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In order to assess or audit your understanding of what you have just read, please examine the statements below. The article has a view on each of these statements – do you think the article generally agrees or disagrees with each view? In some cases the answer is not straightforward, so you may need to qualify your answer with a question mark

Lack of income is a sensible way of measuring poverty.
Poverty differs according to the norms of different societies.
Social exclusion and relative poverty are pretty much the same thing.
Society's attitudes towards the socially excluded range from humanitarian concern to condemnations because of their threat to the social order.
The World Bank and UNDP measure both poverty and development in similar ways.

Now decide whether you personally agree with each statement. Here we are asking you to critically engage with what the article is arguing. Try to reflect on the reasons for your answer – is it based on evidence as to what is the case or on your beliefs/values as to what should be the case? Usually it is difficult to distinguish between analytical arguments based on evidence and normative arguments based on values, and any argument you come across in debates on development and poverty will involve some mixture of the two. However, it is an important skill to be able to disentangle the two, as both your own views and those of others are almost certain to contain a blend of normative and analytical arguments.

Answer

Our answers to the first part of the activity are:

Activity 2: Applying your understanding of poverty

This activity is designed to consolidate and extend your understanding of Article 1, above, and to encourage you to reflect on and value your own experiences. The activity has two parts, the first addressing poverty and the second the importance of context in understanding poverty.

Part 1

Many conceptualisations of poverty are offered in the article, and as you can see from Boxes 1.5 and 1.6, poverty is usefully contextualised. Think about your own experiences of poverty and suggest which conceptualisation(s) has the greatest utility for understanding them.

Part 2

In what ways do you think our understanding of poverty is handicapped if we de-contextualise it?

Discussion

This activity gives you an opportunity to draw on your personal experience. Asking you to suggest which conceptualisation underpins your description of poverty encourages you to move beyond mere description, and to draw out the wider relevance and representativeness of such a narrative by providing conceptual underpinning. A conceptual model has wider applicability, and can be the basis upon which responses to poverty might be theorised. One would not get very far in devising policies to combat poverty if every person experiencing poverty had to be viewed as a unique case.

In responding to Part 2 of the activity I hope you appreciated that poverty as lack of income de-contextualises poverty because the focus is upon providing a universal measure. Compared with a starving child in Africa, you would find it difficult to argue that a British child was poor. However, if you compare the life of a child in a leafy suburb of London with that of a child on a ‘sink-estate’ in London (similar to that featured in Box 1.6 of the article) few would argue that the latter is not in poverty. This suggests that poverty is a relative concept and usefully contextualised. Relative poverty and social exclusion recognise the importance of context, while lack of income recognises context less.

Cynics among you might repost that switching between conceptualisations of poverty allows governments and others to ‘move the goal posts,’ to alter the criteria by which poverty is measured for political ends. I would agree. But this is clear evidence that the cynics are contesting what they read, which is to be welcomed.

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2.3 Globalisation

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Having looked at different conceptualisations of poverty as a shorthand route to understanding development, let us now turn to the context of development. The Development: context and practice course introduces ‘development now’ through a number of cross-cutting ‘big stories,’ one of which is globalisation. Read Article 2 on globalisation, below.

Click below to view Article 2 (0.05 MB).

Developing countries have had a very mixed and complex experience of globalisation. The theoretical order placed upon our ‘big story’ of globalisation through the three approaches of regulation, regionalisation and resistance has helped us to crystalise key fracture lines in an increasingly messy and contested discourse. But let us now consider how governments and citizens of developing states are reframing development strategies in order to engage more effectively with a globalising world.

Now read Article 3 on globalisation, linked below.

Click below to view Article 3 (0.02 MB).

We now want you to apply your understanding of globalisation. Read the following introduction and carry out Activity 3.

Activity 3: A levels perspective in understanding globalisation

Some writers argue that the level of interconnectedness that we have today is unprecedented, permeating all aspects of our lives, while others acknowledge that changes are taking place but contend that they are not fundamental, and possibly no more significant than changes in the past.

Let us explore the position of those in the former camp, who identify globalisation as transformative. To appreciate their argument you need only think about where the clothes you are wearing were made, or where the food and drink you have consumed over the past 24 hours came from. In Section 1 we touched on the interconnections between the global, regional, national and local levels. To demonstrate the utility of such a ‘levels’ approach in helping you unpack the substantive meaning of globalisation, let us take two issues and trace their impact along an imaginary spectrum from the global down to the local level, and from the local up to the global level (see Table 1 below). The first issue is the devastating attacks on New York and Washington in the United States on 11 September 2001, and the second, the uprising of indigenous Indian communities in south-east Mexico on 1 January 1994 against the perceived oppression of the Mexican government. The uprising was led by an organisation calling itself Eje'rcito Zapatista de Liberacio'n Nacional (EZLN), or the Zapatistas.

Table 1

Global	Regional	National	Local
Attacks on USA as World's sole superpower	The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation activates Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an attack on one of their members is an attack on all 19 members.	In return for Pakistan government support of US coalition against terrorism, US economic sanctions against Pakistan are lifted.	One person killed in Jacobad Pakistan (home of an airbase made available to US forces) in protests against Pakistan government support of US-led air attacks on Afghanistan.
Zapatistas use the internet to disseminate information about their cause. They win popular support across the globe, and provide a spur for the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement.	That the uprising happens within two hours of the North American Free Trade Agreement coming into force does not go unnoticed in the region. The Zapatistas call for an end to ‘development’ which is seen as dehumanising.	Mexican government sends in forces to suppress uprising with untold loss of life. But there is widespread support for the Zapatista uprising among ordinary Mexicans.	Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) stages an armed uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas, demanding democracy, liberty and justice for Indigenous Indians.

Can you think of another issue, global or local, and trace it down or up the spectrum?

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2.4 The practice of development

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Let us take stock of where we are. We have considered development through the lens of different approaches to poverty and have engaged with the context within which development happens by considering one of the ‘big stories’ of the course, namely globalisation. We now turn to the second part of the Development: context and practice course, which looks at the practice of development. The work of development managers is the focus of TU870 Capacities for managing development, which you will get a taster of in Section 3.

Here we consider a model to help you conceptualise development practice. This is done via a public action approach. By a public action approach we mean action taken to meet public needs. This involves many institutions such as the state, the market, civil society and NGOs. How public needs are defined is a lengthy and contested process, e.g. whether to provide free primary education or cut taxes for higher earners. To help you apply a public action approach to a real world context, a tripartite model has been developed. This is the steering, enabling and contesting model, which is introduced next.

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2.5 Public action and development policy

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Public action can steer development through deliberate action by targeting of projects and programmes.
Public action can enable development within the framework of immanent development.
Public action can contest development by challenging specific projects or programmes or even the dynamic and rules of immanent development.

The above classification of public action is for analytical purposes only. In reality, of course, public action, whether steering, enabling or contesting, is very much an interrelated process with numerous overlaps. A member of the TU871 course team pointed out another useful purpose of this classification – it gives us a rough idea of the arena where public action takes place, i.e. state (steering), market (enabling) and civil society (contesting). The emphasis must, however, be on the adjective ‘rough’. Civil society is certainly not so homogenous, and I am sure that you can think of many examples where steering by non-state organisations, rather than contesting, takes place (e.g. when NGOs take part in development projects). Most civil society organisations coalesce around social commonalities anyway, such as sports clubs or recreation clubs, and these usually neither contest nor steer development. Also there are a handful of states who contest, in a general sense, any immanent (capitalist) development. Cuba, for example, still clings to a socialist model. One might also include in this category, as I write in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attack on the US, certain ‘rogue’ states who allegedly promote terrorist opposition to US hegemony.

The three types of public action in our classification do alert us immediately, however, to the fact that diverse agents relate to action in sometimes similar, and sometimes in quite different, ways. This suggests that there is no universal model of development action. Yet when we hear talk of development action, the same ideas or concepts seem to recur the world over – participation, accountability, economic development, and so on – suggesting that, at least within each of the three types, there are some universal shared characteristics.

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2.6 Public action as steering development

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

The role of ‘development’ here is primarily to ameliorate the disordered faults of [capitalist] progress, and it is development agencies or ‘trustees of development’ – state, NGOs, international organisations – that act as agents of development. Thus, the desirable ‘developed’ state is one where a modern industrial society and liberal democracy can thrive along with some attention being given to basic social and environmental goals.

Public action that steers development thus includes deliberate action to cushion the effects of a market ‘fallout’ and attempts to make amends towards those who have been caught up in this. In steering development, there is then an attempt to intervene in all kinds of social, environmental and other crises that have accompanied varied degrees of ‘development of capitalism’ through targeting of particular projects and programmes.

In an extreme or pure form of capitalism, there would be only a minimal role for states or any form of collective or public action. In practice, in contemporary or ‘advanced’ capitalism, states have an important role to play.
(Allen and Thomas, 2000, p. 190)

Allen and Thomas argue that even if the state can sometimes act as a structural obstacle to development it does, nevertheless, have the capacity to enable development if it should so will. The state can thus be regarded as an important, if not the major ‘trustee’ and the primary agent for development. Take for example, the story of tea in Kenya (told here very briefly in Box 1) which illustrates well the point that the state can play a major role in protecting those who may be crushed by giants in the market, and at the same time, steer long-term industrial development (although recently this role has been undermined).

Box 1: Case study – Kenyan tea

Indian tea was introduced to Kenya and other parts of Africa in the 1910s. By 1920, BrookeBond had established control over the internal marketing of tea in Kenya, and was rapidly seeking control over production and a good quality supply for exports. By 1939, BrookeBond controlled all the key (and most lucrative) stages of production, marketing and distribution, and its trade orientation was mainly geared towards exports (Dinham and Hines, 1983, p. 100). Kenyan tea was thus developed primarily as a colonial export crop. However, during the Second World War foreign consumption fell significantly whilst domestic consumption, in contrast, rose dramatically to 67%. Nevertheless, by the 1950s, BrookeBond continued to expand as a dramatic increase in the world price of tea generated even larger profits to the company.

Following the Second World War, Kenyan demands for independence, redistribution of land and access to cash crop production began to worry the British colonial government. This prompted the colonial government into considering some form of ‘inclusive’ participation in the production of the main export crops of tea, coffee, pineapples and others. The enquiry into how this could be done resulted in the Swynnerton Plan (1954) which recommended that African Kenyan farmers were ‘incorporated’ into cash crop production through small holder (shamba) schemes (Swainson, 1980, pp. 250–64). Private companies were expected to participate in these schemes in assisting with the production, processing and marketing of the crop.

After initial reluctance, BrookeBond (which was also only too aware of the coming independence) appeared to relent in assisting small holders. It offered facilities and training. For example, whilst tea needs to be processed immediately after plucking, small holders did not have any processing plants to do so. BrookeBond seconded many of its senior officers to advise small holders, engineered the construction of the first small holder processing factory and provided various training and technical assistance. However, it should be noted that in doing so, BrookeBond was in fact weighing up and managing any possible competition from the small holders. For instance, it insisted on setting the quality standard for the tea leaf, often deeming small holder tea to be only fit for local consumption whilst it sent its own tea for the more profitable export market (Swainson, 1980, pp. 250–64).

In 1963, Kenya gained independence, but not before a concentrated (and often bloody) struggle. One of the major features of this struggle was the black African demand to retrieve land from white-owned Highland estates growing tea and coffee. Land redistribution did take place to an extent, allowing African farmers to purchase Highland estates through loans from the Commonwealth Development Corporation and the World Bank. The amount of land that could be purchased in this way was not, however, significant enough to equalise distribution, a feature that marks Kenya's economy to this day.

The first President, Jomo Kenyatta, has been accused of prioritising urban development and economic growth over rural concerns, especially issues of landlessness. Nevertheless, the new Government policy did aim to expand the small holders and prevent further purchase of land by foreign investors. For tea, its major cash crop, the Government sought to steer development by supporting small tea growers through various stages of production, processing and marketing (as it also did with coffee).

A major institutional change was the establishment of The Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) in 1964, which aimed to protect small holders. The KTDA quickly began to build state-owned tea factories which bought green tea leaf from the farmers and controlled the processing and marketing of this. In this way, the KTDA began to steer development towards establishing a niche for small holders in international tea markets that operate through auctions held in Mombassa and London. Since its founding days, the KTDA has also developed its own technological and research base to assist the small holders to increase production.

Under the shelter of KTDA, tea small holding schemes in Kenya have been incredibly successful in terms of production and integration into international markets. Tea production since independence has risen from 18,000 metric tons to 220,000 metric tons out of which production within the small holder sub-sector rose from a mere 1.7% to 59% (Nyangito and Kimura, 1999, p. 1). A recent management study attempting to emulate the Kenyan smallholder scheme Sivaram cited in The Daily News, Sri Lanka (2001) suggests that, ‘After just 30 years of commercial production, Kenya's tea industry has stolen a clear march over the conventional tea producers …’. Even the World Bank once described Kenya's attempts as the best exemplar for developing the small holder tea industry (NewsAfrica, 2001).

Since the 1990s however, there have been several important changes. A persistent nudge from the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programmes has pushed the government towards privatisation. Despite its attempts to continue protecting ‘strategic parastatals’, privatisation and restructuring of KTDA began in 1994. However, there was a strong feeling that the process excluded small holders and thus, privatisation was temporarily halted for six months in January 2000 until various consultations on how to involve small holders took place (The Financial Gazette, 2000).

It is argued that privatisation will lead to efficiency and finer management of tea production and marketing of green leaf (Nyangito and Kimura, 1999). Yet, it is too early to say what implications privatisation will have on the small tea holders of Kenya. However, there is growing concern for those who already live vulnerable lives. One of the major changes is that once again major shareholders rather than the KTDA or the smallholders can set the agenda. This includes the powerful multi-national Unilever which took over BrookeBond in 1984 and has acquired further vast tea plantations in Kenya (http://www.unilever.com). The land for these plantations has been obtained from the small holders, many of whom now have to work as labourers on tea estates that they previously owned. Small holder cooperatives are also experiencing difficulties in the face of multi-national competition, a factor contributing to further impoverishment of small tea farmers. Nevertheless, privatisation of the KTDA and minimising of the state's role currently remains inevitable.

The Kenya tea case study shows that the state can play an instrumental role in steering development. The state, however, needs to filter its ‘steering role’ through its many agencies which function at various levels, and this usually takes some time. Take, for example, the case study of Brazil's pursuit of better public services in Box 2 below. This is taken from the World Development Report (2003, p. 136) which draws its information from Tendler (1997).

Box 2: Steering public services development in Brazil

The state of Ceara in Brazil's poorest region, the northeast, was legendary for clientelism, patronage and poor public administration. In 1987 a newly elected reformist government, led by Tasso Jereissati, took the reins. Only a few years after the new government launched a public health programme, vaccination coverage for measles and polio had tripled to 90% of the child population and infant deaths had fallen from 102 per 1,000 infants to 65 per 1,000. How could a long tradition of clientelism and political opposition be overcome so rapidly? How did reputedly mediocre agencies deliver and sustain better performance spanning several years in administration? The governor of the state administration had to compel reluctant mayors to join the programme. Pressure on the mayors came from neighbouring municipos that had joined the program, and from an unusual and unending flurry of publicity through radio and other means. By creating an informed and demanding community, the state had initiated a dynamic in which mayors saw political rewards for supporting the programme. In doing so the government contributed to replacing the old patronage dynamic with a more service-oriented one, exploiting an opportunity as a strong third party to improve municipal accountability.

