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There is a lot of chatter about the reasons for Britain’s relative success in the Olympic games. This transformation in Britain’s sporting performance has generated a raft of tortured analogies with various non-sporting challenges, such as industrial and education policies (on which Britain’s performance is rather less stellar). So I’m leaping on the bandwagon with two lessons for international development.
“For too long there has been a taboo about tackling [corruption] head on. The summit will change that.” That, at least, is the optimistic pronouncement from the leader of Her Majesty’s Government ahead of the UK anti-corruption summit in London this week.
Administrators in colonial-era Delhi, the story goes, had a problem. The growing capital city bordered agricultural land, bringing more people into occasionally deadly contact with a subcontinental rogues gallery that included cobras and banded kraits.
In the last of a series of three blog posts 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 recognising 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. As explained in detail in Ben’s forthcoming book, these interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors, whose actions are a self-organised search for fitness on a shifting landscape. Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterised 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.
Last week, the New York Times’ Tina Rosenberg wrote about Social Impact Bonds – a new and promising approach to investing in improved social outcomes.
This is a joint post with Rita Perakis
Last week, CGD and Social Finance launched a new high-level Working Group to consider Development Impact Bonds, a new mechanism to enable private investment in development outcomes. Owen Barder and Rita Perakis explain.
There is nothing new about the idea that development assistance is an investment: spending money today in the hope of future benefits. Putting money into immunizing kids or giving them an education is an excellent investment in the future well-being of those people. But if there are financial returns they are often far in the future and cannot be directly linked back to the investment. For many development investments the returns are mainly social, not financial. And the absence of financial returns on a reasonable timescale could be why there is no market for investing in development. There is a small pool of investors who are willing to be paid in good karma; but most would rather be paid in dollars, sterling or euros.
Owen Barder unpacks the results agenda, now so much discussed in the aid and development community, here. It’s brilliant. He sets out four different motivations of various parties in the community for their recent focus on the “results agenda”. I asked myself which motivation has driven my devotion to the idea of Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid).
It’s back to business in the aid industry with the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) behind us, although the impact of the Forum and its communiqué, the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, will likely continue to be debated for some time.
This is a joint post with Owen Barder.
In a recent blog post in the Guardian, Jonathan Glennie welcomes the new focus on results in foreign aid and has some good things to say about Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) in particular. (We especially like this: “COD Aid demonstrates a post-ideological humility regarding how to achieve development.”)
In his article, but even more so in readers’ reactions below it, there are some questions about the possible effects of linking aid to results. We think that the commenters are right to raise these worries, because they are concerns that we share. But we believe that these concerns are relevant for other forms of results based aid, and to an even greater extent for conventional forms of aid, and that COD Aid would in fact go a long way towards allaying them.
Here are the main worries raised, with some reflections on whether and how they apply to COD Aid:
I am delighted to announce that Owen Barder has joined the Center for Global Development as Senior Fellow and as Director for Europe, with responsibility for broadening and deepening CGD engagement with the European development community on policies and practices that matter for the world’s poor.
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