What does adaptive mean? Jean Boulton's comments on adaptive political economy

[Alan Hudson]

As one of the founders of the adaptdev google group, I've long been a proponent of adaptive approaches to development.

So, when I come across a challenge to that way of thinking, and talking, that piques my interest. Or at least it should, if I want to be adaptive :-)

So, I was excited to hear these comments by Jean Boulton about the multiple meanings of "adaptive", in her comments on Yuen Yuen Ang's SOAS lecture on adaptive political economy back in June.

https://lnkd.in/eBhpx5SJ

In the clip (my first time making a youtube clip!), which is just one minute, Jean talks about 3 aspects of adaptation: 

1. Adapting towards a goal

2. Adapting to a context

3. Adapting to an emerging future

When we bang on about being adaptive (and I still do, in conversations about navigating and shape the dynamics of complex social systems), we should perhaps be clear about what we mean, what mix of things we might mean, and how we find an appropriate mix amongst goal-oriented, context-sensitive, and emergence-aware adaptation.

What aspects or elements of adaptation do you mean when you talk about adaptive development?

The rest of Yuen Yuen Ang's presentation, and the discussants' comments, are also worth watching.

adaptively,
alan

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[Katherine Bain]

Thanks for flagging this Alan and nice to hear some conceptual clarity on this. At the same time, are we not adapting to context in order to find realistic pathways towards a goal which identify possible opportunities for systems change in the future. I see them as quite connected - even related- not separate things, although the conceptual clarity is still very welcome.

Kathy

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[rick davies]

Hi Alan

Good basic questions

Cutting across the three views of Jean Boulton is another set of differences in forms of adaptation, based on Gregory Bateson's (Russel-based)  theory of a hierarchy of logical types:

1. Adaptation of means of achieving an objective

2. Adaptation of objectives

3. Adaptation of criteria used to select / prioritise objectives

You can often see all three come under discussion in selection panel discussions implemented as part of a use  the "Most Significant Change

technique

regards, rick davies

Rick Davies, PhD, Monitoring and Evaluation Consultant, Cambridge, United Kingdom | rick....@gmail.com | https://richardjdavies.wordpress.com/  | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickjdavies/   | https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rick-Davies-3  | https://parevo.org | https://www.mande.co.uk |

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[Charlotte Ørnemark]

Thanks Alan and Kathy, it's always fun to go back to the conceptual drawing board at times!  :-) To me, the most critical question asked in this video clip seems to be how to navigate short-term adaptation to context/ at-hand-opportunities in sub-systems vs having a long-term vision for how to influence the system as a whole. And if so, how do we know what is emerging? (That's ideally where M&E comes into the picture as also previously debated). 

However, I do think there has been conceptual clarity on what adaptive means for a long time by now  going back to its origins related to how interactive patterns occur and create equilibria in bounded ecosystems, and how such equilibria are subsequently disrupted or influenced by endogenous agents or contextual factors, which in turn causes new equilibria (or patterns) to emerge and spill over to other bounded systems; long-term change thus being entirely co-created and interdependent, but also uncertain (and to a certain extent "influenceable" if driven from within) etc. 

Curious to hear if those more connected to the "field" (Alan, Kathy, others) see anything new in all of this now being said and debated, or get a sense that sectors/ thought communities/ key players (whoever they may be, and it would be interesting to name these) have moved to embrace such ideas more naturally by now compared to earlier? If not, where is the opposition? What are the consequences? Who are we (still) trying to convince, with what expected effect?  And if all (or most) agree on key concepts -- what's next?

Thanks!

Charlotte

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adaptdev/0BDA5A7C-F774-405D-827F-E35304A4747C%40gmail.com.

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Charlotte Ørnemark

CoConsult Collaborative Consulting

Tracking learning for gender equality and social change

in international development

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[Katherine Bain]

Hi Charlotte,

I am no expert on this and am working on a very, small scaled adaptive program in Colombia. Most of our funding comes from a very flexible donor. Despite this, the obstacles continue to be real. I would say that the top three are: (i) donor’s accountability and reporting processes that continue to crowd out more learning-centric, adaptive processes. They talk the talk but their compliance pressures are real and tend to win, (ii) organizational cultures of intermediary organizations, like the INGO I am working with, are based on this compliance culture and procurement and HR processes that have been built up to satisfy/convince donors and tend to make adaptive approaches extremely hard to achieve so it doesn’t really matter when you find a flexible donor,  and (iii) most of us who work in this sector have grown up in this compliance, reporting upwards, technical knowledge over contextual knowledge, expert advice sector so  it is quite hard to find people that have truly adaptive mindsets and are really willing to let go and hand over to locally led adaptive approaches that are not controlled by a strong HQs in-line with commitments to donors and internal compliance processes. Those would be my top 3 obstacles/opposition. They are organizational culture and architectural by nature, not conceptual and, while I am sure we can continue to clarify concepts and produce solid evidence on the benefits of such approaches when faced with complexity, without solving the nuts and bolts issues, there will continue to be little practical space for anything very new in this field. 

