Since the publication of Cowen and Shenton’s Doctrines of Development in 1996,
(presaged by Arndt’s pointing out in 1981 that development was both transitive
and intransitive – both done and something that happens), practitioners have
had academic materials to feed a nagging concern: do we know enough about what
we are doing to treat our knowledge as predictive, and so feel happy with the
log-frame and other intervention logics posed in terms of cause-effect
relationships that we can know before and after we act? Of course, practitioners
have also had their own experiences, and I think this increasingly leads them
to the same place. And this is confusing. If expertise says X will lead to Y,
why so often does it not?
I think this is experienced as confusing because many
forces, indeed many common beliefs, push very strongly for a formal,
organisational, belief that contexts are what I call ‘Type I’ – that is, that
they are suited to assumptions of predictive knowledge. Log-frames, Theories of
Change and other ways of organising interventions come down to this. DAC
doctrine on how to do international development states this clearly, and,
whether we clothe it in languages of ‘adaptive learning’, ‘results-based
management’ or ‘reflective practice’, I think that the evidence shows that the
forces to assume that contexts are ‘Type I’ are very strong. I think also that
much evidence suggests that such assumptions are often fragile. In a recent
book, I go into this in perhaps tedious academic detail (Reinventing development –
the sceptical change agent 2017). But, as a publisher’s review put it:
"I think that this book should have been written 50 years ago – not that it is out of date, but that it is long overdue. That said, I think that its arguments are likely to be long-lived, at least for as long as we don’t change the way in which we understand beliefs about cause and effect in social and economic policy."
But, if there are ‘Type I’ contexts, then logically there
must also be ‘Type II’ contexts - where it can reasonably be believed that
there is no reason to assume predictive knowledge. This may be because such
knowledge is too expensive (‘Just how much can we spend on the baseline
study?’), too hard to understand (‘No I cannot afford staff who understand the
mathematics behind complex models’), likely unobtainable (“All the surveys are
clearly fabrications”), or for some other reason. There is much evidence that
‘Type II’ contexts are familiar and rather easy to find. In areas of high risk,
a need for great efficiency and effectiveness, and where donor organisations
can cope, clearly one must expect there to be pressure for, and experiences of,
working in contexts deemed to be Type II. But put this way, aid work that
formally assumes this is not easy to find: that is, formally organised aid work
that openly organises, trains, evaluates, reports and learns on that formal assumption.
So, it is odd that the DAC and so on require people to assume ‘Type I’. Be that as it may, it seems evident to me that many of the most interesting and creative developments in aid practice and thinking can be thought of as an exploration of how ‘Type II’ contexts can be managed. This I am starting to learn more about from ‘performing’ the book and discussions with colleagues.[1]
On the one hand, studying these explorations are a research topic. In my book, I try to clear the ground and frame things in this way, and I think this is useful. This is because it highlights the forces pushing for a reversion to ‘Type I’ assumptions: that what we need to do is work out how to obtain change, to seek out such a causative order, and then organise around it. For example, adaptive learning can treat the predictive knowledge as something that varies over time; Theories of Change allow predictive knowledge to vary between interventions; Doing Development Differently can allow for greater variation and fizz in the development of predictive knowledges. All, or perhaps most, clearly preserve the power and value of researchers and all, or perhaps most, I think, fail to grasp the nettle of ‘Type II’ contexts (where such research is of little value).
But on the other, if there is practical issue then we need to find ways to move forward. Having now presented my new book a number of times (seminars, conferences, collegial discussion etc - it has a number of supporting published articles), I would like to share one pretty fundamental conclusion, which comes down to the idea that it is useful to treat ‘Type I’ and ‘Type II’ as a black/white distinction. There are I think various reasons for this.
First, any academic worth their salt can blur the distinction, but keeping it like this helps because it prevents back-sliding from a ‘Type II’ to a ‘Type I’ position. If asked, researchers will almost never reply ‘we don’t know’, but argue that we know with uncertainty (‘Type I’), or we need more resources (‘Type I’) etc.
