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Archive for the ‘Public Policy’ Category

An experiment too far?

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Evolution, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Research on May 3, 2013 | 6 Comments »

This week a breaking story in the UK focused on how unemployed jobseekers are being forced to complete bogus psychometric tests designed by the government’s Behavioural Insights Team (commonly known as the “nudge” unit). The story raises important issues for ethical experimentation which are very pertinent for aid efforts.

The Guardian reported the story as follows:

The test called My Strength… has been exposed by bloggers as a sham with results having no relation to the answers given. Some of the 48 statements on the DWP test include: “I never go out of my way to visit museums,” and: “I have not created anything of beauty in the last year.” People are asked to grade their answers from “very much like me” to “very much unlike me”. When those being tested complete the official online questionnaire, they are assigned a set of five positive “strengths” including “love of learning” and “curiosity” and “originality”. However, those taking the supposed psychological survey have found that by clicking on the same answer repeatedly, users will get the same set of personality results as those entering a completely opposite set of answers.

The Behavioural Insights Team, meanwhile, argue that their intentions were based on sound evidence and good intentions. This includes the finding from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of the survey that it had led to ‘building psychological resilience and wellbeing for those who are still claiming after 8 weeks through ‘expressive writing’ and strengths identification.’

For many critics, however, any potential positive benefits of the exercise were diminished by the fact that jobseekers were warned that the survey was compulsory and not filling it out would lead to allowances being curtailed. Instead of building wellbeing, this exercise simply gave the unemployed something else to worry about.

Clearly, there are some fundamental ethical problems with the way that this whole effort was designed and implemented. And of course, this is not unique to nudge efforts, but extends to all kinds of social policy interventions. But the experimental approach of nudge does open up a range of ethical quandaries that we need to be looking at more closely.

What the admirable efforts of the UK blogger community highlight for me is that aid recipients in developed countries do have some means for addressing their grievances about such experimental processes – even if (as in this case) they are indirect and work through informal rather than formal channels of accountability.

However, the poor in developing countries have few such channels for voicing their grievances and issues. As one statistician put it back in 2010 in a review of RCTs:

In conducting research with people, the need for guidance and adherence to ethical standards is of the utmost importance. Most areas of research involving human subjects have compulsory or voluntary codes of conduct and ethical rules, and many countries have strict processes in place to ensure that ethical standards
are met by any research involving human experimental units. There seems to be a gap, however, in research that involves human subjects carried out in the context of international development. We do not have a system of checks and balances that ensures adherence to high ethical standards. This may be because the jurisdiction of research committees does not extend
to the areas where some of this research is conducted.
And this, specifically on RCTs:
When RCTs are proposed for impact evaluation, the issue of consent from participants is not discussed. Telling a group of people that they will be included in an experiment, but not implementing a development intervention that might benefit them, is something that most people working in international development would find difficult.
There is a lot of talk about feedback mechanisms at the moment as a means of addressing the long-observed ‘broken feedback loop’ in foreign aid. But without “a system of checks and balances that ensures adherence to high ethical standards” such mechanisms will be prone to the same problems as other mechanisms used in development.

In a study I wrote on innovation in aid with Kim Scriven and Conor Foley a few years back, we argued that there was a need to find safe spaces for experimentation, and establish mechanisms to promote “honourable risk” if we wanted to see a more innovative, and yet still principled, aid system.

Even though other aspects of aid innovation have advanced considerably since that study, especially in terms of resources and policy attention, I am not sure we have really seen much progress on the issue of “honourable risk”. As a result, many of us in development aid run the risk of taking our experiments just a little too far.

In fact, we may be doing so already, and not know about it.

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The Aid Explorer: Mapping the Hyperspace of International Aid

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Facilitation, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Research, Self organisation on May 2, 2013 | 1 Comment »

The team behind the Atlas of Economic Complexity (see my post on this here) have come up with a fascinating network-based approach for analysing the global aid system.

As they put it:

International development is a complex global goal that faces massive coordination barriers. The difference in income between rich and poor has expanded over the years from a four to one factor to a hundred to one. Where there once were only a handful of development agencies, thousands have now emerged. The system that connects donor agencies, recipient countries and development challenges is extremely complex and should not be managed with a top-down approach… The Aid Explorer was developed as a tool to facilitate better aid coordination. The Aid Explorer enables users to understand what issues face which countries and which aid organizations are aligned to address these issues.

Some specific pointers:

  • The Aid Explorer’s Profile pages enables us to see which issues face which countries and which organisations are best aligned to address them
  • The Network maps can be used to explore how issues, countries, and organizations relate to each other
  • The Rankings presents the findings and the best alignments of countries, issues and organizations

The process of developing the dataset, and how to use it, is described in more detail in the accompanying paper “The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance“, published earlier this year in the Journal of Globalization and Development.

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Can we rely on our current understanding of the economy?

