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Is this the ‘Next Big One’?

Posted in Agriculture, Biology, Communications, Evolution, Healthcare, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Research, Resilience, Strategy, Technology on April 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

As concern grows about H7N9 in China, this post explores the importance of managing such pandemic risks through collaboration, innovation and systemic thinking

In the month of World Health Day (April 8th), the latest outbreak of bird flu in Asia provided a sobering sense of the challenges the international community still faces. To date, H7N9 has killed 21 people, infected 104, shut down poultry markets across Asia, and has led to Chinese shares tumbling.

The WHO originally announced that the likelihood of this latest pathogen is transmittable between people is low, and that the world should not ‘get into a flap’ – as one observer memorably put it. The potential of bird flu to be the source of the “Next Big One” means however that we cannot be complacent. In terms of global catastrophic risks, it is hard to think of one more serious than the 1918 avian influenza epidemic which killed 50-100 million people worldwide – 3-5% of the global population. This was so devastating in part because the virus had acquired mutations that allowed it to cross from birds to humans, and then to ‘go pandemic’. Based on analysis of the mutations in H7N9, scientists fear that this latest variant may have the same potential.

But there is still a lot we don’t know about H7N9. Where has it come from, why, and how? What is its relationship to earlier variants? How might it mutate? What impact might it have in the future? What does it mean for our ongoing, historically loaded, battle with avian flu?

To answer such questions, we need to draw on a variety of disciplines: epidemiology, molecular biology, virology, all of which fit nicely with the current models of public health. The problem is that many of these models set us, humans, apart from nature. Diseases, the standard narrative goes, encroach on our territory and we need to fend them off. The reality is in fact the exact opposite.

It is now widely acknowledged that many – the majority, in fact – diseases are born in the intersection between society, environment and economy. More than 2/3 of all human infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin, meaning that they somehow crossed species boundaries. The terminology likely to be adopted in future Hollywood blockbusters on the topic is simple but evocative: ‘spillover’. Primates, birds, bats, pigs, rats, mice, dogs, insects – any creature we co-exist with can act as sources or carriers of pathogenic lifeforms.

Spillover is driven by a pattern of activity which is becoming all too familiar. Deforestation: 4% increase can lead to 50% increase in malaria rates. Hunting has led to HIV-AIDS, Ebola, all crossing the species boundary. And, to bring it back to bird flu, livestock. Around 70% of the rural poor and 10% of the urban poor are dependent on livestock. Livestock conditions are increasingly creating tremendous opportunities for pathogens to cross from wild birds to caged birds, and onto humans. And the demand for animal-based protein is expected to grow 50% by 2020, much of it in the developing world. This problem is not going to go away any time soon.

Leapfrogging on the success of the human race, trade and transport linkages provide a morbid global transmission network. The rate at which new diseases are emerging and spreading is nothing short of shocking.  Zoonotic diseases have increased in the past 40 years, with at least 43 identified outbreaks since 2004. ILRI estimates that 1.7 million people die each year thanks to spillover diseases. By way of comparison, the highly respected CRED crunch on disaster epidemiology found that the 2001-2010 average annual deaths from natural disasters was 107k  per year.

Ecological and evolutionary principles are vital in understanding these complex system effects on a more solid scientific basis. Experts at the University of Florida made the point in pithy fashion a couple of weeks ago, “If we don’t understand the reservoir and the ecology of the virus, it’s hard to design interventions to protect humans.” But such understanding is – with a few exceptions – still under-utilised in public health.

Of course, every disease is different, every context is unique. But the process by which spillover happens is similar. We can point to ecologies under stress. Life forms under duress. As an excellent briefing by colleagues in the Consortium on Disease Dynamics (CDD) puts it, “The health of people and animals are… interconnected and inextricably linked to the environments both inhabit. Given the complex pathways that lead to spillovers, it is important that prevention and control measures are undertaken with a strategic approach and an understanding of the many interdependencies.”

What does this challenge add up to for the global risk management community? The work by the CDD gives some very useful pointers.

First, multi-disciplinary approaches are vital. The WEF Global Risks report has for some years now been calling for better disciplinary collaboration in order to think about emerging risks. With avian influenza there is a clear need for better collaboration between public health specialists, disease ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Some important work is already happening, under the auspices of entities such as the global One Health initiative, organisations like the EcoHealth Alliance, and initiatives like the USAID-funded Predict, and this work needs to move firmly to the centre of the debate.

