Decentralisation Blues

The World Bank’s Shanta Devarajan reckons that there needs to be real political demand for capacity building to truly transform dysfunctional developing country institutions, and avoid the trap of isomorphic mimicry. He is surely correct in this assertion, but I fear the rose-tinted spectacles return when he advocates the benefits of decentralisation:

“One reason [for doubting local authorities capacity to manage financial resources] may be that no one has given local authorities the chance to deal with funds.  There may have been no demand for financial management at the local level because the central government has told you what to spend.  If you give them the chance to make the decisions, then they might actually build the capacity or hire that capacity because it’s something they can decide for themselves.

Moreover, if the local governments are accountable to the local population, they will have to build capacity really fast. They can no longer put the blame on central government if things don’t work well.”

To be fair to Devarajan he does qualify his enthusiasm with the requirement that local governments should be accountable to the local population. The trouble is that in the decentralisation that I have witnessed in least developed countries I have never seen much sign of that condition coming true, and certainly not any evidence of it leading to substantially increased capacity. Instead, where local official venality and low capacity are the rule rather than the exception, as is the case around here, such pushes as there are to improve service delivery come from above, although even here there’s a lot more political rhetoric than practical action. Decentralisation thus leads to temporary petty fiefdoms that can go largely unmolested so long as performance is not notably worse than elsewhere in the country (and sometimes even when it is).

This rose-tinted view of decentralisation is not restricted to ill-informed denizens of the embassy district and big donor agencies. I think we field operatives can sometimes be equally guilty in assuming that just because community leaders are that much closer to their constituents they will therefore be that much more responsive to their needs, or that bad leaders will get voted out of office. For even at the community level base party politics and local rivalries so often trump technocratic concerns of executive competence.

I would suggest that demand for good services is predicated on at least some idea of what they should look like and sense that they are properly due. By this I mean not just that a community should want the service, and be prepared to air their grievance to anyone who cares to come by and ask (very common around here), but that their sense of justice should be inflamed at the breach to the perceived social contract, and, as an aggrieved party, they are prepared to act seriously to obtain redress. Consuming many government services, e.g. sending one’s children to the local school, might be a largely passive undertaking, but service quality depends upon a community’s aptitude to pursue their due proactively, and in turn for the rest of society not to regard such direct action as disproportionate.

Some would translate all of that as the need for a large middle class, and trot out that old canard about democracy not being workable without one. I am prepared to be a bit more optimistic than that, but I think we should be cautious about expecting demand for service provision to drive improvements in local capacity. There will always be counter-examples, usually championed by exceptional local leaders, but countrywide I wouldn’t pin your hopes on anything other than slow progress, with plenty of steps back interspersed with the forward ones. Social change is slow and messy.

Hat Tip: Lee Crawfurd

Is development work a route to compassionate conservatism?

Excluding the missionary types most conservation and development workers I’ve met are about as far, politically speaking, as you can get from the neoconservative agenda of Bush junior. However, they all do start out with a substantial minimum quotient of compassion that differentiates them from the average denizen of Wall Street. What I think few of them expect is the degree of conservatism many will take on as a result of a field career in development.*

This came up in a conversation not so long ago with a good friend of mine here. We were discussing the various Occupy <insert-capitalist-symbol-of-choice> protests. My friend’s point was that while she sympathised with friends and acquaintances back home who supported – and may even have actively participated in – the protests, this sympathy was tempered by the fact that the 99% in America are way better than the 99% in this particular part of Africa.

However, it was not just this sense of perspective that lessened her sense of agitation, but also the experience of living and working in a country where the day to day management of government responsibilities is so often completely dysfunctional. In contrast you rapidly come to respect those businesses which can reliably deliver a consistent service at a competitive price; mobile phone companies being the best example. (This experience is may well be different in countries like Ethiopia which reportedly are getting their acts together quite impressively.)

Thus it is, in many developmental discussions across various sectors, that often we seek the involvement of the private sector and other non-governmental actors in preference to the government-centric approach which many officials take as a default. Even the public-private sector partnership beloved of developed country economists leaves us shuddering: how can such a thing work with a government notorious for not paying its bills on time? Similarly, Norman Tebbit’s injunction for young people to “get on their bike” and find some work is a message that many a time we wish we could deliver in its starkest terms to apparently apathetic aid-dependent communities.

I doubt this will translate into many additional votes for right wing parties all of a sudden – development workers (except for the missionaries) are definitely socially liberal – but it is an interesting case, perhaps, of the collision that many of us experience as we grow older between the high ideals of youth and pragmatism in a world consumed by self interest.