Posted in Economics, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Public Policy, Resilience, Self organisation, Traffic on April 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Many would argue that standard economic theory enabled us to analyse and understand the economy as it used to be,
with long stable periods punctuated only by occasional crises. However, the recent evolution of the global economy should drive us to pursue ways of expanding economic theory
such that it encompasses the new structures and organization
emerging as we globalize and network our world.
This is from a great new paper by Dirk Helbing and Alan Kirman, which asks and attempts to answer many questions that are of importance to development, and answer them by drawing on ideas from complexity theory. Well worth a read.

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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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Perspectives on a Hyperconnected World

Posted in Communications, Conflict and peace building, Economics, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Research on February 6, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Many of the grand challenges that confront humanity—problems as diverse as climate change, the stability of markets, the availability of energy and resources, poverty and conflict—often seem to entail impenetrable webs of cause and effect.But these problems are not necessarily impenetrable. Powerful new tools have given scientists a better understanding of complexity. Instead of looking at a system in isolation, complexity scientists step back and look at how the many parts interact to form a coherent whole.

Rather than looking at a particular species of fish, for example, they look at how fish interact with other species in its ecosystem. Rather than looking at a financial instrument, they look at how the instrument interacts in the larger scheme of global markets. Rather than think about poverty, they might look at how income relates to conflict, politics and the availability of water. Whatever the object of study happens to be, complexity scientists assemble data, search for patterns and regularities, and build models to understand the dynamics and organization of the system. They step back from the parts and look at the whole.

This kind of thinking is a major departure from traditional science. For centuries, scientists have worked by reducing the object of study down to its constituent components. Complexity science, by contrast, provides a complementary perspective by seeking to understand systems as interacting elements that form, change, and evolve over time.The multiplicity of ideas, concepts, techniques and approaches embodied by the science of complexity can be applied to people, organizations and society as a whole, from economies and companies to epidemics and the environment.

The aim of this paper is to raise awareness about this new science and its ability to bring clarity and insight to many of the complex problems the world faces today.

This is from a new short (8 page) paper from the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems.

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Questioning innovation

Posted in Accountability, Economics, Evaluation, Evolution, Influence, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Research, Technology on January 30, 2013 | 5 Comments »

Innovation is popular in aid at the moment, so much so that there is a steady spate of articles which range from trashing its potential contribution to development through to challenging Western, donor, countries’ assumed roles as the ‘providers’ of innovation.

In this post I want to argue that there is a middle  ground between the unthinking mantras that are increasingly peddled by agencies and the growing number of entirely justifiable critiques.

An Economist article made the point succinctly over a decade ago, ‘what precisely constitutes innovation is hard to say, let alone measure.’  Some concluded, as a result, that innovation was a ‘new theology’.

innovation-prayer

However, with a growing chunk of economic growth being driven by industries and products that in fact didn’t exist ten years previously, such dismissals seem increasingly Luddite.

While clarity and precision in thinking about innovation is all-important, it is far from easy. We are not helped by the fact that many innovation stories are in fact apocryphal – retrospectively woven to lend the star protagonists much more agency and awareness than in fact they possessed. This is true of even the best known innovation stories. Take Alexander Fleming’s infamous and much-lauded discovery of penicillin – Fleming himself used to describe the conventional account of his contribution as the ‘Fleming Myth’.

Typically in business the market is the ultimate arbiter of innovation, and as we know, most products fail. In aid, however, the market does not provide an adequate indication of what is successful and what is not. This is largely done by the aid system itself. Bill Easterly made much of the fact that the market could get Harry Potter books anywhere there was a demand, which he compared unfavourably to the inability of the aid system to get simple treatments like vaccines to where they were most needed:

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.”

But as Amartya Sen subsequently argued:

the disparity in the results is indeed heartbreaking… [but] there is a radical difference… between the enterprise of supplying “what is in demand” — which is integrally linked to the buyers’ ability to pay — and that of supplying needed goods and services to people whose income and wealth do not allow a need to be converted into a market demand.

While Sen’s point applies more broadly to aid delivery, it is also relevant to new ideas and innovations within aid.

In any case, whether because of market failure or the wilful self-interest of aid agencies, innovation – which is an ambiguous enough concept in the business realm – becomes very murky territory indeed in development. It is hard to say  what innovation actually is, what it generates, and for whom. Like the famous ruling about pornography, many are of the view that ‘I know it when I see it.’

Such vagueness is the ideal seeding ground for development fads, and indeed, innovation is fast becoming the latest ‘fuzz-word’. Everything is being labelled ‘innovation’: as one blogger memorably put it, we seem to be suffering from Innovation Tourette’s.

Problem

Little wonder that growing numbers of thinkers and writers see the need to beat innovation with a big snarky stick. These criticisms play a vital role in highlighting the risks and downsides of  all shiny new aid agendas – and innovation is no exception.

Having observed such trends in the past, I think there is a danger that between the rise of the fad and the indignant reaction to it, we lose sight and sense of why the issue is question is actually important. Specifically, we risk learning the wrong lessons about what innovation actually is, and the potential it has to add to our work.