Kathy

[Ajoy Datta]

Hi Kathy, really interesting what you say. 

As someone who provides consulting services to a range of organisations, I'm noticing, as you say, how intermediary organisations tend to pick up on the vibrations of those they come into contact with. And obviously the direction of those vibrations tend to be shaped by power asymmetries. In psychological terms, this is called projective identification while in complexity terms you could see this as a fractal. 

On where the compliance comes from in the first place, you could argue that this is a way that donor organisations protect themselves from excessive anxiety in uncertain and high stakes environment (with aid often under the spotlight especially when things domestically are politically tricky) - bureaucracy becomes a way to manage collective fears about making mistakes, facing legal consequences, negative press coverage and failing to meet expectations. Sometimes these rules are helpful, but sometimes, they create too much distance between decision makers and the context they are working into, which incurs a high risk of making poor decisions. 

And on adaptive mind sets, I'd say that people don't always have the choice to take an adaptive mind set, as they are often positioned by the organisation - people make organisations, but organisations also make people! 

I guess in terms of a way forward, there is need for employees in INGOs (and donor organisations) to find 'containment', to process difficult emotions, difficult political relationships, to carve out a space to think, to explore what dynamics they are caught up in, and to see if they serve their primary purpose, or whether they get in the way. 

Best wishes,

Ajoy

www.ajoydatta.com 

[Katherine Bain]

Ajoy,

On compliance, if you haven’t read it, you should look at what is still a seminal piece on this, in my view:

Natsios, Andrew. 2010. “The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development.” Center for Global Development Essay (July). http://www.cgdev.org/files/1424271_file_Natsios_Counterbureaucracy.pdf (accessed April 28, 2016).

I also reference Nastio's  piece on whether more politically savvy adaptive approaches to calling complex problems would ever be possible at the World Bank which I also attach:

On mindsets, it is probably a bit of both as you say: organizational culture is heavy and once you have worked in one that incentivizes a linear, log frame way of working, it is likely quite hard to retrain your brain! I still think the US- AID piece on how to recruit such mindsets is fantastic. Whether the organizational culture allows such mindsets to work effectively is, as Nastio points out, another story.

Kathy

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adaptdev/23435478-b14d-4166-a14a-93294f023c84n%40googlegroups.com.

[Monalisa Salib]

Hi All,

 

This is a great topic – thanks for starting it, Alan!

 

@Alan Hudson, first a question, when the person was speaking about adapt towards goals vs. adapt to the context, what did they mean? What is the distinction there? It seems like we would adapt to the context in order to adapt to reach our goals…Perhaps the distinction is they mean that we can adapt our goals, or we adapt how we engage with the context to achieve a goal (in the latter, the goal doesn’t change)?

 

It reminded me of how USAID describes adaptive management in their additional help document – “Adaptive management is not about changing  goals during  implementation, rather it is about changing  the path being used to achieve the goals in response to changes” (my emphasis - see here). I don’t agree with this statement, as adaptive management at times may mean we change the goal. But referencing back to other points below, I think the reason for this sentence is a very practical one: it’s hard to change goals after awards have been signed. That would be a significant modification, and the system doesn’t have sufficient flexibility for it so the emphasis is on adapting in order to achieve a set goal that doesn’t change over at least five years (AKA – we’re good with double loop learning but not so much triple loop learning). In any case, I think it’s useful to break down adapting so we can make sure we know what we’re talking about, and I love the third one of adapting to an emerging future. Sharing a nice thread here from Liz Ruedy on LinkedIn on futures and foresight.

 

And thanks for the shoutout, @Katherine Bain (Kathy), on our work on adaptive employees. Here it is for others. I also just recently posted another piece on integrating these mindsets / abilities / qualifications into position descriptions for senior project staff here with the resource file here. And agreed - if the organization recruits for these abilities but then in reality shuts them down, then nothing will change and those individuals who are adaptive will eventually leave for places that truly enable it.

 

I wanted to throw in another obstacle, which I don’t hear talked about much. It’s not just donors who have a difficult time adapting. In working with national or local government agencies, we know they are similarly struggling with their internal bureaucracy. Once something is approved, USAID tends to have more flexibility to make a change than those local counterparts. And the more development is localized / co-owned / or more owned by local actors, the more their systems will affect whether adapting is possible and to what extent.