* The exception would presumably be all those development economists who dominate the development blogosphere, or at least those sections of it that I follow.

Why I’m a Millennium Villages sceptic

Last week Jeffrey Sachs set out a robust defence of his brainchild, the Millennium Villages Project, although, as Tom Murphy pointed out, it was somewhat low on detail. I’ve never knowingly been near a Millennium Village, but my own experience causes me to doubt the lasting legacy of the MVP, at least in countries with similar problems to where I work.

First the good news, Sachs took on some of this detractors by saying that the MVP was as much about developing systems to improve service delivery (and hence attainment of the Millennium Development Goals) rather than just,  per se, achieving the MDGs in the targeted villages. I’m a big fan of systems approaches, so this gets the thumbs up from me. Systems are definitely more easily replicable and scaled up than individual projects that focus simply on the needs of its target area.

Now for the bad news, systems are not automatically and by definition scalable. A system that works well at one level may not work well a wider scales due to unanticipated problems and bottlenecks. Ben Ramalingam recently blogged on exactly some of the new challenges that occur as one scales up. This doesn’t mean that the original system was designed badly, but simply that good systems management takes an iterative approach, making tweaks and improvements as we go along (what I term the KISI approach).

But that is not the biggest problem that I see. Even the best designed systems need to interact with things outside their control, in particular people; indeed I suspect that the MVP has people playing integral roles at every step in the way (i.e. that mostly what we’re talking about here is systems for organising human work). A system’s output is constrained by the quality of these interactions. In short, as any good businessman knows, you need competent and motivated staff to deliver a high quality of service. And that is where so much service delivery in developing countries falls down, with last mile service delivery particularly badly managed. Unfortunately short-term, local solutions to this are not scalable.

The problems are legion, and not all a result of poor education amongst the workforce. I know some excellent and (when you consider what they are up against) surprisingly motivated local civil servants. But the overall system drags everyone down. Sure you can tinker at the margins with systems to improve paper flow (mostly in local government around here, we’re talking about paper flow), but the elephant in the room is an unmotivated and unsackable workforce.

Of course this problem will apply at the MVP sites, but there you also have a massive aid effort with lots of expat technical advisers and a high level of political interest. I’ve noticed around here, normally sloth-like civil servants who won’t even sit in a meeting without a generous per diem rush around like lauded socialist workers striving manly (or womanly) in the name of their country when a bigwig is due to visit, working into the night and through weekends, all without any per diems.

Thus I fear all the achievements of the MVP will wash up against the great brick wall that is a change resistant bureaucracy. Once the high level of funding, all the expat TAs, and the high level political interest have withdrawn we’ll be back to business as usual, and the MVP will be neither sustainable in the selected pilot villages nor scalable. Maybe this will not apply everywhere, but I would wager a decent sum that it will happen here. The community contributions which Sachs highlights may also be much harder to be elicit when it’s just government staff doing the asking.

The MVP has a laudable goal, and even as an experiment, the idea of resolving various systemic problems in service delivery is a worthy one that definitely deserves some experimentation; marginal changes can lead to marginal improvements, and, as a by product, perhaps a marginal improvement in government staff morale. But if Sachs wants to take a systems approach to achieving the MDGs maybe he should have looked at HR management reform in developing country civil services. It’s a Herculean task to be sure, that, around here at least, the World Bank has been striving at vainly for some time. But until you resolve that problem I fear these sorts of big push attempts to transform service delivery and hence quality of life in developing countries will always be at least one more big push away from succeeding.

The Converse of Accountability

A few years ago a donor asked us (informally) whether we would be prepared to partner up with another local NGO that they were also considering supporting in order to reduce their transaction costs. (An illusory goal – in effect they were asking to pass their transaction costs on to us.) We wanted the donor’s money, so we said yes we’d be prepared to partner in that way, but due to political concerns and doubts about our proposed partner’s capacity, we said that we would not be held accountable for what the supposed partner did or did not do, or how they spent their money. The donor quickly realised the sense of what we were saying and dropped the idea.

Accountability is one of the major pillars of good governance, and a regular buzzword in development-speak. With responsibility comes accountability. But, as the above example shows, with accountability also needs to come responsibility. We rightly object to being held accountable for something we cannot control.