What we need is a more precise and accurate way by which to separate the innovation wheat from the faddish chaff. This was in fact one of the key motivations of a study I co-authored with Kim Scriven and Conor Foley while at ALNAP back in 2008-9.

So what did our study suggest in terms of getting more precision in innovation? We found it useful to ask some key questions to identify whether a particular idea or approach was in fact innovative.

  • Q1. Is the idea being proposed a new Product, a new Process or service, a new way of Positioning aid, or a new Paradigm or mental model? Or is it some combination of the four? (see more here)
  • Q2. What are the origins of the idea, and what does it aim to do differently to what is already out there? Where, exactly, is the novelty – is it a whole new thing, or is it new combinations of existing things? What, in partciular, are the implications for relationships with aid recpients? Did the idea involve re-thinking that age-old and much-critiqued relationship?
  • Q3. How disruptive is the innovation? Is it transactional, in that it enables existing efforts to work; incremental in that improves these efforts, or transformational in that it radically changes these efforts?
  • Q4. What precisely are the expected benefits the idea should confer? Can these benefits be framed in terms of existing evaluation criteria of enhanced relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact or sustainability of aid? Or are there other, newer, criteria that matter? How can the benefits be measured – qualitatively, quantitatively, or some blend thereof?
  • Q5. What are the potential risks and downsides of the idea for all parties – especially aid recipients – and how will these be mitigated against?
  • Q6. Where can the idea be located in an overarching innovation process? Is it at the early stages of recognition and invention, is it in need of development and implementation, or has it been tested and is now ready for wider diffusion?  (see more here)
  • Q7. What are the networks and relationships that will support and facilitate the innovation process? What capacities and competencies are necessary? Are these in place? How can they be built?
  • Q8. What is the potential scope of the innovation in terms of wider diffusion? Who might benefit, and in what ways? What is the route to scale, and who needs to be engaged to get there?

There are no doubt many more questions that could be asked, but the above provide a good starting point for what might be termed ‘innovation due diligence’. The key, in my opinion, is to use these and others questions to develop more honest, rigorous stories about ongoing and historical  innovations: about how they came about, why, and with what benefits. Such questions are useful because they help us look at innovation from a more systemic perspective: looking not just a idea, but the overall social, technological and institutional context from which it has emerged.

These questions should be relevant whether you are a donor bombarded with new proposals and ideas, an operational aid worker seeking to get funding for your exciting new idea, a blogger wanting to shine a light on the depressing excesses of innovation-speak, or a researcher wanting to investigate an supposed innovation in a systematic fashion (in fact I think we need far more of the last category, but that’s another story).

We will need to keep wielding the big stick as necessary, to curb against such excesses of aid ‘innovation-speak’. But we may also at times need a magnifying glass and ruler – metaphorically speaking – and asking these kinds of questions could help with this. My $0.02 is that if a would-be innovator can’t take a reasonable stab at these questions, they aren’t working hard enough, or they are over-selling something. A lot is spoken about creativity in innovation, but recent work suggests – in echo of the old 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration line – that the larger part of innovation lies in the proper execution of the idea.

I think there is a special role for the aid blogging community in asking such questions and demanding answers. We have seen in the past few years how bloggers have mobilised in a largely self-organised fashion to push back against various poorly considered ideas.

I know there are many bloggers who want to engage with innovation in a serious fashion, and who are dismayed by the current hype surrounding it. We should be able to highlight the good and bad of what we see emerging from the aid innovation agenda. And aid agencies should be willing to open their ideas up to the views and scrutiny of this emerging, globally networked, community of thinkers and analysts. This kind of effort has, in other distributed sectors, developed into new crowd-sourced marketplaces for innovation such as Innocentive. There’s no reason why the same couldn’t happen in our sector.

Our ultimate goal, I’d argue, should be to work to bringing the perspectives of aid recipients into the mix as part of our standard operating procedures. Now that in itself could be seen as a real innovation.

The need for such engagement goes beyond mere niceties. The most effective ideas we uncovered in our 2009 study were precisely those that re-thought and re-formulated this core aid relationship: cash, community approaches to malnutrition, transitional shelter. Put simply, these were the innovations that we found to be most worthy of the term.

Gamechanger

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Mapping politics (and the politics of maps)

Posted in Campaigns, Communications, Innovation, Public Policy, Research on November 7, 2012 | 25 Comments »

So after billions of dollars and several years of hard campaigning, the US elections are finally over. The typical map of the 2012 US election results looks like this:

Which is clearly not a million miles away from the 2008 equivalent.

In these maps, of which there are thousands online, on TV shows and in newspaper reports, the US states are coloured red or blue according to whether the majority of their voters were Republican or Democrat.

These maps, are, of course an illusion. They suggests that the ‘reds’ might have won because there is more red on the map, and that the reds and blues are sharply divided. Typical comments about such maps run along the lines of “what a huge sea of red”, “there you go, the liberal-conservative divide”, “it really is two different countries, isn’t it?”, and so on.

