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Complexity Bardar What Is Development
Complexity Bardar What Is Development
Complexity Bardar What Is Development
8/16/12
Owen Barder
This is the first of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity theory
for development. These posts draw on a new online lecture by Owen Barder, based
on his Kapuscinski Lecture in May 2012 which was sponsored by UNDP and the EU.
In this post, Barder explains how complexity science, which is belatedly getting
more attention from mainstream economists, gives a new perspective to the
meaning of development.
View presentation in PDF form
The Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen has twice changed our thinking
about what we mean by development. Traditional welfare economics had focused on
incomes as the main measure of well-being until his ground-breaking work in the
1980's which showed that that poverty involved a wider range of deprivations in
health, education and living standards which were not captured by income alone.
His capabilities approach led to introduction of the UN Human Development Index,
and subsequently the Multidimensional Poverty Index, both of which aim to measure
development in this broader sense. Then in 1999 Sen moved the goalposts again
with his argument that freedoms constitute not only the means but the ends in
development.
Sen's view is now widely accepted: development must be judged by its impact on
people, not only by changes in their income but more generally in terms of their
choices, capabilities and freedoms; and we should be concerned about the
distribution of these improvements, not just the simple average for a society.
But to define development as an improvement in people's well-being does not do
justice to what the term means to most of us. Development also carries a
connotation of lasting change. Providing a person with a bednet or a water pump
can often be an excellent, cost-effective way to improve her well-being, but if the
improvement goes away when we stop providing the bednet or pump, we would not
normally describe that as development. This suggests that development consists of
more than improvements in the well-being of citizens, even broadly defined: it also
conveys something about the capacity of economic, political and social systems to
provide the circumstances for that well-being on a sustainable, long-term basis.
Mainstream economics has had a difficult time explaining how economic and social
systems evolve to create this capacity; and, in particular, our economic models
have struggled to explain why some countries have experienced rapid economic
growth while others have not. In part this is because economists have generally
stuck to models which can easily be solved mathematically. In the meantime, there
has been a growing movement in physics, biology and some other social sciences,
often called complexity science. Some economists notably Eric
Beinhocker and Tim Harford have started to make a compelling case for bringing
these ideas more centrally into our analysis of economic and social systems; and a
new volume of essays from IPPR later this month will call for complexity to be taken
more seriously by policymakers. But with the honourable exception of Ben
Ramalingam, who has a book coming out in 2013 and has published on this topic for
ODI, there has so far been very little work specifically on how complexity theory
might be useful in development economics and policy.
My Kapu?ci?ski Lecture earlier this year was an effort to explore the implications of
complexity thinking for development economics and development policy. I've made
this talk available as a narrated online presentation which lasts about 45
minutes. You can watch and listen online; listen to the audio only - for example in
the gym - by downloading it from Development Drums or via iTunes; or you
can download the transcript and slides.
the 1980s this thinking led to a set of policy prescriptions known as the
Washington Consensus, which is generally regarded as having been a
failure.
But it would be unfair to confuse Mr Cameron with Marty McFly, getting
into his DeLorean to return to the 1980s. In his 2005 speech Mr Cameron
made it clear that he was advocating economic empowerment, which he
explicitly contrasted with the economic liberalism which was the
intellectual underpinning of structural adjustment programmes. So what's
the difference? Economic liberalism is a set of prescriptions intended to
remove obstacles to enable firms to be more efficient and so increase
economic growth; economic empowerment as defined by Mr Cameron is a
set of ideas about what is needed for the economic and social system to
improve itself more rapidly and more fairly. This is not merely a semantic
difference: the golden thread focuses on openness, transparency,
accountability and a free press, none of which was ever part of the
Washington Consensus. That gives grounds for optimism that the golden
thread heralds a new and welcome focus on how economic and social
systems change.
To the extent that the golden thread focuses on what it takes for systems
to change themselves, it fits comfortably within the mainstream
development consensus which emphasises country ownership that is,
the hard-won lesson that lasting change comes from within developing
countries, rather than through policies imposed from outside. With its
If due process and the rule of law are important then wealthy
countries could tackle financial havens and improve information
Third, and probably most important, the golden thread has more to say
about desirable dynamics in society than it does about how to bring them
about. We have had more failures than successes trying to bring about
institutional and political reform in other countries. There is a danger of
going straight back to failed efforts to transplant institutions from one
situation to another. (Section 5 of the presentation discusses the danger
of isomorphic mimicry, a term coined by CGD Fellow Lant Pritchett to
highlight the repeated failure of this kind of intervention.)
Understanding economic, social and political change through the lens of
complex adaptive systems should make us more modest about our ability
to change those systems directly. It is generally impossible to design and
engineer change in a complex adaptive system. As I point out in the
conclusion of the presentation, it follows from a complexity view of
development that outsiders would do better to think about whether they
can nudge systems towards having the right kinds of dynamic properties,
including greater capacity for experimentation, feedback and learning, so
that systems can evolve these kinds of institutions on their own. That
humility seems to be largely missing from the golden thread narrative,
which seems to be presented as a universal blueprint for success. It is
those questions of feedback to which I will turn in my third blog post in
this series.
