Effective governance is increasingly recognised as critical to international development. Efforts to strengthen accountability from the state towards its citizens have become central to improving public services and realising the vision of the Millennium Development Goals. More and more development programmes focus on empowering citizens to demand better services and engage with how decisions are made, both locally and nationally. Arguably the most important lesson to emerge in this work is that power and politics matter. Formal institutions matter but also critical are the politics that lie behind the institutions. Central to this is the ability of civil society and donors to think and act politically.
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This learning workshop aims to provide an in-depth forum for dialogue to better understand how change actually happens and how we can think and work politically in practice in governance programming. It will explore lessons, successes, challenges and failures in governance programmes. Academia, local partner organisations, international non-governmental organisations and donors will discuss the following themes:
- Thinking and working politically- how to make it work in practice
- Delivering change at local and national levels: lessons from civil society in securing the right to access basic services
- Thinking and working differently? Assessing what current funding and monitoring and evaluation methods mean for working with power and politics
Dr Su-Ming Khoo, Development Studies Association Ireland and Rosamond Bennett, CEO, Christian Aid Ireland - Opening remarks
SESSION ONE: GOVERNANCE, ACCOUNTABILITY AND CITIZEN EMPOWERMENT: BRINGING POLITICS BACK IN
This opening session will look at what is needed to enable those working on, or funding, governance programmes to think and work politically. Lessons will be shared from the Mwananchi programme in Africa.
The “Good Governance Agenda” and its discontents - Alina Rocha Menocal, Research Fellow, Overseas Development Institute
Implications for engagement: how can donors think and work in a manner that takes politics seriously?
Re-thinking social accountability in Africa: Lessons from the Mwananchi Programme - Fletcher Tembo, Research Associate, Overseas Development Institute
DOWNLOAD Rethinking social accountability in Africa paper Fletcher Tembo
DOWNLOAD Rethinking Social Accountabilitly in Africa graphics Fletcher Tembo
DOWNLOAD Fletcher tembo's presentation
PLENARY DISCUSSION : From thinking politically to working differently?
Chair: Alina Rocha Menocal
Panellists: Fletcher Tembo, Dr Su-Ming Khoo and Rosamond Bennett
SESSION TWO: MAKING PEOPLE COUNT
This session looks at how specific programmes seek to improve accountability from state to citizens on the human right to basic services. Presenters will address issues such as what’s working and not working in engaging citizens and improving accountability from government at a local level? The challenges of working politically in practice. Linking local interventions to national and international advocacy.
- Chair and respondent - Alina Rocha Menocal, ODI
- Delivering accountability for health services in Sierra Leone - Siapha Kamara, CEO SEND Foundation, Sierra Leone
- Julius Mukunda, Coordinator for the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group in Uganda
- Building citizenship in El Salvador - Ramon Villalta, Director, the Social Initiative for Democracy
- Giving voice to citizens on service delivery in Ethiopia - Tamiru Lega Berhe, VNG, Management Agency, Ethiopian Social Accountability Programme (ESAP2); Tamrat Getahun Woldemichael, KMG, implementing partner agency representative, ESAP2
DOWNLOAD Citizen Engagement for improved basic services Ethiopia Handout
DOWNLOAD the SEND presentation, Sierre Leone
DOWNLOAD the El Salvador presentation
PLENARY DISCUSSION
Chair: Alina Rocha Menocal, ODI
Panellists: Siapha Kamara, Julius Mukunda, Ramon Villalta, Tamiru Lega Berhe, Tamrat Getahun Woldemichael
REFLECTIONS FROM DAY ONE
What do we really mean by Governance? - Rebecca Sinclair, Christian Aid
The first session yesterday morning of the governance, accountability and empowerment learning workshop was focussed on providing an overview of existing learning and lessons from Governance programming from research fellows at ODI.
So what are we actually talking about when we talk about ‘Good Governance?’ Alina Rocha Moncal, a research fellow at ODI emphasised that it’s much more than just the government, looking at the nature of relations between state and society, reminding us that it is process orientated – we need to focus on the how rather than just what is done.