Second, anticipation and warning systems – new investments in surveillance are urgently needed to establish and maintain necessary systems at multiple levels – community, national, regional and global. We need multi-stakeholder information platforms, bringing together government, civil society and the private sector in new kinds of networks, in order to establish ‘systemic  surveillance approaches’. This needs to move beyond a focus on specific disease to looking at the whole system, looking at the intersection between disease drivers, disease incidence, and socio-economic factors.

Third, new approaches – especially in the realm of complex adaptive systems – have a lot of relevance for how we think about such outbreaks in the future. Methods such as systems thinking, network analysis, agent-based simulations, and dynamical systems theories can help develop a more precise and accurate understanding of the complex dynamics of disease. Together with the rise in ‘big data’ approaches, there is scope to develop new models and theories of how pandemics unfold which are more appropriate to our ‘hyperconnected world’. We need to be careful however to ground this science in local, community understanding – to support affected communities to become the frontline of defence: adaptive managers of emerging risks.

Fourth, we need changed funding models – funding prevention, not just response, and linking pandemic risks to high-risk development activities, and ensuring that we don’t forget history too quickly. There needs to be attention even when the threats may not be imminent. The private sector, with interests in business continuity, can be key actors here. Done right, such investments can engender what might be seen as positive spillovers. As the CDD work suggests, investments in prevention of avian influenza can provide the basis for such work on other potential pandemics.

In closing, if we want to take a wide-angle lens on the problem of disease outbreaks like HN79, to understand why these diseases are occurring at an increasing rate, we could do worse than taking a lead from Nathan Wolfe. A globally renowned virologist, a couple of weeks ago Wolfe wrote a tub-thumping piece on the WEF blog about the continued risks of unregulated hunting, especially bushmeat, which gave birth to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). His basic argument was by ignoring the implications of our food production systems, we are running an unacceptably high risk of terrifying global scourges in the future.

Clearly, we all need to start pay much more attention to the intersection of economy, society and the environment if we are serious about proofing ourselves against the Next Big One.

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The globalisation of vulnerability

Posted in Agriculture, Climate change, Conflict and peace building, Economics, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Organisations, Public Policy, Resilience on January 11, 2011 | 5 Comments »

Most analysts agree that globalisation has become more intensive and dramatic in recent decades because of advances in technology, communications, science and transportation. While it can be a catalyst for development and progress, globalisation also carries significant and increasing challenges for aid policy makers and practitioners alike.

I: The new face of vulnerability?

Recent years have seen dramatic illustrations of the downsides of globalisation. Perhaps most significant of these has been the global financial crisis taking its toll on the poorest communities in developing countries.

However, the specific localised impacts and implications of such shocks often fall below the radar of research, analysis and existing monitoring systems. On the whole, these systems are too narrow in scope and too shallow in reach to capture the diverse, context-specific experiences of poor people. As Ban Ki Moon noted in the preface to ‘Voices of the Vulnerable’ in June 2010:

…in the face of the global financial crisis a number of developing countries have proven to be remarkably resilient – if judged purely in terms of economic growth. At the same time, it appears that the burden of coping has been borne disproportionately by poor and vulnerable people. This reality is poorly understood…” (emphases added)

In fact, much work on vulnerability has been traditionally undertaken in ‘disciplinary silos’ – in highly specialised ways which are often in isolation from each other. Environmental vulnerability is assessed by the climatologists, nutritional vulnerability by the food security experts, market vulnerability by the economists, disease vector vulnerability by epidemiologists, and so on. The precise nature of vulnerability is often also heavily debated, leading to differences within the silos.

The gap between this ‘stove-piped’ understanding and multi-faceted reality becomes heightened when one considers the number of ongoing global crises. The financial crisis is just one of a number of global trends (that we currently know about) which are interacting and impacting on the lives of poor and vulnerable people.

To take another example, the 2010 World Disasters Report focused on urbanisation, and found that “a high proportion of this urban growth is in cities at risk from the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and storm surges that climate change is bringing or is likely to bring.”

Along similar lines, the global food system is showing signs of strain once again. Work done during the last upswing in prices in 2008 suggested that a key requirement was better monitoring and anticipation of future bubbles. Unfortunately anticipation has not led to preventative action. All the signs are that environmental disasters - driven by climate change - and a growing speculative bubble in commodities – driven partly by changing investor patterns in the wake of the financial crisis - are pushing the world into a new food price crisis.