(World Bank, 2003, p. 136)

Box 2 illustrates that the steering of various aspects of development may be initiated by the state but it is often necessary to filter it through various levels of society. If, however, the state's role is undermined for whatever reason (for example, privatisation of Kenyan tea), what happens? As Allen and Thomas (2000) point out, ‘The apparent erosion of state capacities has highlighted the issue of what other kinds of actors might try to respond to aspirations of social well-being’ (p. 199). These include NGOs and other organisations who can also act as ‘trustees’ of development, acting to pick up the pieces of both state and/or market failures.

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2.7 Public action as enabling immanent development

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Now let us turn to the idea of how public action can enable development within the framework of immanent development. Thomas (2000, p. 25) defines immanent development as meaning a ‘spontaneous and unconscious’ process of development from within, which may entail ‘destruction of the old order to achieve the new …’ The role of ‘development’ here is to be understood within the immanent process of capitalist development, and therefore the most important agents of development are individual entrepreneurs. The state, however, has re-emerged from the old days of the 1980s and early 1990s of being ‘rolled’ back; it is now the key provider of an enabling framework for immanent development.

Much has been written about enabling capitalist development within the former socialist economies of Eastern Europe, collectively known as the transitional economies (i.e. they are undergoing a transition to capitalism). Also, there is much current debate as to whether or not China – still under Communist Party political control – is in fact undergoing a transition to capitalism. To enable capitalist development in these economies, the state has to build up basic infrastructural services, capacities and means by which to support private enterprise. For instance, water supply, electricity and raw materials need to be more easily and readily available. In a competitive market, private business cannot function efficiently if it runs out of raw materials or has to request them through state distribution systems that are lengthy and require much administration. ‘Red tape’ – too much needless bureaucracy – has to be cut through and new systems pioneered to promote change of practices.

Private ownership also means institutional changes, for example, government or legal institutions that will draw up contracts and define property rights. A change of employment relations will also generate further institutional changes. For instance, the worker moving from a state-owned to a private enterprise will still be concerned with employment protection and health and safety measures, and may seek these through setting up of trade unions or other such bodies. A private employer on the other hand may seek support from business alliances and so on. The crucial point here is that the setting up of these practices and supportive institutions enables a more systematic rule-based system under which private enterprise can operate with abroad consent from society. A haphazard, uncontrolled (unruly) development may lead to all kinds of exploitative practices, social unrest and criminal activity that might actually undermine the legitimacy of private enterprise and therefore be disabling.

Enabling development within the framework of immanent development can face considerable constraints. Some of these concern the resistance to change from powerful existing institutions, especially if such institutions stand to be transformed by the changes. But constraints also arise from a variety of factors including historical mismanagement of resources and the environment; histories of regional, ethnic tensions; attitudinal factors; and state capacities to respond to changes. In considering the mismanagement of the Aral Sea basin in the former Soviet Central Asia, Spoor (1998) advises environmental management strategies that may be more familiar to market-led economies of the western world. (See Allen and Thomas, 2000, p. 145, Box 7.2 for an account of the Aral Sea crisis.)

One of Spoor's arguments is that the transitional economies of central Asia continue to regard water as ‘God given’, which is why it is not used as efficiently as it can be. In echoing neo-liberal views of environmental management, Spoor suggests that one of the problems is that ‘water remains either free, or symbolically priced’ (1998, p. 413). The solution is to create socially acceptable policies such as investment in new smaller-scale, more efficient irrigation systems, along with the introduction of ‘tradable water rights’, water pricing and pollution charges. Spoor also calls for a change in the political will of the Central Asian leadership in negotiating regional conflicts over water and suggests that ‘Civil society environmental organisations could play an important part here, but at the moment the role of such organisations is minimal; in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan particularly, they are struggling to emerge and have little influence on the still powerful state structures’ (p. 424).

As well as discussing the enabling of development, Spoor in his article also advocates a larger role for civil society organisations such as NGOs, for example, The Association of Environmentally Clean Fergana and the Women of Aral, who were active in Uzbekistan when he wrote this article. But I think implicit in his definition of ‘civil society’ and a much larger role for NGOs are international environmental NGOs. However, is there not a danger in lumping together the interests and agendas of the ‘civil society’? Will these differing groups form a consensus on what their role will be, and how they will meet this?

Changes towards a market system, no matter how embryonic, therefore require new attitudes and a re-evaluation of how best to make market reform strategies and policies workable and ruly. As discussed at the start of this sub-section, such changes in turn generate a need for new institutions, and a review of what practices may best deliver growth.

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2.8 Public action as contesting development

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

In this section, we will attempt to explore public action that involves contesting development of capitalism. The role of ‘development’ here includes individual and group empowerment, which often occurs during the process, contesting capitalist development as people come together and begin to organise around ‘social movements’. Yanacopulos (2002, p. 10) defines social movements in this way:

While NGOs have been receiving a great deal of attention in the development literature, social movement organisations (SMOs) have also been important players in development, and are a part of the association revolution. SMOs are typically formed to promote specific social changes, traditionally involving localised collective action. Within a development context, they sometimes articulate an alternative vision of development to that which is currently taking place in the local area. Social movements are often both locally focused and are action to issues which have a wider ‘global’ purchase. Their battles have usually been fought at local and national levels and often their utilisation of technology has been difficult (and remains so) as they are generally comprised of localised and marginalised groups. However, in recent years there have been movements that have successfully taken their cause outside of their local area or state – such as the Narmada Dam movement, the Zapatista … These transnational social movements have been effective in identifying the importance of solidarity groups outside of their country, and have a network of supporters internationally.
… In fact these cases are well established in the global discourse on environmental challenges. Some of these specifically challenge particular development projects such as the building of mega-dams (e.g. the Narmada and Chico dam movements). Others emerge as protest around threats to local resources, focusing on issues such as deforestation through commercial activities and the land speculation that often goes hand-in-hand with growth-led policies (e.g. Chipko; Rubber Tapper; Ogoni movement). Yet others revolve around the issues of ‘political rights to lives and livelihoods’; rights to information; participation; and to access and use of resources (Zapatista Rebellion; Green Belt movement). These movements have encompassed mass protests, campaigns and lobbying; expansion of local and global networks and organisational tactics; active challenges to the ‘ruling’ class and urban or industrial development; and a demand for ‘people-centered’ development. There is rapidly growing literature and voluminous information on the Internet on any of the ‘popular cases’ listed above.
(Yanacopulos, 2002, p. 10)

Activity 4 will allow you to apply the tripartite framework to a real-world context.

Activity 4: Steering, enabling and contesting development

Please watch the ‘Funny Money’ video clips linked below and answer the following questions.

How effective has the Argentinean state been in steering development in Argentina and Quilmes?
In what ways has the enabling mechanism of capitalist immanent development faltered in Argentina, giving rise to the ‘new poor’?
What other kind of actor is trying to respond to the growing public need?
How is social currency different from the Argentinean peso, and how does it contest capitalist immanent development and the failure of the Argentinean Government to steer intentional development?

Click to view the video clip (9 minutes).

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Funny money (Part 1)

Transcript

Click to view the video clip (12 minutes).

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Funny money (Part 2)

Transcript

Click to view the video clip (7 minutes).

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Funny money (Part 3)

Transcript

Discussion

Set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this video clip shows how the state is failing to steer development and has all but relinquished this role. The economic collapse in Argentina has been tackled by the state putting in place measures to further prop up the market mechanism, rather than effectively focusing on intervention to ameliorate the casualties of capitalist immanent development. It looks at how rising unemployment among blue- and white-collar workers has led to social exclusion for many, including the middle-classes. To escape this social exclusion, many have become involved in a barter club to help themselves. The barter club is a social movement to respond to the failure of the state to provide jobs and economic security for the people, and seeks to re-embed the market in social relations.

The market is the enabling engine of development in Argentina, but it is also failing to deliver economic growth. The social movement of the barter club is contesting both the lack of steering by the state, and the failure of the market mechanism and the private sector to deliver development in the form of economic growth. As such, it is pioneering an alternative. The barter club has been so successful that the Argentinean Government is looking at ways to integrate it into the mainstream economy, talking about the possibilities of people paying taxes through credits. As such, the social movement has not only contested the lack of direction of the state and the activities of the private sector, but is also steering and enabling development directly.

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2.9 Section summary and conclusion

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Summary

For analytical purposes, we can categorise development action into steering, enabling and contesting development.
Development alongside capitalism can be categorised as steering. Steering development can also be thought of in terms of interventionism.
Enabling development strives to provide a framework in which immanent capitalist development can occur in a ruly way.
Contesting development generally arises through social movements which create ‘alternative organisations’, and which often ‘scale-up’ local struggles across transnational boundaries.
For all three (steering, enabling and contesting) categories of action, some commonalties can be identified even though the actors of development action consist of a hugely diverse range of people and organisations. Thus, despite the variance in the meanings and practice of development, here appears to be convergence in identifying some common global language.
All development action is, nevertheless, mediated by context and therefore there is also much divergence in how development is understood and practised.
Despite adopting a common language, varied development agents have different agendas and values. Northern agencies continue to dominate and retain control and power through the imposition of conditionalities and drawing up terms of trade. There are many areas of challenge to this dominance, however, that do affect the nature of conditionalities.

Conclusion

We began this section by considering the current global context of huge social and economic changes within which to place questions of development action and practice. To do this, we used the three analytical categories of looking at development in relation to the development of capitalism, i.e. action as steering, enabling and contesting development. In reality, there are complex overlaps between these categories, which means that any analysis of development action has to be holistic.

We have shown that responses to the development of capitalism have varied considerably according to their historical, social and economic contexts. There are, however, generalisations that can be drawn. These are that:

a global trend towards a market-led economy has sharpened the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in both the industrialised rich countries and the economically lesser developed countries;
the role of the state in development has been challenged through the dominance of global market ideologies, and whilst the state continues to hold its position as a primary agent of development, its role has changed;
transformation in other directions, particularly that of new technology, has provided opportunities for people at all levels to participate in development action across transnational boundaries.

People caught up in these changes have responded in several ways. This section has shown how they have either taken on capitalist development by embracing private enterprise; have lost out as markets have opened up the economy and privatised public services; or have attempted to challenge dominant power relations actively (for themselves or on behalf of the global ‘others’). This has meant that a huge number of diverse groups and organisations have converged around various issues that are felt will benefit all. These include ‘common causes’ such as environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, indebtedness of developing countries, human rights and so on. It also would appear that there is a general agreement that development action that takes up these issues should be inclusive and democratic. Therefore terms such as ‘participation’, ‘civil society’ and ‘good governance’ are high on the agenda of highly varied organisations.

But while there is an emerging common language, there is nevertheless considerable divergence in the meanings attributed to ‘participation’, ‘good governance’, ‘civil society’, and to the actual practice of development itself. This divergence reflects the interests, agendas and institutional values of various groups (from NGOs to financial institutions). Negotiations between differing organisations and institutions active in ‘doing’ development take place constantly, and often draw on this shared language. Yet ultimately, the outcome has to be understood within the framework of power relations. There is little doubt that dominant ‘development’ institutions (such as the World Bank, IMF) have faced challenges, even challenges from people who they never expected to contest their agendas (e.g. the Narmada dam movement that gave voices to thousands of poor, illiterate people). Nevertheless conditionality, no matter how gently defined, remains a powerful weapon in shaping prescriptive development action – development as others would like it to happen.

To end, this section has traced some of the ways in which the discourse on public action and policy making for action on development has taken shape over recent years. The concepts and ideas introduced here will also act as starting points toward courses on development management and allow you to reflect on your own practice.

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3.1 Introduction

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

As our look at Development: context and practice showed, lives and livelihoods for many of the world's population are precarious and fraught with seemingly intractable problems exacerbated by poverty, war, exclusion, and continued and growing disparities in the global distribution of economic power. Public policy makers in and around governments have had a chequered history of coping with such problems. International bodies such as the United Nations and international development banks have been hugely influential, but not necessarily more successful. New actors and relationships in the field of development have made their appearance. New ways of disbursing aid and promoting change have emerged.

Getting to grips with this troubled and fast-changing landscape, understanding its dynamics, and working to make a difference for the better are the central tasks of the development manager. In this section we focus on development management and the role of the development manager. You will have an opportunity to share in the challenges of development management, making use of your own experience and perspective. Establishing that link between your experience and the academic discourse around development management is a central concern of our Development Management Programme as a whole.

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3.2 Managing development: professional and personal challenge

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Whatever your background, it is likely that what has brought you to this unit is an interest in, a concern for, the ‘troubled and fast-changing landscape’ I referred to in the previous section. Such an interest, such a concern, can be driven by diverse motives, and you might find it interesting to spend a few minutes thinking about what guides your interest in the development arena. Is it a particular vision of social justice? A specific political position? A commercial interest? Religious beliefs or values? An interest in a particular place or issue?

Reflection

How do you identify yourself? What interests or values shape and frame your engagement with development?

Whatever lies behind your interest in development, our intention is to help you gain a greater understanding of the concepts and practical skills necessary to better cope with the complexities of that ‘troubled and fast-changing landscape’, the concepts and skills of development management (DM).

You may have a good idea yourself what DM is or you may only have a very vague notion of what you think it is. As a starting point for engaging with debates about DM, it is helpful to hear from a range of people about the work they do and the range of activities they engage in.

Activity 5

Watch the video entitled ‘Challenging development managers’, linked below. In this short video you will be introduced to a range of development managers working on rural development initiatives in the UK and India. You will hear their perspectives on what their roles involve and the challenges they face in their daily work.

As you watch the video clip, reflect on your own experience and how you approach the challenges of managing development in the context of your own work or similar activities. What skills and understanding do you already employ in your work, and what would further enhance your capacities to manage development?

Click to view the video clip (10 minutes).

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Challenging development managers

Transcript

Answer

Discussion

The experiences described in the video are certainly not exhaustive of what constitutes the arena of DM. Yet they do capture some of the key activities and practical and conceptual challenges faced by those attempting to manage development. And they highlight some of the key skills and capacities that development managers require.

A key issue emerging from the video is recognition of the different values and interests that drive development managers and influence the approaches adopted to processes of intervention. Is there, then, any agreement as to what development management is?

It is likely that there would be some agreement that development management is:

The management of intervention aimed at external social goals in a context of value-based conflict.
(Thomas, 1996)

The key terms here might be paraphrased as:

Intervention: influencing social processes rather than using resources to meet goals directly.
External social goals: actions directed outside an organisation rather than internal to the organisation, with people as the raison d'etre of such goals.
Value-based conflict: such conflict derives from different conceptions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ and different interests.

Implicit in these concepts is the importance of viewing development policy as process, where the policy process is affected by a multiplicity of interests among state and non-state actors. Which of these, or combination of these, comes to have the greatest influence on policies is an outcome of the balance of power. In this context, the task of the development manager is essentially to negotiate his or her way through the power relationships.

Differing levels of access to resources and power amongst the different actors involved fundamentally affects the nature and impact of their interaction. The concept of ‘public action’ has been used to describe the terrain of DM as comprising many different actors, goals and interests. What do we mean by public action?

By public action we mean purposive collective action, whether for collective private ends or for public ends (however defined). By the public sphere we mean the arena of such public action from parliaments to public demonstrations, passing through the media, trades union activity and voluntary associations for mutual assistance.
(Mackintosh, 1992, p. 5)

‘Public’ in the sense that Mackintosh adopts covers a very wide range of institutions, not only government institutions. The ‘public’ will include, for example, governments, aid agencies, NGOs, community groups, collectives and political movements. Each of these includes a wide range of different types of institution.

From this view, DM moves away from policy implementation in any rigid sense to activities that involve the steering and facilitation of interventions wherever they may originate. This implies thinking beyond organisational boundaries to look at the wider arena in which efforts to promote development and change are being made, and to recognise the importance of building relationships.