We were introduced to the general agreed principles for good governance, none of which would seem out of place in Christian Aid’s own Partnership for Change strategic document. All very familiar concepts that we use regularly internally and when thinking about our programming work:
- Participation and inclusiveness – involvement and ownership by broad range of stakeholders
- Accountability: decision-makers responsible for their actions, checks and balances in place
- Respect for institutions and laws – rules apply equally to everyone (both rulers and ruled)
- Effectiveness in delivering basic services
- Transparency
- Efficiency – government is effective and responsive, proper regulatory framework in place
But the key challenge is how we translate these principles into practice and so we moved on to discusses why so many supposed ‘Good governance’ initiatives have not been so successful. Some of the key limitations of the good governance agenda shared included:
- The technocratic approach to governance programmes – seeing governance as something that requires a ‘technical’’ solution, rather than as a complex process of change
- The tendency to adopt a one size fits all ‘blue print’ approach to democracy rather than focusing on the contextual realities. Excessive reliance on standardised approaches focussed almost exclusively on formal institutions
- The lack of awareness of the political nature of reform processes – more fundamentally reform involves changing informal behaviours, social norms and altering power relations
- A belief that all the principles can be achieved simultaneously rather than understanding that political reform processes take a lot of time.
We were reminded that in this work power and politics matter – that by empowering others to have their voice heard, others become disempowered and recognising this and analysing these dynamics on an ongoing basis is key in order to make any type of progress.
So what were the recommendations coming from ODIs research on governance programming?
- Start with local context – develop solid understanding of domestic dynamics and tailor interventions. Move away from one size fits all prescriptive approach encouraging multiple paths to institutional performance – a focus on best fit approach rather than a best practice approach. There are multiple ways to achieve things depending on context which we should not ignore.
- Be realistic about what is feasible – focus on fostering enabling environment and influencing incentives that can facilitate change e.g. bringing people together that wouldn’t normally come together rather than imposing change
- Recognise the long term nature of promoting development – looking at modest and selective entry points.
- Monitor and update analysis continuously in order to inform on-going donor programming
- Engage with informal systems more thoroughly and explicitly. Engage with no traditional CSOs like religious orgs, trade unions and social movements and MPs
- Focus on capacity building not only on technical but political capacity of both state and non-state actors: the capacity to forge alliances, build a case to influence others. If you solely concentrate on empowering citizens without working with the institutions to ensure they have the capacity to respond, this can be destabilising.
- Choose experienced partners that can reach marginalised groups
- We need to work with elites
Much of the discussion thus far resonates with Christian Aid’s understanding of how change happens and our role in supporting such change as outlined in Partnership for Change: the need to ground our work in contextual realties through partnership; the focus on rooting it in strong power, gender and accountability analysis that we regularly review and update; the need to partner with the right organisations to ensure the most marginalised are represented and their voice is at the table; the role of INGOs in facilitating and brokering key relationships and connecting different actors – including with so called ‘elites’ who often hold power; the recognition that institutions that need to become more equitable are not just state actors/government, but wider such as faith institutions, non-state actors, CSOs etc.
So what are the next steps for taking this work forward? Some of the questions I’m left with at the end of the session:
- What do we do where there is no political will to respond? If working solely on empowering people to demand their rights without capacity building of state and non-state actors to respond can be destabilising, how can we address this in contexts such as Myanmar where there may be a lack of political recognition or will to become more responsive? What are the incentives for them to respond? Is it about identifying potential allies who we can build relationships? But this takes much investment and investment to build individual relationships and often this is harder at national level – what strategies and examples of there for how this has been addressed?
- Who are the elites? How can we work with them to ensure that they use their power effectively? How do we engage with them as civil society without compromising our integrity whilst also recognising that we ourselves can be seen as elites, as can some of our partners? How do we ensure that we are really inclusive and understand our own power dynamics at play?
- Where power is hidden and invisible, how can civil society really engage in shifting this?
- The struggle for greater voice, inclusion, accountability and representation is an ongoing process of negotiation, contestation and consultation and we need to be mindful of whose voice we are actually hearing. We are working in societies that are often structured for elites and by elites and getting a share of that power is difficult – there is a struggle at the heart of this and how do we deal with and mitigate against negative repercussions that can emerge from power shifts?
- How in a challenging, results focussed donor funding environment, can we develop projects that have the flexibility to shift and adapt to contextual realities and recognise that shifting political processes takes time?
A great start to what I’m sure will be a really challenging, insightful and thought provoking two days here in Dublin. I’m not expecting to come away with answers – as we all know it depends on the context and there is no silver bullet, but through discussion and listening to other programmes’ experience of working on governance and accountability projects and their learning – both positive and negative – should help to make us think that much harder……
Making people count - Laura Fletcher, Advisor/Rights to Essential Services, Christian Aid
Having laid the groundwork as to what we actually mean by governance, and what the biggest challenges and lessons are, we then began to delve a bit deeper into examples of social accountability between state and citizens around right to basic services.