However, these maps fail to take account of some basic realities. First of all, there is no representation of population. The reality is that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. So while the blue are small in area, they represent large numbers of voters. Second, more importantly for the results of elections, the maps take no account of the distribution of electoral college votes. Third, they take no account of the often fine-grained distribution of voter preferences within states.

Mark Newman, a noted complexity researcher, has done a lot of work on how we can get more realistic, less simplistic maps of complex, real-world phenomena. By drawing such cartograms, which enable maps to be re-scaled according to key variables like population, maps of the electoral spread can be made more realistic and detailed. They can also tell different, more subtle, stories about political allegiance.

By the sounds of things, he is busy working right now on maps of the 2012 election. Here is his depiction of the 2008 election using a population cartogram.

In this, the states have been squashed and stretched to give relative sizes while preserving the overall US structure. A similar thing can be done with the electoral college results. In the map below, the map scales the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes in 2008.

As Newman writes:

The areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Thus this map shows at a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more electoral college votes – something that you cannot tell easily from the normal election-night red and blue map.

Newman and his colleagues went further to map the election results by county, the resulting images are even more striking. This is the equivalent of the first map above, with each county coloured red or blue according to the majority vote in 2008.

Again, the red appears to be in the majority. Using a cartogram of population gives this:

All of these maps are however also somewhat fictional as they pay no attention to the fact that no single state is in fact a sea of red or blue. Instead, as this election showed, every county and state contains quite closely balanced numbers of Republican and Democratic supporters. By using only two colours we lose any sense of this balance, and feed the myth of red states and blue states, and of sharp country-wide divides.

Newman and his colleagues have got around this by using red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate the nuance in voting patterns: different shades of purple indicate different splits of votes.

This is the county level map with this applied:

And this is the population cartogram:

As Newman explains:

As this map makes clear, large portions of the country are quite evenly divided, appearing in various shades of purple, although a number of strongly Democratic (blue) areas are visible too, mostly in the larger cities. There are also some strongly Republican areas, but most of them have relatively small populations and hence appear quite small on this map.

What I love about this work is that it clearly demonstrates the power of maps and visualisations to shape our thinking. These depictions pose direct and clear challenges to those lazy, pervasive but ultimately unhelpful narratives (“sea of red”, “lib-con divides”, “country of two parts”, etc, etc).

I think that these more realistic, sophisticated  representations should become much more commonplace in politics and indeed in development. Mark Newman set up the World Mapper project back in 2006, which has a whole host of similar maps, many of which have been widely used in presentations and reports.

Much of this work owes a debt – of sorts – to the infamous and controversial Gall-Peters projection, which provided a new visualisation of the earth using a more egalitarian and precise calculation of the relative landmass of developing countries.

Along broadly similar lines, a recent guest post on this blog looked at how we might use tools like fitness landscapes to more accurately represent non-linear development progress.

Perhaps such tools could slowly help change the way we think about a whole range of complex, routinely over-simplified, phenomena.

Who knows, one day they may even help inform some less divisive narratives about the US political landscape. As President Obama put it this morning in his acceptance speech:

We are not as divided as our politics suggest. We remain more than a collection of red states and blue states.”

Too right.

Postscript on 8th November 2012: the 2012 election maps are now done, and here is the 2012 county cartogram.

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Beyond Linear Development Trajectories: What if there were 5 clusters of quite different developing countries?

Posted in Biology, Economics, Evaluation, Evolution, MDGs, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Research on October 2, 2012 | 7 Comments »

This guest post by Andy Sumner and Sergio Tezanos Vázquez explores new approaches to classifying developing countries, based on a new IDS Working Paper published last week. In the paper, they develop a more precise and accurate classification system for low and middle income countries, and suggest that this can support a more complex, non-linear  appreciation of development trajectories. This post concludes with the intriguing notion of ‘development landscapes’ (building on a recent CGD blog post written by Owen Barder and myself). 

Sergio

Andy

In 1963 Dudley Seers wrote –in The Limitations of the Special Case– of developing countries:

[t]he typical case is a largely unindustrialised economy, the foreign trade of which consists essentially in selling primary products for manufactures. There are about 100 identifiable economies of this sort, covering the great majority of the world’s population (1963, p. 80).

 And perhaps most famously, Seers wrote in The Meaning of Development:

 The questions to ask about a country’s development are therefore: What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all of these three have become less severe, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned […] If one or two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would be strange to call the result ‘development’, even if per capita income has soared (1969:24).

Since then many have challenged the use of income per capita as the primary proxy for development. Of course, in addition to low and middle income countries there are many classifications – notably those by Human Development and the Least Developed Countries classifications and the new pioneering work of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.

Our new paper continues this tradition with what might be described as a complex systems twist. The paper challenges the continuing use of income per capita to classify developing countries as low income countries (LICs) or middle income countries (MICs), given that most of the world’s poor live in the later group (see here,here, here, here).

Further, it highlights the ambiguity over the usefulness of the MIC classification given the diversity in the group of over 100 countries that includes Ghana and Zambia, as well as India, China and Brazil.

