Peace in Myanmar: Listen to the people

“Some of you don’t like me. Some of you don’t like the Army. Some of you don’t like the Karen National Union. But that’s OK. We all have to live together”.

The Bago Region State Minister had just summed up the status and sentiment of the peace process in this part of Northern Kayin State, Myanmar.

Today was International Peace Day, and I was privileged to share it with two of the World’s longest military adversaries: Myanmar’s military (called the Tatmadaw) and one of the many Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) in Myanmar who have fought them since the late 1940s, the Karen National Union (KNU). I was here with Saferworld, for whom I work, and some of our partners working on the promotion of women’s role in the peace process.

Some areas of Karen are controlled by the Government. Other parts are controlled by the KNU. Having woken at dawn in Taungoo Township, itself under Government control, we journeyed off road for an hour through misty villages already well awake with the hard graft of farming. The dirt track got narrower, bumpier and more remote. And all of a sudden the odd soldier lining the route had a different insignia on their arm. We had crossed into KNU territory.

But this day was different. Karen civil society had painstakingly negotiated permissions to enable senior Government officials, Tatmadaw officers and even the Myanmar Police to cross into this area, attend and take part in a Peace Day event in front of several hundred villagers, who have borne the brunt of this conflict since before independence from Britain.

Even at 7am the sun was brutal but so were the people’s determination to sit there, sweat and listen to what these men had to say. And yes, they were all men. But it was not lost on anyone that it had been women, working behind the scenes and among their communities, who had brought them to the stage itself. The Commander of KNU’s 2nd Brigade spoke alongside the Tatmadaw officers. Both signatories to a ceasefire since 2012, but their polite mutual applause did not disguise how far remained to travel. In fact all of the speeches were conciliatory and the applause uniform. But what has struck me most in the conversations with those peacebuilders who have done so much to bring us to this point is how long and bumpy it will be before there is long term sustainable peace here. The sheer depth of antipathy, lack of trust in any part of the State by many, and the long term social impact of decades of violence will take generations to overcome, so that Myanmar can start to reach its potential.

Those of us wishing to support from the outside – donors and practitioners – have to start from a point of humility. We do not have the answers. They do. There are real opportunities but there is one simple metric to apply: will it be people-led instead of Government-centred? If the answer is no, it’s time to think again.

Setting Priorities: Listen and Learn

It was notable that behind the dignitaries the poster quoted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and stated that they were collectively “building blocks for peace”. Donors, UNDP: are you listening? That is real people telling us what they want the SDGs to mean in their realities. There are already proliferating SDG initiatives in this country that do not relate to building peace, but other agendas pre-determined by some donors and the government instead. Time to think again.

Making their voices count

Myanmar is about to embark on a process in which some form of federalism will be debated as a future governance settlement to bring the fighting to an end. But there are multiple and competing definitions of that federal state, and not every EAO has signed a ceasefire. Heavy fighting is currently taking place in different areas of the country. The momentum and genuine hope created and sustained by Aung San Suu Kyi is real reason to hope that these factors can be navigated and a more inclusive process can take shape. But it would be a profound mistake for outsiders not to place support for building peace at the centre of any and all of their strategies here, and to support the chances of peace by shaping those strategies from the bottom-up, listening and learning from what communities living in villages like this will gladly tell you about, if only they are asked. Peace will not ultimately be secured at a grand signing convention with world leaders looking on. It will be won or lost in these villages, with real people deciding if they have built enough trust in their former adversaries to begin to build together.

Voice

What today proved was that those people want peace. They showed that standing under the sun. From all generations. Holding candles. Gently scolding bored children. Wearing banners on their heads. They made sure their voices were heard today by those men who bear arms and wield power. That is their victory and what peace day is all about.

An even bigger victory would be for their voices to be heard, listened to and acted upon by those who will celebrate peace day later today at the UN General Assembly in New York, or in the capital cities of donor agencies as priorities are set.

Or is that too much for them to ask?

