to airport, only meet the leaders, men etc.). After typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines a non-operational team did a slower more interactive and representative assessment, hearing other voices, and found unrecognised needs: who would have guessed that old women needed underwear? Could UNOCHA (UN Office for Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs) try this dedicated team approach to test whether it should be standard practice?
• Participatory statistics. Dawit Abebe and Berhanu Admassu presented their participatory impact assessment work with pastoralists which generated participatory statistics. Dawit and Andy Catley have a chapter in Jeremy Holland’s Who Counts? The power of participatory statistics. Great stuff and huge potential. But who will pick it up? I recommend the guide which has just been updated. It is an eye-opener.
• Definition of terms? We did not spend much time on definitions. This was sensible. There was more interest in action. But engagement is a good word. And engagement of crisis-affected people was a move in a good direction.
• Personality and recruitment. The background paper considered skills (the word so often used), but then went further with behaviour and attitudes. I wonder, though, does personality go even further, and somewhere we need to go? Some saw recruitment procedures with interviewing face-to-face as critical. If the sector needs people who are good at listening, empathetic, participatory, they must be sought out, and trained. Also, institutional cultures, personality and relationships interact, so that for good engagement with affected people, with sensitive listening and respect, these must be part of good engagement in organisations at all levels.
• Learning what affected people are doing already came over as important. What are their existing organisations? What are they already doing? These were priority questions, as they have been for decades.
• The Who? Whose? questions. These were as relevant as ever. Who participates in whose project? was asked in the background paper. Who engages in whose action? Do they engage in ours or do we engage in theirs? Several times in the meeting someone asked ‘How do we want to engage with them?’. But further steps are ‘How  do we find out how they would like us to engage with them?’ This was raised but I did not hear it much discussed. A future agenda? To ask them? As standard good practice?
• Listening and learning. We often say and hear that we must ‘go and talk to [sic] people’. Talk to at least involves meeting, but when will we habitually say listen to or learn from? Or listen to and dialogue with? The training the day before the meeting was on evaluation. Next year, a training on listening? But would anyone sign up? Or be able to persuade their organisation to give the extra day to be trained to do something we all know how to do (when we talk to people)?
• Time with people. In a panel session on Building Accountability to Affected Populations into Humanitarian Evaluation, it was proposed that those engaged in the evaluations 9 months or so after an emergency should have to spend 50 per cent of their time with the affected people. Yes. Good idea.
• Accountability to whom? At that moment, a penny dropped with me. I wondered and still wonder, is the humanitarian sector ahead of ‘development’ in accountability to people? If so, or if it appears so, is this because the need is greater? In any case, what can the development sector learn? I suspect, quite a lot. But if so, where should we go from here?
• Gems for reflection from Luz Gomez Saavedra (Oxfam Intermon, formerly with MSF in Niger):
  • ‘Nothing can replace presence and proximity’
  • ‘The most amazing tool, sitting down under a tree with people’
  • An old woman who said: ‘If you want to know who is poor and who not, don’t count goats – ask who is receiving remittances from a relative in Calgary’
  • When she asked people how she could do her work better the reply was unanimous: ‘Don’t change but keep smiling’

Will this meeting transform the sector?
That would be asking too much. But intensifying the shift in the agenda to examining ourselves more (and this is in line with the World Development Report 2015 on Mind and Culture), yes, one can hope for that. And it may countervail against the magnetism of upward accountability which afflicts both humanitarian action and development, and reinforce actions and policies for accountability downwards to crisis-affected people, and learning more about and appreciating their realities, and what they want and need. And what they already do and can do, perhaps often much more than outsiders suppose.

Some in the sector are already onto all this. Could many, many others join them in putting into practice two PRA slogans which fit here as signposts and reminders:

ASK THEM              THEY CAN DO IT

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

Read other blog posts from Robert Chambers:

• World Development Report 2015: Concratulations so far. Can you go further?
• Participation for Development: Why is this a good time to be alive?
• Sanitation and Hygiene: Undernutrition’s Blind Spot
• Ensuring those who are ‘last’ come first: using Reality Checks to inform post-MDGs

World Development Report 2015: Congratulations so far. Can you go further?