In the face of these trends and shocks, there is a slowly growing recognition that vulnerability itself has become globalised. Interestingly this insight has not come from within the aid sector but from organisations such as the World Economic Forum, whose Global Risk Report 2010 shows that – like the world economy – vulnerabilities are now tightly interconnected.

Global shocks and stresses have multiple, unpredictable effects and increasingly demand – but do not always trigger – diverse responses at the local level. As recent research indicates, employing language which Aid on the Edge regulars will recognise:

Cause and effect in global systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect. The global system is characterised by various sizes and degrees of complexity combined into a tangled and heaving mass of interdependent actions.

Despite these shifts in the nature of vulnerability, international aid policy and practice are still dominated by narrow, parochial approaches. Take for example the findings of a report on chronic vulnerability in Africa which found that much of the analysis undertaken by international agencies did not examine root causes and tended to divide vulnerability into immediate and structural issues. The agencies then focused their efforts on the immediate issues, allowing the structural issues to be largely ignored.

By contrast, the reality of vulnerability for most poor people was found to be “complex and nuanced… vulnerability can be influenced by gender, ethnic group and generation issues, and by contemporary and historical social processes that are often not analysed and not explained.” (emphasis added)

It would seem that it is only after things go seriously wrong that the inter-relationships between the key drivers of vulnerability become of importance to international agencies. To cite one prominent and very current example, the densely urban population in Port-Au-Prince was up until January 2010 experiencing high levels of vulnerability and multiple climactic shocks.  It was only after the 12 January earthquake that aid agencies became sensitive to this interconnected reality, by which time it was already too late for many in Haitian population. As one satirical headline put it at the time: ‘Massive earthquake reveals poor country called Haiti to the world’.

These examples give weight to the criticism I have made elsewhere – that the international community employs a ‘catastrophe-first’ model of lesson learning, which puts the emphasis on disasters striking before action is taken.

There are often good practical reasons for this – anticipation is still in its infancy, prediction is largely impossible. However, without wanting to diminish these challenges, the key is to do much more in terms of changing our mindsets.

As we argued in an ALNAP study on humanitarian innovations, there is a crucial need to find ways to move away from this catastrophe-first model of learning, towards putting vulnerability first.

II: From ‘Catastrophe-First’ to ‘Vulnerability-First’ ~ Three Ideas

This idea of putting vulnerability first has a number of possible implications, of which three are explored below.

Putting vulnerability first requires a better, more inter-disciplinary, understanding of the globalised vulnerability landscape among both policy makers and operational decision makers. As well as better shared data and analysis, we need to find better ways of breaking down disciplinary silos.

One way of doing this might be to examine how the ideas in one area might be transferred over to another. There is already some useful work in this direction, which seeks to generalise the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This suggests that vulnerability may be characterised as a function of three components: sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacities. The UNFCC shows that such vulnerabilities can be understood through a combination of top-down modelling and scenarios with bottom-up, community-based approaches which recognise and build upon local knowledge and coping strategies. An interesting manifestation of this interdisciplinary approach in action is how the notion of ‘building back better’, a mainstay of disaster risk reduction, has found its way into the dialogue on the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Putting vulnerability first also means finding ways of communicating vulnerability understanding in ways that capture the political and humanitarian imagination alike. For example, some agencies have started using the evocative image of vulnerability defined as communities and individuals ‘living on the edge’. People are living on the edge if their lives and livelihoods are exposed and sensitive to shocks and stresses, and their adaptive capacities are constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed. Living on the edge suggests that a small push could send a community or individual over the edge.

Being forced to live on the edge can have profound effects on the way people conduct their lives. It can lead to coping strategies which are overtly risk-averse – poor farmers faced with unpredictable prices might start to act in cautious and non-entrepreneurial ways even during normal times, limiting their prospects of increasing their well-being. At the other end of the spectrum, as has been found in coastal communities in Bangladesh, the desperately poor may adopt a “gambler’s throw” strategy, risking all or nothing when they know that a major livelihood shock is inevitable.

The emerging globalised vulnerabilities have already taken their tol, on poor people, and will continue to do so: increasing the numbers ‘living on the edge of disaster’, changing their geographic distribution, and increasing the diversity and unpredictability of risks faced. Successive waves of impacts have fundamentally changed coping mechanisms, reduced long term resilience for the sake of short-term coping mechanisms, undermining development prospects and making many communities more vulnerable to future shocks.

