Improving International Capacity Development

Bright Spots

J. Armstrong

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137310101
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310118
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Nothing is more important to a new, fragile or developing nation than developing the capacity of its government to support national well-being. Every society is complex; every government is complex. Yet, well-intentioned international development aid, born in an era of infrastructure projects, continues to apply simplistic technical solutions to these wickedly complex development problems. It's an outside-in approach that rarely succeeds, even by the development industry's own admission. But out there, amongst the billions of dollars of failed interventions, there are bright spots of success places where capacity is harnessed, not just for today, but for tomorrow, too. What is working so well? Drawing on research, practical experience, and stories of success, Jim Armstrong explores these emerging approaches.

1

One Size Fits All

On the most south-western tip of Canada the Semiahmoo Indian Reserve, my sometime childhood playground, sits on a bay of the Strait of Georgia, a few blocks away from where I grew up. Low-lying, it is a place of saltwater marshes, clam beds, and an impressive seasonal array of migratory birds. Historically, the Semiahmoo used reef-nets to catch salmon as they swam along the Strait towards the spawning grounds – upstream on coastal rivers. By the turn of the 20th century, commercial fisheries had seen the end of the annual Semiahmoo fishery. And so, by the middle of the 20th century, many of the Semiahmoo earned livings working in nearby lumber mills.

As a boy, I explored an abandoned fleet of modern fishing boats that were careened at the water’s edge of the Reserve. No Semiahmoo had fished from them; the seasonal fishery had ended generations before, and in any case, the Semiahmoo had been reef-netters, and had used pairs of canoes with nets suspended between them to catch the migrating fish. The modern fishing boats that were rotting down to nothing had been sent by the federal government in Ottawa.

A well-intentioned government had meant to help the Semiahmoo find a new source of income. But it wasn’t only the Semiahmoo; it had been decided that every coastal Aboriginal band would receive a fleet of modern fishing boats. It was a classic piece of faulty reasoning: coastal First Nations people fish; modern fishers need modern boats; we will send modern boats to coastal First Nations peoples.

The problem was that no one in Ottawa had bothered to find out if the Semiahmoo were fishers or not, if they even wanted the boats, or in fact if they would ever use them.

A civil service is the functional organ that supports government: it collects information, it advises, it plans, it administers, it reports. Civil services have grown up around political systems in every corner of the globe, in every era. In ancient Egypt, in imperial China, in the Roman Empire, professional civil services developed, usually expanding outwards from a small coterie loyal to the politicians or rulers.

As the imperial Chinese civil service grew, it instituted examinations to ensure that competent bureaucrats were hired to exercise their responsibilities judiciously. This system was arguably instrumental in maintaining a 2,000-year record of stability in the Chinese Empire. From the late Renaissance onwards, civil services in other nation states have developed and evolved. In England, a politically neutral, permanent civil service began to be created in the middle of the 19th century. In the late 19th century in the United States, Congress passed acts that demanded standards of training and impartiality in its civil service. In France, strict examinations were developed that were the only means of passing from one level of the civil service hierarchy to the next. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom were modelled on the British system, the ‘all-rounder’ – someone of classical education, who could turn a hand to practically anything – began to be replaced with technical specialists by the middle of the 20th century.

This drive to specialization took place in all the industrialized nations, and it has gathered pace ever since. But the skill of the technocrat comes at a price – and that price is government handing over a great deal of control and responsibility to the technical specialist. Specialists, by their very nature, do things the rest of us don’t always understand. We hope it’s all for the best, but we’re never quite sure – because we’re not specialists. And so, with the rise of the technocrat, there has been concomitant growth in process controls, oversight committees, and governance measures that are meant to help politicians, the public, and other civil servants understand what the technocrat is doing – and why.

But as much as the modern civil service in any developed nation has a number of common factors – an independence from politics (as much as that is possible), specialists working in various departments, oversight controls, and the like – there are distinct differences when we compare one nation to another. Sometimes it is cultural: the Canadian public service must operate in both English and French; the Swiss must provide services in German, French, Italian, and Romansh. Sometimes it is structural: in the Republic of Ireland, there is a distinction made between civil servants of the government, who must remain politically independent even as they work with ministers, and civil servants of the State, who must be absolutely independent of government and work only in select areas, such as in immigration, the auditor general’s office, the ombudsman, and the like.

In every developed country, its civil service has grown and evolved to suit the needs of its citizenry. In every instance, the civil service has shaped itself to the political, cultural, and economic realities of its nation. In most cases, the capacity of the civil service has evolved over the course of centuries. In the most rapid cases, the civil service’s capacity has been shaped by at least decades of change, experimentation, selection, and practice. The result is what Aristotle termed phronesis: wisdom gained through experience. These processes have been so long in the execution that they hardly seem like processes at all. They have been evolutions.

But what of nation states that are new, that are emerging from war, or oppression, post-colonial mediocrity, or venal political corruption? Can we expect to find any civil service capable of meeting these extraordinary challenges? Could our own? How quickly could it adapt to meet the challenge? No matter where that challenge may lie, it is often clear to outside observers and to the civil service itself that, if progress is to be made, the capacity of the civil service to address such complex problems must be objectively assessed and developed.

Government capacity development (GCD) is a process in which governmental organizations and agencies come to understand, harness, expand – and retain – the ability to craft and implement policy that enables the country to become healthier, wealthier, and more resilient. Thus, GCD is a critical factor in any jurisdictional success. When the jurisdiction is a developing country or a country fragile because of its political or economic circumstances, international efforts or even interventions are often undertaken to help strengthen local GCD.