What does social accountability look like in Sierra Leone, Uganda, El Salvador and Ethiopia? First Siapha Kamara from CA partner SEND shared experiences from a two year project in Sierra Leone which sought to improve accountability within the health sector, following the launch of the Free Healthcare Initiative in 2010. Their approach involved using three basic tools; the Participatory M&E tool, Health Summits and MDG awards for health centres. The Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group in Uganda outlined their work fostering social accountability between budget makers/ implementers and communities through participatory community level budget monitoring which informs targeted national level advocacy and propels wider social mobilisation. The Social Initiative for Democracy in El Salvador are using a combined approach of local level strengthening of CSO networks, of stimulating integration at a national level and of creating an active citizenship movement have sought to build citizenship. Finally the Ethiopian Social Accountability Programme spoke of their experience of citizen engagement through information promotion, assessing services, identifying issues and voicing solutions through joint action, and addressing grievances.
Many of the challenges faced within the different projects were very similar and reflected the discussions during the first session:
- Low capacity of citizens to sustain accountability
- Reliable and credible evidence is costly and time consuming to collect
- Limited power of lower government structures
- Difficulty of holding NGOs to account
- Social accountability takes time and requires a significant amount of investment
- Restrictions imposed by multi-lateral donors stifle innovation and creativity
- Difficulty of linking national and local level accountability
- Illiteracy in communities hampers information sharing
- Political interferences
- High levels of apathy in communities
- Budget decisions dictated by where power is coming from
- Anti-corruption agencies don’t have enough resources
- Difficulty in involving all players
- Government officials
- busy and lack commitment, not willing to actively engage, high turnover
- Involvement of vulnerable groups – partners had difficulty identifying them.
- Initially social accountability committees were dominated by service providers
- Sometimes community members feared speaking honestly in front of service providers
- Difficult to sustain committees beyond project.
Lessons: Evidence based advocacy is crucial. Citizens need knowledge of government commitments in order to then monitor them. Importance of creating alliances. Challenges because of technical language around budget – information sharing needs to be accessible to communities. Importance not only of rights of citizens but also of their responsibilities as citizens.
Thoughts and questions arising from the presentations and following discussions:
- We heard in the morning session about the importance of focusing on changing systems and processes rather than individuals, a claim which has been supported by a number of the examples who have cited high turnover of officials as a challenge. However, when working within a deeply political realm in which personalities hold so much power, it is surely difficult to make that first step of progress without having an individual to support you in pioneering your cause in the right circles. How can we reconcile this contradiction?
- We have heard many examples of the importance of supply matching demand, of ensuring that when empowering citizen voice, this is equally met with capacity and will from the political side. This promotion of a holistic approach which focuses on demand and supply in equal measure could be seen to be contrary to the advice that achieving social accountability and good governance takes a significant amount of time and must be seen as a process involving a number of different steps that we don’t have to tackle at the same time. How to we decide to what extent to employ a holistic approach and to what extent to focus on getting single elements right first?
- How can we better bridge the gap between local level social accountability and national level advocacy?
- How can we ensure that information exchange is accessible to all groups, particularly the most vulnerable groups
- How can we protect communities from being adversely affected by social accountability programmes, both in terms of it being a ‘tax on their time’ and also backlashes from duty bearers who don’t agree with them?
- How can we ensure that groups are not treated as homogenous and that voices of individuals are heard?
- How can we ensure that efforts to include women in decision making ensure equitable and meaningful participation rather than just equal presence – i.e. quotas alone might not be effective in empowering meaningful participation of women.
- How can we ensure that dialogues around women and gender are treated as two separate streams of discussion and shouldn’t always be lumped together as one?
- How can we work around/ challenge the significant restrictions imposed by multi-lateral donors through prescriptive and rigid logframes, short timeframes and lack of flexibility throughout the lifetime of the project? This type of monitoring and reporting is not conducive to governance programming which take a long time, are unpredictable, are influenced significantly by politics and individuals who change, and need to be organic and flexible. This is something we need to think about in terms of our autonomy versus reliance on donor funding, how we design our proposals to multi-lateral donors, and how we use our advocacy to influence thinking and understanding of donors about governance programming.
