Complexity Theory for Development Policy

Sponsored by the Center for Global Development. In this podcast, adapted from his Kapuściński Lecture of May 2012, Owen Barder explores the implications of complexity theory for development policy. He explains how traditional economic models have tried and failed to understand why some countries have managed to improve living standards while other countries have not. Using complexity theory, he shows that development is a property of a system, not the sum of what happens to the people within it. 

Drawing on the understanding of complex adaptive systems in physics and biology, this suggests important policy implications for policymakers who want to bring about faster development in their own country, or to help other countries to make faster progress. 

The lecture finishes with seven policy recommendations for development. 

 The pdf of the key slides and narrative is linked here

Complexity, Adaptation, and Results

Extract taken from CDG Global Development 

In a series of commentaries looking at the implications of complexity theory for development, Owen Barder and Ben Ramalingam look at the implications of complexity for the trend towards results-based management in development cooperation. They argue that is a common mistake to see a contradiction between recognizing complexity and focusing on results: on the contrary, complexity provides a powerful reason for pursuing the results agenda, but it has to be done in ways which reflect the context. 
 
In the 2012 Kapuscinski lecture Owen argued that economic and political systems can best be thought of as complex adaptive systems, and that development should be understood as an emergent property of those systems. These interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors, whose actions are a self-organized search for fitness on a shifting landscape. Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterized by explosive surprises and tipping points as well as periods of relative stability.

If development arises from the interactions of a dynamic and unpredictable system, you might draw the conclusion that it makes no sense to try to assess or measure the results of particular development interventions. That would be the wrong conclusion to reach. While the complexity of development implies a different way of thinking about evaluation, accountability and results, it also means that the ‘results agenda’ is more important than ever.


Embrace experimentation
There is a growing movement in development which rejects the common view that there is a simple, replicable prescription for development.  Dani Rodrik talks of ‘one economics, many recipes’. David Booth talks of the move from best practice to best fit.  Mirilee Grindle talks of ‘good enough governance’. Bill Easterly has talked of moving ‘from planners to searchers’. Owen Barder has called for us to design not a better world, but better feedback loops.  Sue Unsworth talks of an upside down view of governance.  Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock aim to synthesize all this into their proposal for Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation.

These ideas are indispensable in the search for solutions in complex adaptive systems. In his 2011 book Adapt, Tim Harford showed that adaptation is the way to deal with problems in unpredictable, complex systems.  Adaptation works by making small changes, observing the results, and then adjusting.  This is the exact opposite of the planning approach, widely used in development, which involves designing complicated programmes and then tracking milestones as they are implemented.

We know a lot about how adaptation works, especially from evolution theory. There are three essential characteristics of any successful mechanism for adaptation:

1. Variation – any process of adaptation and evolution must include sources of innovation and diversity, and the system must be able to fail safely
2. An appropriate fitness function which distinguishes good changes from bad on some implicit path to desirable outcomes
3. Effective selection which causes good changes to succeed and reproduce, but which suppresses bad changes.

These principles are reflected in the six principles for working in complex systems which Ben set out in a Santa Fe Institute working paper with the former head of USAID Afghanistan, Bill Frej. They also run through the ideas in the must-read recent paper by Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock  which sets out four steps for ‘iterative adaptation’ in the case of state-building and governance reforms:

1. focus on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged best-practice solutions);
2. create an ‘authorizing environment’ for decision-making that encourages ‘positive deviance‘ and experimentation, as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them;
3. embed this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from evaluation);
4. engage broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant and supportable.

So there is now some convergence around these ideas, all of which focus on the importance of experimentation, feedback and adaptation as ways of coping with uncertainty and complexity.

Read the full article linked here.

The Congressional Research Service has recently published a study by Marion Lawson summarizing efforts to evaluate US foreign assistance during the past 50 years.  While describing the historical efforts in this area, it also explores avenues by which Congress may influence actions in this area.  

 

 

An extract of the summary is below:

 

The US Congress’s recent focus on reducing federal spending raises questions about the relative efficiency and effectiveness of all federal programs. In this context, evaluation of foreign assistance programs is of growing interest to many Members of Congress as they scrutinize the Administration’s international affairs budget request and debate foreign aid spending priorities.

Policymakers, taxpayers, and aid recipients alike want to know what impact, if any, foreign aid dollars are having, and whether foreign aid programs are achieving their intended objectives. In most cases, the success or failure of U.S. foreign aid programs is not entirely clear, in part because historically, most aid programs have not been evaluated for the purpose of determining their actual impact. 

 

The purpose and methodologies of foreign aid evaluation have varied over the decades, responding to political and fiscal circumstances. Aid evaluation practices and policies have variously focused on meeting program management needs, building institutional learning, accounting for resources, informing policymakers, and building local oversight and project design capacity. Challenges to meaningful aid evaluation have varied as well, but several are recurring.  

 

Persistent challenges to effective evaluation include unclear aid objectives, funding and personnel  constraints, emphasis on accountability for funds, methodological challenges, compressed timelines, country ownership and donor coordination commitments, security, and agency and personnel incentives. As a result of these challenges, aid agencies do not undertake rigorous evaluation for all foreign aid activities.

The U.S. government agencies managing foreign assistance each have their own distinct evaluation policies; these policies have come into closer alignment in the last two years than in the past. The Obama Administration’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) resulted in, among other things, a stated commitment to plan foreign aid budgets “based not on dollars spent, but on outcomes achieved.” 