This may challenge you to think about your own work, if you currently operate within an organisation with a strong internal focus to its work. Or it may offer a useful framework for thinking about inter-organisational working that you already engage in.

Within this framework of ‘public action’, development management encompasses a range of activities:

direct implementation of projects and provision of services;
funding of initiatives;
coordinating the action of a range of organisations;
advising on policy change;
evaluating the use of funds/impact of intervention;
advocacy in wider political and public arenas.

All of these constitute ‘interventions’ in the sense of attempts to bring about positive change. And in all of them, development managers face a variety of challenges, amongst them:

How can interventions be managed in a way that allows flexibility to respond to change, while still keeping focused on longer-term strategic interests?
Who should participate in processes of directing and implementing change? Whose voices should be heard? ‘Participation’ these days tends to be taken as a self-evidently ‘good thing’. But is it? And, if so, how is it to be secured given powerful forces working against it?
What can be done about inequality? To what extent should efforts to transform inequalities be conducted within existing institutional frameworks and the established order? And to what extent can development managers seek to challenge broader sources of inequality?
How do development managers know what to do, and how can they be sure their efforts are having the planned impact? How do they gather the necessary information? And how can they work in situations where much may be ‘unknown’?
With competing demands on resources, how can development managers define the boundaries of their intervention and action? Organisational priorities and particular visions of development can be useful in defining a focus for intervention. But they can also constrain opportunities for working across sectors or exploring potentially innovative approaches to working.

Cutting across all these challenges are questions of: how development is defined; how to engage with conflicting values and interests; how to engage with contexts characterised by diversity and complexity; and how to strike a balance between action and reflection.

Reflection

Where and how do you encounter these challenges, which are both professional and personal? How do you manage them?

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3.3 Development management in the twenty-first century

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Section 3.3 homes in on efforts to reframe DM at the start of the twenty-first century. It highlights the blurring of boundaries between the approaches adopted by development actors, such as the state, NGOs and private sector organisations, as well as ongoing tensions and contradictions in interests and actions.

Three changes are particularly important:

The tendency to pretend that the state has disappeared or, if not, is by definition a barrier to development, has been largely sidelined. Instead, there is recognition that the state is still a key agency in development and DM, albeit in a reformed way. There is, for example, greater recognition of the multiplicity of the state, notably in the context of de-centralisation efforts and of the role of quasi-markets and contracts as features of state operating modalities.
Given the use of markets, and market ‘solutions’ to improving economic growth and the provision of services, private sector companies and businesses can also be seen as making a contribution to ‘development’. Debates about the relative merits of promoting ‘trade’ or ‘aid’ remain heated at a global level. Juggling social and economic goals (promoting ‘corporate social responsibility’) is an increasing concern within the world of business and commerce. There is also increasing focus on the ability of development efforts to be self-sustaining through becoming ‘social enterprises’.
There has always been a wide variety reflecting the heterogeneity of a given society, but it is only in recent years that different agencies have become so intertwined. What is key now to understanding DM is the inter-relation of agencies, including NGOs, community groups and other civil society players.

How have those working in the development arena responded to these changes? How do changing relations between state/private sector/civil society impact on approaches to DM? On the one hand, you can highlight areas of convergence in rhetoric and practice of different sectors: concerns with participation, listening, accountability and sustainability have become almost ubiquitous. On the other hand, there remain differences in approach and in how values translate into management practices.

You can explore this pattern of convergence and divergence in the following activity.

Activity 6

Read the case study by Ann le Mare (2006) ‘Belfast travellers: a case study of the provision of housing and services for the travelling community in Belfast’, linked below.

This activity provides you with an opportunity to engage with the details of a specific set of development concerns and explore how different actors were (and were not) involved in interventions to promote change.

As you explore the material, make notes in response to the following questions:

What are the main problems faced by the travellers?
Who are the key actors in this case? What types of activities are they engaged with?
Can you identify particular interests and approaches adopted by state, NGOs and the private sector?
What challenges does this case pose for development managers seeking to promote opportunities for travellers?

Click below to view the article (0.03 MB).

Discussion

Discussion:

A range of development concerns are identified in the case study, including housing issues, health and education, and the development of economic opportunities. The specific problems stem from the marginalisation of travellers within the broader society. With the focus of development efforts in Northern Ireland largely on tackling Protestant/Catholic divisions, travellers' concerns appear well down on the political agenda, despite evidence of their relative disadvantage (see p. 7).

A range of different organisations are involved in initiatives to provide housing and other services to travellers, which you could broadly categorise as state, NGO (or voluntary sector) and private sector interests. What is striking is the diversity of groups within each category. For example, NGO groups exhibited diverse interests and were often in competition with each other for funding (a position ameliorated to some extent by the formation of a new organisation An Munia Tober).

You also see examples of the blurring of boundaries. For example, formal partnership arrangements have been developed to facilitate interaction between different layers of government (from the European Union to District Councils), the voluntary sector, trade unions and local businesses. However, more does appear to need to be done to extend the benefits of this cross-boundary organisational working to the needs of travellers, who remain largely excluded from participation in such forums.

The implications of this kind of example for managers are that there can be no expectation of straightforward implementation of policy in a complex and contested multi-agency setting. Despite policy commitments to promoting participation and inclusion, it cannot be assumed that this will translate directly into defined actions.

Managers (in whatever type of organisation) will need to be aware of the diversity of interests and relationships that impact on practices on the ground, power imbalances, and competing political and economic interests.

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3.4 Managing development: tools and approaches

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

In Sections 3.5 to 3.7, we look at a small selection of the means – the tools and the approaches – by which development managers go about their business: investigating, or finding out; understanding, where we focus on visioning; and participation, where we look at an approach which stresses the need to be inclusive in development interventions.

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3.5 Tools and approaches: investigating

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Knowing what information to collect, how to analyze it, and how to present it in order to make a case are not simply ‘inputs’ to a project, but are vital political resources in effecting change. In order both to contribute to policy and development and to share in the evaluation of developmental change, development managers need to make use of a whole range of investigative skills. Here we look at just one set of skills developed in a different discipline (journalism), but of immense value to development managers, who in the nature of things cannot be full-time investigators but do need to investigate.

Activity 7

Read Joseph Hanlon's article ‘Grabbing Attention’, linked below. As you read, think about what Hanlon identifies as the key stages in an investigation.

Click below to view the article (0.03 MB).

Discussion

Discussion:

The four stages identified by Hanlon are:

throw the net wider or ‘find the woman who knows’;
redefine the question and select the key issue;
discard and deepen;
write the report to have the desired result.

This is an extremely rich article and there is much in all four steps that is relevant for investigations carried out by development managers. In the process of ‘finding the woman who knows’, note that there may be several such women, and they may be found in all sorts of contexts, although those who have local knowledge may be of particular value. But it's not just women (or people) who provide information. Hanlon stresses the importance of giving equal weight to ‘people and paper’ in the early stages of the investigation. Once you've made this initial trawl you may well need to widen the net. This means being open to contributions from new informants, which may lead to extending the boundaries of the investigation and/or challenging initial assumptions in the light of new knowledge. Once you have defined the key issues, you can discard irrelevant information.

Finally, you need to make sure you include, and respond to, the other side(s) of the argument. This is not only to prove your rigour and lack of bias, but can be a powerful means of making a more convincing argument. This leads to the final issue that you need to consider carefully – your presentation and communications method, most obviously in relation to writing a report.

All this is an intensely political process in which different ‘truths’ are contested. This means information does not ‘speak for itself’, but rather political savvy and good communication help to get issues to the top of the agenda.

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3.6 Tools and approaches: understanding

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

We are now going to look at one of the many possible ways of organising information in ways that provide an effective guide to action. No one tool can be said to provide the ‘correct’ or ‘best’ way of analysing a situation. They all have their uses, and using more than one will often be valuable in providing alternative perspectives that enrich our understanding of the situation.

Visioning is a consensus-building tool, and a way of thinking about the future that is not ‘problem-centred’. It is a group-based tool where people respond as individuals to envision how they would like their situation to be at a time in the future. There is then a group reflection of the alternatives and priorities, with the ultimate goal being a negotiated common vision of the future.

The big advantage is that it encourages creativity and ‘lateral thinking’ in considering possible futures. People's ideas are not constrained by the suggestions of ‘experts’. It can be done in a way that recognises power differences and gives the dis-empowered a voice, for example, by working first in groups which represent different interest groups, and then bringing the groups together.

In the box below a member of the Development Management Programme team describes the experience of being involved in a visioning process.

Box 3: A vision for the future of the West Amazonia Biosphere Reserve (WABR)

Biosphere reserves aim to provide an institutional framework for achieving the integration of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development objectives, which are seen as complementary. At the centre of the WABR is the West Amazonia National Park. It covers a large area of pristine rainforest, most of which is inhabited only by indigenous tribes-people, many of whom have little or no contact with the outside world. The area is legally protected, but despite this it is under pressure from encroachment by farmers who have settled around the Park boundaries. The Amazonia Project was a project run by a large South American NGO which aimed to support the conservation of the biodiversity of West Amazonia National Park and at the same time contribute to sustainable livelihoods among the population of the biosphere reserve.

When I first got involved with the project, it was already into its second phase, and there was a feeling that project staff were becoming overwhelmed with the volume of day-to-day work and in danger of losing sight of the wider goals of the project. Moreover the number and variety of activities seemed to be growing in an unplanned way. In an attempt to deal with these problems, it was decided to undertake a major mid-term review of the project with the participation of project field staff.

We decided to initiate the process with a participatory visioning exercise in a workshop held with project staff, who came from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and included both local people and academics from universities in the capital. In this way we hoped to be able to develop a collective vision of the future of the park and the surrounding area to orientate the future activities of the project.

The basic technique we employed was a simple one, but in fact it took us quite a long time – nearly a whole day – to work through the process. At the start, the participants in the workshop were asked to imagine the area in ten years time, and write down on cards things they would like to see. We ended up with about fifty cards, some of them very down to earth, others with very imaginative ideas for the future of the area. We pinned all these cards on the wall, without attempting to evaluate the content or to discard, and set about ordering them into ‘sets’ that grouped together similar ideas.

For the second stage of the process the participants were divided into small groups and each group was given a few sets of cards and asked to write one card which summarised the ideas in each set. We then repeated the process, finally arriving at a summary of a vision on six cards, as follows:

maintenance of biological and cultural diversity of West Amazonia;
appropriate management of the national park and land-use zoning of the biosphere reserve to achieve biodiversity conservation objectives;
local governments implement sustainable development plans produced in collaboration with local people and institutions;
different social groups in the area maintain their cultural identity, understand the importance of conserving natural resources and have the capacity to do so;
sustainable management of natural resources provides social, economic and ecological stability to the population of West Amazonia;
provision of basic services improves the quality of life of men and women in West Amazonia.

Finally, we all sat down together and tried to write one card that summarised our collective vision for the future of West Amazonia, and agreed on the following:

The West Amazonia Biosphere Reserve is a model of conservation, sustainable development and local participation in the Amazon region, which guarantees biodiversity, the well-being of its inhabitants and the cultural identity of its peoples.

We probably could have arrived at a similar formulation much more quickly, without going through all the work with the cards. But we felt the process of thinking about the future together was also a valuable team-building exercise.

The West Amazonia case shows how, for a group of project staff, the visioning exercise enabled them to identify core issues and to allocate responsibilities to them. This helped them clarify their purpose and build a team ethos.

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3.7 Tools and approaches: being inclusive

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Interest in promoting inclusion of potential beneficiaries, particularly ‘the poor’, has come to characterise the approach taken across sectors and types of organisation in both the North and South, and could be interpreted as heralding a significant shift in the focus and priorities of development agencies and institutions, a new orthodoxy. From the promotion of local-level NGO initiatives to engage multiple stakeholders and listen to local voices, through the use of participatory tools and practices to the World Bank's emphasis on the ‘participatory’ dynamics that underpinned the development of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, the discourse of inclusion and empowerment can be seen informing action across the development arena.

However, if you look behind the rhetorical similarities to how terms are applied and interpreted, the picture becomes somewhat more complex and contested. As Cornwall notes:

Participation in development has gained a new respectability and legitimacy, and with it the status of development orthodoxy. For some, the proliferation of the language of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ within the mainstream is heralded as the realisation of a long-awaited paradigm shift in development thinking. For others, however, there is less cause for celebration. Their concerns centre on the use of participation as a legitimating device that draws on the moral authority of claims to involve the poor to place the pursuit of other agendas beyond reproach. According to this perspective, much of what is hailed as ‘participation’ is a mere technical fix that leaves inequitable global and local relations of power, and with it root causes of poverty, unchallenged.
(Cornwall, 2003, p. 15)

Interest in promoting participation is framed in relation to a range of concerns. For some, it is a question of social justice and the ‘reversal’ of existing power differentials and inequalities (e.g. Chambers, 1983, 1997), for some a matter of efficiency and effectiveness. Links between the promotion of wider inclusion in projects, programmes and processes and the reduction of poverty are also made. Importantly, these concepts are not confined to development or DM, but are found in a wide range of public and private organisations.

Participatory approaches have also achieved prominence over the last thirty years in investigating and designing interventions. The argument for participatory approaches is that they are more ‘empowering’ and give the beneficiaries a direct stake in the direction and running of a project. But what does this actually mean? And what issues does it raise?

It may mean a quite radical rethinking of what a project is about and what its goals are. It certainly means finding out what is important for people. This requires approaches that are qualitative and personalised. These can take a lot of time, as you not only have to find people willing to discuss such issues, but sitting down for an hour or more may be too much given their busy schedules. Such problems could be overcome by interviewing while doing another task, such as food preparation, or respondents could be paid for their time.

A different kind of problem arises in relation to who gets included. Even amongst the ‘marginalised’ as a whole, some groups are more accessible than others. They may not be representative. Seeking less accessible groups out may take special effort since their lack of power or confidence means they may purposefully absent themselves from any consultations. This might mean visiting their homes, but this in turn creates problems of access and ethical issues around investigating poverty or unemployment.

There are other pitfalls in seeking to enhance participation. Even the most sensitive and appropriate participatory approach needs some form of ‘translation’ into policy circles, which is where the development manager often plays a pivotal and powerful role. The challenge is how to ensure that the voices of the marginalised are expressed in ways that do not empty them of meaning. Such exercises can also raise false hopes, since they often ask participants to discuss problems, but lack of resources or institutional barriers mean that these cannot be adequately addressed. Participation can also be time-consuming as it requires people to be directly involved in affairs that affect them. In principle, you can fully support participation and direct democracy, but often lack the time and energy to do as much as you would like.

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3.8 The development manager as advocate: making a case

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Advocacy work has become the latest enthusiasm for most agencies involved in international aid and development. Over the past decade NGOs have dedicated more resources and given a higher priority to influencing and advocacy work at all levels (local, national and international).
(Coates and David, 2002, p. 530)

I cannot hope to do justice to the range and complexity of activities that make up this ‘latest enthusiasm’. But I hope you will get a sense of both the passion and the politics that are at the heart of advocacy.

The reasons for the heightened significance of advocacy are many and complex, but they include the sense that projects have failed to deliver development in the anticipated fashion, and a consequent interest in work that explicitly addresses the structural causes of poverty and that seeks change at the level of policy. These two concerns, to work on causes of poverty and to change policy, are reflected in the following definitions of advocacy:

Seeking with, and on behalf of, the poor to address underlying causes of poverty, bring justice, and support good development through influencing the policies and practices of the powerful.
(Tearfund, 2002)

Advocacy is speaking out against injustice and influencing decision makers to change policies that cause inequality and suffering … What the process involves is not defined, but it must include education of either the powerful or the powerless.
(World Vision International, 2006)

Various typologies have been devised to convey the many ways in which these concerns are turned into the practice of advocacy. Below we present two, both to convey the range and diversity and to enable you to identify and get in mind examples of advocacy with which you are familiar.