The Failure Debate: Cold Shower Time

Failure is a sexy theme at the moment. How to adapt and iterate to it is the latest development Holy Grail. But rather like a religious text the conclusions people draw from the debate tend to depend on their own standpoint, interests and perspectives. A thoughtful blogpost by DFID thinker Pete Vowles illustrates this point. As a donor he wrestles with the idea that failure is inevitable and useful if it can be captured for learning and adaptation, while wondering at how to make it ‘OK to fail’ for those implementing projects.

Pete makes a number of useful observations. He highlights, for example, the constant waves of new donor metrics, clouding one’s ability to judge progress from one to the next. He cites the lack of space for donors to really listen to local communities enough. And the implicit pressure to avoid any kind of failure, for fear of undermining wider aid efforts by handing ammunition to skeptics. There’s no easy answer to any of those when you consider the political economy donors and practitioners inhabit.

Yet some of the points Pete makes I think could be helped along by a cold shower reality check followed by some political thinking.

Time, cost & quality 

Pete posits one useful way of understanding failure is to adopt three lenses of time, cost and quality. But then leaves that hanging without returning to it anywhere else in his blog. This sounds eerily like the magnificent sounding “3 E”’s that were unveiled excitedly by DFID bods some years ago. We were told that Efficiency, Economy and Effectiveness would be the yardstick of judging Value for Money, but that was never really defined either.

I recently read a DFID call for proposals that very clearly judged VFM not on any of the “E”s but squarely on what percentage their implementing partner would charge them in overheads. And not much else. We clearly need a framework for judging value for money. We don’t yet have one beyond buzzwords that are ill-understood and applied inconsistently. And that’s a problem for adapting and iterating to failure using public funds that are rightly under scrutiny.

Safe to fail? 

Pete states that donors need to make it ‘safe’ for implementers to own up to, highlight and learn from failure. That is absolutely correct. But if Pete doesn’t mind me saying so, he is whistling in the wind.

The brutal reality is that there is a massive power imbalance which it is naïve to pretend doesn’t exist. Donor agencies have plenty. Sometimes more than their host Governments. Implementers, be they community based organisations, activist networks, NGOs or INGOs have absolutely none. There is a sliding scale of ‘none’ with local CBOs at the bottom, as INGOs can lobby. But it’s still basically none. Take a look at how DFID is destroying some UK based INGOs at the moment by repeatedly missing its own deadlines and commitments to re-invest in a PPA agreement. It’s already too late for some of them. Consider how that has impacted in turn on the local partners with whom those INGOs work, who rely on flexible funding to experiment, try new ways of working and to do the things Pete says he wants to see more of. It’s already too late for some of them too.

Institutional self-awareness is not easily created, but for all the woolly talk of “partnership” by donors it will always be a patron-client relationship. So if donors are serious then they need to start placing a hard financial value on learning in project design that goes way beyond standardised approaches to M&E or disjointed ‘learning components’ that often look like a bolt-on. We need consistent investment in projects that incentivise learning and adaptation at the core, recognising the value of both. Time to stop talking and start doing.

Be an aid skeptic 

Pete comes to the right conclusions in many respects. His points about listening to local people being the most pertinent among them in my view. So long as listening is accompanied by a preparedness to change course. But I couldn’t let his final flourish go without comment. He urges the reader to “think like an aid skeptic” in order to understand how this might all appear externally and to be self-critical. He later states:

“After all, the task of poverty reduction is one of the most challenging there is.”

The problem with this is twofold. Firstly there is an implicit assumption that his readers are not skeptics. I am. In fact most of the people I consider to be doing the most innovative thinking on adaptive programming are also wizened old skeptics. We should all be skeptics in my view, all the time. That, surely, is a pre-requisite to recognising when things go wrong, and to avoid the overly optimistic theories of change that often lead to mistakes being repeated, frequently by donors themselves, while limiting a tendency to overstate the actual impact of our efforts on people’s lives. It would also help with reducing hype-cycles that lead to ever shifting metrics and priorities. 

Secondly, and linked to the first, should we perhaps drop the pretence that development is about poverty? What does that mean anyway? $1.25 a day, or freedom of expression? Going back to Pete’s point about listening to local communities I doubt very much they would all frame their challenges in that way.