So we need to be paying much more attention to, and advocating for, people living on the edge of disaster, rather simply waiting until they have been tipped over the edge.

Finally, putting vulnerability first also means highlighting examples of good practice and innovations, and fostering national level and local engagement. Social protection, micro-insurance, community-based adaptive learning measures, and new national policy frameworks all have an important role to play in enhancing community-level and national resilience. It also means being honest about how far the international community still has to go as well as its inherent limitations. We need to see some significant organisational and professional changes in international agencies, who need to do more than simply ‘mainstream’ vulnerability. The globalised nature of vulnerability demands nothing short of a fundamental strategic re-orientation.

The final words go to Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, drawing on some of his work from last year, in which he suggests what this re-orientation might look like:

[This] line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage…

… the resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that… offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems…

...it encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world…

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An interview on complexity and aid

Posted in Agriculture, Biology, Chaos, Innovation, Organisations, Public Policy on January 6, 2011 | 1 Comment »

…Because of our urgency to end poverty, we act as if development is a construction, a matter of planning and engineering, rather the complex and often opaque set of interactions that we know it to be…

This is a excerpt from a recent interview I gave to Dennis Whittle (former CEO of Global Giving).

Click here to read the interview in full.

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Land is not Linear: Towards the Brown Revolution

Posted in Agriculture, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Resilience, Self organisation, Strategy on October 22, 2010 | 1 Comment »

This year’s Buckminster Fuller Prize winner, Operation Hope, has seen the transformation  of 6,500 acres of parched and degraded grasslands in Zimbabwe into healthy pastures despite extended periods of drought. The story behind Operation Hope is an inspiring one with real insights on how complexity science concepts can help transform development practices on the ground.

First, the background to the project, described by one of the BF judges:

A quarter of the land area of Earth is turning into desert. Three quarters of the planet’s savannas and grasslands are degrading. And because the main activity on rangelands is grazing livestock, on which 70 percent of the world’s poorest people depend, grassland deterioration therefore causes widespread poverty.

Significant resources have been spent on trying to understand and reverse desertification, but with few successes. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the transformation achieved by Operation Hope from depleted to flourishing grassland, was that it was achieved by dramatically increasing the number of herd animals on the land. It has challenged the dominant and widespread theory that desertification is caused by overgrazing.


The animal-treated field on the right hand side and the conventionally managed field beside it.
Image courtesy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute

Behind Operation Hope is an approach called “holistic management,” derived from five decades of work by Allan Savory, who tried to develop a practical theory of semi-arid grassland ecologies to understand and improve range land practices. Key guiding principles of holistic management are listed below – regular Aid on the Edge readers will recognise many of these because they are firmly grounded in ideas of complexity science and systems thinking:

  • When actions are guided by complex realities, rather than by rational and abstract concepts, goals must change continuously
  • Conversations are more important than plans. In a healthy community, discussion of its overarching goals never ends.
  • A healthy community does not aspire to create the perfect plan and then implement it; rather, the idea is to grow and develop goals over time. Each and every managed system — people, land, money — is unique… just as one cannot step into the same river twice because it is flowing, holistic management does not allow for replication.
  • ‘Letting things go where they will’ implies accepting that things will unfold in unexpected ways, and there is a need to be flexible to that, taking up unforeseen opportunities as they arise and being prepared to abandon unrealistic aspirations along the route
  • Means rather than the ends: “You might even say that the means are the ends. Whatever you think your goal is, the true goal is to have a process for making decisions on an ongoing basis… Any so-called goal is merely one step along [a] path.”

How does all of this apply in the context of natural resource management programmes, and in particular the counter-intuitive notion that desertification could be reversed through more herds of animals, rather than less?

Moving across the land in large herds, the herbivores trample and compact soils in much the way that a gardener does to encourage plant growth — while also fertilizing the soil with concentrated levels of nutrient-rich animal wastes.

This approach aligns itself with nature a comprehensive way; it increases plant growth, improves rural livelihoods through additional livestock, and increases wildlife populations across the landscape. Grasses depended on herbivores to help them with their decay process. When large herbivores… disappear, grasses begin to decay far more slowly through oxidation.

When millions of tons of vegetation are left standing, dying upright, the result is to block light from reaching growth buds; the next year, the entire plant dies. The death of grass leads to bare ground, and desert spreads.

