With development funding rapidly shrinking, the future looks bleak, especially for the development strategist. On the bright side, public discourse has finally reached the point where we can openly discuss why so much development aid failed, or why its results always seemed so elusive whenever annual reports came due.
We were amateur actors in a theatre production called development. I have said this before and attracted the ire of esteemed colleagues and readers alike, because everyone understandably wants to believe they were hired for their expertise.
And of course, you are an expert. You may be an expert in medicine, cold-chain management, communications, economics, education policy, human resource management, or early childhood care. I myself am reasonably good with numbers, although I cannot remember more than two decimal places of π. Being a mathematician has limited practical use in ordinary life, apart from a persistent aversion to confusing an assumption with a proof.
But expertise in medicine, hydrology, nutrition, or logistics is not the same thing as expertise in development. Most of us, myself included, were never experts in that.
After several years in relief work in Somalia and South Sudan, I wanted to move into development. Malawi first, then Namibia. Compared to disaster zones, they seemed reassuringly manageable assignments. I assumed the organization would immerse me in the actual machinery of statehood: how governments identify priorities, negotiate political compromises, take difficult but transparent budget decisions, respond to the expectations of citizens, and gradually build institutions capable of governing effectively.
However, never once did UNICEF favour me with an intellectual foundation for understanding development itself.
Everyone knew the indicators of health, wellbeing, and economic progress, but there was little to nothing about the secret sauce that actually sets a country on the path to development. Instead, I was handed UNICEF plans and frameworks, documents almost entirely concerned with internal UNICEF strategies, UNICEF procedures, and UNICEF project management. Before long, and without quite noticing it happen, I was swept into the great bureaucratic maelstrom of organizational navel-gazing.
I became sufficiently proficient at it that I was eventually asked to rewrite the UNICEF Programme Policy and Procedure Manual. At one point, I was probably reading more draft Country Programme Documents than almost anyone else in the organization.
By the turn of the millennium, UNICEF had begun speaking the language of “systems change”. Policy advocacy became the magic phrase, yet tangible results remained elusive. We never asked the obvious question: why on earth didn’t ministries, governments, elites, autocrats, or elected presidents simply implement the brilliant national plans of action that we had hammered out together with their UN focal points through endless workshops and so-called national consultations? The plans that had emerged from ever more declarations issued at UN conferences and summits, each launched with glossy publications and photographs of important people?
We never stopped to ask whether anyone was serious about implementation. We did not ask these questions because we were amateurs. We had little understanding of how development actually works.
Almost nobody seemed interested in how governments set priorities, what exactly shapes public policy, how ruling parties or coalitions maintain power, or what drives the distribution of domestic resources in the concerned country, even though these are precisely the forces that ultimately shape development outcomes.
Our expert attention was fixed elsewhere: how we in UNICEF spent money, managed projects, monitored dashboards, and accounted for ourselves to donors. We reported how many wells we built, but not whether the national water agency was competently managed, sustainably financed, or performing as expected once our project vehicles disappeared over the horizon.
Development cooperation became something performed adjacent to the state, substituting government agency and accountability with parallel systems of fund administration.
Truer words have never been spoken Detlef!!! I can give you a multitude of examples to prove the point you're making. The UN has great systems in place, just don't apply them for large scale implementation. I am applying them now in my consulting work, and they work like magic, because I'm in control of how things get done.
ReplyDeleteBingo !!
ReplyDeleteDetlef - give yourself some credit in math for one UN . The calculation of what it cost to pay to work in the “free “ UN house was epic
ReplyDeleteDetlef, sensible and clear as a bell. Applying those same lessons learned within the communities where we now live is the true test.
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