And yet in efforts to improve local governance in developing countries I fear this is exactly what we may be in danger of doing. Around here at least, service delivery over the last mile is often poor to abysmal, so pushing local officials into being accountable for the performance of their departments seems like a good idea. But department heads have remarkably little control over their juniors. They have minimal say over who is hired, and even corrupt officials are very rarely fired, just transferred to another province, to become somebody else’s problem. Patronage is also a problem; disciplining some local bigwig’s distant relative is always going to be a dicey proposition. So officials lapse into the inevitable semi-comatose apathy.

Civil society advocates for accountability should take note. So should donors. My suggested rule of thumb: never give money to someone who lacks professional authority over his/her own staff. Unfortunately that would rule out a lot of government to government aid.

Has economic reform stalled?

Last month I rambled on about the personally enriching experience of being toughened up by dealing with all the various challenges of living and running an organisation in a developing country. Good for personal development, bad for economic development, I reckoned.

Then aid thinker Ranil pops up with his observation that the life seems to have gone out of the development / aid debate recently, or at least that bit that is conducted in the blogosphere. (Probably the least relevant bit, but we bloggers can continue to day-dream upon our self-importance.) So here’s half an idea to stir things up a bit.

That is, around here, and in other countries in sub-Saharan Africa from what I gather, the economic reform agenda seems to have rather stalled. The structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s were certainly harsh, but they did precede a remarkable era of economic growth compared to what had come before. (Note I am careful here not to ascribe cause and effect; I don’t have the economic expertise, and presumably some elements, e.g. the commodities boom, would have happened any way.)

However, since then things seem to have rather stalled with government retrenching in the opposite sense of the word, i.e. hunkering down in their current ways with minimal reform at the margins. White elephant projects seem to be back in fashion (Wade’s statue of the African Renaissance, Mutharika’s inland port at Nsanje), though maybe they never went away? Meanwhile essential economic investments such as in power generation fail to materialise as the Mr 10%s of this world demand their cut. Government debt appears to be on the increase again (e.g. this).

Thus while businesses in a few boom sectors such as mining and telecommunications have mushroomed spectacularly, growth has been very uneven (maybe this is inevitable in early economic expansion?), and companies in other sectors continue to struggle with a business environment that is challenging to say the least. Government leaders appear to have little in the way of vision (other than jam for you all tomorrow while I eat jam today) and even less of a sensible road map as to how to get there. At a more technocratic level the emphasis appears to remain on form over substance.

I have never lived through structural adjustment myself (and it looks like I’ll be on another continent while the UK goes through its forthcoming mini adjustment), but the stories I hear are scary. No doubt that, with the benefit of hindsight, if we had to do it all again we might do at least a few things differently to try and ease the pain, although even there I suspect that the IMF might reasonably point out that it is up to host country governments to make decisions about how to distribute the pain and provide the right cushions; the IMF’s role is just to set the limit on their overdraft.

Can African governments micro-reform their way to economic transformation? Or is there no gain without pain? (Not that the two are mutually exclusive; micro-reform can still cause pain.) My guess is that memories of the upheavals of structural adjustment are still too raw for anyone to attempt something similar so soon again, even if it were a good idea. Might this, however, be condemning poorly governed countries in Africa to another 20 years of gradual stagnation before once again we have the courage to wield the knife?

I have the macro-economic skills of a sea anemone, so all of the above are just my observations. I await informed comments from those who actually have half a clue …

Development is complex, so start with the simple things

Building capacity one brick at a time

Ben Ramalingam has a great post setting out how to incorporate both results-based rigour and necessary but woollier capacity-building type projects, by putting them on a two-dimensional continuum of complexity. I think this is a good way to visualise the issues.

I have only one thing to add, and it links back to Tony Blair’s recent comments (see my previous post on Learning by Doing) and the problems of form vs function. If we want to build the capacity of developing country institutions, then I think there is no better way to do so than to first focus on delivering the simple things, which can indeed be measured using a results-based framework. Moreover, critical self-analysis of the difficulties in improving delivery beyond a certain threshold may well lead the institution on to try tackling the more complex and challenging tasks whilst not forgetting the most important end goal of improved service delivery.

J the Hoodie recently contended that while Aid might be able to deliver some worthy results, it cannot (at least not on its own) ‘fix’ any of the big problems such as poverty alleviation, food shortages or global environmental degradation. In such I think he is right. Part of the problem, I think, is that Aid has even tried. When faced with such intractable problems it is far better to focus on what we know we can do; start with the simple things and build up from there. There’s a lot that we will still never fix with Aid alone (international aid policies and environmental cooperation surely need to see order of magnitude improvements), but you never know, we might even surprise ourselves with what we can do!

