Notes from a 'Learning Laboratory' on Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions
I was in Cape Town, South Africa, last week as part of a team of trainers. We were delivering a course titled 'People, Politics and Change: Communication Approaches for Governance Reform'. The participants were 29 senior government officials from 10 different African countries, each one being responsible for a specific governance reform initiative.
As one of our trainers explained it, the idea of a 'learning laboratory' is an adult-learning moment where three-way learning occurs: the participants learn from the trainers, the participants learn one from the other, and the trainers learn from the participants. And that is what happened over those four days in Cape Town.
Based on the practice-based research that CommGAP has been conducting, we have identified a set of issues that reform managers have to tackle in order to stand a chance of succeeding and some of the communication approaches and techniques that have proven useful. That is what we the trainers offered. The government officials brought their own stories and experiences; and what a fascinating variety they had! Half of the value of the entire course for the officials came from the experiences they so fulsomely and willingly shared. And for us the trainers, we learned a whole amount. You pass along an analysis of a challenge and how it might be tackled; then you give a couple of examples. But it is as the participants begin to work the issue that you see dimensions to the problem that you had not thought about. That leads to growth, necessary growth.
I came away with a number of conclusions. First, governance reform interventions are very difficult to make work and to sustain. The story is mostly one of failure: powerful vested interests defend the status quo, lone champions are removed from office, public support is absent even where real benefits will accrue to the public and so on. And the reason failure is ubiquitous? Not enough attention is paid to the adaptive challenges - securing political will, organizational will and public will - which always confront reform efforts. Second, I came away even more convinced about the centrality of reform-specific political analysis without which the underlying 'rules of the game' are not revealed, and technical experts place excessive reliance on technical solutions. Third, I also came away convinced that in spite of how easy it is to ridicule senior bureaucrats - as, well, bureaucrats!- they are real and potential change agents in their own societies. They are highly educated and they mostly mean well. It is important to keep developing their capacities so that they can lead processes of change successfully, all under real-world conditions.
We had a good bunch last week and by the time the week ended, we had a veritable mutual admiration society going.
Photo Credit: Antonio Lambino
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Governance and real world conditions
Having read Sina's article on training for government officials last week, I was pleased to note the mutual admiration society. Often, development workers can get caught in a mindset of underestimating government employees, and assuming that the capacity to make change does not lie within them. I have found that more often than not, the capacity is there, but it is the circumstances which do not allow for the change to occur. The circumstances are affected not just by the will of the government employees, but also pressures from below, above and ironically from donors which prevent action.
Learning Laboratory on Governance Reform
Sina, Thanx for copying the blog to us. I benefited a lot from the Cape Town seminar, and your summary is right on. Although you touched on the aspect of how bureaucrats often mean well but can do much, it should also be mentioned that there are issues that are sometimes difficult to communicate. If one brought them out in the open "stakeholders" will often ignore them because they are so sensitive, taboo. Beneficiaries from such bad governance practices will often deny vehemently, and when in decision-making positions it frustrates reform agenda. Example, favouritism along tribal lines that have resulted in "ethnic cleansing" in more than one sense are never brought out in the open. It may be "politically stupid", but it is one of the most important factor underlying bad governance in most African countries.
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