Unfortunately, the majority of externally aided GCD interventions either fail to improve sustainable capacity or have generally unsatisfactory results. How can this sort of failure happen so regularly? External GCD interventions are made with the best of intentions. They try to implement the best practices developed in rich, successful donor countries and by rich, successful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and agencies. Large sums of money are expended in an effort to help jurisdictions struggling with difficult problems. And still, the failure rate is high.

Success and failure are two sides of the same coin: learning. From failure, we learn what does not work, and that we must try again. From success, we learn a formula that we can re-apply. It should be noted that when there are no real negative consequences, success is a far more potent teacher than failure.¹ In this instance, success takes the form of the best practices and theories of the civil services that evolved in and for developed nations. If these practices are successful in one place, surely it makes sense to try to apply them universally?

The answer is simple: yes. However, if repeated tries result in repeated failure, then this ‘standard model’ approach needs to be revisited. Clearly the lessons of failing teach us that much at least. The almost universally applied ‘standard model’ approach to GCD is based on the assumption that capacity development is a technical problem to which experts can apply ‘solutions’. Yet, when GCD is reviewed against a comprehensive typology of problems, it clearly emerges as a ‘wicked problem’.

The term ‘wicked problem’ was coined by C. West Churchman in 1967.² Redolent of a deep understanding of humanity, the whiff of good humour that comes from calling a problem ‘wicked’ likely relates to the fact that Churchman was not only a systems scientist but also an ethicist and a philosopher. A wicked problem, so characterized for its complexity, its often contradictory aspects, and its mutability, is most unlikely to ever have a ‘solution’. This is the reality that any true pragmatist understands. And so, a realistic goal is one that is much more subjective: the situation should be made better.

It is one thing to recognize that GCD must deal with wicked problems. It is another thing to find approaches that have worked. Do they, in fact, offer more promise than technical, mechanistic standard model approaches? What can donors, development organizations, and host governments themselves do differently in order to improve the effectiveness of these GCD interventions?

There is an emerging approach in which external intervenors play the role of learning coaches: facilitators of internally led government processes. Because these processes are approached jointly by the host government and the external intervenors, we term them ‘co-diagnosing’, ‘co-designing’, ‘co-acting’, and ‘co-learning’. Findings suggest that such an approach has been more effective than the standard model. However, it requires a far greater tolerance and deeper understanding of wicked problems, ambiguity, risk, contextual uniqueness, and confidence in developing nations than is the current norm.

This emerging approach is neither a silver bullet nor a quick fix. Rather, it is a call to reframe the thinking and assumptions that underpin the standard model and to assiduously explore alternative approaches that show greater promise. In The Social Construction of Public Administration, Jong Jun concludes that change ‘requires that people share knowledge, learn, and make a commitment to their plans’.³ The World Bank does not disagree; its extensive 1998 and 2008 reviews of over 800 public sector improvement projects, with combined costs exceeding US$40 billion, provide self-assessed accounts of enormous failure rates. ‘Capacity development remains a central issue that has not been well-addressed. Much capacity has been “bought in” at high cost but has not resulted in building sustainable core capacity in Government, and there are widespread concerns about the quality, cost, management, and capacity building impact of Technical Assistance.’⁴

One important observation that can be taken from these reviews is that the less developed the country, the higher the failure rate. The seemingly sound recommendations for improvement generated from these studies are remarkable only because they are rarely, if ever, implemented. Possibly worse than just failures, these initiatives may in fact be deleterious, and have precisely the opposite of their intended effect. In his 2007 work, The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier observes that for the sixty poorest nations, the result of the billions of dollars of aid expended has been a significant and measurable drop in the standard of living.⁵

It is no comfort to observe that these public sector improvement initiatives fare no better than their private sector counterparts. Oxford University’s Keith Ruddle estimates that, based on their own objectives, only 30 per cent of private sector change interventions can claim any degree of success.⁶ A 2003 international study of the successes and failures of 1,666 attempts of American and European organizations to change culture found that only 19 per cent were successful.⁷

Dwelling on the failure rate will not make it better. More important are the emerging, potentially more effective methods to develop capacity. Still, it is important to establish that there is a current and widely accepted way of approaching GCD. Field experience and research lead towards the conclusion that there is a predominant paradigm or standard model used when approaching international GCD. In its simplest terms, it is a sequential four-step process: assess, plan, implement, and evaluate. Tellingly, it is usually shown as a continuous loop. Assessment and planning are almost always carried out by external experts. Invariably, once the situation is assessed by external experts, another group of external experts takes over to plan a detailed programme of activities. This is converted into a call for proposals from yet more international experts who are charged with implementing this programme of activities. While espoused theory holds that programmes must be context-specific, the reality of programming shows that what follows is most often a transplantation of deemed best practices into often extremely difficult locales, with little practical regard to the context.

Next, this detailed programme of pre-specified activities is implemented. Often this phase calls for obtaining local buy-in. Rarely, however, does the programme contain the flexibility to permit significant accommodations or alterations that could be informed by on-the-ground experience and its concomitantly gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 One Size Fits All
• 2 Wicked Problems
• 3 Positivism and Constructivism
• 4 The Central Case Study
• 5 Non-linear Process
• 6 Co-diagnosing
• 7 Co-learning
• 8 Evaluation as Co-learning
• 9 Co-designing
• 10 Co-acting
• 11 Trinidad and Tobago Example
• 12 The Way Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index