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Donors as political actors: fighting the thirty years war in Bolivia

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2003

Abstract

Based on the author's own experience as head of a bilateral agency country office, the paper tells a story about how the donor community became engaged in a conflict about monitoring the Poverty Reduction Strategy. This experience is used to explore donors' involvement in political processes within aid-recipient countries. Their understanding of the national context and the quality of the relations that donor staff establish in the recipient country only partially explain the nature of their involvement. Because they are sustained over time and are not contingent on the country where a staff member happens to be working for a few years there are two other sets of non local relationships that may be more influential. These are membership of the global development cooperation community, of which the country specific donor community is a sub-set, and the relationships back home to the staff member's own country's history, institutions, values and practices. The interpretation of these sets of relations, and the action resulting from this, are mediated by an individual's own personal history and life experiences. Consciously situating oneself with respect to personal and institutional values and relationships would allow individual staff members in donor agencies to reflect upon and explore taken for granted assumptions about the way the world appears to them. It would help them work more comfortably and sensitively with the ambiguity, paradox and unanticipated outcomes that they encounter on a daily basis in their goal of reducing world poverty. The paper argues that greater reflexivity would help donor staff and their organisations become more skilled at supporting aid recipients in their efforts.

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Going against the flow: the struggle to make organisational systems part of the solution rather than part of the problem: the case of ActionAid's Acountability, Learning and Planning System [ALPS]

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2004

Abstract

This paper is part of the series Lessons for change about organisational learning, resulting from a collaboration between ActionAid, DFID, Sida and the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies to explore understandings of learning and to document innovative approaches. The paper looks at the origins of the Accountability, Learning and Planning System (ALPS), an approach to managing the learning and relationships of an international non-governmental agency, ActionAid. Starting with the origins of ALPS in the late 90s, and describing the false starts and factors that mobilised change, the authors go on to describe: the new system and what was unique about it; challenges and successes of introducing the idea and encouraging local innovation with over 30 country offices on three continents; dilemmas and contradictions between the organisation's international systems and the principles of the new accountability learning and planning system and how they were overcome; and the differences made by the new system and the work still to be done. Recognition of the need for participation and downward accountability has been around for a long time. This paper shows that the hard work starts in creating systems that will make it happen. ActionAid is by no means the only organisation which is going through this process. Hopefully some of the insights in this paper will help those on the same journey.

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Relationships matter for supporting change in favour of poor people

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2004

Abstract

This paper is part of the series Lessons for change about organisational learning, resulting from a collaboration between ActionAid, DFID, Sida and the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies to explore understandings of learning and to document innovative approaches. Based on the author's own experience of working for development agencies, most recently as head of a country office in Latin America, this paper also draws on research carried out in 2003 and supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) Asia Regional Policy Research Fund. This included interviewing DFID's partners in one country and running workshops for DFID staff in the same and in two other country offices. The first draft also benefited very considerably from the opportunity of sharing ideas and experience at a workshop in Sahy, Sao Paolo on Partnerships and Influencing, described in another paper in this series. The paper summarises the principal theme and poses some questions for readers to consider and discuss, possibly in workshops that they may wish to organise. It briefly reviews and critiques current understandings of influencing in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and provides examples from Latin America of efforts to take the agenda further. It looks at how these understandings have been applied and developed in parts of Asia. Finally it proposes some fundamental principles for influencing and explores the operational implications of these for teams in country offices of DFID and other international development agencies.

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Participatory learning groups in an aid bureaucracy

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2004

Abstract

This paper is part of the series Lessons for change about organisational learning, resulting from a collaboration between ActionAid, DFID, Sida and the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies to explore understandings of learning and to document innovative approaches. Today's development talk is full of concepts such as participation, ownership, partnership and accountability; concepts that speak above all to the complex relationships that those who work in aid bureaucracies need to manage. Yet scant opportunity exists within these settings for reflection in and on everyday working practice and its relationship with the ideals that policies profess. In this paper, we describe an experiment in creating these spaces for reflection and learning in such an organisational setting. It narrates the process of establishing and running two participatory learning groups in the Swedish official development agency, Sida: one in the Stockholm headquarters, and one in the Embassy of Sweden in Nairobi. In the work, a hybrid approach to participatory learning was evolved, taking principles from action oriented research methodologies and adapting them to the context of an aid bureaucracy. Through cycles of reflection and action over a period of close to a year, group members explored experiences and ideas, building analyses, alliances and possibilities for action through participatory interaction. Fostering subtle changes through small acts and shifts in thinking, the learning groups helped foster greater reflexivity amongst participants and, with it, a degree of engagement and awareness with the potential for changes at other scales. This paper reports on the way the process developed, and reflects on lessons learnt with potential for wider application.

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Poverty unperceived: traps, biases and agenda

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Authors: 
Robert Chambers
2006

Abstract

With the priority of poverty reduction and with accelerating change in many dimensions, up-to-date and realistically informed perceptions of the lives and conditions of people living in poverty have come to matter more than ever. At the same time, new pressures and incentives increasingly trap decision-makers in headquarters and capital cities, reinforcing earlier (1983) analysis of the attraction of urban 'cores' and the neglect of rural 'peripheries'. These trends make decision-makers' learning about poverty and from people living in poverty rarer and ever more important. One common means has been rural development tourism, the phenomenon of the brief rural visit from an urban centre. In 1983, six biases of such visits - spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic and professional - against seeing, meeting and learning from the poorer people, were identified and described. Security can now be added as a seventh. Much can be done to offset the biases. The solution is to make more visits, not fewer, and to enjoy doing them better.

In addition, new and promising approaches have been pioneered for experiential, direct learning, face-to-face with poor and marginalised people. Examples are: UNHCR's annual participatory assessments by staff; SDC's 'views of the poor' participatory research in Tanzania; and various forms of immersion, most recently those being convened and organised by ActionAid International. In many immersions, outsiders become guests for a few days and nights, and live, experience and learn in a community. The question now is not how an organisation can afford the time and other resources for immersions for its staff. It is how, if it is seriously pro-poor, it can possibly not do so. This paper is a challenge to development actors to practice a responsible pro-poor professionalism; to be pioneers and champions, seizing and making space for themselves and others to offset the biases and traps of headquarters and capital cities; and to have the vision and guts to seek out direct experiential learning and so to be in touch and up-to-date with the realities of the people living in poverty whom they seek to serve.