People who have met me in person know that I am a skeptic, either out of conviction or because somebody has to be. Part of this comes from my upbringing: too many Marx brothers films growing up. Like all good Marxians (of the absurd persuasion), I enjoy quoting Groucho’s famous message to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Therefore, I find it difficult to say the following: I seem to have joined a club, and it is one I am happy to belong to. Damn you, Doing Development Differently!
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The DDD Manifesto
Statement from the October 2014 ‘Doing Development Differently’ workshop [re-posted from here]
Too many development initiatives have limited impact. Schools are built but children do not learn. Clinics are built but sickness persists. Governments adopt reforms but too little changes for their citizens.
This is because genuine development progress is complex: solutions are not simple or obvious, those who would benefit most lack power, those who can make a difference are disengaged and political barriers are too often overlooked. Many development initiatives fail to address this complexity, promoting irrelevant interventions that will have little impact.
Some development initiatives, however, have real results. Some are driven domestically while others receive external support. They usually involve many players – governments, civil society, international agencies and the private sector – working together to deliver real progress in complex situations and despite strong resistance. In practice, successful initiatives reflect common principles.
- They focus on solving local problems that are debated, defined and refined by local people in an ongoing process.
- They are legitimised at all levels (political, managerial and social), building ownership and momentum throughout the process to be ‘locally owned’ in reality (not just on paper).
- They work through local conveners who mobilise all those with a stake in progress (in both formal and informal coalitions and teams) to tackle common problems and introduce relevant change.
- They blend design and implementation through rapid cycles of planning, action, reflection and revision (drawing on local knowledge, feedback and energy) to foster learning from both success and failure.
- They manage risks by making ‘small bets’: pursuing activities with promise and dropping others.
- They foster real results – real solutions to real problems that have real impact: they build trust, empower people and promote sustainability.
As an emerging community of development practitioners and observers, we believe that development initiatives can – and must – have greater impact.
We pledge to apply these principles in our own efforts to pursue, promote and facilitate development progress, to document new approaches, to spell out their practical implications and to foster their refinement and wider adoption.
We want to expand our community to include those already working in this way.
We call on international development organisations of all kinds to embrace these principles as the best way to address complex challenges and foster impact. We recognise the difficulties, but believe that more effective strategies and approaches can generate higher and lasting impact.
Day 1 of fieldwork in Kampala. Government-owned New Vision daily, page 4, manages to get everything wrong about police reform, church-state relations, and – I would argue – even Christianity itself:
[Re-posted from the ESID blog]
Two weeks ago Harvard Kennedy School and ODI co-hosted a very particular kind of workshop, entitled “Doing Development Differently”. I say particular because I have not attended anything similar in my years as a grad student or researcher: the list of participants was small, largely a self-selected group mixing incredibly qualified veterans and refreshingly energetic newcomers; the format of sessions was heavily geared towards interaction, so that everyone felt like a contributor; the pace of debate was relentless, with real space for reaction and accumulation; and the point of it all was not simply to share knowledge or pad a CV, but to build a community and even lay down the foundations of a manifesto. Credit for all this must go to the three individuals who led the experiment: Harvard‘s Matt Andrews, and ODI‘s Marta Foresti and Leni Wild. Reacting against the unfortunate trend of getting the “usual suspects” of aid together for yet another session of group therapy, they conceived and successfully executed a different model for informed policy debate.
Inequality is at the core of our work at the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID): our entire analytical framework rests on the idea that there are powerful groups and individuals – elites – who influence or make policy with the intended or unintended effect of perpetuating privilege. We ask why these actors behave the way they do, what kind of institutions they support, and what policies – if any – would encourage them to build less unequal societies. Our intent is certainly noble, and our focus on inequality aims to produce research that leads to a better world. But the profound irony in our work is that we ourselves belong to a small intellectual and policy elite, and I wonder whether we should match our fight against global inequality with a more intimate reaction against the unequal nature of our voice in this conversation.
The more I read first drafts of working papers, the more I pick up on scholars’ diverse skills: some authors are really good at coming up with an interesting question; some can really execute a rigorous research design; some have a flare for composing elegant prose; and some are really good at organizing a manuscript. But few – very few!! – are good at all those things combined. In yet another piece in my saga to save academia from itself, I say scrap the expectation that a single scholar must struggle to be a creative, methodologist, writer and editor. An alternative system is possible.