Learning by Doing

Kudos to Owen Barder who has no lesser a dignitary on his Development Drums podcast than Tony Blair. Some of his answers are slightly evasive, suggesting to me that you can take the man out of front line politics, but you can’t take the politician out of the man. But he has also got some interesting things to say about his African Governance Initiative, and Lee the Bandit’s unerring sense for the hidden gem was fully functioning on this roughly transcribed extract:

“People often say to me ‘you’ve got to train the civil service of the country in order to be able to do the things they need to do.’ I personally think you can spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars doing that and nothing much come out of it (Barder: and we do). What we do is different in 3 crucial respects, the first is we combine a political interaction … the second is we prioritize, this is about delivering programs … people have this view that if you train up the civil service then they can deliver the programs. My view is that if you work on delivering  specific prioritised programs, you will get out of that the capacity that you require and can work on for delivering other things, and that its in the practical prioritization and doing things that makes the difference. The third thing is that our teams live in the country, they work alongside their counterparts in the country, there is a very strong interaction.”

Later on in the interview Tony Blair uses the actual phrase Learning by Doing. Three cheers say I, for this is definitely something in which I believe, big time.

Traditional development approaches to capacity building tend to focus around short training courses. These can teach people technical skills but they fail to stimulate the critical thinking that is essential to solving real world problems. Instead we get dysfunctional institutions that superficially look capable of doing a job, but lacking the internal engine to make it tick. This problem applies equally to government institutions, local NGOs and even local branches of international NGOs.

Learning by Doing gets people to work through an entire process, and in doing so develops a whole host of soft skills. In practice this is achieved through mentoring and is inevitably a slow process that is not readily susceptible to rapid scaling up. Indeed this lack of scalability is, I believe, a major factor hamstringing attempts to transform pilot projects into large national programmes. Development agencies have attempted to get around this problem by the ‘Training of Trainers’ approach, but you have to have trained some really top notch trainers if this is not to suffer from the inevitable Chinese-whispers-style degradation of skills imparted. Any way, nobody I yet know has tried ‘Mentoring of Mentors’.

One big problem with this approach can be the receptiveness of the institution whose staff are being mentored. Tony Blair’s initiative appears to work at the very highest levels, and to be aimed at supporting African presidents who really want to get things moving (even if this is at the expense of democratic accountability). He takes an admirably realistic approach that focuses on just a few priorities over a presidential term of office. Elsewhere in developing countries, however, just about every institution of government has multiple sources of donor support, many of whom will be engaged in some kind of capacity building. It is far from clear that the staff from these institutions are interested primarily in delivering change, or more in the per diems and other ephemeral benefits. I gather that the ‘traditional’ Technical Adviser role is losing popularity in favour of short term consultants precisely because developing country institutions find these less intrusive.

So three cheers for Learning by Doing and Mentoring. And thirty three cheers for institutions who are open enough to genuinely want it!

The Scaling-up Fallacy

Last month Justin Sandefur at CGD lamented the regrettable failure of the Kenyan government to sustain a successful school-based de-worming programme after donor funding was withdrawn due to corruption in the Education Ministry. This is another good example of the sustainability paradox: despite clear evidence that this programme was extremely cost-effective it was cut when the donor funding was withdrawn. I assume that this was as much a political act intended to hurt the donors – who lost something they cared about – but as such is clearly rather callous. But, more than anything, it is another example of the phenomenon that what the donors want and what the recipient country government want are often not the same thing.

This, however, is not exactly news around here. More interestingly Sandefur also suggests that this raises questions about “the feasibility of turning small NGO pilots into manageable national policies”, although he failed to elaborate much on that idea in the rest of his post. This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently, and I think there is an important additional argument to be made here.

Whether a pilot is being developed by an NGO or a bespoke, direct donor-funded project, it will have its own management structure. It will also have a significant investment of technical advice and support that is inevitably diluted when a project is transformed into a national programme. However, I can live with that; if we want aid to be cost efficient, then we need to be able to realise economies of scale on techniques that have been shown to work.*

My beef is with the management. Because, to the international aid industry, scaling up nearly always means launching a nationwide government programme. In doing so the donors discard the effective management that produced the initial successes in favour of a dysfunctional government bureaucracy. Not only do you lose some basic management nous, but you also lose the driving vision, the leadership that got the pilot project to where it did.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, they didn’t show some initial promise and then hand their genius idea over the government. Instead they secured some outside investment including big business management expertise (Eric Schmidt) – thus addressing their ‘absorptive capacity’ – and grew the company to the multinational search behemoth it is today. More to the point, Google isn’t just big; it continues to be incredibly successful.