Finally, it points to a new way of framing development, which moves beyond the linear league table approach which tends to imply a certain shared pathway (cf critiques of HDI as ranking countries on a scale of 0 to Denmark). In closing, we touch on one example of what this might  look like below: there are no doubt others.

We used a cluster analysis to identify five types of developing country using a set of indicators for 2005-2010 covering definitions of development based on the history of thinking about ‘development‘ over the last 50 years from four conceptual frames:

  • development as structural transformation;
  • development as human development;
  • development as democratic participation and good governance;
  • development as sustainability.

This is what we found:

Our development taxonomy differs notably from the usual income classification of GNI per capita (Atlas method) used to classify LICs and MICs. Notably many countries commonly labelled “emerging economies” are not in the emerging economies clusters because they retain characteristics of poorer countries.

Our analysis generated 5 clusters as follows:

Cluster 1: High poverty rate countries with largely traditional economies. Those countries with the highest poverty and malnutrition headcounts, who are also countries with low productivity and innovation and mainly agricultural economies, with severely constrained political freedoms. This cluster includes 31 countries, some of them might be surprising: Pakistan, Zambia, Nigeria, and India.

Cluster 2: Natural resource dependent countries with little political freedom. Those countries with high dependency on natural resources, who are also countries with severely constrained political freedom and moderate inequality (relative to the average for all developing countries). This cluster includes 9 countries, such as Mauritania, Vietnam, Yemen, Cameroon, Congo, Swaziland and Angola.

Cluster 3: External flow dependent countries with high inequality. Those countries with high dependency on external flows, who are also countries with high inequality, and moderate poverty incidence (relative to the average for all developing countries). This cluster has 32 countries, such as Senegal, Ghana, Indonesia, Thailand, Peru, Colombia, and Panama.

Cluster 4: Economically egalitarian emerging economies with serious challenges of environmental sustainability and limited political freedoms. Those countries with most equal societies, who are also countries with moderate poverty and malnutrition but serious challenges of environmental sustainability and –perhaps surprisingly– limited political freedoms. This cluster has 15 countries, including China, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Cluster 5: Unequal emerging economies with low dependence on external finance. Those countries with the lowest dependency on external finance and who are also countries with the highest inequality. This cluster includes 14 countries, such as South Africa, Botswana, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Chile and Uruguay.

Two-thirds of the world’s poor – not surprisingly given the characteristics noted above – live in Cluster 1 countries though this is largely due to the inclusion of four populous countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nigeria –and one should remember a third of world poverty is accounted for by India). About a quarter of world poverty is situated in Cluster 3 and Cluster 4 countries and the remaining 5% live in Cluster 2 and Cluster 5.

What is most striking – and of particular relevance for readers of this blog – is that we find that there is no simple “linear” representation of development levels (from low to high development countries), as found in the Human Development Index or its variants.

We find instead that each development cluster has its own and characteristic development issues. Building a development classification is not a simple task: once we overcome the over-simplistic income-based classification of the developing world, we find that there is no group of countries with the best (or worst) indicators in all development dimensions.

It thus would be more appropriate to build “complex” development taxonomies on a five-year basis than ranking and grouping countries in terms of per capita incomes or other indicators, as this will offer a more nuanced image of the diversity of challenges of the developing world and policy responses appropriate to different kinds of countries.

In keeping with a growing consensus in development thinking, this way of thinking points to an understanding which is less about linear progression, and where change is path dependent, and development policy is best seen as an evolutionary process of learning.

What might such a complex taxonomy look like? A fruitful avenue to explore (following the recent post by Ben Ramalingam and Owen Barder on complexity and results) might be the notion of fitness landscapes from evolutionary biology, which illustrate how different species attain biological fitness through processes of variation, selection and amplification.

Erik Beinhocker and Tim Harford have argued that growth and innovation can be likened to a evolving search of a dynamic fitness landscape. “Development Landscapes” might provide an analogy and a model for explaining the distinct but related positions of countries in different development clusters.

This would enable analysts and policy makers to examine the different pathways the cluster members have been on, and to explore the space of possibilities for future change.

About the guest post authors:

Sergio Tezanos Vázquez is an associate professor at the Economics Department and a research fellow at the Iberoamerican Research Office on International Development & Co-operation at the University of Cantabria.

Andy Sumner is Co-Director of the newly established, King’s International Development Institute, King’s College London.

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Conversations on Complexity: A Tribute to Elinor Ostrom

Posted in Biology, Evolution, Influence, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Organisations, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on August 16, 2012 | 12 Comments »

Many people around the world were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Elinor Ostrom in June this year. By way of a tribute, this extended piece brings together some of her ideas on the implications of complexity science for development aid. It draws on material from a series of interviews I conducted with Professor Ostrom between 2009-2012 for use in my forthcoming book, and has been approved for publication by her colleagues at The Workshop, Indiana University.     

When Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in 2009, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences made the following statement:

[she] has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concluded that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories.”

