Results, Effectiveness, and Good Old Pragmatism

Technocracies change very slowly, if at all. Why? I have come to believe that people are both enabled and imprisoned by the frameworks and paradigms of their technical disciplines, the subjects in which they have earned advanced degrees from top universities. It is how they tend to see the world. It is also how they approach problems in international development.

Let's take an example. Suppose you are thinking through how to improve the governance of the transport sector in Gugu Republic. Engineers will see an engineering challenge. Economists will see markets and incentive systems. Political scientists will look for the underlying 'rules of the game', the politics of why the sector does not function the way it should. Social development specialists will worry about affected 'communities'. And communication specialists? They want to think about the attitudes, opinions and behaviors of key stakeholders. So, you ask each of these specialists: How do we fix the problem? The tendency is for each one to apply the frameworks and paradigms of the academic discipline he or she has emerged from. This is where power comes in. If one of these professional groups is in power in a particular development institution or sector then the temptation is to impose the frameworks and paradigms of that discipline.

The problem is: reality is complex. Societies and political communities are irreducibly complex entities. There is no discipline whose frameworks totally explain reality, although I have smart friends of mine who claim otherwise. Experience suggests that when you really want to solve real-world problems and achieve results - the development effectiveness agenda - you are going to want to have as many perspectives as possible. I have found, for instance, that when senior officials in development agencies are under pressure to show results limiting frameworks and paradigms are jettisoned, and good old pragmatism wins the day. This is particularly true of political leaders and reform managers in countries whenever pressure for accountability is real. The lesson is that when there is genuine pressure to deliver results then and only then do technocrats think: "Forget what I studied in school. What do we do here? What works?'

This reflection has been prompted by the difficulties being encountered by all those like ourselves working on bottom-up or demand-side approaches to development effectiveness. The dominant disciplines in international development mostly favor  top-down, supply-side approaches. Even when bottom-up approaches are acknowledged as 'useful' they still struggle for a place, for funding, for cohorts of employed experts. Now, if I am right that pressure for accountability, for results makes pragmatists of all of us, is the problem we face in international development the fact that officials are not really being put under pressure to show results and, therefore, have the luxury of sticking to narrow frameworks?

Photo Credit: Thomas Sennett/World Bank