FYI: What We're Reading

[David Jacobstein]

Hi all,

As another eventful year draws to a close, we hope you're able to pause and reconnect with friends and family, and get away from the ongoing grind of work to recharge and renew. For this audience, for whom reading about innovations in applying systems thinking and TWP to development programming is intriguing or inspiring, we offer some reads to start the new year on a good footing:

• One of the most exciting things we've read in a long time is starting to put some specifics to the longstanding question of how adopting a social and behavior change (SBC) lens will update approaches in social change work such as democracy, rights and governance. This post from Laura Adams and the resources linked within offer some compelling answers. As she writes, "The unavoidable but challenging conclusion I drew from this research is that social change interventions should target networks, not individuals. This isn’t the way that most of us design our interventions in the DRG Sector. However, the means by which social change happens (social proof, collective excitement, feelings of solidarity, and norms) are all phenomena that spread through networks." Among the implications, better measuring whether we are approaching the 25% tipping point within a network, considering who can carry which messages, and ensuring messages are suited to avoid resistance are small but deeply significant tweaks to current ways of designing programming. Again, quoting Adams, "Changing petty corruption behavior entails huge coordination costs as well as making sure that new behaviors are being perceived by peers in the network, thereby shifting the norms."
• Many are familiar with the "Sandwich Strategy" of Jonathan Fox as a way of theorizing how different tactics can contribute to greater accountability; there is now a great resource page that builds out elements of this approach with detailed and compelling examples.
• Some interesting research from Tom Aston looking at social accountability and sanctions, which looks at ways in which sanctions sometimes (but not always) are related to positive change in service delivery driven by social accountability, and examines some of the mechanisms for this. Citing some findings that link back to Fox's work above, he notes that "It’s vital to situate change processes in space and time and indeed to clarify who you collaborate with and who you confront. Fox et al. have recently stressed that both collaboration and confrontation may drive institutional reform. Yet, from our evidence — which partly overlaps with Fox et al., very rarely (if ever) did we find a productive combination in the same time or place, with the same actors.
• A good applied example of the question of how combating corruption relates to state capability/performance can be found in this opinion article by Yamini Aiyar, which looks at corruption in identification of beneficiaries for state welfare in India, the use of centralized surveillance to limit discretion in this, and ways in which this top-down control approach may limit the capability of the state to perform even as it restrains corruption in the processes - as she notes, "as government moves farther away from people, so do sites of accountability. Where does a citizen go to complain, protest, demand accountability when entitlements are denied? How can local governments respond to needs, if they do not have powers?"
  
• For a cautionary note on expert consensus developing policy while bypassing meaningful debate and ownership, and how this can lead to democratic progress that is rapid but fragile, I'd suggest Enrique Mendiazabal's writing about what has happened over the past two decades in Peru. As he notes, even as a technocratic leadership seemed to outflank politics and provide research-based policies in the country, the process by which this happened avoided the messy process of building political support and so proved brittle over time. Centering notions of progress on the laws and policies in place, while ignoring the consensus around those policies and resilience of them to adapt to future shocks, yielded illusory progress that has been rolled back together with a real diminishing of state capacity.
• An exciting way to think about the dilemma of how social accountability generates change in services and/or accountability might be looking at work on relational contracting. As laid out in a new research agenda from Dan Honig, "the way we normally conceive of state capacity – as the stuff governments can do or make or deliver to citizens – is incomplete. Myriad public services require action not just by state actors, but by citizens. Citizens must agree to take vaccines when provided for community transmission of COVID to be reduced; voluntarily provide information to police to identify criminals and promote public order; citizens must voluntarily place trash and recycling in appropriate places for waste collection to function efficiently and the streets to remain clean. The capacity of the state is contingent not just on the abstract strength of the state, but on the actions of citizens who interact with the state. Citizen action is in turn conditioned by relationships with state actors. This project will explore relational state capacity – bringing economics’ relational contracting to the study of interactions between citizens and state representatives." I find this particularly interesting after speaking with him about it because in the economic literature on relational contracting, it is often the case that the contracts are deemed unenforceable, but there is still a value in the clarity of defining a contract and the commitment of signing it for the contracting firms. This seems to me to offer interesting mechanisms of change that probably apply within various social accountability and participatory governance tools, but which are not how those tools are typically understood to work. Bonus points for anyone who can connect how this relational idea of state capacity works with the SBC-informed notions of how behavior changes at scale identified by Adams above!
• Some other recent guides and tools of interest:
• A great podcast around the "innovation sandbox" at UNDP, on moving M&E from compliance to learning and being able to perceive emergent change;
• A review of 28 systems change frameworks looking at commonalities and differences across how they are defined and used;
• A version of the excellent CLA Maturity Matrix tool, used for some years within USAID, for partners - it's particularly great in breaking down and defining the culture, processes, and resources that CLA hinges on as a practice (or as they like to say, "CPR keeps CLA alive")
• An IAF guide unpacking counterpart contributions to donor grants, which should be broadly applicable;
• A toolkit looking at the role of social accountability in promoting respectful care, which applies some of the thinking from the scholars above to this particular area of health
• An interesting article looking at what makes for local leadership put together by the Development Leadership Programme through conducting a large number of interviews with leaders and allies in various contexts; looking at both the motivations and the characteristics that lead to someone becoming a civic leader, this is a rich assortment of thick qualitative research.
• A guide that I had a large hand in developing on distinguishing tools for capacity strengthening from risk mitigation and progress monitoring, which builds out some important planks of the Local Capacity Strengthening Policy. If you do or support work related to capacity strengthening, please review - it is perhaps the most frequent pitfall in how we undermine good intentions related to asset-based approaches and locally-led development. Short form: don't conflate the tools used to gauge risks in grant-making or to perceive change in performance with those used to support capacity strengthening, and don't try to use one tool for two purposes!
• Finally two outstanding events in the TWP community occurred this quarter. First is a community discussion around where we have gotten to after 10 years of TWP (within the US-based chapter, at least). Second is an outstanding event by the Chemonics Center for Thinking Politically that included two full days of panels around different aspects of TWP. I was privileged to introduce the second day's panel on TWP and Localization, and it is a tour-de-force of honest and clear thinking from frontline activists around how they see TWP and what they would ask those who support them to do more, less, and differently - one of the most informative conversations I've heard in years, just an incredible return on investment for an hour's listening!

Finally, we have to close with a standout song for 2022 - the outstanding Baraye, a deeply moving song coming from the citizens' protests in Iran. I hope you find it as uplifting as we did here, for those of us facing challenges and needing to remind ourselves why we stand up despite risks, failures, and challenges. May it be an anthem for breakthroughs in the New Year, and may everyone have a happy and healthy 2023!

Best,

David

David Jacobstein 

DCHA/DRG Policy, Coordination and Integration Team

United States Agency for International Development

T: (202) 712-1469

djaco...@usaid.gov

Context-Driven Adaptation Collection:

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