FYI: What We're Reading

[David Jacobstein]

Hi all,

It's been an incredibly busy fall for many of us here in Washington, capped by the Summit for Democracy and all of its associated civil-society-hosted side events, which has meant that there are tons more things to read and listen to than we can capture this time, resulting in our longest list ever. Hopefully, this roundup finds you contemplating a new year of good health and opportunities, and in addition to what is listed here, you can review some of the findings from the Summit, which collectively places us in great stead going into an important year of action. Without further ado, here are some things that caught folks' eyes this quarter:

• A series of excellent papers summarizing, synthesizing, and reconsidering one of the most noted TWP-informed efforts in history is a real highlight of this year. Covering work started 20 years ago by DFID in Nigeria as SAVI which transformed through several different iterations, most recently as PERL, you can find several learning papers by ODI (summary here) and a fantastic webinar featuring many who worked directly on the projects. My most important takeaway, among many, is probably that even where donors aim to incentivize TWP, structurally requiring it by making things like political economy analyses into deliverables can undermine the work by taking something meant to help an implementer succeed and making it a bell-and-whistle done to manage upward. Seems that a lot of the donor challenge around incentives isn't to update requirements, but to reduce the burden of managing upward so that more effort can go into the program itself.
• Here is Duncan Green on the same set of papers and here are some other distilled highlights from Laure-Hélène Piron and Sam Waldock that look at when governance reforms work - in states of Nigeria, depending on the nature of the political settlement, it is in states with limited political competition where reformers understand the base behind strong governors and how to apply that knowledge to frame and structure reforms they pursue.
• Some interesting thoughts around reforms at scale and how they happen from Lant Pritchett, looking at the connective tissue that leads to broad reforms. Scale has been getting increasing attention lately and I think this is a really important consideration, if challenging for outsiders to accept. Here's a key quote to me, in full:
• Embedding good practice takes time; the political commitment leading to adoption of an innovation is often, however, tied to an immediate political opportunity being exploited by the political elites. Thus, when political opportunity rather than a genuine political will creates space for adoption of an innovation, state support for that innovation fades away before the new ways of working can replace the old habits. In contexts where states lack political will to improve learning outcomes, NGOs can only hope to make systematic change in state systems if, as in the case of Pratham, they operate as semi-social movements with large cadres of volunteers. The network of volunteers enables them to slow down and pick up again in response to changing political contexts, instead of quitting when state actors withdraw. Involving the community itself does not automatically lead to greater political accountability. Time-bound donor-funded NGO projects aiming to introduce innovation, however large in scale, simply cannot succeed in bringing about systematic change, because embedding change in state institutions lacking political will requires years of sustained engagement.

Part of what this suggests is that the role of donors and others aiming to support change at scale may be more to build connections and linkages that allow key local actors to adjust broad efforts to the dynamic political realities of contexts. While we tend to think of this as "our project should be adaptive" it's much more "our programming needs to up the odds of adaptiveness", describing a world where even if we do great, our projects will not directly drive success, though they may play critical roles over time. This idea is simple to express (see the sidekick manifesto) but is so hard to really internalize, that the work of development projects is to change the odds and build the enabling conditions and infrastructure toward other folks' eventual successes not to make change directly.

• Taking a brief opportunity to self-promote, the above considerations of systemic change and scale are part of the background to a paper on community health workforce performance that I contributed to, which aims to consider broad functions and move away from linear sequencing of change, allowing the work of outsiders to be to spur improvement to any of the areas of the framework.
• One donor explicitly experimenting with working in systems oriented ways is UNDP (h/t Alan Hudson for first sharing this), and they have a disarmingly clear and useful set of reflections on systems work. In particular, their question on whether the approach is top-down or bottom-up - that is, centered on helping a single actor navigate change or fostering an ecosystem to work in concert - comes to an answer that both may be viable but they are different, and so an important step is to define who "we" are in the project. Please note, they also explicitly are asking for input on how they can more robustly build a power lens into their systems work, which should be of interest to the TWP community. This may be a real challenge, given that their short rubric on building political factors into work is actually really thoughtful and clear! But hopefully some of this group will follow up with them.
• I find a mirror to these questions of systemic transformation in a cogent critique of local governance work in Afghanistan - basically finding that faulty assumptions and over-emphasis on quick wins and ability to work with donors led to churn without meaningful change. As described, "Program design continually failed to acknowledge that any missing connection or linkage was not due to inadequate communication facilitation or the result of Afghans not knowing how to talk to one another—instead, the lack of connection often reflected deeper political obstacles. In some instances...silences were strategic. In others, citizens at the local level lacked interest in being connected to the central state, which they viewed as extortionate and corrupt, and the state was disinclined to bolster its communication with a periphery demanding more authority or resources." When the political realities contradict the thrust of programming and measures of its success, we introduce faulty assumptions in order to create a space where we can do reportable work, defining "our work" in ways where we can succeed at it, even as staff knew these assumptions not to fully hold at the time and that the work being done will not relate to broader strategic purposes behind it.
• Sometimes international actors attribute the lack of consideration of political realities as a function of not having savvier local outfits leading work - that it's because of our outsider status. However, pointing more toward underlying incentives related to aid projects, there is a thoughtful critique of NGOs in Ghana which are unwilling to meaningfully cede power to local communities. It's a great consideration of where and how Ghanaian NGOs draw legitimacy and how they view the communities who they aim to help, and points to the re-consideration of development to #shiftthepower as something much deeper than surface questions of the nationality of implementers - it's not about origins, it's about power.
• Speaking of shifting the power, there's a great visual looking at who is working to shift power that has been organized through BOND. I suspect many on this email list would view themselves in that cohort but haven't yet self-reported the data, so I encourage folks to add to it! I also want to highlight their acknowledgement of the Association for Women in Development; AWID has been a powerful movement that both advances the field and also lives their values, with "decades of experience, accumulated knowledge and resources of influencing donors for funding to go directly to "drivers of change”.
• Moving into some of the papers around corruption and social accountability, which continues to be a core focus for so much great writing and learning, a number of quick hits on great papers:
• Halloran on accountability ecosystems latest highlighting a choice between strengthening or navigating (and offering the value proposition of considering when is today’s navigation part of a long-term strengthening, helping us to distinguish early steps in long-term change from quick wins that don't directly build toward something larger)
  