 

Best

Monalisa

 

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Monalisa Salib

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From: adap...@googlegroups.com <adap...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Katherine Bain
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2024 2:47 AM
To: Ajoy Datta <mrajo...@gmail.com>
Cc: Adaptive Development | #AdaptDev <adap...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [adaptdev] What does adaptive mean? Jean Boulton's comments on adaptive political economy

 

Ajoy,

 

On compliance, if you haven’t read it, you should look at what is still a seminal piece on this, in my view:

 

Natsios, Andrew. 2010. “The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development.” Center for Global Development Essay (July). http://www.cgdev.org/files/1424271_file_Natsios_Counterbureaucracy.pdf (accessed April 28, 2016).

 

I also reference Nastio's  piece on whether more politically savvy adaptive approaches to calling complex problems would ever be possible at the World Bank which I also attach:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adaptdev/F8054A5B-D774-4380-9139-D12B613AA2C6%40gmail.com.

[rick davies]

Following in from Monalisa Salib's posting

I think one other distinction that is useful to make about adaptation is between temporal and spatial adaptation. A lot of adaptation discussion (that I have seen, at least) seems to focus on adapting over time to changing circumstances. Spatial adaptation is about adapting designs (both means and ends) to different locations (aka contexts) within the same period. I have felt, for a long time, that most ToC of interventions do not pay enough attention to diversity of implementation (designed and otherwise)  within the same time period.There is a strong argument for doing so, even from the point of view of coping with unpredictable futures, let alone diversity of local needs. Here is a quote that I have used to start a recent paper on foresight methods:"It is clear from both evolutionary and immunological theory that in facing an unknown future, the fundamental requirement for successful adaption is pre existing diversity".[13] – Gerald M. Edelman (1978)

regards, rick davies

Rick Davies, PhD, Monitoring and Evaluation Consultant, Cambridge, United Kingdom | rick....@gmail.com | https://richardjdavies.wordpress.com/  | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickjdavies/   | https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rick-Davies-3  | https://parevo.org | https://www.mande.co.uk |

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adaptdev/CO6P221MB072646E03CF45645C68F7912B4222%40CO6P221MB0726.NAMP221.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM.

[pryo...@gmail.com]

A very good thread!  And after Monalisa's very thoughtful response I just wanted to add a couple of supporting points.  On the issue of adapting to context, and adapting to goals, it reminds me of Rebecca Kelinfeld's piece on planning for sailboats not for trains. The idea being that for development, or pretty much for anything, it's better to have a clear sense of the end result but keep how to get there flexible and adaptable to both contextual changes and lessons learned along the way.  And of course, as Ben Ramalingam had said, one can also be adaptable as to goals. but if you are adaptable on BOTH the outcome and the way to get there, simultaneously, it's pretty easy to lose one's way.  

I remember when the folk over at the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) looked at USAID's monitoring and its emphasis on indicators, their informal response was, to be polite: why would anyone rely on detailed indicators tracking a predetermined plan, and yet have soft, vague, overly large and often poorly defined end results?  Without an end state - what does success look like - adapting to context, and monitoring the path, doesn't help.  CNA and their colleagues out at the CALL with the US Army were mystified by the development donors' focus on detailed indicators, essentially a predetermined pathway and a predetermined cause and effect path, and yet often with very poorly defined outcomes.

The one thing I'd gently disagree in the dialogue above though is the idea that donors, including AID, often have more options for responding to change and being adaptive than local counterparts  I'd agree with that in principle, but then USAID's business model can be a problem - if one does work through contracts, a "contractible" outcome often prefers a certain path - a railway track as it were - so the actual inputs, outputs and indicators can be tracked and regularized, and therefore readily budgeted for.  Often those involved in contracting feel that bobbing and weaving leads to misuse of resources.  And while there are plenty of examples of adaptive mechanisms, they still aren't the norm. 

 

Tony Pryor, nicely retired but still interested!

pryo...@gmail.com

[Alan Hudson]

Hi Monalisa,

To respond to the question you posed for me, I'm wary about saying what Jean Boulton meant  in the clip I shared (she did chime in here, though), but my interpretation was that as regards "goals", she was talking about taking action (which for me is the substance of adaptation) in ways that keep those in mind, rather than talking about changing the goals.

More broadly, as your question suggests, the distinctions between adapting to goals (or direction, if that carries less risk of linear thinking), to context, and to things that are emerging, are fuzzy, with plenty of overlaps. (One might even say that they are all aspects of context, if one takes a broad view of context).

