How one UK government fund tracks its influence in fragile countries

LONDON — Whether negotiating access to a community or gaining the trust of local powerbrokers, diplomacy is often essential for groups working in conflict-affected and fragile places. But measuring the success of those efforts can be hard to quantify, particularly in unpredictable and fast-changing environments. It is a problem that led the United Kingdom’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund to develop a Political Access and Influence tool. First developed for use in East Africa, the tool has since been adopted by regional CSSF teams around the world. “Politics is inevitably part of the context in which any program is developed and delivered,” said Christian Dennys, head of CSSF. “Therefore understanding that context is really important to understand whether you are having the effects that you want to achieve.” CSSF is a cross-government fund, established in 2015, which mixes official development assistance and non-ODA money to tackle instability and prevent conflicts that threaten U.K. interests. It has 90 programs in 70 countries, including those experiencing protracted conflicts and crises, such as Iraq and Somalia. The tool was “born of the CSSF’s need to be responsive to complexity in these very fragile settings [where] ... there’s a lot of different actors and perspectives,” said Angela Christie, technical lead for CSSF’s global monitoring, evaluation, and learning partner. Building relationships and understanding what motivates people helps navigate these environments, Christie added. “The Political Access and Influence tool ... tries to capture the evidence of how change really happens in that complexity,” she explained. The tool was developed by Itad, a development contractor and CSSF’s monitoring, evaluation and learning partner in East Africa. David Fleming, project director for Itad’s CSSF work in the region, said that to tackle issues embedded in local power structures and dynamics, a statistically informed approach was necessary. “It’s important to understand who are the key individuals or groups who have power or agency in a particular context, and what are their interests and motivations … Having political access provides entry points for engagement and influence on key decisions,” he said. After researching political access and influence and producing a theory of change, a “simple framework” was developed by the team and piloted on a few programs before being refined based on the feedback. “Where the tool helps us is to think through that journey from the beginning of an intervention through its delivery, about whether an intervention is likely to have [broad] outcomes.” --— Christian Dennys, head, CSSF One example of its use was in demonstrating how political access and influence shaped CSSF’s mutual legal assistance program in Kenya. The program saw a criminal justice adviser from the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service deployed to Kenya to improve legal procedures, building up relationships with key officials. “That provided a strong foundation for that capability building for … cooperation between the U.K. and Kenya around criminal prosecutions and other outcomes,” Fleming said. He added: “Benefits to Kenya … were significantly enabled by the strong access and influence that were carried by that advisor over the years.” While the policy impact of this project was measured according to the regulatory changes achieved, prior to this stage, winning “buy-in and attitudinal change and then a meaningful action” from key individuals is crucial, according to Christie. “The PAI frame was really just capturing the value of that relationship building between governments and between peers, and how that leads to individuals who have agency making decisions that are aligned and meaningful,” she said. The tool is used for planning and monitoring projects, or as a training tool to assess the importance of certain relationships or to envision what good access might look like. A simplified version can be used by embedded advisers to identify who they want to access and work with to meet their objectives, Christie added. What counts as meaningful “access” may vary in different contexts: Sometimes it simply involves an adviser initiating contact with a person or group; in other more established relationships, it could mean regularly seeking them out for advice, according to Christie. The tool measures influence as a “growing commitment to shared objectives and … demonstrable attitudinal change, where people begin to influence others themselves in terms of shared objectives,” she continued. The goal is to show how access and influence can be an enabler for programs, according to Fleming. Meanwhile, Jennifer Stuttle, monitoring and evaluation adviser for the Middle East and North Africa with CSSF, said her team used it as a “safe space with partners to look at what we are trying to achieve … in more of a process, conversation or structuring [mechanism] … and less of a rigid tool.” The tool’s approach could be especially useful for NGOs embedded in fragile environments that still need to report results, to think about how unpredictable circumstances can impact their programming, Christie suggested. But it will never be entirely comprehensive, Dennys admitted. “Where the tool helps us is to think through that journey from the beginning of an intervention through its delivery, about whether an intervention is likely to have [broad] outcomes ... and also begin to help us evidence those outcomes as we begin to see the results of that activity over time.” Dennys added that the next iteration of CSSF would “engage more of these processes in a much more systematic way across the fund, which will hopefully explain these types of outcomes” more clearly.