Robert Chambers

Robert Chambers was recently asked to provide comments on the forthcoming World Development Report (WDR) 2015. The annual reports are the World Bank’s major analytical publication, each year focusing on a different aspect of development. The WDR 2015 will be on the topic of ‘Mind and Culture’. Below is Robert’s response to Steve Commins, of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, and Varun Gauri, Senior Economist at the World Bank. Both are part of the WDR 2015 team at the World Bank. Robert’s response  gives a window onto some of the pressing avenues that participatory thinking should be exploring.

Hi Steve and Varun,

Much stimulated by the video call yesterday. Good to meet again after some time, Steve – I do remember your visit to IDS.

I am excited by the focus and proposed content that you outlined. Both actually and potentially (see below) this WDR promises to take us forward. As background to this, please read the critical piece I wrote about WDR 2000, which was such an achievement by Ravi Kanbur especially. It is in a book Provocations for Development, reprinted from Journal of International Development You are closer to what I advocate in the final paragraphs of that piece than any other WDR has been, to my knowledge, in examining ‘us’. This raises a host of questions (Who? Whose?) which you illustrated, Varun, with the example of Whose indicators? I.e. score cards for health services. How far can you push the envelope in this WDR? Huge opportunity.

My main points:

Reflexivity
(As above, a mirror on ‘us’) Can you, as I suggested yesterday, conclude powerfully with the case for reflexivity, setting an example with your own critical reflections on the framing and content of knowledge in your own WDR?  It would be brilliant, absolutely brilliant, if you could, and would set a wonderful example to all of us who call ourselves development professionals. ‘Belief traps’ is a great phrase and concept. Can you illustrate and elaborate, and show how we are all in them, and how we can recognise them and mitigate them.  Wow! What an opportunity!

Emotion
This is such a significant driver of change in norms and behaviour. In your presentation to us, Varun, you did use the word once, but only once. But is it not almost everywhere, but papered over by our analytical intellectualism? For learning and changing, is it a key element? See John Kotter and Dan Cohen  The Heart of Change: real-life stories of how people change their organizations ,including the critical distinction between see-feel-change and analysis-think-change.  Argues for the transformative power of the former. See also Valerie Curtis Don’t look, don’t touch, don’t eat: the science behind revulsion; also Nick Haslam Psychology in the Bathroom . Both well researched, insightful, entertaining. Haslam pages 9-11 section on emotion points to a dramatic rise in professional attention to disgust and shame.

There is a right hemisphere-left hemisphere dimension here – development in the last decade has lurched into the left hemisphere. But with participation, much of it Bank-led in the now-forgotten 90s, there was a much better balance. See paradigms in Provocations pages 190-4. This links with

Experiential learning
This is implicit in initiatives that give people new experiences. The Bank’s immersions (starting with Wolfensohn in the 90s, and still going on a bit) and similar experiences have been enormously formative. (See pages 171 ff in Provocations). You have experiential learning and change in there – experiences overcoming belief traps. Do we, in development, need to be much more resolute, imaginative and bold in designing experiential learning, as with immersions, into our professional lives? When you talk about horizontal (and by implication vertical) teaching and learning, is the horizontal more experiential in a whole-person and relational sense?

Accelerating change – in every dimension?
Has the perennial challenge of keeping in touch and up-to-date with the realities of people living in poverty – marginalised, vulnerable, weak…. become more acute because of the way in which social and other change has accelerated and continues to accelerate? I recommended the Reality Checks in Bangladesh (pdf). They have done five annual summaries of these. The rate of change they find is astonishing. I have to say that Bangladesh may be an outlier in speed (fertility rate now 2.2!!!), but there are many indications and experiences that suggest that acceleration is the norm. Could you have a box, perhaps combining the experiential learning of immersions with the need to keep in touch and up to date? This could have a big, good, impact. The person best able to advise on this is Dee Jupp who started and has continued this (There is a major review of this in Stockholm this week). In my view all countries should have reality checks – and they are spreading – Indonesia, Mozambique Nepal, Ghana , Dee could tell you.