Challenging standard theories was a running theme Professor Ostrom’s work. Ideas of the commons and how they really worked were central to this, as was the analysis of institutions and the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Complexity was a particular interest: ideas of systems, self-organisation, the evolution of rules, institutions as emergent phenomena and resilience are all repeated motifs in her papers, books and speeches. Indeed, her 2009 Nobel Prize Lecture – she was the first and, to date, only woman to win the Economics Prize – builds on the distinction between simple and complex human systems, and closes with the following words:

We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it.

She was on the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) Science Board for five years. Corresponding in 2011 while I was visiting the Institute, she wrote to tell me that it was one of her favourite places in the world. It is easy to imagine how the SFI approach naturally appealed to someone who had spent her life’s work breaking down disciplinary boundaries.

My small-scale engagement with Professor Ostrom started in 2009 following the publication of a report on complexity science and aid I led on while at ODI. She used it as reading material for her students in Autumn 2010 and kindly wrote back to tell me how useful she had found it. We subsequently had telephone and face-to-face interviews on the topic of complex systems, development and aid. These discussions, and of course her rich body of work,  helped to shape the ideas in my forthcoming book, which she warmly encouraged from the outset. I have used material from these interviews to write this post.

*

What is your view on complexity and the complexity sciences? What is the value of this approach?

I get so upset when people use complexity as a reason not to do things – complexity and context are essential for operating in many different situations. In order to make sure decisions are relevant, we have to understand the context of decisions, and the complexity of the situation. My take on complexity is that it is a key set of concepts which are essential for understanding how the world works. There are many situations where simple models don’t work – when there are 10, 15, 20 variables. For example, think about situations where problems are nested within each other or situations where there are many actors capable of actions, conflicting information about transmissions and payoffs and diverse outcomes. Here, the ideas of complexity can lend a hand by providing a means of analysis and understanding the reality of these action situations.

How would you apply these ideas to international aid agencies?

The last thing aid agencies want to do is analyse things as a complex system! (laughs) But how do you unpack systems without such analyses? In biology and ecology, there is a necessity of using complexity science and related ideas as a model – although it is not always acknowledged, they do have to use it. For example, in a situation with 10, 15, 20 species, how do you understand the potential impact of the elimination of one species, when one unit being eradicated would cause disaster rather than simply being important. We can’t address these questions without drawing on complexity theory in some way.

The lack of long timeframes and a lack of supporting cultures means that aid agencies don’t help people learn how to think about and change the structure of the situations they are facing. In many situations, this is because of colonial roots of aid, which did not respect local institutions – they didn’t understand them so they were treated as non-existent.

The difference between this approach and that of Darwin is stark – the care and diligence that was given to studying animal species in the 19th century is so evident, and it from this that we have evolutionary theory. But these countries also had people, but there was no attempt to understand their knowledge systems, the rules they had developed to manage various kinds of socio-ecological systems… Colonial powers assumed we have the answers, and destroyed social capital. Aid agencies, unfortunately, do much the same thing.

What are the biases of development aid that you see inhibiting the take-up of a more complex, realistic way of doing things?

Development aid asks the question: where can we pour money in to make the most difference in the most visible way (laughs). This is not especially amenable to complex ways of understanding the world. Most projects are 2-3 years, some are 7, but these are big engineering projects, and then they disappear.

‘Fitting’ is all important in this context. Many agencies today have blue prints for situation A, but they are so ingrained they can’t deal with B, C, D and E. Some employ very inspiring young people, but they are not keen to stay long in their organisation – 4-6 years max, they tend not to be sanguine about the future. This is understandable, but it also goes against what we know about bringing about social change.

Take the Sida work. We said, we want to understand the role you play in sustainable development – tell us what your best projects are. And we found that their best projects were relative failures because of exactly these issues.

The most fundamental change is to change the social science curriculum to change the way that development is taught. We need to get away from treating governance as top-down. The presumption of almost all work is that a hierarchy will work effectively, gather information from variety of sources and develop tactics of behaviour. In complex systems, there are many different areas, all moving in different directions and at different speeds, doing localised things which are relevant. The idea that a central processing unit that can gather up all of this information and make decisions about the whole system… the theories fall down.

I developed a framework to understand complex social-ecological systems, which builds on my work on governing the commons. This sets out the key design principles for complex systems which sit on the interface of society and ecology: watersheds, fisheries, increasingly the whole planet. Some of the reaction has been very enthusiastic – some people, the biologists, the ecologists, the complexity scientists, love it. Others hate it, they say it’s not science, it’s too complex.

What examples do you see of good development practice, which do take account of complexity?

I was at a conference recently in the north of Sweden, for the Childbirth Foundation, 1000 young people from 100 countries. They were trying to answer the question – how do you change the way the world works to develop more opportunities in developing countries. There were lots of ideas, using the market, ideas like cooking stoves and many others, all aimed at the broader goal of dealing with climate change, bringing about development. Some of these ideas have already been applied; some are still being tried out. But the key is that they are doing development in a way that has a chance of working.

And there were no international development agencies present. They should have been there, just to see what was being discussed. The key difference was that while international development agency way of thinking has seen a lot of failure, they haven’t picked up yet on the answer, which is that we must have multiple approaches, small and experimental and larger and more concrete. But apparently the taxpayer doesn’t like to see experimentation with their money!