Savory tried to explain why the “unmanaged” grassland of pre-colonial era had supported enormous herds of wild ungulates and recovered from even severe droughts without loss of biodiversity while land grazed by domestic stock under human management degraded rapidly. He hypothesised that on enormous unfenced ranges, existing land use patterns and pack-hunting predators assured beneficial herd behavior. By contrast:

limited lands demand management that is ”holistic” to the extent that it respond to ever-shifting conditions of weather, economics, culture, and environmental conditions.

Here is a great Flickr Slideshow on how Operation Hope worked in practice.

For most of the 50 years that Savory has battled to make the scientific case for his approach, he has had to contend with intense opposition from mainstream range science researchers. One observer, Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, has suggested that the reason for the long resistance to Savory’s approach is simple:

Mainstream natural resource management systems were in essence designed to avoid or bypass complexity. They coined the term “best management practice” — but this was a misnomer. What may be the right thing to do on a farm this year may not be next year, let alone on a different farm. Although their motive was good, complexity—social, environmental and economic—is the implacable reality for management and thus cannot be bypassed or avoided. It has to be embraced through holistic planning processes.”

One of the most significant obstacles Savory encountered is the pronounced tendency to make conscious decisions — planning and design, for example — in a linear way. The implications for aid organisations are spelled out in stark fashion:

We have created complex global organizations that are programmed according to the same linear thinking. We manage these organizations by designing missions, or visions, that give the collective entity something to aim for in its linear journey forwards. We have been successful with developments of technology — but have failed over and over again to deal with complexity in nature and human society. The trouble stems from our attempts to control a world that is holistic, and fundamentally non-linear, in its makeup. This rational, control-seeking approach makes it almost impossible to deal with such wicked problems as biodiversity loss, desertification, and climate change.

The limits of linear, reductionist management are seen to be especially true for land:

Land — whether rangeland or cropland — cannot be managed like the production line in a car factory. Land alone is no more manageable than is the hydrogen or oxygen alone in water. Traditional scientists would never understand nature until we understood that nature functioned in wholes and patterns of great complexity, unlike the mechanistic world view in which nature is viewed as a complicated machine with interconnecting parts.

After decades of rejecting the idea underlying Operation Hope, that increased livestock could reverse desertification, a growing number of scientists now accept that the results claimed by Savory are supported by rigorous data, and that they therefore deserve to drive land use, agriculture, and ultimately new kinds of development policy.

Savory’s acceptance by the mainstream is part of a profound shift in scientific thinking. He is no longer alone in realizing that transfers of energy and nutrients are innate to the growing understanding of ecosystem ecology, that has emerged from biological studies of plants, animals, terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems. As a result, Savory’s work has far wider implications than desertification alone. His approach contains the elements of a whole new approach to agriculture. As he has argued on the Savory Institute website:

The Green Revolution was based on high input, industrial agriculture. It involved massive inputs of petro-chemicals and herbicides, monoculture cropping, and confinement animal feeding operations. It increased global food production tremendously, but it has also tended severely to degrade its ecological and socio-cultural capital base in the process. The Green Revolution has not been characterized by ecological or social integrity—quite the contrary. Horrific soil erosion, dead zones at the mouths of rivers, severely depleted levels of biodiversity, impoverished rural communities, soil fertility loss, and oxidation of soil organic matter have been exacerbated by the Green Revolution. We posit the necessity of a new ‘Brown Revolution’, based on the regeneration of covered, organically rich, biologically thriving soil, and brought to fruition via millions of human beings returning to the land and the production of food.” (emphasis added)

International agencies may have been slow to pick up on these ideas, but the idea of a Brown Revolution focused on improving soil is catching on. Savory has recently received a $4.2m grant from USAID to replicate his work in several other African countries. What’s more, Howard Buffet, son of the famous investor Warren, gave a speech at this months World Food Prize symposium in which he argued that a “Brown Revolution” in soil cultivation was vital for the future of African agriculture. To quote directly from his keynote:

Food security is complicated, agriculture is complicated. Simply distributing seeds and fertilizer, if that’s the plan, will fail long term.”

Given Buffett’s potential to take over his father’s company, and the strong philanthropic links between the Buffetts and the Gates Foundation, we might be hearing much more about a Brown Revolution, and the ideas underlying Operation Hope, in the future.

