What We're Reading, Part Two
David Jacobstein
One theme running through a lot of my reading this quarter is a deceptively simple question: what changes once we actually take complexity seriously? Not just in how we analyze systems, but in how we organize institutions, write rules, and enable people to act within them. Two pieces in particular pushed my thinking on this, one looking at how international relations grapples with complexity, and another at how rules and bureaucracies can either constrain adaptive action or deliberately create space for it.
One of the members of our Systems Practice Community (if you don’t know what that is, please ask, we’d love you to join!), Asaad Taha, wrote a great personal reflection on Sudan for Johns Hopkins on how relational architecture defines resilience, and how this should shape our future development assistance. Lower down the same page, you can see an article I shared last quarter from Brandon Halloran around local ownership (more from him tomorrow).
I decided to keep the systems thinking post really short this quarter because I think there are two really significant articles worth in depth consideration. The first is Henry Farrell’s review on the challenges of International Relations in grappling with complexity. It’s a thorough review of different schools within international relations, and really a primer on complexity and how it applies (and mostly upends their approaches). What I find interesting about this is that it suggests how far the mainstream IR theorists lag behind in internalizing that complexity shifts what matters. In the democracy space, for example, we learned some time ago (though we seem to keep relearning it) that meaningful change comes from building resilience, relationships and connections that support actors to adapt to unforeseen shifts. He describes his article as pointing out a problem rather than a solution, but this seems to be a problem that is largely solved, just the solution hasn’t been imported into the IR space (see tomorrow for some great examples).
Second, this great if long article on rules and bureaucracy, which is a real tour de force for anyone interested in how complexity relates to bureaucratic function. It’s full of great examples and illustrations, but I particular value it for its discussion of how Horizon 2 work either makes better outcomes possible despite existing rules or works towards the future we need. In particular, this reminds me of the work by Dan Honig on Navigation by Judgment that is foundational to my understanding of how large structures can be set up to support meaningful change when it must be driven by tacit knowledge of embedded actors not visible to central planners - a brief description of the entire field of international development. In particular, this article shows how a mix of well-intentioned caveats and a waterfall of rigidity among different actors in a chain leads to strange and counterproductive outcomes. Conversely, a clear understanding of how this happens can lead to “designing for the cascade” or intentionally structuring the core ideas (and the more fluid external frameworks incorporated by reference) to fit a context with fairly rigid and uninformed interpretations yet be leveraged well by empowered actors imbued with a sense of mission.