• Tufts continued series on social norms and corruption, which explains how social norms are different from attitudes, behaviors, morals, conventions and values and why that matters to programming.
• The excellent ARC series on the language of accountability has one of my favorite entries, looking from Zambia at Ubuntu
• A fascinating paper on shifting anti-corruption messaging, drawing from public opinion research in North Macedonia, the United States, and Brazil, with the broad takeaway that we've been too short-term in messaging. As they write, A “crime and punishment” mode of communication emphasizes individual acts of (illegal) corruption and/or outrageous unethical practices (even if not illegal), in order to stoke public outrage and build pressure for punishment of the malefactors. But while this kind of discourse can be effective in mobilizing people in the short run, in the longer term the main effect of this mode of communication is to discourage people and reinforce their cynicism. In contrast, a “guardrails for good government” mode of communication highlights pragmatic solutions. It focuses less on good and bad people, more on stories of building or strengthening key mechanisms (rules, processes, institutions, etc.) that have successfully put or kept government on track serving the public. The focus is less on stoking moral outrage over individual wrongdoing, and more on practicality and prevention. There may still be heroes or villains in these narratives, but moral assessments of individual actors are tied to how these individuals relate to the “guardrails”—do they build, support, and reinforce them, or attack and weaken them?
• An excellent and thorough report from Mushtaq Khan on what explains progress reducing corruption in Bangladesh, with a linked video through LSE, looking at the nature of market competition and horizontal linkages as creating the tipping point when there is enough support for meaningful control of corruption to be expected, executed, and built into operating assumptions of players.
• For those interested in monitoring and evaluation, one of the best papers I've read around evaluation and TWP (gated) from Tom Aston, Chris Roche, Marta Schaaf, and Sue Cant really covers the full gamut of approaches that can be used and how and why each one might offer value in learning and evaluation that accompanies TWP programming.
• A short paper on how we can rejuvenate civic space in authoritarian settings, helping to examine the realistic and meaningful steps that can be done in those settings and some of the patterns apparent in them.
• If you prefer to listen to your content, a really interesting podcast covering recent innovations in how scholars understand dictatorships - particularly, that dictators share power in key ways not defined by de jure rules but more around de facto positioning of successors and allies, and how this builds meaningful institutions over time, is very clearly explained.
• A fantastic piece of scholarship from a domestic context here in the US that seems highly relevant to international work is  from Jane Booth-Tobin, Kal Munis, Lynsy Smithson-Stanley, and Hahrie Han, looking at strategic capacity, itself synthesizing work from a number of disciplines that, as they say, don't speak to each other. As they write, "Any movement-based organization seeking to build, exercise, and win political power must have sophisticated strategic capacities to be able to navigate these uncertain, dynamic, and constantly shifting political environments. Yet, our knowledge of how movements can nurture the kind of strategic capacities that allows them to build constituencies and leadership that can operate in the flexible ways needed for these dynamic circumstances is limited." The connection to TWP should be clear, and some of the scholarship might update and sharp TWP approaches. The paper yields an assessment tool that might be of interest to implementers working with or on TWP.
• Finally, generating a lot of buzz, the first of a series of papers on different pathways to scale for social accountability, outlining a subsequent series on pathways of resonance, resistance, and best practices, looking at which ones suit which contexts and types of accountability, and linking to an exciting announcement: "For those interested in digging deeper, in 2022 we will publish a paper, with co-authors Brian Levy, Paula Chies Schommer, Rebecca Haines, Sue Cant, and Grazielli Zimmer, which presents a research agenda and approach to thinking, supporting, monitoring, evaluation and learning about scale." So hopefully, more to come here, and potentially even opportunities for multiple folks to pursue coordinated research in this space.

Wishing everyone a happy New Year!

Best,

David

P.S. With tremendous gratitude, I should also note that older editions of these digests are now being stored as part of Global Integrity's set of readings here - a treasure trove of material from Alan Hudson, whose work to co-found #adaptdev and to send out his own reflections have been foundational in building such a broad discourse. Many thanks!

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:

https://usaidlearninglab.org/context-driven-adaptation-overview

https://programnet.usaid.gov/collection/context-driven-adaptation (Internal only)