Everything Is Political! - Sarah O'Boyle, Head of Programme Development, Christian Aid Ireland
Day one of the conference saw fascinating talks from Alina and Fletcher giving an overview of the challenges and shortcomings of traditional governance models. This was enhanced by learning from partner experiences in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Ethiopia and El Salvador. Key issues to emerge were the importance of understanding the local context and both formal and informal systems and institutions. While NGOs and donors talk of the importance of this contextual analysis, do we really take the time (and it takes time!) to do it properly? Such analysis may uncover systems that we don’t like but we need to consider ways of working ‘with the grain’. The advice is to be realistic in planning and work with the institutions that exist, not the ones we may wish for.
There was consensus also on the importance of engaging with elite groups (be that in state or civil society institutions) as there is unlikely to be fundamental change without their support and if we can align with their interests (where appropriate) we could really gain traction. Another point (that may seem obvious) was to recognise when we work on accountability and ‘giving voice’ is that there is no ‘one voice’ – there are many people with many different interests. This was reinforced in a further discussion about engaging women in governance programmes and again recognising that they are not a homogenous group and there are always power dynamics – everything is political!
The case studies highlighted how governance programmes are a slow process with examples from Ethiopia showing how the time taken to build the trust of local authorities delayed implementation and an example from Uganda showing the frustration as even when government institutions become more accountable, impunity continues. In El Salvador, our partner ISD talked about how they are working from a 50 year plan to reach a society based on democracy and human rights. This shows the scope and ambition of real change but it can be difficult to fit into rigid donor models which in the words of one presenter ‘are making me less creative by the day’.
SESSION THREE: THINKING AND WORKING DIFFERENTLY
This session will assess if current funding and monitoring and evaluation methods are fit for purpose for working with power and politics. It will assess the challenges international NGOs and governments face and what new approaches might be needed.
Tom Lodge, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Centre for Peace and Development, University of Limerick - Recap
Tembo Fletcher, ODI (Mwananchi Programme) - Chair
- Social accountability programmes as part of a large donor-supported basic services grant - Bizuwork Ketete, Irish Aid Ethiopia
- The perspective from Irish Aid- Earnan O’ Cleirigh, Irish Aid Policy Department
- Sharing key lessons and challenges from governance programmes from the INGO perspective - Niall O’Keefe, Trócaire; Karol Balfe, Christian Aid Ireland
DOWNLOAD the Ethiopia presentation
DOWNLOAD Christian Aid Ireland's presentation
DOWNLOAD Irish Aid's presentation
REFLECTION FROM SESSION THREE
How many power relations have you changed today? - Alexia Haywood, Angola programe officer, Christian Aid
To kick off session 3, Tom Lodge and Fletcher Tembo reminded us of a few of the challenges that emerged the previous day and that many of us have been grappling with for some time. Among the key ones being that political processes don’t lend themselves to easy prediction or control from above; so-called citizen empowerment can have far-reaching and unintended consequences; and long-time frames are needed to really see some of these consequences. Given all this, how do some of the M&E tools we use, in particular results-based management approaches, help or hinder this work?
Within this framing, the presentation from Bizuwork Ketete from Irish Aid Ethiopia was thought-provoking. Despite Ethiopia being a developmental state, with restricted political and civic freedoms, NGOs in partnership with the government have implemented a successful country-wide social accountability programme. They have achieved positive results in terms of citizens monitoring services, and demanding and seeing improvements to these services. Both Bizu and the representatives of other agencies involved in the programme highlighted the lengthy negotiations that took place to get the Social Accountability Programme (now in its second iteration, ESAP2) off the ground, and the continued complexities of the process. However it seems to be encouraging increasing government buy-in for social accountability more broadly.
ESAP, interestingly, is not subject to some of the restrictions imposed on civil society organisations in Ethiopia during the last decade. I couldn’t help wondering whether the ESAP approach would lead to an incremental opening up of civil society space more broadly or potentially positive, ‘far-reaching and unintended consequences’, for citizen empowerment? Or whether, in line with a more cynical perspective expressed during our afternoon discussion session, these programmes were functioning not despite, but because of a more authoritarian state, playing into the hands of those in power, and reinforcing their control.
Not everything that counts can be counted
Results: what counts as results, and what counts as evidence of them, within programmes fundamentally aimed at changing entrenched unjust power relations, was really the burning question of the day. As Fletcher Tembo, Trocaire’s Niall O’Keefe and our very own Karol Balfe emphasised, the trend towards quantifying everything can lead to meaningless and time-consuming number-crunching. What is more, ‘logical’ frameworks and associated tools tend to be normative, and apolitical, obscuring contextual nuances and hidden power relations. But how can we track and measure intangible results, in a rigorous way, while acknowledging the contestations of power going on all along the way, from the work ‘on the ground’, and between and within all organisations (CSOs, NGOs, Donor Governments) involved? How can we be realistic about what we can achieve, and honest about what we have?