Citizens in Turkana. Voice, not poverty alleviation

Development is politics

When I met these communities in Turkana, who score highly on any poverty index, they didn’t talk about ‘poverty’. They talked about power. And how they didn’t have a voice, as one teacher put it, because there was no local strongman fighting their corner. They wanted to be treated justly, to have a voice and to build a better world for their children. How do we judge the relative contribution our efforts might be making to them? Or to these open government activists in South Africa trying to realise Mandela's vision of liberty amid rampant elite corruption?

And to readers who have never met her before allow me to introduce a young woman who to me personified the chasm that lies between the aid industry and the international initiatives which become their world - and the reality of what the world actually looks like to ordinary people. In my view Amina from Dar es Salaam should be asked to write every donor agency's strategy with immediate effect. Is she poor? Absolutely. Would she describe herself and her ambitions in that way? Not a chance.

Development is politics, whether we like it or not. So how we ultimately judge success or failure surely needs to go way beyond a projectised approach to business as usual development in the short term and take a much, much more holistic and long term view of how our aggregate efforts are having an impact overall. Otherwise it might add up to a row of nicely arranged beans in the end.

The New Deal: all about poverty?!

Sarah Hearn has written a thought provoking article on the World Bank’s site which argues that the New Deal, of which she has just led an independent evaluation, is “…the basis for fighting extreme poverty”. As if that wasn’t enough she goes on: “…the New Deal could strike the definitive blow against extreme poverty in the next fifteen years”. In both cases, for added impact, the quotes are hyper-linked as ready-made tweets for the faithful to send out about the New Messiah.

I don’t think the New Deal is the new Messiah. In fact I think it’s been a very naughty boy in recent years. Beset with a lack of senior engagement or delivery by the very donors who brought it into this world in partnership with the G7+ Group of fragile states, who themselves have faced trenchant criticism from their own civil society for not having lived up to the commitment of developing a participatory approach to a new way of inclusive governance, the New Deal has suffered what Dave Algoso refers to as the ‘hype cycle’, which I applied to the New Deal here.

Not the Messiah

Hearn’s article seems to want to cheer-lead the New Deal back onto centre stage by aligning it with pre-defined agendas of ‘ending extreme poverty’ which was never the basis for the initiative. Which is a shame, because elsewhere in her article she makes a number of very valid and profound points that those of us who want to see real progress on conflict, peace, justice and governance need to reflect on. Here are some of the stronger take-aways for me:

Local accountability

Hearn rightly points out that “…solutions to conflict and poverty only work when they are nationally-owned and led”. She adds that one of the strongest aspects of the New Deal was that it established the principle of mutual accountability for progress against commitments: between citizen and State, but also between State and donors.

Leaving aside the dubious word ‘solution’ (conflict is never 'solved' it is a process of contestation which in and of itself is not a problem, it’s the violence when institutions fail that can be the problem) – the author hits the nail on the head. The FOCUS and TRUST principles established mutual accountability between citizens, States and donors for the first time in what should have been a binding framework which, even if some parties didn’t live up to their commitments was, in and of itself, a real marker of progress in the way the world responds to conflict.

Global progress

Which leads me to my second point. Hearn usefully describes the G7+ as ‘global norm entrepreneurs’. I haven’t come across this description before but it fits – and that is what is so potentially exciting about the New Deal; placing control in the hands of progressive partners in government and civil society in the fragile states themselves and for them to start to jointly redefine the routes out of conflict. This is real global progress and played a large role in the emergence of SDG16 on governance, peace and justice. Though the author omits to mention that global civil society, which included those drawn from fragile states, themselves played just as much an important norm re-setting role as their governments did in the years leading to 2015.

The author also notes the lack of progress by donors in meeting commitments to their G7+ partners. This has been picked up before, notably in this landmark review from 2014, and in the light of the European refugee crisis I suspect is a feature that will worsen. But right to hold them to account.

So far, so good. But...

No room for governance?