Table 2: Three approaches to advocacy

Approach to advocacy	Advocacy FOR those affected by a situation	Advocacy WITH those affected by a situation	Advocacy BY those affected by a situation
Advocacy work done by	Professionals, NGOs	A mixture of professionals, NGOs, local community groups	Local community workers
Main objectives for intervention	Change in law, policy or practice	Increased access to decision-making; change in law, policy or practice; build advocacy capacity of those affected by situation	Increase in awareness of advocacy possibilities and capacity to do advocacy
Characteristics	Issues often identified by outsiders; usually targeted at official decision-makers	Issues identified by community; shared planning, resources and action; outside organisers mobilise capacity	Issues identified by community; learning by involvement; may have significant outside input at start
Advantages	Quick access to decision-makers; good access to information about wider context	Increase access of poor to decision-makers; advocacy skills and capacity developed	Empowering – poor see themselves as agents of change; sustainable; can correct power imbalance
Disadvantages	Could strengthen existing power structures; may not increase the capacity of local groups to act	NGO often in control and sets agenda; slower due to need for agreement between all parties	Access to fewer resources and information; risk of revenge; policy change may take longer

(Tearfund, 2002, Advocacy Toolkit) ©

Tearfund (2002), ‘Advocacy Toolkit: Understanding Advocacy’

You will notice that judgments are being made here, about advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. That is a reminder that judgments have to be made over the type of advocacy that is appropriate, a subject of interest throughout Section 3, and one we will focus on at the end. You will also notice something of the politics of advocacy, politics both in terms of relations between those involved in the advocacy and in terms of impact on policy. The latter is taken up in the next typology.

Table 3: Framework for understanding possible outcomes and impact of advocacy and campaigning work

Dimension of work	Intermediate objectives	Longer-term objectives
1. Policy change	Increased dialogue; raised profile of issue; changed opinion (whose?); changed rhetoric (in public/private); change in written publications	Changed policy; change in legislation; change in resource allocation; policy/legislation change implemented; (and in the very long term) positive change in people's lives as a result of the policy/legislation change
2. Strengthening civil society by working with individual organisations and networks	Change in individual members' skills, capacity, knowledge and effectiveness? Change in individual civil groups' capacity, organisational skills, effectiveness? Greater synergy of aims/activities in networks/movements; change in collaboration, trustor unity of civil society groups	Increased effectiveness of civil society work; civil groups active in influencing decision makers in ways that will benefit poor people; civil groups monitoring implementation of policies/programmes; partnerships and networks effective and sustainable
3. Supporting people-centred policy making	Greater awareness of individual rights and the power systems that withhold rights; change in local people's skills, capacity and knowledge to mobilise on their own behalves; increased reporting of rights violations; existence of system to monitor rights; claims made by CBOs for enforcing rights	Improved access to basic rights such as health, housing, water, food, non-discrimination
4. Enlarging democratic space or the space in which civil society groups can effectively operate in society	Greater freedom of expression; greater acceptance/ recognition of civil groups; existence of forums for civil groups to input into a wide range of decisions; increased legitimacy of civil society groups	Increased participation of civil society groups in influencing decisions; change in accountability and transparency of public institutions

(Chapman, J., 2002, Monitoring and evaluating advocacy) ©

Chapman, J. (2002), ‘Monitoring and evaluating advocacy’, PLA Notes, Vol. 43, pp. 48–52, International Institute for Environment and Development.

You will by now possibly be overwhelmed by the range of undertakings that can be described as advocacy and by the number of outcomes and impacts that are intended. So it would be worthwhile to stand back and consider what holds all these diverse types of advocacy together. If one thing unites them it is that they all entail a process of engagement between the advocates and decision-making agencies. That is at the heart of advocacy.

The skill we looked at earlier, the skill of investigation, is fundamental to the success or failure of this process of engagement. In making a case, there is a need to find out as much as possible about who the people are who have power to make decisions about that case, how those with the power to make decisions might react to the case, what arguments are likely to appeal to them, and how they are best engaged with. There is also a need to find out as much as possible about what change is needed, why it is needed, what is most likely to work, and what the impact of a particular approach may be, before seeking to make the case and act on it.

It will be clear that investigation is not just about gathering knowledge. It also has a strongly political function. It is about building relationships and testing people out, in order to influence them and bring about change in policy and practice.

Mayer (2007) makes two important points about the politics of presenting evidence: Although the concept of ‘evidence-based policy making’ sounds logical and non-contentious, the implication that by having the evidence the ‘right’ answer will emerge can conceal many value judgments, political preferences and assumptions. This is because many questions about ‘what evidence’ and ‘what to do when evidence is lacking’ demand social, economic and political judgments to be made. While evidence alone may not be the answer, good quality evidence used in the right context can help gain influence for a position and, most importantly, give it the necessary substance to gather support. (Mayer, 2007, p. 254)

In short, evidence will not ‘simply speak for itself’ (p. 272) (or simply will not speak for itself), but it is worth making it ‘speak’ as persuasively as possible.

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3.9 The development manager as advocate: making a case against

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Advocacy is not just about proposing change. It can also be about opposing change. By way of drawing your look at development management to an active conclusion, the following activity gives you the opportunity to make a case against a real-world development. The Insect Resistant Maize for Africa (IRMA) Project, a project based in Kenya, is designed to address the issue of food security in Africa using genetically modified (GM) maize.

Activity 8

Read Seife Ayele's (2006) ‘IRMA: a case study of a science- and technology-based intervention to reduce hunger’, linked below.

Imagine you are a campaigning NGO opposing the IRMA project. Using the reading and other material that you can find, think about what kind of case you could build up against this intervention.

As regards the material to use, note that Ayele cites various websites that you should find useful. He also mentions individuals and groups opposed to the IRMA intervention. You might look on the internet for material about them. Beyond this, you should use keywords from the debate presented in the reading to guide your search, noting also the Kenyan (or east African) location of the intervention.

You will need to think about your own position, the perspective from which you are going to challenge the intervention (though note that your perspective may change as you build the case). You will also need to think about whom you will address your case to. One possibility is the Kenyan Government. Another is IRMA itself, any or all of the members of the partnership. And there may be other NGOs, and other agencies, who are potential allies in your campaign and whom you should seek to engage.

This is an activity that could potentially take up a lot of time! I recommend that you spend no more than two hours on it. It is also an activity that is likely to generate different processes and ‘products’. I will not try to anticipate these in the discussion, but present an overview of the key issues that occurred to me when I did the activity.

Click below to view the article (0.05 MB).

Discussion

Discussion:

Though this is not the ‘real thing’, I hope that you had some sense of the experience Mayer is referring to when she writes that: ‘Finding innovative ways to give voice to concerns not usually heeded by those in power is one of the exciting and enjoyable things to do with evidence’ (Mayer, 2007, p. 274). Certainly, I found it fascinating to look at the kinds of arguments being put forward by, for example, GMWatch, and by people speaking on behalf of poor farmers, and at the complex politics surrounding the introduction of GM crops, not only in Kenya but in other East African countries such as Uganda. I also found it important to try and get ‘into the minds’ of promoters of GMO, such as Syngenta, not least because to make the case against intervention it is crucial to appreciate the case for the intervention.

Having done this I worked through a range of issues. I appreciate that the range of responses to this activity is likely to be great, but when I undertook the activity the following points emerged, which may echo some of your thinking. I developed the activity from the point of view of an (imagined) agency specifically established to oppose IRMA: ExtIRMAnate. This brought together a number of interests, in particular local smallholders, organic farmers and global environmental activists.

What capacities did each of the interests bring to the campaign: these ranged from local knowledge to global knowledge; from the capacity to mobilise smallholders to the capacity to challenge the IRMA partners wherever they were located; and included some funding, some personnel, contacts in government and contacts in the local media.
What would give our campaign public legitimacy and political credibility? Thoughts centred on the threat to indigenous gene pools and the possible elimination of local varieties of seeds. I also wanted to link this to longer histories of struggle to protect rural livelihoods, such as those dating back to the colonial period and heavy state involvement in agriculture.
How might I establish the public illegitimacy of the IRMA project? Possible lines of argument related to foreign domination, possibly corrupt linkages between government and private interests, and the lack of proper regulation.
Who would be the agency's ‘audiences’, or ‘targets’? I certainly had to motivate my own various constituencies. I also had to engage government, and looked for, and found, MPs opposed to GM crops. Should I target the research community? Should I target USAID, which has consistently promoted the development of GM agriculture in Africa?
What might undermine my case? An obvious possibility was that the initial impetus for the campaign came from a ‘foreign’ body, GMWatch. I also needed to demonstrate that I did genuinely represent particular communities of interest.
What could I focus the campaign on? The obvious political opportunity related to the Bio-safety Bill. I also looked to establish a presence of our allies on the National Bio-safety Authority.
How confrontational should I be? This came to be a significant issue, with great potential to divide the agency.

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4.1 Introduction

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Institutional development can be, and is, studied in a variety of ways. Most obviously, the academic disciplines of politics, economics, sociology and anthropology have all contributed to our understanding of institutions and their development. We draw freely on these disciplinary approaches and the insights they have generated.

There are three other qualities that distinguish our approach:

It is concerned with institutional development for development, in which views of ‘development’ are informed by values. We do not all share the same values. However, a useful starting point for thinking about values in this unit has been expressed most explicitly and powerfully by Amartya Sen, for whom development is ‘a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’; freedom from poverty, freedoms associated with literacy, numeracy, political participation, uncensored speech, and so on.
It recognises the contested nature of institutional development, and that any process of institutional development involves people with different and differing interests, values and meanings. The outcomes of any such process emerge from the negotiations between all the interested parties, which in turn are shaped by the power relationships between the actors involved. This is not a matter simply of dividing the world into the powerful and the powerless. We recognise that power derives from diverse sources, comes in diverse forms, and is never the exclusive possession of any particular group.
It acknowledges that institutional development is undertaken by people and organisations in the public sector, in the private sector and in civil society. This implies that no single sector can claim responsibility for institutional development. It also implies that the quality of institutional development depends on the quality and qualities of the relationships between people and organisations in all three sectors.

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4.2 Understanding institutions and institutional development

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Institutions frame our lives. From birth through to death, in the most private and the most public aspects of our lives, in our personal and professional histories, we are shaped by – and we in turn shape – institutions. They give structure and meaning to our lives. They make shared experience, and shared action, possible. In short, we live our lives through institutions.

We can express this in more formal, academic terms. Brett talks of institutions in these terms:

Institutions are sets of ‘rules that structure social interactions in particular ways’, based on knowledge ‘shared by members of the relevant community or society’ (Knight, 1992, p. 2). Compliance to those rules is enforced through known incentives or sanctions. In other words, institutions are the norms, rules, habits, customs and routines (both formal and written, or, more often, informal and internalised) which govern society at large. They influence the function, structure and behaviour of organisations – ‘groups of individuals bound by some purpose’ who come together to achieve joint objectives (North, 1990, p. 4) – as actors in society. Institutions, by producing stable, shared and commonly understood patterns of behaviour are crucial to solving the problems of collective action amongst individuals.
(Brett, 2000, p. 18)

Brett's definition of institutions raises a number of questions. Amongst the most significant of these questions are:

1. What does it mean to describe institutions as ‘sets of rules’?

One way of getting at the meaning is to think of the expression, ‘as a rule’. It's a term that indicates the way in which life is expected to be conducted in particular contexts. Thus, for example, in contemporary liberal democratic societies, ‘as a rule’:

children between particular ages go to school (the institution of education or schooling);
we elect our leaders (the institution of democracy);
people with insufficient income receive benefits in cash or kind (the institution of welfare);
wealth is distributed unequally (the institution of inequality);
we have a choice as to how and from whom we obtain goods and services (the institution of the market).

As Brett indicates, the ‘rules’ are not necessarily written down. Some will be, but in all these cases – and in any others – written rules will be complemented with unwritten ones, and those unwritten rules can be the ones that act most powerfully on us as ‘incentives or sanctions’. And, of course, different people will interpret the rules in different ways – and some will break them or work outside them.

2. What is the difference between ‘institutions’ and ‘organisations’?

Again, Brett begins to suggest an answer. He describes organisations as ‘actors in society’. Organisations, then, get things done or, to follow the metaphor, they act, they perform. Institutions provide the framework in which the performance occurs. Thus, for example:

schools teach children, within the framework of the institution of education;
political parties seek votes, within the framework of the institution of democracy;
public and voluntary agencies provide benefits, within the framework of the institution of welfare;
companies give different financial rewards to different employees, within the framework of the institution of inequality;
supermarkets and other shops compete to provide goods, within the framework of the institution of the market.

And, of course, some organisations will perform better than others. And, as with people, some will act outside the institutional framework – and will sometimes break the rules.

3. Is the difference clear cut?

As you will probably already appreciate, there is a considerable overlap between institutions and organisations. Organisations can become institutions (can be ‘institutionalised’) as they become established and recognised as standing for something more than themselves; they come to embody and express important social norms and values. This can perhaps be seen most obviously in a global context, with organisations such as the World Bank or the United Nations. But it is no less true at a local level where, for example, a school can come to be recognised as having a significance far beyond its own gates, or a shop come to be seen as a place not just where buying and selling take place but also where key neighbourhood concerns are identified and expressed.

4. Does everybody agree on the meaning of ‘institutions’?

The answer here is twofold. First, there is some broad agreement that ‘institution’ has a dual meaning, as already indicated: as ‘sets of rules’, or complexes of ‘norms, rules, habits, customs and routines’ in Brett's more elaborate formula; and as organisations when they are established. Second, the term is used in different, though often overlapping, ways in the literature and by development practitioners.

Activity 9

Identify and make a few notes on some of the institutions that have ‘framed’ your life. Make these notes before you read the discussion below, and then compare your notes with that discussion.

Discussion

Discussion:

While there is a long list to choose from, you may possibly have thought of the family, schooling, faith community, university, the state, law, democracy (or some other political system), money, or the market. Whatever you have chosen, though, it is likely that you will have chosen them because – using different means to enforce the compliance that Brett speaks of – they have enabled you to understand the world you live in and your place in that world. They will have governed your relations with other people in particular contexts and in society at large, and given you a sense of who you are.

Activity 10

Now extend the previous activity. Identify and make notes on some of the institutions that frame development. Think about both the organisational aspects and the rules (or norms, values and customs) aspects. Draw on your own experience; remember that whether you are professionally involved in development or not, you will be caught up in development of some kind.

Discussion

Development, too, is framed by a variety of institutions. You might have thought of some of the large institutions, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, which are major players on the world stage. You might have thought of micro-finance, of workers' associations, of NGOs, of development ‘partnerships’, of free trade, of civil society. You might have thought of smaller, more local institutions where you live and/or work. The institutions that contribute to the improvement of health services in the UK are different from the institutions that contribute to the reduction of poverty in the Indian sub-continent, which in turn are different from the institutions designed to create liberal capitalism in Eastern Europe, or those set up to address problems related to HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, and so on. It is worth noting, though, that such is the sway of ‘globalisation’ that similarities can be identified between institutional development in very different contexts: so, for example, one finds similar institutions of partnership, social enterprise, participation, governance and so on, being developed for urban regeneration in the UK as for rural development in Uganda.