Mr Cameron's golden thread fits well with the view that we should do what
we can to help change occur from within, not impose it from outside. It
emphasizes the importance of institutions and policies which may
strengthen and shape change. In this respect, it fits well with a complexity
view of development. But to be a credible basis for a development policy,
it will need to embrace a broader understanding of how societies change
(e.g. attacking privilege, not just further liberalising markets), recognise
the need for changes in global systems and in the behaviour of rich
Owen Barder
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Perverse incentives against program innovation, risk taking, and funding for
new partners and approaches to development
The reason for most of these process and measurement requirements is the
suspicion by Washington policy makers and the counter-bureaucracy that foreign
aid does not work, wastes taxpayer money, or is mismanaged and misdirected by
field missions. These suspicions have been the impetus behind the ongoing focus
among development theorists on results.
These arguments made with particular authority by Natsios resonate strongly
with the views of the growing movement for more experimentation, adaptation and
learning. But does that mean as is often implied that it is inappropriate or
impossible to pay attention to results?
If anything, the opposite is true. All three steps in the adaptive process variation, a
fitness function and effective selection depend on an appropriate framework for
monitoring and reacting to results. Natsios himself calls for a new measurement
system. But as Ben argued last year we must ensure that the results agenda is
applied in a way which is relevant to the complex, ambiguous world in which we
live.
Results 2.0: thinking through a complexity-aware approach
A meaningful results agenda needs to take account of the diversity of development
programmes, and the need for a more experimental approach in the face of
complex problems. A good place to start is to borrow some approaches from
academia, civil society and business strategy. This work suggests that a complexityaware approach to results needs to get a better handle on need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the problem we are working on,
(b) the interventions we are implementing
(c)
This gives us three dimensions ranging from simple problems and interventions in
stable contexts through to complex interventions in diverse and dynamic contexts.
But in the complex world of development, we do not know the production function
and we cannot readily attribute progress to any particular intervention.
Furthermore, we often do not know where we are in the cube. We sometimes have
reliable evidence about the value of a particular technology (say, a nutritional
supplement or a bednet) which suggests we are down in the bottom left hand
corner of predictable and attributable results. But when we introduce the messy
reality of needing to inform people about the product, overcome resistance to
change, of managing production and distribution and creating incentives for
effective delivery, we rapidly find ourselves in a much more complex world.
So most of what we do to promote development is not in the bottom left hand
corner: our interventions operate in the world of adaptive management and
complexity. The main value of a results focus in development not squeezing greater
efficiency out of current service providers: rather it is in enabling people to
innovate, experiment, test, and adapt. The challenge here is to ensure that we
have a focus on results which supports, rather than inhibits, effective feedback
loops which promote experimentation and adaptation. This requires a new and more
innovative toolkit of methods, and most importantly an institutional and relational
framework which uses that information to drive improvement. We call this resultsenabled adaptive leadership (because it has a nice acronym: REAL).
What might results-enabled adaptive leadership look like in practice? The Center for
Global Development is currently exploring two specific ideas which we believe fit
well with an adaptive, iterative and experimental approach to development : Cash
on Delivery Aid and Development Impact Bonds.
If you believe that development is a characteristic of a complex adaptive system
then both of these ideas are attractive because:
They avoid the need for an ex ante top-down plan, log-frame, budget or
activities prescribed by donors. Because payment is linked only to results
when they are achieved, developing countries are free to experiment, learn
and adapt.
In a recent talk at USAID, Nancy Birdsall issued the following rallying cry: Its time
to stop worrying about getting what were paying for, and start paying for what we
get. This principle also underpins another initiative with which CGD is associated,
TrAiD+, which calls for the creation of a market of global results in which investors
could choose what type of projects to fund, based on results achieved. Given the
growing role of business and philanthropy in development, this approach may well
prove to be attractive to many funders.
These are examples of how a focus on results could help, rather than hinder, the
process of adaptation and experimentation in development. That does not mean
that these are the only or even the best approaches (though CGDs Arvind
Subramanian teases his colleagues for offering cash on delivery as a solution to
every problem).
Conclusion
The growing movement towards experimentation and iteration is driven by a
combination of theory and experience. Though these argument have rarely been
explicitly framed as a response to complexity, as a whole they are entirely
consistent with the view that development is an emergent property of a complex
system. We in the development community have much to learn from other fields in
which thinking about complexity is further advanced.
Many development interventions operate in the space between certainty and chaos:
the complexity zone which in which we believe that adaptive approaches are not
only effective but essential. This is often presented as a decisive argument against
results-based approaches to development. We argue that, on the contrary, a focus
on results is an indispensable feature of successful adaptive management. The
challenge is to do this in a way which avoids simplistic reductionism and promotes
an approach which focuses on outcomes rather than process, monitors progress,
and which scales up success.
We are conscious that this falls well short of a detailed blueprint for how this might
work in practice. As they say in the world of tech: that is a feature not a bug. As
Alnoor Ebrahim of Harvard University, one of the leading authorities on
development accountability, puts it: there are no panaceas to results measurement
in complex social contexts. A nuanced approach to results must be based on a
thorough assessment of the problems, interventions and contexts. Our point is that
there is no contradiction between an iterative, experimental approach and a central
place for results in decision-making: on the contrary, a rigorous and energetic focus
on results is at the heart of effective adaptation.
Consistent with our view that success is the product of adaptation and evolution of
ideas as well as institutions and networks we look forward to comments,
improvements and corrections to these ideas so that we can get past simplistic
extremes on either side and build a shared understanding of how to make this work.
This is the last in a series of three blog posts based on Owen Barders presentation
on complexity and development. The first blog post asked What is Development?.
The second blog post looked at the UK governments golden thread approach to
development through the lens of complexity.
Ben Ramalingams book, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, will be published by Oxford
University Press in 2013.
Authors:
Owen Barder
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