Taking resilience from buzzword to real-world impact

A recent commentary by Thierry van Bastelaer of Abt Associates on Devex discussed this new popular focus on resilience and its application in development.  An extract is below with full article here:

Resilience has recently rocketed to the top of the list of development buzzwords. But is it just a buzzword that will fade away like many others? Are we simply repackaging an old concept (sustainability, anyone?). How do we make resilience more than a word?

The answer, I suggest, is to put substance behind the concept and see how we can apply strategies in one arena, for example, disaster resilience, to other areas such as household finances, climate change and personal health to name a few. Otherwise, “resilience” will meet the same fate as so many development ideas that came along and briefly lit up our seemingly endless search for magic solutions to poverty.

I believe resilience is more than a buzzword, and actually a new concept — and the timing of its emergence should be no surprise at a time when donors are rethinking the use of their resources, with an eye toward longer and, yes, less expensive solutions to the largest development problems. Although it’s probably only one of many valid ways to approach the concept, I find it useful to refer to resilience as the combination of four — almost inevitably overlapping — strategies: behaviors, networks, policies, and products (one could make the convincing argument that knowledge should be added to the framework). Here are some ways to think about it:

• Behaviors refer to all actions that individuals, households or communities can take to limit their exposure to risk, or to limit the impact of adverse events when that risk is realized. This includes using preventative medicine, engaging in a better diet, practicing safe sex, stopping smoking, et cetera.

• Networks relate to the formal or informal expressions of social relations between households and groups, often aggregated under the term of “structural social capital,” and the elements of physical infrastructure that facilitate these relations. In the context of resilience, networks include mutual support arrangements and collective action agreements that individuals and households can call upon to prepare against negative events or to mitigate the effect of crises and shocks — as well as the physical or virtual communication channels that accelerate these arrangements such as roads and the Internet.

• Policies refer to actions taken by national, regional or local governments to protect families against shocks and help them recover quickly when these shocks cannot be avoided such as social safety nets, early warning systems, clean air regulation, food labeling and immunization campaigns.

• Products include a wide variety of goods and services that can help prevent crises or contribute to post-shock recovery, or both. Examples include drought-resistant seeds and fertilizer, health insurance policies, savings accounts, condoms and other contraceptives, bed nets and anti-mosquito chemicals.

Taken individually, these strategies rarely provide the levels of resilience necessary to deal with the variety and severity of risks faced on a daily basis by low-income families or vulnerable communities. 

Read recommendations and full article here.

Getting to Zero and Eliminating Extreme Poverty

This is an extract from a recent commentary by Steve Feldstein, Director of USAID Policy

For those who spend their days focusing on international development issues, only occasionally does the full public spotlight shine on their work. On Tuesday night, near the conclusion of his State of the Union address, the President articulated a vision that represented one of the clearest, most direct calls to development action in recent years.  He noted that in many parts of the world, people still live on “little more than a dollar a day,” and called for the United States to “join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades.” This has caused a flurry of activity as the development community begins to dissect what exactly this means, how it will be done, and who will be affected. In the policy office at USAID, we’ve spent considerable time analyzing this issue and what it would take to eradicate extreme poverty...

... We should recognize that we’ve made substantial progress – more than was ever anticipated. The number of people living in extreme poverty continued to rise until around 1981, when it reached 1.94 billion people. From 1981 until around 1993, the number did not change much overall, but after 1993 – for the first time in history – the number began to fall. Over the next fifteen years, historic growth rates were achieved and the extreme poverty figure fell from 1.91 to 1.29 billion, nearly a one-third decrease. It will be challenging to maintain this rate of reduction; as poverty numbers get smaller, the rate of decline may slow as remaining pockets of poverty persist in increasingly difficult environments. But economic growth has been the main determinant of progress in poverty reduction and we believe we are well positioned to help foster such growth...

Read the full text here...

Building Local Capacity for More Effective Development

InterAction has just published it's latest Foreign Assistance Briefing Book, a relevant and timely resource created for the 113th Congress and the Obama administration as they make decisions with significant implications for the United States and the world.  An extract from the report recommendations as regards more effective capacity building is below:

International assistance programs should support capacity building for local organizations to accelerate development and achieve aid effectiveness goals. To contribute effectively to development, civil society organizations must have the rights and freedoms to organize, secure resources, voice opinions, participate in agenda setting, operate effectively and help hold state institutions accountable for development results. Development assistance can be more efficient and effective if local capacity building is better integrated into ongoing programs. The following policy and program steps can help local organizations assume more effective roles in country owned development:

•  Promote more capable, self-sufficient local organizations by supporting policies and programs that build a healthy enabling environment for nonstate actors.

  

•  Make capacity building a higher priority and better integrate it into development and humanitarian assistance programs. 

•  Support and leverage established capacity building relationships between international NGOs and local NGOs. 

•  Increase the effectiveness and sustainability of local capacity building by supporting longer-term programs. 

You can find the full article at this link.

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.