As you thought about the activity, you might have noted that institutions last. Brett uses the term ‘stable’, others say that institutions ‘persist over time’ (Uphoff, 1986, p. 9). That is the nature of institutions: they are around for a long time – it is one of their defining qualities. Yet – certainly in a unit on institutional development – we have also to appreciate that institutions are not ‘for ever’. Even in the cases of institutions which seem to go on for ever – the family and religions are perhaps the most significant examples – the form of the institution, the relationships involved, the norms and values embedded differ so markedly that they constitute different institutions at different times and in different places. Certainly there is continuity. No less certainly there is change.

Sometimes, as suggested by the terms just used – ‘designed’, ‘set up’, etc. – change comes about as a result of deliberate action: the change is intended. Perhaps more often the change is less the outcome of intervention, but emerges – in a way no one exactly intended – out of the complex of social interactions that make up history.

This distinction between the more and less intentional processes is important for our understanding of institutional development and its value for development management. So take, for example, the emergence of liberation movements in the colonised world, of the movement for women's emancipation, of the anti-globalisation campaign, of the movement to secure human rights in the face of massive abuse. All have been created through the purposive, value-oriented action of individuals and groups, often in the face of great personal danger. Equally, all have arisen in the context of broader social and economic processes – most obviously to do with changes in labour markets – which certainly have not been intended to bring about these specific developments.

We can label this distinction between more or less intentional processes succinctly as the distinction between ‘institutional development as intervention’ (where the focus is on intentional activity) and ‘institutional development as history’ (where the focus is on the context that determines the scope and potential for interventions). And we can note that, in both cases, we are talking about changes in Brett's ‘rules that structure social interactions’.

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4.3 Why are institutions and institutional development important for development?

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

From the discussion in the last section we can identify two reasons why institutions and institutional development are important for development.

Institutions are the sets of rules that structure development just as they structure any aspect of social interaction. They will govern, for example, who gets what, and how, from development. It is important to get the rules – i.e. the institutions – right. And it is also important to recognise that what is ‘right’ will be contested.
Both forms of institutional development are of significance for development:
- institutional development as intervention, as a process of consciously and deliberately seeking to establish rules that promote development; and
- institutional development as history, as a matter of the context in which interventions are designed, both making possible and constraining the scope of such interventions.

In recent years a number of more specific factors have combined to ensure that they are at the core of thinking about how to promote development.

Concern has been expressed about how specific institutions operate and the effects of their operations on development. The list of institutions thus criticised includes, but is not limited to, the following:

The state: The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a series of debates over the role of the state. More recently something of a consensus has emerged over the ‘facilitative state’. However, the idea – promoted by commentators on both the right and the left of the political spectrum – that the state might hinder development, that government might fail to promote the public interest, still has currency.
The market: Purely market-based solutions are now widely perceived not to have been the all-sufficing means of development they were assumed to be in the 1980s by, for example, the World Bank. There is a growing awareness that markets are themselves socially created and are part of a broader institutional infrastructure. The role of market forces is a focal point for debates about institutional development.
Civil society: The institutions of civil society – whether in the narrower form of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or the broader form of organised social movements of diverse kinds – have come to play particular roles in development that some people find inappropriate and unacceptable. The most obvious example of this is their role as providers of services previously delivered by the state. Such institutions, and their role in development, have attracted a variety of criticisms, most seriously that they lack the accountability of state institutions and that, in accepting state money, they have at the same time accepted a much less radical role in society.
Multilateral institutions: The effectiveness and legitimacy of multilateral institutions which operate in development are under question. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been criticised by governments in the South, NGOs and others for being ‘top-down’ and inappropriately ideological in their pursuit of market reform, and for not understanding the importance of institutional infrastructure in economic change. The United Nations is frequently accused of being wasteful and ineffective by donor governments and observers. The prominence of these institutions means that questions about how they should operate and what their roles should be are significant questions for the field of development as whole.

In line with this questioning of institutional behaviour, there is a tendency to attribute many failures of development to a failure to develop appropriate institutions.

As one development manager commented:

Institutions have failed as effective development organisations but they still are the linch-pin around which development revolves. Ignore them at your peril.

This sense of institutional failure has been given a sharper edge as a result of the ‘terrorism’ that has assumed a more evidently global form in recent years. The institutions of intelligence, politics and diplomacy are perceived to have failed to comprehend and respond to terrorism adequately, while some would argue that the causes of terrorism lie in the failure of institutions to promote development. The obverse of this – and another factor behind the heightened interest in the impact of institutions – is that a process that might be described as the ‘institutionalisation of insecurity’ has emerged. Amongst the concerns associated with this is the sense that a range of legal and constitutional institutions are being developed – justified in terms of the need to counter terrorism – that have profound consequences for civil rights and for justice more widely. For some people, the ‘success’ of these institutions is no less worrying than the ‘failure’ of other institutions.

Activity 11

To draw your thoughts about institutions and institutional development together, listen to the audio clip linked below in which a number of development practitioners explain how they understand institutional development. The names and organisations of the people you hear speaking are given in the transcript

As you listen to the audio, make summary notes on some of the questions asked in the interviews:

What is the purpose of institutional development?
How do the interviewees see institutional development?
What activities do they think ‘doing’ institutional development involves?
What management skills do they think institutional development requires?

Click to listen to the extract (5 minutes).

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Perspectives on institutional development (Part 1)

Transcript

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Perspectives on institutional development (Part 2)

Transcript

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Perspectives on institutional development (Part 3)

Transcript

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Perspectives on institutional development (Part 4)

Transcript

Now compare your notes to the summary discussion below.

Discussion

Discussion:

The interviewees make two main points: firstly, that institutional development is about change and liberation; secondly, that its purpose is to develop the efficiency and effectiveness of partners and indigenous organisations.
Several of those interviewed talk about organisational issues – capacity-building, human resources, efficiency and so on. However, they also indicate that organisational development in itself is not the same thing as institutional development.
Many of these development managers talk about activities pertinent to the organisational level, such as the reorientation of an organisation's management style, from vertical, control systems to horizontal, participatory systems. For a number of those interviewed, the pursuit of institutional development lies in the arena of inter-organisational relationships, in the activities and purposes undertaken beyond the organisation itself.
As those interviewed indicate, the skills required in institutional development can be broad and demanding. It is not about managing projects or organisations as such, although many of the core skills required for this will be relevant to institutional development. What emerge from these development managers are skills of analysis, knowledge of ‘models’, theories and ideas which have been tried in other contexts, and an ability to appreciate different rationalities and to communicate ideas. Also implied are skills of facilitation and negotiation to help build commonality of views and shared objectives. In the final part of the clip, interviewees also talk about their views on the concept of institutional development, reflecting on institutional failures, and on influence and power in setting the institutional development agenda.

To summarise, as exemplified in the interviews in Activity 11, development practitioners use the terms ‘institution’ and ‘institutional development’ in different ways. Those in large, powerful agencies tend to think in terms of changes in broad societal norms and large-scale institutions designed to deliver development goals. Those in smaller agencies, such as many NGOs, often talk of institution building and organisational strengthening as ‘institutional development’. There is also a difference between those who see institutional development in terms of organisational performance, as in:

I find it very hard to separate institutional development from things like capacity-building. These are things that a lot of organisations do without necessarily calling them institutional development or saying that they are doing capacity-building. But people are seeking to improve the performance. So I think those key words like performance, efficiency, improving human resources, are all part of what we mean by institutional development.

and those who see institutional development in more political terms, as in:

I think the main point of institutional development is to create a sense of liberation whereby people think forward to changing their circumstances and situations.

It is not, of course, necessary to choose between different meanings. But it is important to recognise the differences, if we are to build up an appropriately complex and flexible understanding of institutional development.

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4.4 Why do inter-organisational relations matter?

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Development management necessarily and inevitably involves the management of relationships between organisations. As one development manager puts it:

Effectiveness means not just looking internally at whether you've got your personnel policies right, it means whether the managers of that organisation can take on the negotiation, networking, brokering, contracting work which is necessary … to relate across boundaries, with the public sector, with the donor community etc.

The fact that there are many actors with different resources, norms, values and practices means that relating to other organisations involves recognising those differences and the (likely) power relations involved. It also means that no single organisation is likely to have the monopoly of action on institutional development.

In the remainder of Section 3 we are going to look at the management of relationships in two ways. Here we will look at the different kinds of relationships that can be established, identifying them in terms of three types: competition, coordination and cooperation. In the next sub-section, we will look at one of the key skills required in managing inter-organisational relationships, the skill of negotiation.

Activity 12

Read ‘Why inter-organisational relationships matter’, linked below. This introduces ‘competition’, ‘coordination’ and cooperation’ as the three ‘ideal types’ of inter-organisational relationships. As you read, make notes on:

how the ideal types have been significant at different times in the history of development;
the warnings the authors give as regards the use of the term ‘partnership’;
the significance the authors attach to inter-organisational relationships for institutional development.

Click below to view the article (0.01 MB).

Discussion

The significance of the ‘3Cs’ (i.e., competition, co-ordination and co-operation) is that they all represent ideas and practices which shape the institutional frameworks within which individual institutional development efforts take place. In reality, the distinctions between the three forms are not clear-cut.

However, the common associations made with each have been important to the way that institutional development initiatives are structured. As the article indicates, in the past a focus on the state has led to institutional development meaning action to support the development of government structures and of government's capacity to co-ordinate relationships with other groups (NGOs, for example). With the emergence of neo-liberalism, competition has been particularly favoured, implying changes in institutional frameworks, organisational types and inter-organisational relationships. And in recent history, the co-operation that (in an ‘ideal’ sense) has always characterised civil society has assumed a greater significance, resulting in the emergence of networks as important ways of organising for development.

The term ‘partnership’ is often used as though it is equivalent to co-operation and is characterised by trust, shared values and consensus about what is to be done.

The article hints at several points that this may not be the case. It asks us to make ‘sense of the politics which underlie the rather cuddly notion’ of partnership, the ‘real conflicts of interest and agenda which persist in all areas’ (p. 2) , and the processes through which these conflicts are managed. ‘“Partnership” often masks a complex reality’ (p. 13), one aspect of which may be the exercise of power by stronger partners to bring weaker partners ‘on board’ – or ‘into line’. The broader point that the article is making, though, is about the significance of inter-organisational relationships for institutional development. It argues that they ‘particularly matter when it comes to working towards broader, collective outcomes’ (p. 14), and that nurturing such relationships will ‘produce new and more desirable (read “effective”) institutions’ (p. 15). This reading presents the 3Cs as a framework for understanding these relationships, arguing that it ‘will help us to make sense of more complex realities’ (p. 4).

The following activity provides a brief example of this. It relates to a case involving the development of a micro-finance institution in Russia in the 1990s. With funding from the G7 countries and Switzerland, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) established a package for promoting the development and growth of a small business sector in Russia. This package is called the Russia Small Business Fund (RSBF), and its wider goal was to contribute to the development of competition in the Russian economy. The activity will give you a sense of the network of inter-organisational relationships involved.

Activity 13

Watch the video ‘Micro-credit in Russia’, linked below. A list of interviewees is provided in the transcript. After viewing the video clips, read the short document ‘Russia Small Business Fund – Informal Note, July 1997’ (RSBF, 1997), also linked below. The document provides some detail of the way in which the Fund is structured and its operational mode. Make notes on the following questions:

What were the objectives of the RSBF?
How would you characterise the inter-organisational relationships between the main players in the programme?
How does the programme promote competition? How is competition viewed by the people involved in the programme?
Are co-ordination and co-operation also promoted or employed at different times by any of the agents involved? Can you give examples?

Click to view the video clip (9 minutes).

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Micro-credit in Russia (Part 1)

Transcript

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Micro-credit in Russia (Part 2)

Transcript

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Discussion

According to Elizabeth Wallace (Senior Banker at EBRD) and the Informal Note, the programme has two principal objectives. The first is to help small business develop with the help of loans. The second objective is to build capability in the banking sector so that small firms have access to finance on a permanent basis. Loan officers are trained by the programme so that they have the skills to judge requests for loans on the basis of business plans and a more general analysis of businesses, and on the basis of the people asking for loans, rather than collateral or connections. As Martin Holtmann from International Project Consultancy (IPC) notes, consultants are also willing to assist the banks in more general ways to ensure their own survival in the new environment.

The EBRD has a great deal of power and is co-ordinating this programme through IPC. The Russian banks have to work with EBRD in order to get the funds, and as Elizabeth Wallace comments, they ‘need to change their banking practices’ if they want to succeed in the new economic climate. The entrepreneurs themselves, while having little formal power, seem pleased to have a new source of income and are keen to work with the banks. The programme is clearly designed to help small businesses compete successfully in the new capitalist environment. Entrepreneurs who have received loans all testify to the contribution that the loans have made to their ability to be competitive and to enable their businesses to grow.

Competition is promoted in other ways. Competition requires a complex regulatory framework, and appropriate institutions have to be developed so that competition can not only thrive, but deliver on improved quality, choice and, most importantly in this case, the growth of employment opportunities. You may be able to see elements of the framework in the structures which EBRD and others are trying to put into place. As you will have noted from the video and the Informal Note, a number of different banks are involved in the programme at this stage. The EBRD considers this to be very important in constructing a positive competitive environment in which banks will become more efficient. The development of trust, by establishing and maintaining shared norms and practices, and the growth of social capital, improving the skills and expertise of both bank officials and entrepreneurs as well as their ability to work together, are both important to the successful development of competitive services and businesses. Thus, from the beginning, while the RSBF is a programme based on improving enterprise through competition – competition between banks and between businesses – the main implementer, EBRD, uses co-ordination to get the banks moving in the same direction, to initiate appropriate regulatory frameworks, and to establish shared norms around the development of new banking services. However, there is no doubt that co-operation is also important – employees and entrepreneurs have to believe in the new practices and make changes because it is in their own self-interest to do so.

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4.5 The changing relationships between state, market and civil society

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

The central development debates over the last fifty years can – somewhat crudely – be characterised by shifting perceptions of the relative roles of the state and the market. Until the late 1970s development policy and practice was dominated by a state-led vision of social and institutional change. By the 1980s, neo-liberal perspectives came to dominate. Through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, a reframing of the relationship between state and market took place and greater interest was expressed in ‘getting social relations right’. As a result, a third element, ‘civil society’, has become a dominant feature of the institutional landscape within which development intervention takes place.

We will now look briefly at how the roles of the different sectors, and the relationships between them, have changed.

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i. Bringing the state back in

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Recent debates on the relative roles of state and market in development have not essentially arisen out of a critique of the post-war conception of the ‘developmental state’, i.e. that which ‘takes on the function of leading and guiding development’ (Doriye, 1992, p. 98). The critique has primarily focused on whether the state or the market in general is the more effective means of achieving (economic) development. Maureen Mackintosh, in a book chapter called ‘Questioning the state’ (Mackintosh, 1992b), provides a very useful perspective on the arguments. She argues that post 1945, the state was regarded as the key agent of development, viz. the developmental state. Economic crises and political change during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in criticism of the role of the state on two main grounds: that the state was (i) unresponsive but invasive, and (ii) inefficient and restrictive.

As a result of this critique, and because of economic crisis and the decline in state revenue, in the South there have been policies to cut state spending, to privatise state and para-statal entities, and to promote the market by deregulation, decentralisation (using private management), cost recovery and targeting the remaining public spending towards the poor. (These measures are, of course, not only familiar in the South.) There has also been a drive on the part of both left and right critics of the state to devolve some of the functions previously held by the state not just to private companies but to the ‘third sector’: voluntary or charitable organisations, trusts, NGOs and so on. On the right, this move is in recognition of the need to have some organised and responsive provision of services; on the left, the argument is based on the empowerment of disadvantaged sectors of society. However, many questions are raised about the capacity of such organisations to respond to needs as well as whether such organisations are becoming centrally located in service provision rather than carrying out the more political task of advocacy.

