FYI: What We're Reading part one

[David Jacobstein]

Hi all,

It’s autumn here in Virginia, and as the days shorten and nights lengthen, there’s more time to curl up with some pumpkin spiced treat and enjoy fascinating articles. And so, just in time, the latest installment of What We’re Reading. To start with, some articles on political economy and development, where there's an increasing shift visible from expert analysis to shared conversation:

• It’s always great to see a robust conversation that reminds us that all development is fundamentally political and that contestation and incentives will determine what outcomes are reached. Peter Evans’ Open PEA site is now hosting a number of blogs, and I was particularly struck by this post from Kenechukwu Nwagbo on the politics of learning because it goes beyond the pushback on “what works” as a path to change, and focuses on the incentives that would drive learning outcomes versus access. Relatedly, they share their excellent, data-rich review of Nigerian health system which really helps put emphasis on relative weights and how incentives that shape the system are not in focus for change agents.
• The always thoughtful Jonathan Fox published a solid article with a further focus on shared action learning, not only as a useful technique but even further as an approach that can enable collaborative agenda setting and greater peer sharing, with more meaningful conceptual translation. This aligns well with the Open PEA project of shifting from a paradigm of researchers discovering how to drive change towards a paradigm of empowered change agents refining approaches and building pooled knowledge. Too often the idea of local knowledge mattering or decolonizing development are framed as pushbacks against a general discourse or shared understandings, as though the only possible frameworks are ivory tower driven or infinite unique contexts. Establishing a clearer vision of shared understandings shaped by rich contextual pictures and owned by those driving change is a useful signpost towards the paradigm we want to build.
• The leading edge of shifting power in this way for many years has been the Global Fund for Community Foundations and their #shiftthepower movement. As they start to explore what is #possiblenow in a new reality, I can’t speak highly enough of the GFCF Fellowships and their writing. There is so much to learn and so many great conversations to join here (shout out to the four Stitching Fellows I’ve already spoken with, thank you!). The emerging conversations around what is possible now and how it looks are taking place among practitioner-scholars regularly, and now is the moment to participate.
• I’ve long been a fan of Vijayendra Rao, who wrote some of the articles that influenced my thinking most a couple of decades ago, so I was really moved to see his personal attestation as an anthropologist-spy among the economists as to why the discipline of economics is so poor at listening.
• Another personal sharing of interest is Gabby Boyer, who synthesizes her years of work at the Inter-American Foundation into this clear set of lessons from community philanthropy.
• A related roundup of various CSOs thinking through what they want out of evaluation practice from Flor Guerzovich highlights the continued value of monitoring and evaluation as a discipline but as something now divorced from top-down accountability, with a real emphasis on connective learning infrastructure as a felt need among many civil society members across Latin America. This reinforces that the emerging paradigm is around a shared connection, focusing on different questions and driven by different stakeholders’ needs than before, but still centered on surfacing important learning.
• Anticipating tomorrow’s installation on systems thinking and practice, I also want to highlight this compelling article (h/t Alan Hudson) on moving from collaborative political intelligence to shared interpretation of change and response. As author Zahed Yousuf writes, “What if the central problem in systems change is not our ability to analyse problems, generate learning, or coordinate action, but our ability to collectively interpret how systems adapt politically once change efforts begin?” This pushes the boundaries of the shared sensemaking informing Evans and Fox above and suggests that we need not only to share analysis and interpretation of context and problems, but that collective interpretation and understanding of systems and their evolution while change is happening may mediate the depth and durability of outcomes. Perhaps part of the shift from top-down to collective engagement also shifts the temporal focus from how to catalyze change towards how to maintain and mediate it.

Tomorrow, systems thinking and practice!

Best,

David

[David Jacobstein]

Hi Fletcher and all,

This is a really thoughtful take - you make me wonder the extent to which ongoing debates in the democracy sector about narratives understand the power and negotiation of meanings as their core task. I think that centering that concept, rather than centering an institutional reform and trying to find "who of community x can speak in favor of it" or which frames resonate with which audiences, would help align a lot of effort. 

I also really love the idea of using qualitative research to code and unearth whose interpretation counts, it's a great way of exploring that deeply embeds political economy considerations. You should write a longer article about this, it's really sharp!

For colleagues who are doing more of the narratives work, what do you all think?

Best,

David

On Wed, Sep 30, 2026 at 6:50 AM Fletcher Tembo <tembof...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi David, hi all 

What a rich synthesis of ideas in various papers/ articles you have produced here - a big thank you! It reminded me of what happens when you use Nvivo for analysing qualitative data, where you often start with premeditated codes from your emersion in data and then as you code, other codes evolve, and you use memos to track how your ideas are evolving as you analyse and code in a deeper sense. In your analysis there are various codes of the emergent type. 