Aid agencies tend to not involve staff in anything other than a project, and sometimes only for part of a project. And when the project ends, they leave. Mr Shivakumar, a colleague who worked on the Samaritan’s Dilemma, has done work with Action Aid in their Ethiopia programme. They will go to a site where they are trying to help farmers build up their capacity, say for public services. They are there for some time, but they try to do something 5 years before they are going to leave. They will call a meeting and say ‘we will fund 1 year for 100%, after that, we will drop to 80%, and you need to support 20%, then down to 60%, and so on… If we are doing something good, then you should want to carry it on. If not, that’s fine, the project closes. That is an example of an aid  philosophy that takes account of complexity.

Look at Grameen Bank, that started off slowly, and if it was cut down after 2 years it would never have turned into the institution it is today. But it worked because it was a system within a system within a system. It didn’t have public official waiting for a report on a Friday afternoon before they could go home. It had lots of people in localised situations who presented and developed rules for how things would work, providing some basic structure for example, you have to meet every week, we have to put money on the table, we have to be forgiving at times… These small-scale units proved to be very innovative and creative. Small-scale units can be very adaptive in changing – look at family units when a child arrives, or a job changes. They can deal with the complex, but they are guided by a different philosophy to development agencies. They don’t have to come up with winning solutions, they can learn from their own successes and diversity of other approaches, they can change things if they are not working.

There is a growing interest in resilience in development circles. Do you see this a promising line of enquiry?

Resilience and sustainability are very similar – these systems have similar properties. It is another attempt to get this kind of thinking into institutions, and just the latest one. The work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre is very important here, and they have been successful in influencing a number of research agendas. But I think a lot of the time policy people are just using the language without knowing what they are talking about (waves hand in mock exasperation). When I did my work on social-ecological systems I was very careful to build on the work of ecologists and social scientists, so it was a truly integrated framework. The trouble with much of the development policy work around resilience I see is that so much of it doesn’t really try to engage with the science of resilience, but instead uses as a catch-all to further particular institutional interests. We need some real serious thinking on this issue if it is going to make a meaningful contribution.

What do you think are the implications of the science of complexity for big conferences like Planet Under Pressure and Rio+20?

We are lucky that there is growing interest in this area, from academics and researchers across the world. The work you have been leading on your book – I think this is work of immense value and importance for the development sector. The crucial question is whether international agencies are ready to hear the message and willing to act on the lessons. I know there are others leading similar work in other closely related sectors like environmental sustainability, community development and social entrepreneurship – about the complexity inherent in different resource systems and under different rules.

We need a broader approach to these systems. What we are lacking at the moment is a shared framework. Without this, how are we to ensure our knowledge accumulates? A shared framework of complex systems can help us ensure knowledge in these different fields is not isolated. There are more people working on this, and they are working together more, but not enough is being done yet.

What do you see as the key to the success of Rio+20?

There needs to be more connection around this challenge through a shared lens of complex social-ecological systems, and these large-scale events provide an opportunity to do this. The key principle informing all of this has to be taking a more evolutionary, polycentric approach to policy making.

This is the key challenge we face, and it is only going to grow with time. I am hopeful though. If there is one thing I think I have learned it is that just because we have a certain emphasis in our institutions today, it doesn’t mean we are stuck with it forever.

 What three things would you change among aid agencies to get them to take more account of complex realities?

The number one thing is the ‘spend it or lose it’ mentality – it is common to most bureaucracies, but getting it changes is essential if aid is going to be tailored to the complex realities of development. This institutional change will allow many others to come about, and so it is a very important one.

Number two is getting aid agencies to be more of a learning enterprise and less of a doing enterprise. This means feedback, training, reflection. This means not assuming we have the answer. We need to create an environment where discussion and debate are openly welcomed, and where redundancy is not always seen as bad, just excessive redundancy.

Third, we need to reward people for developing imaginative ideas that draw on the complexity of the real world, that leave people in developing countries more autonomous, less dependent, and more capable of crafting their own future.

*

There are of course many tributes to Professor Ostrom, by people far more qualified than me to write them. For my own small part, I feel grateful to simply to have known her: for her time and support; for how generous she was with the benefits of her towering intellect; and for her gentle, playful sense of humour. The fact that someone of her stature could take the time and care to engage with and mentor me and so many others like me around the world speaks volumes about the extraordinary person she was.

She will be deeply missed – as the Indiana University president said in his statement, we have “lost an irreplaceable and magnificent treasure”.

“We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life
where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.”

Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012

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Official Views, Doing the Wrong Thing ‘Righter’, and the World Bank Presidency

Posted in Accountability, Evaluation, Influence, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Strategy on March 5, 2012 | 14 Comments »

There’s been a lot of interest in the imminent vacancy of World Bank President, with numerous suggestions of qualified individuals who should be on the list. This post looks at one particular aspect of the role which seems to be missing from most of this debate, and which should be high on the list of criteria for a successful future leader of the Bank.