Karol spoke about the methods some Christian Aid programme countries within the Irish Aid funded programme had begun to use to more deeply assess their effectiveness, including those better informed by power analysis and complexity theory. Fletcher Tembo and Tom Lodge both strongly advocated ‘outcome mapping’. Earnan O’ Cleirigh from the Irish Aid policy department believed all aid instruments could be used to foster empowerment. But does this view not risk once again concealing the power relations inherent in aid relations and practice, including its associated tools, emphasised by many of the speakers during the two days? Our friend and skilled translator José Gutierrez from the Latin America Solidary Centre brought this home in one of the concluding comments of the afternoon discussion. He reminded us that many of the approaches and tools we are using, including power analysis, are produced in Europe or ‘the West’. What about more of a focus on knowledge produced in the countries where we are working to see change? What about putting Julius Nyerere, Paolo Freire, Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara back on the reading list? Or are we working in a world where things are no longer so black and white, so to speak?
SESSION FOUR: DELIVERING LOCAL CHANGE
This session will provide in-depth examples of lessons on how change is happening at a local level. They session will look at a case study from Sierra Leone on health services and a study of decentralisation in Burundi.
- Chair and respondent - Siapha Kamara, CEO SEND Foundation, Sierra Leone
- Lessons from social accountability programmes in Sierra Leone - Pieternella Pieterse, Department of Politics and Public Administration and Centre for Peace and Development, University of Limerick
- The politics of decentralisation - DrNiamh Gaynor, Development and International Relations, School of Law and Government at Dublin City University
DOWNLOAD Delivering Accountability for Health Services in Sierra Leone SEND
DOWNLOAD the Sierre Leone presentation
DOWNLOAD Politics of Decentralisation presentation
PLENARY DISCUSSION
Chair: Tom Lodge
Panellists: Pieternella Pieterse, Niamh Gaynor
REFLECTIONS FROM SESSION 4
Delivering local change - Julie Mehigan, Middle East Programme Officer, Christian Aid
Session overview After having thought through the importance of political engagement in order to invoke the change we want to see, we had by now looked at bringing citizens into the picture; we’d also tried to engage donors on ways of working differently so that they might incorporate the politics of power. The purpose of this session was to get to grips with ways in which change is happening at local levels. The two examples we looked at were Sierra Leone and Burundi.
Sierra Leone – Accountability measures in the health sector. The work looked at interventions which provided incentives, some financial, some non-financial to ensure accountable health care provision. Pieternella from University of Limerick looked at 4 accountability projects in similar areas in Sierra Leone to measure the relative effectiveness. She examined models for accountability where communities engaged directly with health care providers along with one control group where they did not. In some there was also an element of district and national engagement. Discussion groups raised issues they faced in receiving health care e.g. being charged for things they were supposed to get for free. However it seems that, in the case of unfair charges, raising the issue did not necessarily result in a reduction.
Key findings included the fact that individual personalities matter: in accountability groups when you find strong, motivated people, you can select accountability champions – they will be effective. People tasked with facilitating dialogue between communities and service providers must be carefully selected and well versed in power dynamics, so that they can get the most out of group sessions. As development practitioners we need to be realistic; rely on repeated power analysis; and don’t expect more from people than they can give. Finally, if the incentives are big enough, behaviour can and does change.
Burundi – the politics of decentralisation. Decentralisation is not a major focus of development academics, but it can present opportunities for accountability. It has the potential to make services more efficient and effective as it serves to legitimise the state and rebuild social capital in a fragmented, post-conflict state, and bring decision making much closer to the people that it affects. In Burundi, the legislation and policy on decentralisation is clearly grounded in the constitution: provinces administrate the communes which are divided into hills. On the hills, councils are formed, and these meet the commune administrators weekly.
Seemingly most of the people involved in hill councils meet regularly and know and understand the rules: budgets and minutes are supposed to be publicly available (although the former are nowhere to be seen and the latter are posted in French, not the local language). Notwithstanding this level of policy coherence and understanding at a certain level, community participation was limited. In fact, some communities they purport to represent did not know of the existence of hill councils. There is clearly a gap between how it should be and how it is. So…the question was asked, is the answer building capacity? Or should we understand it as an issue of politics? The response was clear; politics is getting in the way. Institutions, legislation are in place for this mechanism, but there is still enormous work to be done to make sure reality reflects theory.