Second, to the extent that we have historical examples of shifts from Type I to Type II, these tend to have required major changes that are locally explained as qualitative paradigm shifts requiring massive changes in views of power, the nature of leadership and the nature of the relationship between strategic visions and tactical interventions. This is often said because attempts to manage the shift without such an appreciation leads to unhappy results.
Third, whilst there are some areas where piecemeal change seems viable, in general working to Type II assumptions requires violation of organisational doctrine (the DAC is a good source of this), which, combined with the powerful forces that push for Type I assumptions means that experimental activities that can exploit formality are unstable: find a good branch head and you can get away with Type II ‘under the table’, but if they leave it reverts to ‘Type I’, likely supported by the latest research that shows that there is reliable predictive knowledge, when the practitioners think there is not, and have to be corralled into line. An example I know of where Type II practice can be found clearly in a part of the practice is evaluation, where (as in my own practice) reports are of trustworthy accounts of stakeholder and others’ accounts of what caused what, and what they felt about it, reported back to them. The assumption that there is no predictive knowledge means an assumption that an intervention will contain a range of beliefs, thus avoiding (one hopes) denial of voice that is built-in to Type I work where these who disagree with the (assumed) predictive knowledge are deemed wrong.
Fourth, as I watch the process unfold, it seems to me that the pressures for change come from the widespread evidence that, whilst trial and error has generated convincing power to predict in some areas, generally there is belief that there are Type II contexts that should be worked in, and that we lack thought-through ways of organising to do so. Theories of Change and other adaptations of hard-line doctrine are then seen as useful, but also as pushing back towards Type I beliefs, and that these not only do not solve the problem of Type II contexts, but they actually prevent working out how to do so, because they do not accept that in such contexts research containing cause-effect logics gets in the way.
What we need, therefore, are formal trials of how to organise in Type II contexts. This means:
- 1. Finding ways of judging contexts to be treated as unpredictable. This could be because they are very important, hard to research, because of their nature, or whatever. There are statistical ways of judging whether a particular dataset is too irregular, but this is not likely to drive aid workers into paroxysms of delight. Some ways of coping with this task are needed.
- 2. Sorting out how strategy is to be developed in those contexts in ways that have meaning for lower levels, gives them the discipline of accountability, allocates them suitable and suitably defined resources, and leaves them to get on with the job.
- 3. Developing training systems that are suitable. Evidence suggests that organisations that work formally in what they believe are Type II contexts train primarily through practitioners and that leadership capacity at one level is also capable at the both of the two levels above it: that is, the project team leader is competent at project manager level and, say, the local country desk and the home-country equivalent. This means, naturally, that the latter is also competent as a project team leader.
From what I have been learning since the book came out, one
reason why we lack experience of formal organisation to do aid work in Type II
contexts is because it has not been realised clearly that that is the core
issue (is it? – trial and see), and so trials and experiments are carried out
within organisations designed, as we know from the LFA, to suit Type I
contexts. Much existing literature (which I cite in my book) shows the
inconsistencies, tensions and frustrations that accompany this.
Prof. Adam Fforde
Victoria
Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University www.vu.edu.au/vises (Professorial Fellow, part-time)
Member, Editorial Boards: Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs and
Canadian Journal of Development Studies
BOOK JUST OUT - Reinventing development - the sceptical
change agent (Palgrave March 2017) http://www.springer.com/us/book/97833195022670
And for how to get a review copy -
https://www.springer.com/gp/reviewers/online-review-copies---all-in-a-nutshell/4798
[1]
For a Seminar at the ANU see - https://crawford.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/9461/coping-high-risk-and-uncertainty-aid-policy-design-and-practice
I also presented at this - https://www.jcu.edu.au/@jcu/rethinking-development-pedagogy-and-practice-new-visions-for-global-development