I: The Official Views of ‘Development Churches’

David Ellerman, currently a visiting scholar at the University of California in Riverside, and World Bank Staffer for over a decade (where his roles including being senior advisor to the Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz), is one of the most original and innovative thinkers in development. In 2000 he published a paper entitled ‘Must the World Bank have Official Views?’ in which he argued that the Bank spent a lot of time and effort determining its Official Views on particular development issues, and that this practice undermined in efforts in a number of ways.

Specifically:

  • it impedes the open contesting of adverse opinions that is so crucial to the advancement of knowledge
  • it impedes the Bank as a learning organization since the overturning of an older view is all the more difficult if it has been branded and enshrined as an Official View
  • it impedes client countries being intellectually in the driver’s seat as they will inevitably be encouraged in a multitude of ways to accept an opinion because it is an Official View

(The fact that Ellerman wrote and published this while still at the Bank gives some indication of his intellectual courage – I don’t know the backstory so cannot say what impact this had on him personally or professionally.)

Ellerman expanded on this in a subsequent paper for Development in Practice Journal. Through its focus on Official Views, the World Bank and other aid agencies become, in effect, ‘Development Churches’:

“…giving definitive ex cathedra ‘official views’ on the substantive and controversial questions of development. As with the dogmas of a Church, the brand name of the organisation is invested with its views….”

Ellerman argues that in the face of these Official Views, adverse opinions and critical reasoning tend to give way to authority, rules and bureaucratic reasoning shaped by the hierarchies within the organisation. Moreover, these Official Views “short-circuit” and bypass the active learning capability of national and local actors, and substitute the authority of external agencies in its place.

…Once an ‘Official View’ has been adopted, then to question it is to attack the agency itself and the value of its franchise. As a result, new learning at the expense of established Official Views is not encouraged…”

II: Moving Away From Doing the Wrong Thing Righter

The conclusions of a recent, still draft study on the World Bank’s efforts in participatory development indicates that the issues Ellerman highlighted are still an issue within the agency:

Project structures need to change to allow for flexible, long-term engagement. Projects need to be informed more seriously by carefully done political and social analyses, in addition to the usual economic analysis, so that both project design and expected outcomes can be adapted to deal with the specific challenges posed by country or regional context… Most importantly, there needs to be a tolerance for honest feedback to facilitate learning, instead of a tendency to rush to judgment coupled with a pervasive fear of failure. The complexity of development requires, if anything, a higher tolerance for failure. This requires a change in the mindset of management and clear incentives for project team leaders to investigate what does and does not work in their projects and to report on it (emphasis added)

This general phenomena is not unique to aid agencies, of course. The late great Russell Ackoff, a systems thinking pioneer, used to argue that almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them ‘righter’.

The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.

Back in 2000, David Ellerman suggested a way of overcoming the addiction to Official Views, which involves presenting the following message to client countries, and then acting upon it:

“…To the best of our accumulated experience (which we deem to call “knowledge”), here is what works best in countries like yours. Why don’t you study these principles together with their corroboration to date, take a look at these case studies, contact these people who designed those reforms, set up horizontal learning programs with those best practice cases, and try some experiments to see what
works in your own country? After carrying out this learning process on your own, you might call us back if you feel we could help…”

III: Implications for World Bank Presidency Candidates: A Simple Questionnaire

Building on all of this, we might view the current candidates for the World Bank Presidency in a different, and hopefully useful, light. We need someone who can take Ellerman’s message and Ackoff’s philosophy make them part and parcel of the way the organisation works.

To test candidates suitability in this regard, we might sensibly ask them, and those who know of them, the following yes / no questions (which should take no more than fifteen minutes of their time).

  1. Does the candidates track record indicate they have the ability to be a leader who facilitates as well as one who directs?
  2. Is the candidate able to let go of the notion of selling to, or controlling, others using a set of predefined strategies and results? (Can they effectively manage the uncertainty and ambiguity that ensues?)
  3. Does the candidate instinctively seek out challenges to their institution’s  ideas and policies, and see their leadership role as catalysing ‘mutual learning’? (Does the candidate routinely present their viewpoints as ‘permanently provisional’ and ‘up for debate’?)
  4. Can they respectfully but purposefully elicit the insights, creativity, and wisdom from others? (Can they do this even when others disagree with them?)
  5. Can they encourage multi-stakeholder dialogue and debate as a route to experimentation and innovation?
  6. Are they courageous enough to say ‘I was wrong’, and enable their learning process to be public, to allow others in their organisation and more widely to follow suit? (Are they willing to hear about, and learn from, failure, even in high-profile programmes?)
  7. Can their leadership help diverse groups and constituencies accomplish the results that they want? (Are they willing to share the credit for successes with others?)

I would tentatively suggest that if we have ‘yes’ responses against most of these questions for a given candidate, we could be looking at a genuinely interesting appointment.

If we have mostly ‘no’s, then we should all get ready for another term or two of Official Views, and all that goes with them.

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