Hearn repeatedly states that the New Deal is about ‘ending extreme poverty’. No it isn’t. It is about assisting countries to break cycles of conflict that keep repeating because of factors like weak institutions, elite resource capture, endemic corruption, marginalisation, contested legitimacy and ham-fisted interventions by international institutions which often make things much worse. Like the World Bank, for example. It’s about redefining how citizens self-define as participants in that State, how they define the causes of fragility that undermine that State and by reaching a compact with political elites about how to address them. Yes, that might provide the basis for economic growth to take place which lifts people out of poverty – but conflict exists in a wide range of countries with a very wide range of economic circumstances. Who defines ‘extreme poverty’ anyway? Is that how those actors engaged in armed conflict define their struggles? Is that what citizens are saying that they want? Or is this an attempt to shoe-horn the New Deal into a ready-made set of mantras that passed their sell by date in 2015 with the passing of the MDGs?

The point here is not semantic, it’s serious. SDG16 requires us to think about governance as well as justice and peace. That is far more relevant than a discourse on ‘extreme poverty’ to the people it is supposed to support. Ask these people in Liberia.

Nowhere in this piece does Hearn mention the Open Government Partnership (OGP) for example, which some fragile states, including G7+ members, are starting to join. The idea that the New Deal is the main show in town for fragile states is daft. What we need surely is a coherent approach that brings open government efforts to improve transparency, accountability and anti corruption – usually dominated by civil society elites in capitals – with peacebuilding efforts usually taking place within traditionally marginalised populations who may in many cases have been engaged in armed confrontation for decades. Initiatives like OGP and the New Deal do not talk to each other at the moment, and that is a problem. There is much they could learn from each other, and together would stand a far greater chance of generating real progress in line with the holistic approach to peace that SDG16 sets out.

Jim Kim gets it

Earlier this year I watched Jim Kim issue a comment at the Bank’s Fragility Forum that startled many of his colleagues. He acknowledged that the Bank had been part of the problem in many fragile states and promised to be more coherent, more joined up and to end a technocratic and fragmented approach which mitigated against progress. Perhaps getting carried away he demanded to be told if any World Bank employee didn’t live up to that vision.

Articles like this highlight that we have a long way to go before we achieve that level of joined up thinking. And considering how long real change takes to happen, we don’t have a moment to waste.

Conflict, peacebuilding & open government: opportunities & threats

“Election victories bring legitimacy to new leaders and provide windows of opportunity for bold action … nevertheless ethnic armed groups … also enjoy significant, if contested, legitimacy, particularly among marginalised communities that often regard the State as alien.”

A key passage from an excellent review by Ashley South of the peace processes in Myanmar and the Philippines, and the daunting challenges they face now. This review is written from a political economy perspective and looks at the bargaining and deals that have or have not yet been done in both contexts. The comparative study makes a number of observations that to my mind highlight a set of challenges but also opportunities for a combined open government/peacebuilding approach to have greater traction on openness as well as long term peace. Ultimately this calls for a unified institutional approach to an SDG agenda that places conflict together with governance and justice in a way that will force us to confront this challenge. In my view not a moment too soon.

Don’t rush

South points out that as a peace process takes hold there is an increasing asymmetry of power which threatens vested interests on the part of non-State armed groups. Put bluntly they start to lose relevance. South states:

“While the current transition in Myanmar may prove an opportunity to reassess State-society relations in the country, it might also represent a turning point in influence for the ethnic armed organisations”.

Another way of looking at this, is that the elites at the top of armed organisations are at their most vulnerable as this process takes hold. A quick look at the overthrow of elites in other former armed groups that were attempting non-violence in the past makes this point. Not appreciating this, and rushing towards elections and/or new forms of electoral or otherwise political contestation before democratic institutions and armed groups themselves are ready for this, therefore poses huge risks. Timing and sequencing for governance initiatives, especially those under the ‘democratisation’ banner, is critical.

Build trust

South notes that in both Myanmar and the Philippines, the conflicts dividing society have lasted so long that there is now a lack of understanding on both sides of the other, particularly among the young. A lack of understanding by a majority population of the history, circumstances and grievances of marginalised communities is acutely dangerous if a governance approach is not itself informed and shaped by it. The “Open Government Partnership”, for example, is a title that implies one singular government with one State to which all citizens subscribe. If that is not the case and, furthermore, the people themselves do not understand each other's perspectives let alone universally self-define as citizens of that State, such an approach is doomed to fail or even do harm. Yet we do now have States joining OGP who face such challenges. The organisation I work for Saferworld is thinking hard about how to bring those approaches together to minimise harm and maximise potential. Because, amid the danger, there is potential.