You can see a talk by Allan Savory on holistic management here

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Towards the Twig-Frame: Update on Complex Adaptive System Conference in Arusha 31st Sept – 3rd September

Posted in Agriculture, Evaluation, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Meetings, Organisations, Resilience, Self organisation, Strategy on September 20, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Two weeks ago we blogged about a fascinating event taking place in Arusha, convened by World Vision, which aimed to explore how complex adaptive systems thinking can be used to transform approaches to rural development.

Below is a round-up of the event. Special thanks are due to Miriam Booy of World Vision for  both synthesising the material and co-authoring this post, and to all the participants for openly sharing their thoughts and ideas.

The conference ran from Tuesday August 31st-Friday Sept 3rd and attracted 50 participants from 11 different countries including South Africa, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Rwanda, DRC, Tanzania, Kenya, Canada and UK. Participants included World Vision staff, community members, international organizations, academics, the private sector and the government. A major focus was the World Vision Governance-Ecosystem-Livelihoods (GEL) programme, a 3 year program (now coming to a close) that integrated complex adaptive systems as its principle programmatic approach.

The emphasis of the event was reflecting on complex adaptive systems approaches and adaptive management practices, through presentations, group discussions and practical exercises.

To paraphrase one of the presenters, a key shared message was that complex adaptive systems approaches suggest that aid agencies need to reconsider the social problems which they are working to address. Specifically, complexity means that agencies cannot afford to ignore the interconnectedness and interaction between diverse elements of the social systems within which they are working. This in turn challenges linear cause-effect thinking to which many aid agencies are wedded. The widely cited example of bed nets as a solution to malaria was highlighted by another presenter:

…the eradication of malaria is not limited to giving out nets and medicine. It is a result of business interests, economic well-being, civic competence…  To intervene and eradicate this problem, we need to go beyond the technical and understand its roots… our intervention may require us to address complex administrative and political issues of coordination as well as the simple technical issues of providing nets…”

The presentations themselves were rich and detailed – see below for the pdfs (with warm thanks to all the presenters for agreeing to share them more widely)

Just as important as the presentations were the open discussions that followed them in which participants were able to share their own ideas and personal experiences. A major recurring theme of the discussion will be familiar to Aid on the Edge of Chaos readers, namely: how to promote adaptive management in risk-averse communities and rigid organizational structures such as those found in international aid?

Recognizing that complex systems approaches and adaptive management practices require both time and flexibility, there was much discussion around how such a large international organization (like World Vision) with a wealth of existing policies, logframes, donor deadlines and standardised linear approaches might be able to respond to and encourage adaptability and flexibility within ongoing and new programs.

The wonderful phrase ‘twigframe’ was introduced by Anja Oussoren, the Operations Director of Kenya based Ivory Consult, as a metaphor for a programming model that might be more appropriate to development contexts: after all, twigs are more flexible, diverse and ‘multi-directional’ than logs.

Participants worked through different ideas for bringing complex adaptive systems approaches into the mainstream of aid work. A key realisation was that complex adaptive systems is more of a ‘mindset’ and an approach, rather than simply a set of tools to be implemented into programming. The mindset change necessary was beautifully summarised by one participant:

…I realize that there is often a disconnect between what we are actually doing and what we would like to achieve. We are perhaps focusing too much on addressing individual symptoms rather than dealing with root causes of problems – in part because we don’t understand the system or simply don’t acknowledge the complex network of connections…”

One of the conclusions of a session for World Vision staff which followed the conference was that the new ‘Integrated Programming Model’ currently being rolled out by the organization could potentially be augmented and strengthened the use of the ideas of complex systems approaches and adaptive management. In particular, it was seen as vital to involve communities themselves in mapping out the complexity of their lives – this was seen as a powerful opportunity to improve the relevance of programming approaches. However, it was also recognised that even the biggest NGO in the world was unable to completely change the system on its own – other parts of the aid system would also need to be engaged and convinced.