Blind spots
This is something I am working on just now and links with the points I made about reflexivity above. There have been major areas that have been overlooked or given inadequate attention in the past across a whole range – sexuality and discrimination against LGBTs, canal irrigation at night, group-visual synergy in diagramming on the ground, the potential of participatory statistics, the combined nutritional impact of the many faecally-transmitted infections (perhaps responsible for some half of the undernutrition in the world, certainly in India…remarkable recent research findings by Dean Spears ), environmental enteropathy).These raise the question: what are the characteristics of areas that are blind spots (links with your belief traps, also institutional and professional silos, blinkers)? Why have there been these blind spots? Can you take this on? Open it up as a topic? If we missed these in the past, what are we missing now?

Words and concepts
They frame pretty much everything. We all have our favourites (see the first section of Provocations). The words and concepts here are not as dominated by economics as they might have been, but all the same what are the implications for framing and recommendations of those which come naturally to you and are part of current development speak,  Incentives, Prices, Regulations, information, for example ?

Can you define e.g. belief traps with examples, and cognitive taxes with examples, and explain how the latter overlaps with but goes further than transaction costs (if I understand it right)?

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)
I will write about this separately. Excellent that you have this in. And it is a good illustration of a number of the points above.

Finally, I would like to congratulate you, the collective you working on the WDR, on your work, but I would also like to challenge you and ask ‘How much further can you go?’ in order to make a real difference.

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

Read other blog posts from Robert Chambers:

• Participation for Development: Why is this a good time to be alive?
• Sanitation and Hygiene: Undernutrition’s Blind Spot
• Ensuring those who are ‘last’ come first: using Reality Checks to inform post-MDGs
• Discrimination, duties and low hanging fruit: reflections on equity in CLTS

Top PPSC blog posts in 2013

Susanne Schirmer

As we’re approaching the end of 2013 I would like to use the opportunity to highlight the top ten posts of the Participation, Power and Social Change blog, as well as some other interesting posts, that you might have missed.

This year we had an interesting array of posts providing commentary on events around the world, such as political change in Egypt, riots in Brazil, tragedies and revolts in Bangladesh, as well as presentations of outputs from some of our main research programmes and initiatives. Bloggers included researchers from the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change team, some of our partners, working with us on a variety of projects and some students associated with the team through our MA course in Participation, Power and Social Change and through our PhD programme.

Welcome to all those that joined our follower-list in 2013. We now have over 450 people following our blog and compared to 2012, we have more than doubled our views, which is excellent news. We hope you have found our posts interesting and even enjoyable. Please feel free to invite others to join our follower-group and find out what we’re up to.

Top 10 blog posts:

1. Participation for Development: Why is this a good time to be alive? By Robert Chambers

2. Bangladesh: Rana Plaza is a parable of globalisation by Naomi Hossain

3. From making us cry to making us act: five ways of communicating ‘development’ in Europe by Maria Cascant

4. The Marriage Trap: the pleasures and perils of same-sex equality by Stephen Wood

5. Bangladesh is revolting, again by Naomi Hossain

6. Storytelling in Development Practice by Hamsini Ravi

7. Missing the pulse of Egypt’s citizens? by Mariz Tadros

8. I’m (still) hungry, mum: the return of Care by Naomi Hossain

9. The crisis of Brazilian democracy, as seen from Mozambique by Alex Shankland

10. Heteronormativity: why demystifying development’s unspoken assumptions benefits us all by Stephen Wood

Other interesting blogs that you might have missed:

• A sense of insecurity – violence, gender and agency in South Sudan by Marjoke Oosterom
• ‘We can’t wait to improve sanitation’ by Petra Bongartz
• Involving the world’s poorest citizens in the post-2015 agenda by Joanna Wheeler
• The K’dogo Economy: Food Rights and Food Riots on Harambee Avenue by Patta Scott-Villiers

To give a different nuance to our commentary and research, we’ve also introduced some visual blog posts this year, showing videos, photographs and cartoons. Have a look:

• Work with us: Community-driven research inspiring change: Susanne Schirmer introducing a short documentary film by the Participate Initiative
• Fair markets and food prices: Images from North Bengal by Naomi Hossain
• Relationship Anarchy: Cartoons by Maria Ellinor Persson
• Is this that time? (Será este aquele tempo?): Images from riots in Brazil by Luan Citele and Renan Otto and a poem by akshay khanna

Finally, on behalf of the Power, Participation and Social Change Team at IDS, we wish all our readers happy holidays (if you’re celebrating) and a good start into 2014. We will be back with more blog posts in early January.

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