Opportunities

I used to work in Sri Lanka just after the civil war. Not only did communities there not understand each other’s perspectives, in the case of younger generations they didn’t even speak the same language. English had been the official language which enabled Sinhalese and Tamil speakers to communicate prior to a war which erupted in 1983 and prevented most Tamil children born afterwards from learning it. To me it seemed symbolic of the challenge but also the chance to build: you can in the end learn to speak another language and, albeit in similarly lengthy timescales to learning a language, learn to understand and trust others too.

The potential presented by the entry of open governance initiatives into fragile contexts to create opportunities to support that process of learning to understand and trust through collaboration can be harnessed if the initiatives are designed in a way that is conflict sensitive, genuinely inclusive but also that do not shy away from difficult and intensely political issues. Otherwise you risk having a dialogue between international donors with privileged civil society and political elites that do not speak to the underlying grievances that at any time could re-emerge in favour of data-led projects that only scratch the surface. It’s worth remembering that the majority of conflicts are relapses of old.

Two themes seem likely to emerge from these initiatives in Myanmar, the Philippines but also Sri Lanka, Kenya and a wide range of other fragile contexts: federalism or some form of devolution on the one hand; and transparency/accountability on the other. Marginalised groups will tend to be interested in the former while relatively privileged majority groups the latter. Open government initiatives tend to avoid questions of devolution while peacebuilding approaches avoid transparency, beyond the superficial. Yet if they can be combined as part of the peacebuilding/openness deal then there could be very clear dividends for both. Devolution need not only be framed as answering a political demand from a formerly armed group but also as enhancing transparency for all groups in society, including the majority group, by bringing decision making closer to the people. Similarly enhancing transparency need not only be framed as something of relevance to the majority communities in society but also has the benefit of shining a light on the elites who for years have controlled the lives of marginalised groups in times of conflict.

An inclusive approach to peacebuilding and open governance – for example by ensuring the participation of all groups (defined by ethnicity, gender, geography etc.) – in determining political settlements as well as the themes on which a new era of governance is to be founded is going to be really, really hard. That’s why it hasn’t been tried before. But with the new era of SDGs that will compel donors and practitioners to come together to try them there are grounds for some hope. And the relevance of what we learn from this work will have implications way beyond post conflict states.

Panama Peril for Opengov

This was the week the open government movement lost a leader, and began to realise its own frailty. The implications of a global political crisis sparked by the Panama Papers revelations has already claimed one Prime Minister, but for the openness movement it is another political casualty that risks exposing the flank of a movement that to date has enjoyed glitz, glamour and relative safety. David Cameron’s disastrous week involved issuing no less than five statements followed by an awkward TV interview in which he revealed that yes he had in fact benefitted from an offshore secret tax avoidance scheme, but promised not to do it again. He increasingly resembles Blair in the latter years, as even St. Snowden calls for his head.

Personally I think £30,000 inherited from your father that you sold prior to becoming Prime Minister is spectacularly small fry. But my opinion doesn’t matter – he’s joined the ranks of the politically walking dead. And that matters. 

Days gone by: HLP on post 2015

Cameron has long been a vital source of support for the open government movement. From his time co-chairing the High Level Panel on Post 2015, where he placed anti-corruption alongside economic growth and peace as part of his ‘golden thread’ ideas – which in turn found their expression in SDG 16, through to ensuring a reformed DFID invested in governance and peacebuilding; and forging coalitions of progressive donor countries to support the Open Government Partnership (OGP) he has been a long-standing source of political and financial support for the movement to grow and thrive. That he did so against the wilder instincts of the right wing of his own party is to his enduring credit.

So his leaving the stage, along with Obama, matters. It opens up three main challenges which are each potentially terminal for the movement for openness: an increased ability of strongman elites to block progress, a withdrawal of funding for the movement and a consequent vulnerability to other external shocks.

