FYI: What We're Reading part three, TWP and Foreign Aid
David Jacobstein
Hi all,
My third what we’re reading this quarter is around the use of political economy in international development and has spilled over into larger questions of where foreign assistance may go.
I hope it’s old hat to you, but I published a comprehensive reflection piece on how a group of us attempted to spread PEA/TWP within USAID. Hopefully the three key takeaways are particularly valuable, as I think they can inform new models of international assistance. In particular, while I think TWP has advanced as a set of tactics, the larger strategic question is the right one to raise now: what are the larger change processes and issue sets we care about, ranging from climate change to exploitative capital flows, and how can individual efforts and partnerships improve the odds of those larger issues changing? I think many of the most valuable investments made through foreign aid were not short-term and measurable accomplishments, and that an open architecture of adaptive learning partnerships fits better with a complex world. TWP considerations should help structure what we might envisage.
Duncan Green also wrote an article on the future of PEA. I love his suggested judo moves (and the analogy of working with where power and interests lay, which you’ll see throughout our internal reform efforts above), as well as his citing of Gopa Thampi on how the acid test of a political understanding is how it emerges over time through specific crises. And lots of promising connections to value for money (but only if properly understood; the big fear is that proper value will be ignored in favor of randomizable output metrics, or being a big fish in a puddle rather than trying to swim in deeper seas).
I’ve long been an advocate of market systems dynamics and thought it was an approach my colleagues in governance work could learn from, so I’m delighted to see a robust cross-walk by Alan Hudson and Luis Osorio-Cortes of SOAS-ACE political economy methodology and MSD. Lots of new ideas emerging in this space, worth watching to see how the SOAS-ACE understanding of incentives and the market systems approach to system dynamics might reveal insights and offer synergy.
Speaking of dealing with larger strategic questions rather than tactical, I really enjoyed this series by Suleiman. In particular, his callout to the steps of discernment, and drawing a tighter connection between reflection and relationships, seems like an important way to be reflexive while finding ways to enter into change efforts in more meaningful ways. Knowing who you are, and why you relate to stakeholders, should be something we all reckon with but is often obscured or assumed in practice, and this is one of the ways that deeper connection and insight may be closed off. The practical consequences are significant - as he writes about youth protests in Kenya, “And discernment, ironically, is what the IMF itself lacks most. It cannot explain why public trust has eroded so rapidly. It cannot see the limits of its own credibility and it continues to mistake its access to government ministries for alignment with national priorities.” Discernment might be a better name for what the TWP lens is meant to bring into focus - to see what is really going on and at stake, and for who, and inform approaches accordingly.
I also was very encouraged by this outstanding TWP article that directly relates, per Duncan’s point above, a TWP approach to weighing in on development bargains as a crux aspect of greater and more effective development. In particular I comment the Traction Malawi example as modeling a facilitative approach (core to MSD), proving cheaper and more effective at fostering change over time in part because it was patient and waited for the right moments while investing in the right things in the meanwhile. Of course, this type of approach is more dependent on trust - but the artificial certainties of thousands of indicators, volumes of compliance costs, and tight attribution of results proved to be worth very little in domestic political bargains in practice, so perhaps trusting those most invested in change and familiar with the landscape to steward efforts forward is a promising alternative.
One of my favorite discoveries this quarter is the Nebraska Community Foundation, a group putting into practice a lot of meaningful community-led, asset-based approaches to change in the US. I was especially struck by this article by a young Nepali activist (before the Gen Z protests focused more attention on people like Nish) about his visit and the similarities he saw in efforts to address outmigration through development in Nepal and Nebraska. It made me hopeful for the emergence of a more authentic and mutual partnership-based approach to joint learning. I also strongly commend these excellent videos giving a sense of NCF’s work, and you can read more about their approach here. For me, the big lightbulb was that they have had tremendous results by working with communities to make small towns (really villages) more desirable and higher quality living spaces, resulting in a handful more people staying or moving to them and bringing jobs - often remote - with them. It is such an inverse of the typical effort to attract jobs, often through huge tax breaks for wealthy corporations, and then hope it spills over into revitalizing communities, and it seems to be remarkably effective and possible now.
Quick Hits
I’ve only scanned it, but I liked this PEA-informed take of women peace and security in ASEAN as an excellent example of applying PEA lens to inform understanding of contextually-specific details and fit of a given agenda to larger topics. It offers both high-level and detailed perspectives and shows how they speak to each other.
I appreciated the overview for those less versed in the industry in this article on fixing foreign aid, which actually named some of the issues we ran into regularly within USAID.
This work on the future of aid in the EU offers the advice that the “strongest framing to sustain policy-makers’ support for aid in the long term may lie in the domain of global public goods, better expressed as ‘shared global challenges’.” I think this resonates strongly with the shift from assisting those less fortunate toward brokering mutual partnerships, and both gets out of the “symptom treatment” trap and helps a strategic rethink towards where value exists.
And with that, goodwill and solidarity to everyone and please share back in the comments what struck you most or what other reading has been making you think!