Through the 1990s and into the 2000s efforts have been made to ‘bring the state back in’ to development discussions – but in rather distinct and particular ways. For example, recent donor interests and interventions have tended to focus on the efficiency of the state as an administrative body (Crewe and Harrison, 1998, pp. 5, 54) and have considered how to improve the effective operation of state institutions. Yet the role of the state remains constrained by global policies and pressures, including, most notably, the emphasis on expanding the private sector, market liberalisation and the reduction of government involvement in economic management. The state has been ‘brought back in’ as one development partner among others – notably the private sector and NGOs – albeit with a particular remit to create an ‘enabling environment’ within which these other actors can operate.

This changing view of the state sees it less as a monolith and more as a multi-layered view of the networks and institutions which constitute the state. Related to this there has been increasing interest in exploring the ‘local’ or ‘everyday’ state – how individuals and groups experience and understand the state. The concern with de-centralisation is also related to this changing view of the state. De-centralisation is based on the idea that the state is made more efficient through the delegation of planning responsibilities to regional or other more local levels of the administration. The introduction of such measures is couched in terms of equity and efficiency, and presented as participatory and thus more able to direct resources towards target groups.

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ii. Building institutions for markets

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

The World Bank (amongst other institutions, including governments) sees a close relationship between the role of the state, the process of governing, and the extent to which there is effective market development (and by implication, economic development). In addition, the state is seen as having a role in maintaining the general welfare of populations, in particular in cushioning them against so-called market failures, particularly with respect to service provision, and in protecting vulnerable groups. Thus the World Bank World Development Report 1997 opens by saying:

Far-reaching developments in the global economy have us revisiting basic questions about government, what its role should be, what it can and cannot do, and how best to do it. An effective state is vital for the provision of goods and services – and the rules and institutions – that allow markets to flourish and people to lead healthier, happier lives … the state is central to economic and social development, not as a direct provider of growth but as a partner, catalyst, and facilitator.
(World Bank, 1997, p. 1)

The introductory overview also states that

… we now see that markets and governments are complementary … the state is essential for putting in place the appropriate institutional foundation for markets. And government's credibility – the predictability of its rules and policies and the consistency with which they are applied – can be as important for attracting private investment as the content of those rules and policies.
(World Bank, 1997, p. 4)

This view is based on a number of surveys in different countries around the world about people's perspectives on their governments, the institutional frameworks in which they invest in business or earn a living, and the degree to which the institutional context is or is not seen as conducive to economic development. The state is expected to provide such a framework when the role and size of the state in the economy is changing, in particular in the privatisation and decentralisation of services.

This interest in ‘building institutions for markets’ is further taken up in the 2001 World Development Report. In this report, the market is centre-stage, yet its role, like that of the state, seems to have been rethought. The emphasis on strengthening and extending market opportunities is seen as having two (related) goals – boosting economic growth at a national level and reducing the poverty of individuals (p. 1). Market mechanisms are seen as a key driver of this potential transformation, with the state, the private sector and communities playing their role to ensure participation in market activity. Rules, norms and values that ensure effective markets have to be promoted – and enforced. The state in particular is presented as a key partner – ‘a key feature of all industrial market systems is a strong state that can support a formal legal system that complements existing norms and a state that itself respects the law’ (p. 4). The report recognises, however, that the specifics of what constitutes an ‘effective’ institution may vary in different contexts.

The World Bank has also stated that private interests can contribute to institution building for markets – and can play a role in development efforts. Indeed, interest in public–private partnerships has been increasing globally – particularly in relation to the promotion of private sector involvement in the delivery of services such as health care, transport and housing, with the private sector increasingly identified as a development partner.

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iii. Understanding civil society

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Civil society is the third element of discussions about how institutional development should be brought about and by whom. The term ‘civil society’ itself is ‘used in different ways by different people’ (Bebbington and Riddell, 1997). But the following definition is one that gives some insight into its core meaning.

Civil society is, together with the state and market, one of three ‘spheres’ that interface in the making of democratic societies. Civil society is the sphere in which social movements become organised. The organisations of civil society, which represent many diverse and sometimes contradictory social interests, are shaped to their social base, constituency, thematic orientations (e.g. environment, gender, human rights) and types of activity. They include church-related groups, trade unions, co-operatives, service organisations, community groups and youth organisations, as well as academic institutions and others.
(UNDP, 1993, cited in Bebbington and Riddell, 1997, p. 109)

A concern with civil society groups and their participation in diverse arenas of decision-making and programme implementation has certainly increased in recent years. Civil society has had a growing voice in global governance and is said by Edwards, who has written extensively about NGOs, to be a ‘prerequisite for creating viable policy and strategy’ (Barakat and Chard, 2002, p. 72).

Of particular interest has been the role of NGOs in service provision – historically considered part of the state arena, even if the state did not necessarily meet this expectation. Although different NGOs have their own histories, goals and constituencies (and may not be engaged in service provision at all), they can also be repositories of activities:

devolved by the state;
which the state has failed to carry out; and
which the market is unable to provide to particular (usually vulnerable) groups in society.

However the conception of civil society is not simply benign. For example, Howell and Pearce argue that civil society has two contrasting and possibly opposing roles: to challenge the status quo as well as to work in synergy with the state. The concept of civil society can thus encompass a diverse set of groups and movements.

If there is no agreed definition, how can it be used to act with? Or is the diversity also part of its strength as it opens space for diverse groups to enter into debates? Howell and Pearce argue that

… its appeal to such a wide institutional and political spectrum lies not least in the intellectual and political space it opens up within a context where long-standing dualistic debates about state or market paths to economic development, reform or revolution have reached an impasse. Ironically, its diffuseness has also been a secret of its success, enabling it to be legitimately claimed by everyone.
(Howell and Pearce, 2001, p. 1)

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4.6 Making institutional development happen

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

As we've seen, institutional development involves a multiplicity of people and organisations, and depends on the working relationships between them. Negotiation and brokering are skills that are vital to organisations' and people's ability to work together.

This section looks briefly at some of the techniques and skills involved in negotiation and brokering and how they relate to the work of development managers involved in institutional development. Negotiation can mean managing different demands, understandings and expectations, not simply about having a ‘position’ on something and negotiating with someone else's ‘position’. Generally speaking, negotiating means acting on behalf of one party which is trying to agree terms with at least one other party. Brokering, on the other hand, means trying to bring together several parties and facilitate an agreement between them.

The following are some examples of the types of negotiating and brokering situations common in development management (although clearly there could be hundreds of different examples):

Negotiation over texts and agreement on policies as, for example, in the production of organisational strategies.
Negotiation between an NGO's field officer(s) and local community leaders. For example, when an NGO wants to secure the participation of all those affected by a development project.
Brokering where one agency takes on the job of bringing together a number of other organisations in order to try to achieve co-ordination between different roles and projects in the context of a larger campaign or programme.
Conflict resolution where negotiation and brokering help to create a situation in which positive development can take place, e.g. community development projects in neighbourhoods where local conflicts have prohibited development.

There is, of course, a very wide range of situations which will call for some sort of negotiated settlement or brokered agreement. Some of these will be informal, some will be formal, and there will be varying degrees of disagreement. Identifying the type of situation is an important part of constructing the best way to deal with the situation. There are, however, some general ‘rules’ which many find useful when approaching a negotiation or acting as intermediaries.

Some of the rules are treated under the heading of ‘win/win bargaining’, emphasising the fact that the simplest application of the ‘win/win’ idea is in negotiations (or ‘bargaining’) between two parties over the terms of a ‘deal’. Some of the same ideas can be applied to multi-party negotiations or brokering, but here we will consider ‘win/win bargaining’ in its simplest sense.

In many instances, negotiations for development management will not involve one-off ‘deals’ so much as the structuring of ongoing working relationships. Thus, ‘winning’ means creating situations in which all parties feel their concerns and needs are addressed, at least to the extent that they can continue joint endeavours. Some thoughts on the different dimensions and approaches to win/lose and win/win negotiation are laid out in Box 4 below. The following activity asks you to reflect on them.

Activity 14

Read the extract in Box 4 which discusses different approaches to negotiation in terms of win/win or win/lose outcomes. As you read it, make notes on any thoughts, critical or otherwise, that you have about the approaches outlined.

Box 4: Approaches to negotiation

Positional bargaining

Negotiating and bargaining have commonly been perceived as some sort of haggling over different positions, for example, arguing over the price of something, reacting to a set of trade union demands, or trying to get a larger grant from a donor agency. These are all forms of positional bargaining; that is, each of the parties has a particular position which it seeks to advance in the face of what are seen as the opposing and incompatible positions and demands of other parties. The assumptions are of the ‘win/lose’ type. Such positional bargaining may be quite ‘hard line’ or may have a superficial friendly or ‘soft’ aspect to it, but this softness belies the underlying ‘win/lose’ nature. Indeed, it may be a deliberate tactic to gain advantage.

Organisations involved in development are not immune from the pressures to adopt a positional approach. ‘Sticking to our principles’, ‘protecting our clients’, ‘asserting our right to autonomy’ – all these sorts of commitment can lead to a sense of internal and external negotiations as ‘win/lose’ positional affairs. Yet, the limitations of such a confrontational approach are such that a better way needs to be found if at all possible.

Four constructive approaches to negotiating

Fisher and Urry (1986) advocate four basic approaches to negotiation which begin to overcome the problems, limitations and impasses of positional

1 Separate the people from the problem

All negotiations involve two elements: the substantive issue over which you are negotiating and your relationship with other people involved in the negotiation process. One of the recurring problems in negotiations is that these become hopelessly intertwined. Taking the sort of approach which separates the issues from the personalities requires a conscious effort from you to consistently make that separation. Practical steps towards this are to:

ask people what their intentions are, instead of just assuming them;
be open about your perceptions;
avoid ascribing motives and feelings to the other party.

A consistently positive approach to the other people helps make this separation. In terms of the issues, it is wise to develop options that give them a stake in the outcome and to develop proposals which they can accept without loss of face.

2 Focus on interests, not positions

It is important to get behind specific positions to address the more general interests and concerns of the various parties in a negotiation. Once into this area, rather than the specific positions adopted, it may be that there is more scope for compatibility than at first appeared possible. The fact that all parties have multiple interests extends the scope of what is possible. Such an approach helps the people involved to focus attention primarily on the problem rather than on their respective solutions.

3 Invent options for mutual gain

Given the complexity of even the smallest organisations, there is unlikely to be a single ‘right’ solution to an organisational issue. The positional assumption of a single ‘win/lose’ solution is not really valid. The negotiation process does not have to be a limited trade-off between a fixed set of options. A search for alternatives and for mutually advantageous outcomes is possible within the framework of a negotiation. This requires a similar sort of change in mindset to that [required for] brainstorming, i.e. being prepared to develop and explore innovative options, suspending judgment till much later in the process.

4 Insist on objective or explicit criteria

Talk of ‘win/win’ outcomes should not, of course, conceal the fact that interests do conflict and that deals have to be struck. What this approach is about is seeking to ensure that the eventual agreement is underpinned by reference to a set of agreed principles or a formula which all participants recognise as valid. Depending on the context, the questions this approach would prompt you to ask would be things like:

What is the basis on which you would find a solution acceptable?
What specific standards of service are needed for the performance of this relief operation to be seen as acceptable again?
What are the standards by which you would assess whether or not our operation is environmentally acceptable?

Whilst such principles and criteria may be subject to renegotiation later, since circumstances and standards change over time, it is important that negotiated agreements reinforce the basic coherence and reasoned justification that are essential to organisational life.

(Adapted from The Open University, 1997, B789)

Discussion

Win/win may be desirable but may also be hard to achieve. Win/win presupposes that interests can be accommodated and that different values can be addressed. However, you may think of circumstances in which such outcomes may be hard to achieve, or may not be desirable. Are there times when a positional approach on matters of principle is necessary, or is everything open to negotiation? Sometime there will be hard decisions to make. In addition, win/win may represent an ideal situation to which we may aspire, but there may always be relative losers and relative winners in the sense that the positive outcomes may not be equally shared. Moreover, we cannot always predict the unintended or unanticipated outcomes of negotiation, and there may be issues that were not taken into account or foreseen at the time. However, with these caveats, negotiation for institutional development and for joint action will require some element of accommodation to be able to move forward.

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4.7 Perspective and power in making institutional development happen

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

We want finally to look at two factors which shape negotiation and, more generally, how institutional development happens: perspective and power. Our perspective is the collection of attitudes and outlooks which arises from our circumstances or beliefs. Perspective is a fundamental dimension to any social interaction, and is of particular importance when people are trying to work together within and across organisations, as well as within and across different social contexts. It is closely related to the idea of meaning and the meaning we give to the elements of our worlds and the actions we take (as well as what meaning we give to the actions of others). Our perspectives will be affected by our own histories (personal and professional) and the social contexts in which we have lived them. Although organisations comprise individuals, all with their own perceptions of the world, organisations also have perspectives, expressed commonly these days through vision and mission statements, as well as in the policies developed and actions taken (which may or may not match the espoused vision and mission). Perspective will affect how the problems, processes and outcomes of institutional development are perceived, the kinds of relationships that are created, and the kinds of solutions that are negotiated.

Another key element that affects what kinds of solutions to development problems are negotiated is power. Power can take many forms. The multiple forms of power have been considered by Norman Long. Long suggests that:

Like knowledge, power is not simply possessed, accumulated and un-problematically exercised … Power implies much more than how hierarchies and hegemonic control demarcate social positions and opportunities, and restrict access to resources. It is the outcome of complex struggles and negotiations over authority, status, reputation and resources, and necessitates the enrolment of networks of actors and constituencies … Such struggles are founded upon the extent to which specific actors perceive themselves capable of manoeuvring within particular situations and developing effective strategies for doing so. Creating room for manoeuvre implies a degree of consent, a degree of negotiation and thus a degree of power, as manifested in the possibility of exerting some control, prerogative, authority and capacity for action, be it front-stage or backstage, for flickering moments or for more sustained periods … Thus, as Scott (1985) points out, power inevitably generates resistance, accommodation and strategic compliance as regular components of the politics of everyday life.
(Long, 2001, p. 71)

Perspective and power shape any approach to making institutional development happen. We will end our discussion with two radically different approaches which serve to show that institutional development, and the way to achieve it, are contested matters. They reflect two different theories of change, one individual the other more social.

Gareth Morgan is a Canadian academic who has written much about organisational development and change. Morgan is insistent on the possibility of personal empowerment and the potential for each one of us to ‘assume our personal power in rethinking and reshaping the world around us’ (Morgan, 1997, p. 292). The following summarises his position:

There are, no doubt, deep structures of power shaping the structure and logic of the global economy. We are, no doubt, caught up in all kinds of sedimented patterns of culture, ideology, and social practice that inhibit capacities for change. The power of macro global forces do encourage a sense of inevitability and powerlessness when it comes to having a significant impact on our world. Indeed, even the leaders of major countries sometimes feel that they have no power to shape things and have no option but to swim with the prevailing tide.
That's why we have to bring it all back down to the level of the individual and individual capacities for change – for change is an individual affair! Individuals can form groups, and groups can become social movements. But the process begins and ends with the commitments and actions of individuals. Certainly, it makes a big difference if one is a head of a large corporation as opposed to the average man or woman in the street. But it is the individual who has to move.
(Morgan, 1997, p. 293)

You may or may not agree with Morgan on the possibility for individuals to create change. But the approach is certainly as applicable to institutional development as to organisational change.