Poised to strike 

Political elites reach and maintain power by being ruthless. Amid the Panama revelations last week we saw the ICC dismiss a case against the Kenyan Vice President over a lack of evidence resulting from witnesses recanting their evidence. Allegations abound of why so many witnesses suddenly decided to withdraw their evidence. Political prisoners reside in several OGP countries, while others have banned newspapers that print inconvenient articles. And you may remember Jacob Zuma, the current co-chair of OGP, once gave a speech attacking the idea of the Independent Reporting Mechanism of the initiative he co-chairs. He seems to have survived another corruption scandal this week too. My point here is that elites like this have got very different ideas about openness, transparency and accountability, and the movement needs as many supporters as it can get. Where are the Southern political leaders to replace Cameron and Obama? 

An independent reporting mechanism in action

Where’s the money? 

The harsh reality for the open government movement is that it relies on a fickle donor community to keep going. Many European donors have already scaled back their funding to deal with the political fall out of the biggest refugee flow streaming across the plains of Europe since 1945. That will worsen this summer. DFID has long been chief among donors supporting this work, but will it continue under new political ownership? Many will have noticed that Justine Greening has not rushed to Cameron’s defence. With the Opposition Labour Party in no state to win the next General Election it is hard to see any of the leading contenders to replace Cameron as Prime Minister regarding this as a priority. Particularly not this man.

That would leave USAID about to be overshadowed by the prospect of a demagogue, with the other major donors caught between an intolerant domestic electorate and an increasingly vocal political opposition to the idea of continued assistance.

External shocks 

The one thing we can predict is that the future is unpredictable. The impact of another 2008 scale economic shock, more horror from Syria or the re-opening of frozen conflicts will all have their impacts on the movement for openness and transparency. To my mind this underlines why OGP in particular needs urgently to step out of its comfort zones and adapt its approaches to take into account the fragility, power dynamics and conflicts that underlie so many of the symptoms it seeks to tackle. There’s no tech, or app for that, I'm afraid. Data needs to be understood in the political context which will shape the responses of elites and citizens alike.

Grounds for hope

Amid the peril, hope. I spoke to a grass roots leader of an activist network of women in Sri Lanka yesterday. They work across that conflict scarred but beautiful island supporting widows and other women in a fight for social justice that has been going since the nation’s independence. These are the people who will ultimately determine whether abstract international constructs like OGP or the SDGs actually mean anything. Where are their voices in those high level summits so beloved of donors and practitioners alike? To date they have consistently failed the Amina Test which I suggested as a metric for the Africa meeting of OGP last year. We need to hand power to people like Amina and listen to what she wants and can tell us a whole lot more. If we do that, then I think the movement can transition into a long lasting force for good that actually changes things. 

That doesn't mean the international voice of civil society isn’t important either. The global movement which grew into the Beyond2015 coalition consistently challenged the idea that openness, transparency and peace was a Northern inspired idea. The momentum that this movement captured offers a chance to maintain the pressure on all political elites which, if harnessed, has already show itself to be a powerful force that cannot be ignored.

Many people, including me, were profoundly sceptical as to whether the post-2015 campaigns would overcome the scale of the challenges before them. But they did. And they did so because of people like the Sri Lankan activist, the Tanzanian mobiliser, the South African children of struggle and their allies in the wider development movement. Those are the people who can succeed in the more difficult times ahead as the pushback begins in earnest.

Power and politics never went away. They were just sleeping.

Payment by Results: past its sell by date?

Duncan Green has posted an excellent take-down of Payment by Results (PbR), the latest donor trend which is increasingly being used to impose conditionality on implementing partners. He quotes David Cameron himself, who believes this to be the best thing since sliced bread but draws in multiple other viewpoints to question whether this really is likely to improve outcomes. His main analysis is that this is a fad, does not particularly work and risks decreasing rather than increasing the effectiveness of aid. And then, bewildered, asks why on earth donors keep doing this.

To answer that last question and to think about how those of us at the sharp end navigate this trend I think it’s worth considering (a) the motives driving donors to do this, (b) alternatives to PbR that might meet those motives in a more effective way and (c) highlight that there are some grounds for hope that a more holistic approach might soon replace this very technocratic, transactional way of doing aid in future.