In this light, participants were intrigued by the fact that the Governance-Ecosystem-Livelihoods (GEL) program was actually funded and implemented by two very large, bureaucratic aid organizations that have a heavy reliance on logframes, preset goals, fixed timelines and linear approaches. But as one of the conference hosts put it:

…GEL was funded on the basis of broad goals that the project set out to accomplish, allowing the communities to define the specific activities to be carried out based on their own systems analyses. This does give hope that different projects reflecting the CAS approach can emerge from within ‘the formal system…”

Knowledge and learning efforts were also seen as a potentially useful entry point for complexity-oriented approaches. As another participant put it:

…we do need complex adaptive systems in research, capacity-building, and community development, as opposed to the linear, technical approaches, that fail because they fail to address other variables key to the problem as well…. systems approaches can be complex and impractical, but there are processes in it that can make it practical. One key entry point is knowledge management…”

The third day of the conference featured a very energised World Cafe session.  This process was also designed to demonstrate complex systems in action, with emergent themes, linkages between processes and the involvement of multi-stakeholders with potentially divergent perspectives. The key themes for a “way forward” which emerged from this exercise were

  1. the need to create community space and capacity to implement this approach,
  2. the need to build staff capacity to facilitate adaptive processes and
  3. the determination to seek out ways to introduce appropriate levels of flexibility and adaptability in the use of traditional tools such as the logframe and within wider organizational systems

As one participant summarised:

The theory presentations and discussions were very engaging and definitely inspiring and I hope to somehow integrate complex adaptive systems approaches into how my organization approaches community development. It has certainly influenced my own perceptions of how to approach community development especially in relation to conservation and it has challenged me to rethink our approach to interventions.”

And finally:

…[the meeting] has helped me to think seriously about the impact (or lack of impact) of many of our community projects especially in terms of what our goals are as a conservation and development organization…”

The conference proceedings can be found here, and the GEL ‘lessons learned’ summary report will be circulated in the next couple of months. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the programme or the meeting, post them in the comments section and we will respond accordingly.

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Governance, Ecosystems and Livelihoods: New Strategies for Transformational Development

Posted in Agriculture, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Organisations, Resilience, Strategy on August 31, 2010 | 2 Comments »

This week sees what promises to be a fascinating event bringing together practitioners and scientists to reflect on issues of complex adaptive systems and rural development, organised by World Vision Canada in Arusha.

The three day conference has a special focus on the lessons from an innovative programme to enhance aid agency staff and community leaders capabilities to “deal with the changing and complex nature of poverty and development”.

Governance, Ecosystems, Livelihoods (GEL) is a three-year program funded by Canadian International Development Agency, World Vision Canada and the Manitoba Council of International Cooperation (MCIC) and is aimed at improving community resilience in four African countries.

What makes GEL stand out, to my mind, is the explicit attempt to bring complexity thinking into aid policy and practice, and at the largest international NGO, no less.

The GEL program proposes the use of complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach as an effective and sustainable framework for World Vision Canada and its partners to promote good governance, advance environmental sustainability and create a better environment for economic development.

As the GEL programme information suggests:

The need for this program emerged from a growing awareness that, despite the best of efforts, many poverty and health indicators in sub Saharan Africa are actually getting worse. Traditional sector based approaches were not fully addressing the complex underlying causes of poverty. Development assumptions have been made and strategies developed, on the fact that the needs of people were based on a homogeneous and essentially static knowledge of communities and environments. The situation of individuals within communities varies temporally, spatially and socially at a variety of scales. Attempts to “sector” peoples lives have often ignored important external problems, influences and feedback loops that affect poverty. The current challenge is the need to develop tools and frameworks to deal with this complexity. New strategies for transformational development are needed.

The speakers at the event include David Waltner-Toews, Chris Burman and Harry Jones (who worked with me on the ODI working paper on Exploring the Science of Complexity). I managed to speak to David and Chris before the event, and they both had some fascinating insights to share which will resonate with regular Aid on the Edge readers. Here are a couple of their insights, rapidly transcribed – I hope I have done them justice!

David:

…complexity enables us to simultaneously address technical, ethical and political issues – it allows you to do so, in fact, done right it even forces you to do so. There is a strong tendency in large development bureaucracies to separate out these things – so for example, there may be a new strategy which says, we are doing agricultural development, and therefore we want to increase productivity and value for money. But if you ask, what are the implications for equity, community, gender, taking into account that women tend to do better in the informal economy and men in the formal economy, the standard response is, that’s not our department, go to health, or the place where that is dealt with… Give me a legitimate theoretical basis for saying ‘this is just agriculture, this is just health, this is just environment’. We need to bring together disciplinary perspectives on the same complex reality because ultimately the world we live in is all of these things…

Chris:

…complexity enables us to begin to get people to think about the world in different ways – which means they have an expansive learning field as opposed to a rigid learning field… much aid learning is very limited and it has almost no space for creativity – it is learning as a bureaucratic tick-box. Complexity approaches open up new potentials and horizons within which learning can take place, and if we can play around with new ways of situating learning in the context of peoples lives, we can find ways of moving beyond the linear and predictable. The key is to use complexity to reframe the context for learning…”

Compelling stuff. I will be blogging more about the event in the next week, hopefully with some of the presentation files and real-time updates from the participants, and will also be writing about the some of the lessons emerging from the GEL programme in the coming weeks.  Watch this space!