Trying to build support for change, in opposition to powerful interests, by working with and attempting to empower powerless groups, is in a very different tradition of radical activism from that of Morgan. One example of such an approach espoused by many activists is the idea of ‘conscientisation’ (in broad terms, ‘awareness-raising’) put forward by Paolo Freire in his famous book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire uses the notion of ‘cultural action’ (p. 146), which is quite similar to what we have called institutional development in this unit. It is a ‘systematic and deliberate form of action which operates upon the social structure, either with the objective of preserving that structure or of transforming it’ (p. 146). It serves either domination or liberation. Perhaps things are not always so clear-cut when particular institutional development interventions are considered. However, Freire's insistence on dialectical opposites in terms of standing with or against ‘the people’, especially when it comes to questions of power, can provide an important reminder of stark realities.

Freire's ideas have also contributed to a radical empowerment perspective in discussions of participation, ‘with development practitioners working with poor people to struggle actively for change …’ (Cleaver, 2001, p. 37).

One might be sceptical about the capacity of outsiders to identify with poor people's concerns. Perhaps, as Rahnema (1992) suggests, we should look to grassroots movements to bring about change. Nonetheless, the idea of the development practitioner facilitating empowerment is one that has taken hold within institutional development.

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5.1 Introduction

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

There have been more than 200 wars in the past half-century. Nearly all of them have been civil wars – wars within a single country. Although there have been many attempts to generalise about civil wars, only one generalisation seems to hold true – each war is different. There are no ‘best practice’ handbooks; experience from one war is often not applicable to another. Further, many of the glib generalisations about civil wars, usually characterised by words or phrases such as ‘greed’ or ‘tribe’ or ‘ancient hatreds’ or ‘mindless violence’, turn out on investigation to not provide a satisfactory explanation for the war, and thus provide a poor guide for intervention.

Outside interveners have provoked wars and made many wars much worse. But outsiders are often an essential part of a peace process, helping to bring people together and to broker the social and economic changes that are needed to bring about a lasting peace. In some cases, military intervention has been essential to create the conditions for building peace. The goal of Open University course TU875 War, intervention and development is to provide tools that can be used to make interventions positive rather than negative. A central premise is that because each war is different, the first step to improving intervention is to understand the roots of the war and the roles and goals of the various actors. It is this central premise that this unit addresses. We stress a developmental, institutional, structural perspective in dealing with interventions in war and peace. Limitations of time and space mean we will not deal with interpersonal issues such as mediation, conflict resolution and reconciliation, but we can sensitise you to the management of peacebuilding, and help you think about solving problems in a creative way. Thus, in this unit we introduce you to decision-making and management skills in civil war and post civil war contexts.

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5.2 Perceptions

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

This section looks at how to manage conflict sensitively and introduces a number of intellectual tools to help facilitate this.

Read Article 9, linked below, then complete Scenarios A and B.

Click below to view Article 9 (0.1MB).

Scenarios

Section 5 contains six scenarios. All are based on real-life situations; in some we have changed names and places so as not to identify organisations and individuals. It is important that you work through these examples, because they will give you more grounded experience in thinking about perceptions, problem analysis and decision making in complex and changing environments. Put yourself in the position of the decision-taker. Use these cases to explore the issues and to develop your creative and critical thinking skills.

Scenario A

FAMAID is a UK charity with an international reputation as a key player in alleviating distress and suffering in the aftermath of civil wars and natural disasters. Suppose you are working for FAMAID at a refugee camp which has been set up for people fleeing civil war. It is located on the edge of a large town. Your main responsibility is to ensure that people are properly fed. Food is coming in by road twice a week.

Your current thinking is that if you are to distribute food effectively, then you need somewhere secure to store your supplies. You see security as essential if food is not to be stolen before it can be distributed. You have learnt that the local town council has a large, suitable warehouse within easy distance of the camp, and only a third of the warehouse is being used, to store building supplies. You would like them to allow you to use the rest of the warehouse, but initial informal discussions show the council to be very reluctant to let you use the warehouse.

Think about how you solve this problem.

Discussion

Did you stay rooted to the concept of storage of food?

Did you discuss the issue with community leaders in the refugee camp and try to develop systems which did not require storage?

Did you consider changing the truck delivery system so that storage was no longer required? If this could be changed to daily deliveries, then the need for storage would no longer be so critical and may even not be necessary. Thus one solution would be to reorganise the truck delivery system.

Why do you need a warehouse? Are there other ways of storing food safely? Did you consider storing food in a tent? This is real lateral thinking. But how secure is food stored in such a way? It would be very easy to steal from a tent. So this will not work. Or would it? If the food is distributed fairly and efficiently to people then there is very little incentive to steal – and in such circumstances there is no need for a secure warehouse. Local leaders and groups in the camp might play a more active role in fair distribution and securing stocks. A tent storage system could work. This option was used to store food safely and securely after the floods in Mozambique in 2000. Thus one solution to the problem is to focus on the fair and efficient distribution of food aid to all in the camp. This is thinking laterally.

Did you think of any other solutions?

Scenario B

You are still with FAMAID in a refugee camp, but this time there is an urgent need for clean drinking water and latrines. FAMAID is very aware of its reputation as being one of the best-organised and most effective aid agencies. Senior management in London are keen to see its high profile maintained, particularly as a number of large corporate donors take a real interest. You report on the situation and describe your plans to install latrines as a first priority and also water tanks. Head Office has already told you that an ITN news team will be coming out to film in a couple of days. It is essential that the latrines are placed in prominent positions, preferably on the main road, so that the name of FAMAID is seen. But the local people make it clear that they want latrines placed away from the prying eyes of the public and definitely not on the main road. You will need their cooperation and assistance in installing everything.

Now, suggest a possible solution, and give your reasons.

Next, ask yourself:

What is the real essence of the problem?
What are your criteria for deciding on a solution?
What possibilities do you consider?
What do you decide to do?

Discussion

Did you consult with the local people and seek their ideas? Did you focus on the latrines or did you look more widely at the issue and explore some creative options? The real issue is reconciling the need for publicity for FAMAID with the needs of the people. Your criteria would include: providing sanitation and clean drinking water as speedily as possible; siting the FAMAID logo where it can clearly be seen by the visiting film crew; and the privacy needs of the local people.

Did you consider locating the water tanks in prominent positions with the FAMAID logo clearly visible? This would allow you to discreetly locate the latrines and satisfy the requirements of the people using them. This would also solve the PR problem. This was a real life problem and this was the solution used. Instead of focusing on the latrines, lateral thinking clarified the question and provided a creative answer.

How we perceive a situation or the motives we attribute to others is critical in informing how we respond. This section explores how we can be less instinctual and more creative in our perceptions and approaches to problem solving.

Now read Article 10, linked below, and complete Scenario C.

Click below to view Article 10 (0.1MB).

Scenario C

Why does the drug trade continue to flourish in the Ferghana Valley, Kyrgyzstan? Look at the list of actors in the DfID box below:

Local conflict actors in the Ferghana Valley, Kyrgyzstan

Post-Soviet Elites: Despite the democratic reforms of the post-Soviet era, officials from that time have been successful in retaining much of their former power and have developed sophisticated mechanisms for using the state apparatus for their own gains. In particular they have been successful in directing the benefits of development projects to their own advantage. Because the reform process is exclusive there are risks of alienating ethnic minorities as well as creating general ‘grievance’ in society.

Drug Traders: Although the region is poor, spectacular wealth can be made in the drugs trade from Afghanistan. This acts as a magnet for young men who otherwise have very little hope of employment. The trade results in the spread of weapons and violence. It also leads to an increase in drug addiction and more crime by drug addicts. If outside forces attempted to suppress the trade there could be a violent reaction.

Religious Fundamentalists: There is widespread depression, especially among young men, because of the economic situation. Many are turning to fundamentalist religion. This might act as a safety valve except that in neighbouring Uzbekistan and widely throughout the region, Islamic Fundamentalists have been viewed as opposition to state power and potentially dangerous. Russian and US perceptions could lead to the suppression of such groups and this could trigger violent popular reactions.

Military and Police: The huge imbalance between Kyrgyzstan's weak military and Uzbekistan's much larger forces could lead to border incursions. There are already strong tensions over the sharing of resources, notably water and energy. At a more local level, the police offer little help in resolving tensions but often exacerbate them by corrupt practices. Along with a corrupt judiciary, these factors mean that the state has lost its ability to mediate.

General Public: Although conditions may not be much worse that in other poor countries, the people of this region had been used to high levels of employment and very good health and education services until recently. The memory of lost happiness exacerbates the sense of grievance and could become the ‘fuel’ on which a conflict is created by those with an interest in doing so. Grievance could be directed against the state, or more probably against vulnerable ethnic minorities.

(From DfID's ‘Conducting conflict assessments: guidance notes’, 2002, Box 1, p. 14.)

Discussion

Here are some answers – you may have these and others:

There are corrupt government officials who are lining their own pockets.
It is not in the interests of the government to stamp out the drug economy when it adds to export earnings.
People are poor and the drug trade offers the possibility of huge wealth.
Many young men are attracted to the drug trade because there is little hope of employment.
There is corruption in the local police forces.
The military are weak.
If outsiders attempt to suppress the drug trade there could be violence.
There is corruption in the judiciary.

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5.3 Decision making

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Decision making is not an exact science but research has come up with some guidelines which can help with the process. It may be helpful to consider some of these and the different ways in which decision making takes place along with insights into the process and the practice.

The social scientist Herbert Simon pointed out that decision making exists on a continuum that stretches from the programmed decision at one end to the unprogrammed decision at the other end. Programmed decisions are routine decisions which have been made before. Over time, a process for effectively handling such decisions is likely to have been learnt by the experienced person. These decisions are unlikely to be challenging or difficult. Classical management theory focuses on these decisions, with an emphasis on analysis and step-by-step reasoning.

It is the unprogrammed decisions that are the most demanding. These are decisions relating to situations that have not occurred before or are especially complex or difficult because of all the circumstances involved. Successful handling of this kind of decision making requires judgement, intuition and creativity. Kuhn and Kuhn (1991, p. 74) say ‘never begin by checking the experts, and always use insight and intuition before logic and analysis’. This has to be tempered by remembering that experience of past wars is often not a good guide and that our assumptions can often be wrong; nevertheless, intuition and experience are often a key part of lateral thinking. Kuhn and Kuhn also point out that creative decision making also takes into account a range of other factors, such as stakeholder analysis, in order to better understand the motivation of others involved in the decision-making process. It is worth standing back and considering the personality, motivations and attitudes of all those with a stake in the decision. Personal and internal politics might play a powerful role, as might individual career aspirations.

Scenario D

Now we are going to pull together lateral thinking, logic bubbles and Kuhn and Kuhn's injunction to take into account stakeholders and organisational politics. Assume you are a field worker dealing with the fighters returning from the civil war, and the reintegration is not going well. You believe that the main reason why they are not integrating into society is because they are unable to find work and therefore a job creation scheme is needed. Your manager at Head Office in London, however, thinks this is not the case at all. She recently attended a seminar on post-war trauma counselling and was heavily influenced by it. She is convinced the ex-soldiers have severe psychological and social problems after their war experiences and are unable to settle down into civilian life again, so what is needed is trauma counselling.

Thus you disagree on the cause of the reintegration problem – but you do agree that there is a problem and that substantial funding is needed to solve it. Your manager wants to fly in a team of trauma counsellors, whereas you want to spend the money on setting up a job creation programme. What do you do?

Discussion

One choice is to try to enlist the support of other field workers from your own and other agencies and, if possible, use their data to support your case. If you are able to build a good alliance with others and present a strong, well-documented case then you may be able to challenge your manager. But this is highly risky if you are unsure about Head Office politics.

Alternatively, let us start with perceptions and logic bubbles – first with your own. Have you checked your logic bubble and considered that your manager may have a point? Have you become too focused on the obvious lack of jobs? Might you learn something from these outsiders?

Next, think about your manager's logic bubble. Her commitment to counselling is real, but think with Kuhn and Kuhn of personal and institutional factors that may also influence her thinking. As a manager working at Head Office she will also be considering how any response will be regarded by fundraisers and other donors. She may feel that being seen to be innovative and responding to new thinking will be good for her career. And if you mount a successful and innovative programme of trauma counselling, then it could raise the prestige and income of your agency. Lateral thinking plus consideration of her logic bubble might produce a compromise solution. You could agree that counselling is needed – but you could also point out that this will be wasted if the soldiers are then not gainfully employed. Thus you could create a joint package of trauma counselling and job creation. This would go a long way to solving the problem – on which you are both agreed.

Read Article 11, linked below, then complete Scenario E.

Click below to view Article 11 (0.1MB).

Scenario E

You are a field officer with WorkAid in a small Asian country were there is an intermittent civil war between the government and an anti-government group known as the ‘Unity Front’. The annual rains have been disappointing and the harvests have failed in many parts of the region where you are based. WorkAid provides food for work, such as road improvement, and there is a need to expand the programme in your area to avoid severe food deficiency and an outflow of people. This is your responsibility. The army is not keen on expansion but after considerable negotiations and international pressure the government has agreed. The Unity Front allows the programme to expand and, in spite of various difficulties, all is proceeding well.

Your district headquarters lies inside government-held territory but many of the recipients live in territory under the control of the Unity Front. To reach your distribution centre and collect their food allowances the recipients have to cross between the two territories.

Then comes news that a group of recipients on their way home after collecting their rice were killed when one of them stepped on a landmine. Before they left the army had advised them to remain in the town. As a result, other recipients are afraid to come to the headquarters to collect their rice allocation.

A week later another group of recipients in a neighbouring district are also killed by a landmine on their way home with their food allocation. This increases local fears, and people stop coming for their regular rice ration. Many people are becoming desperately hungry as a result and some are taking the risk of crossing the boundary to become refugees on the government-controlled side.

Both the army and the Unity Front deny any responsibility for the mine laying. Local information, however, suggests that the army is responsible, as they are known to use anti-personnel mines of the type laid locally.

The leadership of the Unity Front contacts you and makes a couple of proposals. They can provide you with porters to take the food to a safe site which the local people can access. Or they can provide you with a landing strip in the next valley (they control the air space here) to which the local people also have safe access. They promise they will guarantee the security of your flights. You would be able to organise air transport.

The problem

What are you to do? What are your priorities? Who are the key stakeholders? How do they see things? What ways forward are possible? What are the options? Are you becoming an actor in the war? Consider the issues involved and some possible approaches that you might use to resolve things and to achieve your objectives.

Work with the list of questions in Box 10.3 in Article 11 and your own experience in analysing and understanding the issues, considering the possible solutions and making decisions. Finally, list your options for a decision-making solution – you may have several you would consider, or none.

Discussion

We now work through Adair's three areas and the questions in Box 10.3, Article 11:

Analysis

Your job is to operate the WorkAid programme and to ensure that the people in your area are fed. Your original goal had been to discourage people from migrating to other areas causing problems elsewhere. But things have changed. Your food may have become a weapon in the war, as both sides want to use food aid as a way to maintain control over the population.

The important technical factors seem to be: the need to provide rice for work; the location of the distribution centres; the routes to these centres for the local population; and your neutrality with respect to the army and the Unity Front. But is this too narrow a focus?

The key actors and their concerns appear to be:

The army. Is its goal to force people to leave Unity Front zones? Will it stand by and let the rebels use their porters to move food across their territory?
The government. Will it stand on the sidelines or will it intervene to block flights to Unity Front areas?
The Unity Front. Its goal is to obtain food so that people can stay in zones it controls. Can you trust it to honour its promises? How much control will it demand over distribution?
The local people. How do you work with them to overcome justifiable fears and find a solution? Will they be afraid to have public contact with a scheme that is openly operated by the Unity Front or which seems to have the backing of the army?