Things to consider… Things that struck me from this session was the onus that these types of interventions puts on communities to demand their own rights. The local level at which we tend as development organisations to challenge power structures can have a lasting change in terms of community participation in decisions that affect them. But the power challenges we’re involved in appear to be between nurse and patient for example, as opposed to focusing on the higher level between duty-bearers in Ministries and National parliament. There is of course great value in engaging with these power dynamics so that people have a say in how their services are provided but is that enough to invoke deep, lasting change?
Health care provision is a positive right, one which obligates the state to provide assistance to those over which it has protective duty. It is right that those people have their voices heard, that they are given the chance to have a say in the running of a system that is (or is not) in place to provide assistance. Few would argue that the responsibility to change the system rests with them and not with duty bearers. But are the people to whom communities involved in social accountability work voice their grievances with the system the right groups to focus on? Or are they themselves also struggling with a system that has inherent flaws?
Our work challenging these power relations strengthens our advocacy at the national level of course, giving voice to the communities that use the services and strengthening our evidence base for change. However one question raised by a Christian Aid colleague was interesting: by funding communities to themselves hold service providers to account, are we creating a space for donors to pursue their own agendas? One thing was clear to me in these discussions: we need to be very honest with ourselves that politics matters and therefore political agendas are consistently getting in the way of positive change. One way out of this would be to strike a balance between national dialogue that excludes the end-users; and community accountability projects. When designing programmes of this sort it is imperative that we consider a balance and have at the very least a two-pronged approach to accountability: community level accountability supported by national level advocacy. Creating national level platforms for the discussion of issues affecting end-user communities could be one way of carrying this out.
Working Politically: Power Relations & Development - Colm Moloney, Development Practitioner
Last week, international development practitioners and researchers convened at the European Union House in Dublin for a two-day learning workshop on governance, accountability and citizen empowerment in the global south. Participants discussed and learned from governance initiatives being implemented in Burundi, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, among others.
While much of the discussion drew upon experiences of implementing social accountability initiatives, which aim to enable citizens to hold governments and service providers to account by creating channels for civic participation in political decision-making, the challenges and lessons raised pointed to a fundamental need to recognise the role of power and politics in shaping development outcomes more broadly.
Organisations like the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) have in recent years demonstrated the problematic nature of attempting to transpose Western models of governance to disparate developing contexts. One issue is the tendency for such technical ‘cookie cutter’ or ‘best practice’ approaches to ignore the landscape of politics and power (often comprised of formal and informal institutions and relations) in which they are supposed to function.
As Alina Rocha Menocal, Research Fellow at the ODI, stated at the conference: “governance reform is about nothing if it is not about changing power relations”. Rather than aiming to apply a rigid model and expecting rapid change, governance initiatives should adopt a ‘best fit’ approach, based on a more realistic timeline of expectations and a deep understanding of the political context.
Although Ms. Menocal may have been speaking more specifically about governance reform, the need to understand and address the role of power relations in terms of shaping development outcomes is crucial in development planning more broadly.
The very idea of ‘empowerment’, which is found in the mission statements of many development NGOs, entails a notion of increasing the power of an individual or a group, or, in other words, their capacity to make choices and to transform choices into desired actions and outcomes (to paraphrase the World Bank’s definition). Although that definition focuses on the individual or group to be empowered, there is an implicit need to understand and account for the wider network of power in which they are embedded: how can you be sure that you are truly hearing the voice of the marginalized if you cannot account for the influence of those who are not?
Power is, of course, often quite intangible. It can be hidden, and exerted in discreet ways. However, there are tools and analytical approaches that can enable development practitioners and researchers to understand contextual power relations and their effects. The ODI, for instance, published a toolkit for civil society organisations for mapping political context, while DFID published an accessible ‘how to note’ for political economy analysis.
It is crucial, if development agencies are to understand and adapt to the context in which programmes are being implemented, that such tools are used to guide planning and decision-making on a continuous basis.
FURTHER READING
3 articles were recommended by Alina Rocha Menocal in Session One Plenary.
- An article by Frances Stewart and Arnim Langer exploring how change happens over time:
- 'How Do People Make Their Voices Heard?' A graphic which relates to Alina's talk.
- ‘Localising Development: Does Participation Work?’ Article published by the World Bank
In the first plenary, Dr. Su-Ming Khoo recommended the book ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’ by Judith Butler.
In Session 2 Plenary this book was recommended – ‘The Great Transformation’ by Karl Polanyi
Book recommended - Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoğlu, James Robinson
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