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Coping with Complexity in Agricultural Water Management

Posted in Agriculture, Institutions, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Water on January 12, 2010 | 1 Comment »

An 2009 IFAD report highlights the importance of complexity for improving agricultural water management. It suggests that conventional project management approaches are not suitable for coping with complexity-oriented interventions, and also emphasises the importance of combining professional competence and complexity-related capabilities for achieving programmatic success.

The paper is ‘geared towards promoting further discussions and reflections, in the conviction that coping with complexity is one of the key future challenges for Agricultural Water Management’. It’s well worth reading - recommended for generalists and water specialists alike. (More complexity-related reports and books can be found on the Publications page of this blog.) 

An extract from the executive summary follows.

Overall water use and competition for increasingly scarce water resources are rising fast. Although this makes the excessive consumption of water for agriculture no longer sustainable, demand is growing in the wake of the current food crisis.

Depletion of surface and groundwater is putting unbearable stress on ecosystems. Water pollution degrades the remaining water bodies. And external factors such as urbanization and climate change compound these constraints. This is placing unprecedented burdens on agricultural water management.

As a result, agricultural water management professionals in developing countries feel confronted by ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty, which threaten to make interventions… unmanageable. This leads to a critical gap between the increasing sophistication of concepts for interventions to improve agricultural water management and the reality of implementation on the ground.

This paper suggests that complexity is one of the main stumbling blocks for agricultural water management practitioners as they struggle to achieve social, economic and ecological sustainability. Complexity will become a more important issue in the future, in the rapidly changing context of agricultural water management. The paper discusses essential aspects of meeting this challenge – of coping with complexity.

An important distinction is made between systemic and non-systemic interventions… Systemic interventions are tasks and services – such as the reform of water user associations or the drainage of wetlands – that need to take account of the complexity of the ‘target system’. Non-systemic interventions are those that do not have to do that, such as simple construction tasks. This distinction results in the differentiation of groups of interventions… that call for different management approaches. In particular, it highlights a central separation between two types of systemic interventions.

First, there are interventions that lend themselves to in-depth analysis and the elaboration of solutions… by professional experts. Second, there are interventions that squarely confront the limits of expert advice. Here, attempts to assume the role of expert – who conceives ways to change or ‘improve’ a complex system – may even be counterproductive. Neglecting this crucial differentiation is one of the most frequent reasons for the management failures of interventions in agricultural water management.

The essential differences in management approaches required by the various types of interventions are specified and discussed. These reflections result in the grave observation that conventional project management approaches are not suitable for coping with complexity-oriented interventions. The paper presents different management models compatible with the different types of interventions.

Coping with complexity requires capacities of those involved that go beyond the usual disciplinary competence. The paper examines the professional capacities needed by those who provide agricultural water management interventions. Moreover, it draws attention to the special capacities that clients of systemic interventions must acquire if they are to retain ownership. This sheds light on the crucial difference between professional competence and complexity-related capability and on the consequences of ignoring it.

Agricultural water management practitioners face specific pitfalls when confronted with complexity. These relate to the inscrutable nature of complex systems, which tend to encourage opportunistic behaviour such as rent-seeking and corruption. These ‘principal-agent problems’ often result in the misallocation of scarce (water) resources and discriminate against poor rural people. The causes of such problems are described, together with ways of counteracting their emergence.

Agricultural water management systems are nested systems. They are embedded within and contain other complex systems. Moreover, they are highly context specific. Given the importance of institutions to the management of agricultural water, special attention is attached to the issue of specificity of institutional context. The paper presents a ‘quick and dirty’ approach to assessing different institutional contexts that can serve as a basis for strategy discussions… This is an important step when coping with complexity. It can help avoid intervention designs that are incompatible with the prevailing capacities and capabilities.

Finally, the main implications for IFAD are highlighted. A range of suggestions are put forward for future steps and initiatives on how to cope with complexity in agricultural water management. Considering the emerging problems of water scarcity, food security and impact of climate change, IFAD needs to embark on a process of adjusting its future operations in agricultural water management to deal with complexity.

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