 

Though recent evaluation reform efforts have been agency-driven, Congress has considerable influence over their impact. Legislators may mandate a particular approach to evaluation directly through legislation (e.g., H.R. 3159, S. 3310), or can support or undermine Administration policies by controlling the appropriations necessary to implement the policies. Furthermore, Congress will largely determine how, or if, any actionable information resulting from the new approach to evaluations will influence the nation’s foreign assistance policy priorities.

 

The complete CRS report is linked here.

 

An update of USAID Evaluation Policy progress is linked here.

International Development Assistance Ecosystem of the USA

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has published a new white paper on US international development assistance strategy (link here).  An extract of the introduction is below:

Since the end of the Cold War, the method by which the United States delivers foreign aid to the developing world has changed considerably. During this time, as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) saw large-scale staff reductions coupled with an increase in programs, a large base of U.S for-profit and nonprofit organizations grew up to implement projects and programs in the developing world. Although the budgetary situation reversed beginning in 2002, staffing levels at USAID remained low and a need to engage the U.S. implementer community continues. 

Concurrently, a broader discussion occurred over the effectiveness of development assistance by major donors. This effort, which resulted in the Paris Declaration of 2005 and later agreements at Accra in 2008 and Busan in 2011, enshrined the notion of country ownership—that the developing world must drive its priorities to ensure sustainability. The Obama administration launched its USAID Forward agenda to re-establish USAID as the premier development agency in the world. A central aspect of this agenda are reforms designed to reduce the Agency’s dependence on contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements with U.S. development implementers and shift to a greater use of government to government support and local organizations.

The report argues that the current U.S. ecosystem of international development assistance should be treated as a strategic asset that plays an important role in meeting U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives. As with all systems, it can and should be improved; however, it should be strengthened, not weakened. This system, while imperfect, delivers a level of accountability and transparency for the U.S. government that is vital to continued political support for foreign assistance. 

The development implementers must do more to evolve to meet the changing nature of how the U.S. government sees development and the broader trends in the field. However, there are significant risks associated with USAID’s proposed reforms, which, if fully implemented, may not achieve the results desired.

A New Framework for Philanthropic and International Development Collaboration

The Bellagio Initiative is a series of global consultations to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human well being. Advancing well being in a world experiencing scarcity, complex risks and inequities is a key challenge facing philanthropists and development experts.

As the 21st century unfolds, climate change, economic volatility, and social and political polarization will challenge existing models for sustainable development and human well being.

In September, Bellagio will release a report that addresses the key insights from the Bellagio Initiative. Human Wellbeing in the 21st Century: Meeting Challenges, Seizing Opportunities, analyzes the Initiative, presenting major themes and conclusions. The report reveals new ways to promote future wellbeing through strengthened philanthropy and development.

 

Several videos, compiled from the insights of Summit attendees, begin to point in the direction of some of the major themes of the final report. 

Next steps to act on these themes are already underway: workshops on balancing risk and opportunity; a study of the potential role of philanthropy in innovation ecosystems; work to strengthen North-South and South-South collaboration in philanthropy.

Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation

Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock with Center for Global Development argue in a recently published working paper that many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. 

In addition, the flow of development resources and legitimacy without demonstrated improvements in performance undermines the impetus for effective action to build state capability or improve performance. This dynamic facilitates “capability traps” in which state capability stagnates, or even deteriorates, over long periods of time even though governments remain engaged in developmental rhetoric and continue to receive development resources.

How can countries escape capability traps? We propose an approach, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), based on four core principles, each of which stands in sharp contrast with the standard approaches.

1. PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting preconceived and packaged “best practice” solutions).


2. It seeks to create an authorizing environment for decision-making that encourages positive deviance and experimentation (as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them exactly as designed).


3. It embeds this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from ex post “evaluation”).


4. It actively engages broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant, and supportable (as opposed to a narrow set of external experts promoting the top-down diffusion of innovation). 

Read complete working paper linked here.

How to feed the world’s population through 2021

7B and counting: How to feed the world’s population through 2021

inShare

Global demand for food is expected to rise sharply in the next 10 years. To meet such demand requires a significant but sustainable increase in agricultural productivity, according to two leading international organizations.

The latest edition of a joint publication by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization predicts potential scenarios for global agriculture through 2021. Chief among these is a sharp increase in food demand due to migration, urbanization, changing diets, higher incomes and population growth.

But agricultural resources, especially arable land, are likely to shrink over the same time period. That’s why OECD and FAO are stressing the importance of increasing agricultural productivity in a sustainable manner.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria, in his speech at the launch of the joint report, proposed a number of ways on how this can be achieved:

• Promote green growth in agriculture and giving incentives to encourage sound agronomic practices such as drip irrigation.
• Create a technical, commercial and regulatory environment that promotes farm-level agronomic practices.
• Encourage agricultural innovation.
• Tackle wastage.
• Close the gender gap in developing countries’ agriculture sector.
• Support the development of infrastructure in the developing world.

Aside from the sharp increase in global food demand, the OECD-FAO report predicts food prices will remain high through 2021 because of higher energy prices. Further, it notes that the bulk of vegetables, rice, oil, sugar, poultry, beef, fist products and oil seed exports will come from developing and emerging countries, especially Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil and Ukraine.

A separate report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, meanwhile, finds being a landlocked country does not mean having greater food insecurity. The report suggests governments should focus on improving access to and finding more sources of financing for farmers, safety net programs, and nutritional intake to boost food security.

The report also provides a ranking of countries based on their levels of food security. Not surprisingly, Western nations are at the top of the index, with the United States, Denmark and France the three most food-secure countries in the world. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are ranked most food insecure, with Burundi, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo occupying the bottom three spots.