For the short time I have right now  I have captured 'shared interpretation of change' as the new way of looking at systems change. This emergent concept has been excellently delivered in your analytical text - ''shared interpretation' or otherwise also called 'collective interpretation'. However when you identify such a catch concept, other concepts immediately come forward to try to explain it. For instance, from my much earlier research, I found that shared interpretations do not really exist in practice. Instead, the useful  concept tends to be 'power and negotiation of meanings', which you can trace to who is doing the interpretation, and according to Robert Chambers you could say "whose reality or interpretation counts".  In this case the reality that is used for decision making tends to be for the powerful almost by default. There are no real 'shared interpretations' until you learn to deal with power interfaces and 'hidden meanings', and how these are negotiated in a given polity.  

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[David Jacobstein]

Hi all,

Here's the final What We're Reading of this quarter (you can find it online here, and the earlier ones here and here)

Democracy

Yesterday I wrote about complexity and the problems that arise when we try to manage complex systems through increasingly elaborate cascades of rules. A surprising amount of the democracy writing I read this quarter seems to be wrestling with essentially the same problem from a different direction: we have spent a lot of time supporting particular organizations, strategies and interventions, but much less thinking about how a diverse democratic ecosystem can develop shared direction, learn and adapt together, and become stronger than the sum of its parts.

• There are some pretty striking mea culpas in this quarter's reading. Rachel Pritzker, one of the founders of the Democracy Funders Network, asks whether democracy philanthropy may actually be making some things worse, particularly through an emphasis on defending institutions and adversarial advocacy rather than rebuilding trust and broad democratic constituencies.
• Kristie D Evenson and Roland Kovats similarly ask what democracy advocates should learn from illiberal movements that have spent decades patiently building networks, institutions, people and ideas.
• And Al Kags offers perhaps my favorite truth-to-power version of this argument, asking philanthropists why their opponents are willing to finance infrastructure over twenty-year horizons while they continue to demand short-term projects and results.

I don't think the lesson is simply that democracy supporters picked the wrong strategies and now need to pick better ones. The more interesting possibility is that we have been treating an ecosystem problem as an intervention problem.

• That is why I particularly liked Brendan Halloran 's excellent piece on developing a shared strategy for democratic renewal. The goal isn't to get a huge and diverse collection of actors to follow the same plan. It is to develop enough shared understanding of the system, some common strategic frames and better connections among actors that many different organizations can make better decisions while pursuing complementary work. Strong echoes of the last two days’ insights here!
• A number of other pieces fill out what that alternative might look like. Anne Healy argues that government reform needs to be built deliberately as a field, rather than as a collection of organizations. While this seems similar to governance, it is a distinct idea of how we pursue government reform as an overarching approach. Perhaps a democracy landing point for more of the banana peel metaphor from yesterday?
• A really useful BOND/International Budget Partnership review finds that sustained government responsiveness often comes not from a single transformative intervention but from coalitions, relationships and organizations capable of staying engaged and acting when opportunities emerge.
• Nick Deychakiwsky's reflections after 26 years of grantmaking at Mott similarly emphasize patient, relationship-centered support. Nick was one of the core members of our global alliance on community philanthropy when I was at USAID, and did a great job centering more of this work in the wider field through his own patient, relationship-centered engagement - he’ll be missed!
• And I really liked Harry Boyte's framing of “public work”: sustained, uncoerced effort by a mix of people who create things of lasting civic or public significance. I think this is a really useful conceptual landing point as distinct from thinking of citizenship primarily as voting, volunteering or advocacy, since it orients the thing we want to see as inherently self-directed and emergent rather than in service to a donor-coordinated coalition or objective.
• All of this also suggests we should be much more expansive about where democratic resilience comes from. More in Common has a fascinating study showing that passionate sports fans are both more civically engaged and more willing to work with people across political divides than non-fans.
• Benjamin Chou makes a related case that democracy philanthropy invests far more in mobilizing existing constituencies than in activating the much broader majority that may hold democratic commitments while disagreeing profoundly on politics.

These aren't arguments against advocacy or organizing. They are reminders that healthy democracy depends on a much larger social infrastructure than the organizations we normally label “democracy.” That feels particularly important internationally right now:

• Tom Carothers documents just how dramatic the US retreat from its longstanding democracy-support role has become.
• Larry Garber and Ed McMahon ask what should endure and change in democracy, rights and governance assistance.
• And the new Plural Futures for Democracy volume from the Thinking and Working Politically Community (h/t Alina Rocha Menocal) offers a range of provocations about what might come next.

Perhaps the thread tying all of these together is that the future of democracy support may look less like finding the right intervention and scaling it, and more like cultivating an ecosystem capable of learning, coordinating and adapting without requiring everyone to do the same thing. That means investing in relationships and connective infrastructure; allowing different actors to play different roles; supporting work whose value may be to hold ground or preserve future possibilities; and creating enough shared interpretation that distributed action can become mutually reinforcing. And it forces anyone offering resources towards these ends to define their own role more precisely, as contributing towards that open-ended architecture, rather than selecting a goal or impact and pursuing specific steps towards it. If democratic change is emergent, relational and political, our institutions need to become much better at enabling that kind of work rather than trying to specify it in advance.

And with that, wishing you well and sending warm wishes to everyone in this season of change, as the old leaves display the brilliant colors that were always there underneath the chlorophyll while they mat the ground to survive winter frosts and reemerge vibrantly in the spring.

Best,

David