What are the agendas of your funders? Are they pro- or anti-government? Are they largely humanitarian or not? How important is it to be seen to be neutral – are you willing to seem sympathetic to one side?

The discussion has been focused on the two parties to the war, the army and the Unity Front. What are the views of local community leaders? You may have to talk with them in secret, but they may characterise the problem in entirely different ways. They may even say that food is not the priority, but instead they are worried about atrocities by one or both sides. You will need the active support and participation of the community for any action you decide on.

What are the longer-term implications? By feeding both sides, are you simply keeping the war going? What portion of your food is going to fighters on the two sides?

If this is really a security situation, have you consulted with your guidelines for such a contingency? Are there experts in your organisation who could fly in and advise? The essence of the issue is how to maintain the flow of food and not exacerbate the situation in any way that could harm the local population, and how to avoid becoming an actor in the war.

Synthesis: considering the possibilities

Is it possible to take the rice to the people rather than expect the people to come to the rice? Could you negotiate with the Unity Front and arrange to use their safe sites as your new food distribution centres? Is this geographically and logistically possible?

Is there any way you could work with the army on identifying safe distribution sites? Are there any helpful local commanders that you or other aid workers could approach? They may have laid the mines, in which case they should know where it is safe to travel. Is there any way you can bring pressure to bear so that they help? Perhaps you could contact HQ and ask them to speak to government ministers and the international community.

If you have considered the perception bubbles of the key actors you will understand how very differently they all view the situation. Is there any common ground here, however? What is your leverage – can you use outside pressure to promote cooperation or will pressure just provoke a backlash? Do the army, the government and the Unity Front all need to consider the role of the international community and its view on the situation? How reliant are they all on the goodwill of others: the local people, the international community, financial donors and political supporters? Could the national government be persuaded to intervene positively if it is a recipient of aid from the UK or elsewhere?

If people do not get food, there could be a severe outflow of the population from the Unity Front-controlled area. But this raises two opposite possibilities. Is the real goal of the government to use the drought to force people to leave Unity Front zones, and thus would they oppose food going to people in those areas? Or will population movements cause real problems for the government and local councils, and could this be used as a way of getting helpful discussions going with local and national government contacts?

Is there another NGO who has faced a similar problem, whom it might be worth contacting and discussing the situation with?

Select, evaluate, test: possible options

Carry on as usual and hope that things will not get any worse. Is this really an option? Already people are leaving the area. Already there is hunger. But will feeding people only in government-controlled zones be seen as taking sides and compromise your neutrality?
Refuse to continue with the programme unless both sides guarantee safe access.
Work with the Unity Front and accept one of their offers. But would this compromise your working neutrality in the other direction? Could it alienate the army? Could the situation deteriorate into open conflict again if the army feels threatened in any way? Could it lead to a dependency on the Unity Front? Will local people cooperate?
Accept one of the Unity Front offers as a temporary solution. Make it clear to them that this is the case. Then start negotiations with the government or local army commanders to make local routes safe or to provide you with a new location for your food distribution headquarters that is on army-held territory. Would the Unity Front and the army go along with this? What happens if you fail to persuade the army to cooperate?
You decide to fly in the food to the safe sites. You would then distribute the food. But would the army let you do this? Can your budget accommodate the costs of this? This may be a temporary measure while national level negotiations are held.
You work with the Unity Front and let their porters take the food to the new safe site. They would distribute the food on your behalf. This might be safer and a less high profile operation than flying the food in – but would the army let them do it? Also, it would appear that the Unity Front was providing the food and not your agency.
Work with other NGOs and local people and set up new safe distribution centres that local people can reach. Is this possible? Can you create ‘zones of peace’ where people can come from both sides to collect food? How would you make sure that the army did not lay more mines? How would you ensure that the Unity Front allowed people to go to those locations to collect food? How would you ensure that people left the distribution centres, and that they did not turn them into refugee camps?

There are many more possible options and many variations on these options, so your list could be very different from this one – reflecting your own knowledge and experience. Evaluation of these and other options will clearly depend on extensive discussions and much more detailed local understanding.

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5.4 Choices and principles – sanctions and Sierra Leone

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

To get your feet wet, we are going to immerse you in a difficult environment right away and ask you to think about the sanctions that were imposed during Sierra Leone's civil war in 1997. You will complain that you don't have enough information, which is precisely the point – decisions during war and in early postwar periods are almost always made with too little information. You will, we hope, think yourself into the shoes of people who had to make hard choices.

Read Article 12, linked below.

Click below to view Article 12 (0.4MB).

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‘The sanctions debate’

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

The audio tracks linked below are of the discussion between Margie Buchanan-Smith and Peter Penfold. As you listen to this discussion, and again later when you know more about the Sierra Leone war, ask yourself what you might have done in late 1997 if you were involved as an outside intervener in Sierra Leone.

Activity 15

Listen to the audio tracks linked below and look at the transcripts with the specific purpose of compiling a list of the points on which Peter Penfold and Margie Buchanan-Smith agree, and the points on which they disagree.

Click to listen to the audio (9 minutes).

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The sanctions debate (Part 1)

Transcript

Click to listen to the audio (9 minutes).

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The sanctions debate (Part 2)

Transcript

Click to listen to the audio (8 minutes).

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The sanctions debate (Part 3)

Transcript

Click to listen to the audio (7 minutes).

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The sanctions debate (Part 4)

Transcript

Discussion

Here are our lists. See how they compare with yours.

Peter Penfold and Margie Buchanan-Smith agree that:

sanctions can be legitimate;
they would not impose sanctions if people were starving to death;
the junta was universally condemned, inside and outside Sierra Leone; and
aid agencies do have a responsibility to take into account the political context.

Peter Penfold and Margie Buchanan-Smith disagree on:

whether NGOs were able to control food aid and prevent its misuse;
whether or not the people of Sierra Leone supported sanctions on rice;
whether people were starving;
whether there was a humanitarian crisis;
what was the basic human rights principle in this case; and
whether giving food aid would have prolonged the junta's life.

One thing that is striking is just how fundamental are some of the disagreements. Consider the question of whether or not people were dying of hunger. Peter Penfold makes clear his view that sanctions could only continue if they were not killing people; as he says, we were not ‘going to starve people to death for the sake of some political gain’. He goes on to say flatly, ‘There was not a humanitarian crisis.’ For Margie Buchanan-Smith, people were starving to death by inference, not because they were collapsing on the street. Malnutrition was rising, and ‘there was inevitably an increase in mortality which accompanies an increase in malnutrition’.

Another issue that is raised here is how much we can transfer experience from other countries. There is agreement that aid was looted in neighbouring Liberia – for Penfold this carries over to Sierra Leone and means that the same NGOs would have the same problem, while Buchanan-Smith says they learnt their lesson and would do it differently, setting up feeding centres. Penfold sees no one starving to death; Buchanan-Smith uses data from Sudan to argue that rising malnutrition means people are dying hidden in villages.

You may have noticed hints of accusations of self-interest – that Margie Buchanan-Smith was an official of an NGO which had had substantial government grants which had been cut off, and which she hoped would be restored through feeding programmes, while Peter Penfold as High Commissioner had a vested interest in carrying out government policy and in supporting the Kabbah government in exile.

But the most profound disagreement is over human rights and what kind of rights come first. For Buchanan-Smith, it ‘contravenes basic humanitarian principles’ to withhold humanitarian aid; humanitarian aid is supposed to be given unconditionally. For Penfold, ‘It's more important that people have a right to live in a peaceful and humane way without an evil regime bludgeoning them.’ Penfold says more lives were lost due to the junta; Buchanan-Smith says that calculation is not permitted to be done. Penfold says, ‘The important thing about the Geneva Convention is the protection of human rights and to prevent human atrocities. We had a situation in Sierra Leone where people were being brutally murdered.’

Finally, both were looking to the broader implications of their actions, and were not only thinking about Sierra Leone. Penfold was ‘trying to send a message to the whole of Africa that this would be the last military coup in Africa’. For Buchanan-Smith, humanitarian aid was such a human right that a precedent of denying could not be set in Sierra Leone.

Our discussion above raises three questions which you should try to answer:

Having compiled your list of points of disagreement, do you think you might be able to establish some more information to clarify these points? If so, what information, and how would you find it?
Both Peter Penfold and Margie Buchanan-Smith were outside Sierra Leone, and were dependent on telephone calls, letters and visits from people who were inside. How serious do you think is the danger that information would be biased – the people talking to Penfold would be linked, at least indirectly, to the High Commission and would tell Penfold what he wanted to hear, that sanctions were good, while people talking to Buchanan-Smith were indirectly linked to aid agencies and thus would support an increase in aid? Think back to your own experience – do you know of examples where people were afraid to say the ‘wrong’ thing to someone they hoped to look to later for a job or grant, so just told them what they wanted to hear?
Assume for the purposes of discussion that Penfold is right that people in Sierra Leone overwhelmingly wanted rice sanctions, and that Buchanan-Smith is right that at least a few extra people were dying. Do the Sierra Leoneans have the right to ask the international community to violate one human right – to humanitarian aid – if they feel that this will end a larger human rights abuse?

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5.5 Negotiation

The Open University — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:25:50 GMT

Resolving tensions within an organisation requires similar negotiating skills to those needed to develop collaboration between organisations, so we look at these issues together. But we start with tensions within an organisation, which can vary in strength and origin. In particular they can be: longstanding or of short duration; intense and damaging or minor and easily managed; and between local and national perspectives, between head office and field or between national and foreign.

Read Article 13, linked below, then complete Scenario F.

Click below to view Article 13 (0.1MB).

Scenario F

Our final scenario is one where the factors working against agreement may be overwhelming. Two years ago you were appointed as Country Director of END POVERTY for a small African country. A bitter civil war had forced the office to close and you were to reopen the office and get water projects rolling once more. To you it was the dream job, and offered you a real chance to deliver on some meaningful projects. You have been very successful. You have established excellent working relationships with local officials and there has been considerable genuine local capacity building. At a recent meeting with the Minster for Water Affairs you were publicly congratulated on your role in helping with post-civil-war reconstruction.

Unexpectedly, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of END POVERTY takes early retirement. His replacement is a man with limited NGO experience but considerable experience in the commercial sector, and he argues that END POVERTY has to change to make itself more distinctive and different from other development NGOs. He argues that there is a significant niche in the market for those with management expertise in development and he proposes to put the emphasis on providing development consultancy services to developing country governments, and to sharply reduce involvement in actual projects. In particular, END POVERTY should stop working in water because there are so many other NGOs in that sector; established projects have six months to be wound up. You speak briefly on the phone to your line manager, expressing your dismay at the new line. He is unsympathetic and totally supportive of the new approach and the new CEO. This surprises you, as he had always been so pro-development projects and capacity building, but now he sees consultancy as the way forward.

What are you to do? Consider your options and your likely responses at this point.

You want to maintain water projects and capacity building. Accordingly, you prepare a detailed report, which argues the need to keep the water projects going, as the country still needs support in the aftermath of a devastating civil war. To pull out now is too soon and could damage END POVERTY's reputation in your part of Africa. You speak to a number of colleagues in headquarters who are prepared to support your arguments. Your report is sent to your line manager and, after some negotiation, it is agreed that you may extend the projects – but only for another six months.

Instead of simply closing the projects, you find other NGOs that would be prepared to fund some of the existing projects. This is very good news as it means that several important projects will be able to continue.

But there is no time to consider consultancy initiatives and anyway you have very little enthusiasm for this. You are invited to attend a number of management seminars in support of the many changes to END POVERTY, but you decline, saying your primary responsibility must be to your projects.

You then receive a letter from your line manager reminding you that your role is to find consultancy projects. He writes: ‘I am quite frankly very dismayed by the line you are taking and I would warn you that your current activities go against END POVERTY policy. Any further failure to ignore policy could lead to disciplinary procedures in the future.’ It has been copied to the new CEO.

You speak to your manager on the phone expressing your dismay at this letter and pointing out that you are doing your best in difficult circumstances. He replies that your failure to support the new policy looks very bad for his department. You are now seen as someone who is resisting change. In your view the new policy is a major mistake and you decide to speak to other END POVERTY Country Directors in your part of Africa. Surely if a group of you opposes this new approach something will be done. Your lobbying is going very well. Some of your co-directors feel, like you, that support for development projects should continue. After all, it is agreed, this could work well alongside a consultancy arm.

Then you are summoned to headquarters. You are told that your line manager is recommending to the CEO that END POVERTY pulls out of your country, citing your views that the new consultancy policy is inappropriate for your country and others just coming out of civil war. And you are told you are unlikely to find a new post within the organisation because of your refusal to participate in the change process. As you reflect on events, consider how you might have handled things differently.

Could there have been a better outcome? If so, how might it have been achieved? Why do you think these internal disputes arose? What clues were there indicating the final problem? Finally, do you think you were successful?

Discussion

All three of the Whetten and Cameron organisation problems are here: lack of information, conflicting roles and organisational stress. So it may not be surprising that the confrontation became personal. A further problem is that head office was using a forcing strategy to push through institutional change.

A collaborative approach requires goals, issues and interests of all parties to be made clear. One question we asked above was: Do you think you were successful? That can gain a mixed response – you saved projects but END POVERTY left your country and you lost your job. You are probably unsure about your success because you lacked clear goals – what did you actually want for yourself and your country? Were your goals peacebuilding, or specific projects, or keeping END POVERTY working in your country?

Similarly, did you try to understand the position at head office? This requires looking at logic bubbles and organisational politics. Did you wonder why the CEO had taken such an approach to policy? That it might be necessary for sound financial reasons? What was positive about his new thinking?

How hard did you try to discover why your line manager had undergone such a sudden change of heart? Could it be that your line manager, concerned about his career prospects, is keeping in with the new CEO – and thus is very disturbed by your apparent lack of cooperation? If so, what might be an effective way to respond?

A key to collaborative negotiating is to prevent personalisation, yet you may have made it easy for headquarters to personalise the problem rather than treat it as an issue. Did you consider how your line manager perceived your response to the changes at END POVERTY? Is it possible that you were perceived as a blocker to change and progress? You were refusing to come on the new courses. You had made it clear to him that you did not agree with the new changes. You were rallying other co-directors against Head Office policy.

Your negotiating tactic was initially avoiding, moving to forcing but from a weak position. Collaborative negotiating means finding solutions that satisfy the interests of all parties; that clearly required taking an active part in the change process which was central to the CEO's interests.

Perhaps most important, you were very slow in building allies who might convince the CEO that a more balanced approach was in his interest. Your lobbying of codirectors was very effective – should you have done this earlier, instead of concentrating on your own country? Could you have worked with them to develop consultancy in your part of Africa, giving it a high profile? This would have been an overt demonstration of your support for the new policy. Also, it may have enabled you to informally support capacity building and other development activities.

Did you consider building up your network of contacts at Head Office and working with them to develop an effective strategy for working with the new policy while still arguing your case?

Finally, you did not make use of your good local contacts – in the projects and in the ministry – who might have lobbied embassies and others to stress the good work END POVERTY was already doing and how this should not be lost. Also, it should not have been difficult to convince the Minister for Water Affairs to accept a high profile consultancy – which would have made you seem a leader in the change process.

If you feel your strength was in working with local people and supporting their peacebuilding, then you should have been able to draw them into developing a collaborative negotiating strategy.

Overall, if you had been more collaborative and drawn in local partners, you might have done more than simply saved a few projects.

We have demonstrated the utility of lists in organising your understanding and responses in complex and conflict contexts. In this final article we introduce one last checklist of concerns to reflect upon and some simple rules to guide behaviour to maximise creative thinking in solving problems.

Read Article 14, linked below.

Click below to view Article 14 (0.08MB).