I’ve blogged before (here and here) about the importance of the quality of management in delivering conservation and development results. The standard donor approach to scaling up suggests that donors remain stuck in a rut that emphasises technical barriers (leading to misdiagnoses of project failure) over management constraints, combined with the belief that all you need is a bit of capacity-building in profoundly dysfunctional institutions to turn it around.

The next time donors are seeking to scale up a successful programme, I hope they will remember the Google story, the Grameen Bank story, and the countless other examples of private sector efficacy in turning innovation into successful business models. After all, most donors are capitalist countries, not socialist ones, and there’s a reason that communism collapsed.

* There is another argument to be made here that many projects are scaled up before the jury has properly returned a verdict, leaving key issues still unresolved. But, conversely, if an approach does appear to be working, I can understand how funders, desperate for new solutions, may pile in prematurely.

Evolutionary biology meets development

Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) theory of evolution by natural selection has been described as the most powerful idea ever conceived; the shear breadth and variation in the natural world all created from the inexorable application of one, very simple principle. So fantastically powerful is it that its application is not limited just to biology but is increasingly being applied in the social sciences … and now in development economics.

If looks could kill: a non-poisonous frog that looks rather poisonous

The Sapito Listado frog from South America would make a tasty meal for many a tree snake, but it doesn’t get eaten so much as it looks like poison dart frogs which the snakes have learned are not nearly so digestible. In other words the Sapito Listado has all the trappings of a poisonous frog without the key poison functionality. Since poison is a hard thing to produce this is a great evolutionary strategy, known as Batesian mimicry, or at least it is until the snakes learn to spot the difference.

Lant Pritchett reckons the same thing could be happening with institutions in developing countries. This is an analogy that makes a lot of sense: the education ministry may have an org chart that looks like a Western education ministry, it has lots of schools and nearly as many teachers as classrooms, but, at least around here, too many children aren’t learning very much. Lant Pritchett suggests that this is because developing country institutions have mimicked their Western cousins’ appearance without taking on their functions.

I think this is a key insight. Development experts have long understood that just providing the monetary inputs isn’t enough (even though donors have taken rather longer to catch on), and the dysfunctional nature of many developing country institutions has been clear to see. The response has usually been to invest in building the capacity of those institutions (perfecting the mimicry), but Lant Pritchett’s analysis tells us this is insufficient, and that instead we need to go back to square one and focus on the outcomes. This brings us back to Cash on Delivery aid.

In the evolutionary arms race some snakes may eventually work out how to tell apart a Sapito Listado from its more dangerous cousins, and the Sapito will have to come up with a new survival strategy. There might not quite be an ‘arms race’ between Western donors and patronage networks in developing country governments but their priorities clearly diverge. Can they evolve a more symbiotic relationship? I hope so. A bit more selective pressure and less quasi-monopolies on both sides would help a lot, along with better feedback loops.

Institutional Imports

Ranil over at Aid Thoughts, responds to a couple of blog posts by Lee, the Roving Bandit. I commented upon the first of these, and Ranil’s post expanded usefully on my theme. Here are some further thoughts.

Many developing countries have rules and institutions imported from elsewhere, either by their coloniser or at the behest of donors. These are classic top-down blueprints rather than emergent systems (ref Duncan Green’s comment). Even many of those working within them may not fully grasp exactly how the institution is supposed to work, especially how it should integrate with local cultural norms. The situation can be even worse for the general populace, who have an even dimmer understanding of the proper purpose of the institution: they may attempt to interface with it in the wrong way, and will almost certainly fail to hold to proper account those working within the institution. They will very probably understand that things are not working as they should – that one is usually easy to spot – but not how to resolve it.

Take, for example, local government. Around here, everything passes through the hands of the LGA Executive Director, and I mean everything. Of course the Director is easily overwhelmed, and too many things proceed at a snails pace. But the concept of the big man (or even big woman in the modern age) functions just as well at the local level and is extremely enduring. Hence there is little delegation of decision making, and we have a poorly functioning LGA. (There are, of course, many other reasons why the LGA may fail to do a very good job.) But for poor local constituents, they all know the importance of taking their problems to the big man, and thus cultural norms perpetuate the situation. I don’t see this bottleneck really going away until both the cultural norms and the institution adapt to deliver a more workable solution, and this kind of adaptation almost certainly has to emerge locally rather than being imposed from above.