Motives

On one level you can see the attraction of PbR. There is sadly no shortage of wasteful spending within the sector and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with challenging that. For the UK it’s also worth reminding ourselves that the current Conservative leadership have consistently gone out on a limb to defend aid spending, frequently against attacks from their own side, so PbR is a helpful way of placating those for whom the idea of aid in and of itself is questionable. The power of sceptical MPs and the Daily Mail, together with public cynicism is a powerful force.

It also, as Duncan points out, transfers risk from the donor to the implementing agency. Or does it? While that may be the motive I would argue that this form of funding has aided the growth of another trend, which is the emergence of large global accounting firms who are increasingly awarded donor tenders. The reality is that a global firm can handle more financial risk than a hand-to-mouth I/NGO. Are we really sure that a global company driven by profit rather than other motives is better placed to actually deliver results, though?

Alternatives

A more radical solution to meeting the needs of sceptical polities and electorates, while dealing with risk, might be to totally re-shape the I/NGO environment. This is within the gift of the top 5 large donors alone. A fundamental and co-ordinated shift in their funding strategies would do it. How about deciding that they will only fund Southern programming which is run from the South, and which is clearly building a capacity base in the South rather than maintaining those in donor capitals? Some agencies have already seen that this might be on the way and are relocating accordingly. Perhaps we should go the whole hog sooner rather than later. The message to sceptics and electors is that we are building a long term capacity which is by definition closer to the problems they are trying to solve and is therefore better placed to navigate risk.

An alternative to PbR is surely Positive Deviance. This is an idea that has been kicking its heels since the late 1990s, just waiting for people to try it at scale. It is far more based in the reality of messy power, politics and conflict and is thus far better placed as a methodology to try to meet those challenges. It is also likely to be far cheaper to try to incubate localised approaches to political problems than the sort of top-down pre-cooked approaches which PbR encourages. Twaweza has already done some useful and pioneering work on this in East Africa, reflected in its current strategy.

Allied to Positive Deviance programming how about a dash of Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), which at last is becoming more widely accepted as a means by which we move from tick-box approaches to M&E towards actually setting out to LEARN and act on that learning at every stage. For the sceptics here we would therefore have a combined Positive Deviance & PDIA model – which is enabling local people themselves to put forward their own ideas about how to meet challenges, and to do so in a way that is flexible enough to deal with the most complex and challenging of contexts. Surely better than PbR – which sees development as some kind of series of transactions between a ‘purchaser’ (donor) and ‘supplier’ (aid agency). Looks good on paper. Looks silly in real life.

Grounds for Hope

I suspect the large statutory donors will be embarrassed into abandoning PbR. A number of the more agile and free thinking donors, notably the Foundations of this world, are pursuing far more innovative approaches. Ford Foundations Darren Walker has railed against the “tyranny of donors” – and PbR was the sort of thing he had in mind. Micro-management at its most tyrannical. He has adopted a version of funding which involves agencies themselves being incentivised to learn, experiment and innovate – and be held accountable throughout. If this model proves more effective, then it is hard to see how the more lumbering statutory donors can maintain the pretence that PbR is a worthy alternative.

That said, Mr Walker has also warned that the I/NGO world needs to be slimmer, fitter and involve far less duplication. For reasons that may be obvious, I/NGOs have preferred to concentrate on the first part of his message, and not the second.

The new SDG framework also gives grounds for hope that this sort of approach will soon be heading of into the annals of past fads. It is simply not credible to claim that you could pursue Goal 16 on peace, governance and justice by an approach which is characterised by a series of linear and results driven transactions. More flexible, innovative, locally driven and learning based approaches will surely prevail.

And lastly, we finally see the importance of dealing with power and politics being placed centre stage by the new SDG framework. I witnessed the extraordinary sight of Jim Kim and others, the very authors of technocracy, pledging to end that approach and adopt a new politically driven approach in order to tackle conflict and governance at the Bank’s Fragility Forum recently. While there is a world of difference between a pledge at a conference and what the Bank does at local level, it seems the tectonic plates are finally grinding in the right direction. As it becomes increasingly clear that PbR is an entirely inappropriate way to tackle complex, volatile and changeable contexts, I suspect it will not survive that tectonic movement for long.