Nevertheless, I find the reminder that there can be value in paying attention to multiple elements of a situation you are in when you are working out what to do and how to act, and that there may be some tension amongst those elements, helpful.

To take the three elements that Jean mentioned, it makes sense to me that one might take action in ways that are informed by: i) the direction you want to head in; ii) the features of the landscape that you are in; and iii) things that have emerged, or that you've newly become aware of.

So, if I'm hiking with some friends with a plan to reach the summit of a mountain, our actions will be shaped by that ambition; by whether there's a river between us and the Summit that we can only cross by diverting from a direct route; by the discovery of an ice-cream van that had been hidden behind a tree; and various other things such as how much food we have and how much daylight is left. Neglecting an important aspect of our situation could lead to bad decisions about what to do.

I wonder whether and how you see this discussion - which I see as being about awareness of different aspects of context - connecting to your thinking about getting cozy with the context podcast, which I very much appreciated?

For those keen to explore what Jean might have meant in the clip I shared, do have a look at the 15 minutes of excellent comments she made in response to Yuen Yuen Ang's presentation on adaptive political economy (from 41 mins). Jean's recent book on the Dao of Complexity (my notes here) may also provide some additional context, including as regards what it might mean to go with the flow, with intention, in ways that take account of context and embrace emergence. Perhaps the path is made by walking, and a good path is made when the walker's steps are informed by an integrated awareness of the various elements of context that are important to them?

best wishes,
alan

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[Alan Hudson]

Thanks Charlotte.

Yep, your first para perspective on the key question raised in the short clip of Jean Boulton's comments seems right to me; how to pay attention to context, and to what is emerging, while trying to head in a general direction. 

I appreciate and agree with your clear and helpful para 2 summary (below) of how change happens in complex social systems. Indeed, that's the understanding of change that Kathy and I set out in our paper on systems of corruption late last year, a paper which was informed by our reading of many years of work on complexity and systems thinking, as well as our engagement with SOAS-ACE and the Corruption, Justice and Legitimacy programme.

"going back to its origins related to how interactive patterns occur and create equilibria in bounded ecosystems, and how such equilibria are subsequently disrupted or influenced by endogenous agents or contextual factors, which in turn causes new equilibria (or patterns) to emerge and spill over to other bounded systems; long-term change thus being entirely co-created and interdependent, but also uncertain (and to a certain extent "influenceable" if driven from within) etc." 

That view of how change happens might be common in some communities and conversations, and there has been some encouraging progress (including, for instance, in USAID's inspiring work on local systems - see the Policy Implementation Assessment, David Jacobstein's reflections, the local systems position paper, the summary of feedback, and a video of the launch, oh and an annotated literature review; also see Tom Aston and Florencia Guerzovich's excellent recent piece). But I don't feel that it's the standard starting point in conversations about global development, which are still far too often aimed at single-point solutions derived from simple causal models, and is pretty hard to find in conversations that are focused on anti-corruption. So, I think your questions are good ones.

For my part, in recent years - adapting my approach in the light of my experience over the last ten years - I've been putting my energy into conversations and engagement where a complex social systems understanding of how change happens is more common. That then means that the conversation can move more quickly to consider what sorts of practical approaches and ways of being can - because they are aligned with an explicit understanding of how change happens - helpfully support social change in complex social systems. And that then might provide useful examples of the value of working with the sort of understanding of how change happens in such systems which your second para sets out. That's my hope/hypothesis!

On that note, some of you may be interested in signing up for this event, from the Human Learning Systems collaborative, on Monday 25th. I'm keen to explore and support the application of the Human Learning Systems approach - and similar sorts of approaches - in the global development space. See for instance this piece on education in Tanzania, by Fodé Beaudet and Calvin Swai. If that piques anyone's interest, feel free to drop me a line.

best wishes,
alan

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[Kerry Abbott]

I find this analysis quite distant from the societies under review. Deeming them complex social systems places them under the microscope or in the lab of outside analysts and the language itself devolves into something reflective of that academic world--so scientific and dense. But it sounds like someone is making a professional contribution, an addition to the knowledge base constructed for outsiders looking in.

It suggests the two worlds--that of the analyst and the analyzed--will never meet.

Why is the aim to change, probably towards something more familiar and "acceptable"? Why is the aim to fit other contexts into the adaptive or the systems models, where some elements might fit but probably the most relevant will not. To fight corruption?

This is such dead end thinking, a real rut.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/adaptdev/CACtHe9eNvZ7EdXxTBpae-enAY5nJA9TXZAUX-aRzw_1eJqjzeg%40mail.gmail.com.