Q&A: Oxfam advisor urges NGOs to grow 'curious'

In Canberra on Tuesday, discussions of development turned to questions of change, as Duncan Green, senior strategic advisor for Oxfam Great Britain, launched his new book, “How Change Happens.”

The book, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and available as open access, provides insight into approaches that can lead to sustainable change in developing countries — something that requires a shift in the sometimes linear and short-sighted programming of aid and development today.

Prior to a seminar at the Australian National University as part of the launch, Devex sat down with Green to discuss challenges facing the development sector on making change in times of increasing financial and political uncertainty. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In conducting your research for this book, what literature and research was available on change-making in the development sphere?

The book emerged from a lot of other work and research I have done over the years. I started to recognize repeated patterns on how change happens both at large and small scale — the same pattern of shocks, windows of opportunity and critical junctures leading to change at global scale. From world wars down to the village level, where a small conflict will trigger a social change process.

Understanding power and thinking about systems emerges organically from writing about different change processes.

My background is more in advocacy than in long-term development, but I was seeing similar stories in the other fields, so I thought it was worth exploring whether there was enough in common for it to be worth thinking about.

The development sector works in a range of political, economic and social conditions and programs. Are there strategies all can use to enable lasting and sustainable change?

I think of it a bit like an earthquake. You need to think about the pressures that build up in the earth’s crust and then the triggers that produce the earthquake.

People tend to think of either the pressures or the triggers, but it is the combination of the two that enables lasting change. You need long, slow changes in social norms, attitudes to women or people with disabilities, and this needs to be combined with an event to precipitate change that looks like it comes from nowhere. Development workers need to understand how the two interweave.

The other thing that needs to be considered is how often change takes place when people who don’t often talk to each other — unusual suspects and awkward allies — find a reason to work together. That’s really interesting to watch and see how it triggers change.

Sometimes in the NGO sector we tend to just talk to each other. And that’s a mistake.

In terms of creating both pressures and triggers, what do you think NGOs are good at, and what should they be considering to enable both?

We had a really interesting discussion about this in Oxfam recently. Because of the events of the last year, we were questioning whether we should be thinking long-term about the social norms, and how people see outsiders to influence the pressures.

If an NGO were going to work on targeting the social norms, they would need to consider when people form their social norms. This is generally by the age of seven, but who helps formulate them? Parents, often mothers, faith organizations, early year educators. But NGOs have the flimsiest connections to these kinds of groups. We would have to completely revise how we work if you took this idea seriously.

So I think NGOs are not good at the pressures, and we’ve been blindsided by recent political events because we have ignored targeting long-term social norms in programs. What NGOs are good at is triggering change through advocacy and relatively short programs.

The recommendations I make for change in my book first require us to look at systems and power.

In complex systems, you can’t predict what is going to happen and that puts the traditional linear program planning into doubt. The book says that in order to work in these complex systems we need to be more curious, and want to dance with the system. That means a lot more curiosity about local politics and what is happening within communities, and requires us to give more power to local and younger staff.

The second thing we need to do is get much more systematic about the nature, distribution and renegotiation of power. I draw the comparison with the part of the film The Matrix where Neo can see the matrix. For NGOs, power is the underlying force field of development, and when you can see it — and who has it — this can enhance the ability to design an intervention that works within the setting.

NGOs and aid programs are being encouraged to take more risks in delivering programs. In “dancing with the system” would you encourage trial, error and riskier programming to see what works?

There is a lot of very interesting stuff happening in the aid world at the moment. For example, USAID has rewritten its procurement guidelines to say to all implementing partners: “You will be adaptive.” And this is across the whole of USAID.

There is also an interesting coalition called Doing Development Differently which says NGOs need to be politically smart and locally led to design interventions.

And new research is encouraging institutional reform through problem-driven iterative adaptation, essentially helping find local answers to define the problem, test small solutions and iteratively build up what might work best to bring about reform.

Although there are a lot of interesting initiatives happening in aid, it is worrying that they may have the rug pulled out from under them by rising public and political skepticism about aid.

To counter the public and political skepticism, are there different strategies for NGOs to consider in creating change at home to build support for foreign aid?

Political realism says you need to shore up public support for aid. But how do you do that?

The polling we have done suggests that saying “it is good for British business,” for example, doesn’t resonate with the public at all: They think this sounds grimy, and they want to know how we are helping poor people.

If this strategy has not been based on evidence of public opinion, then who is this “Britain First” or “America First” strategy aimed at? Perhaps it is the clever lobbying of companies that aim to benefit from getting their snout in the aid trough.

On the other hand, if you want to shore up long-term support for aid, you should be looking at the social norms, and making the broader humanitarian case for aid which requires a different language and narrative to the risk averse and scared tone we are currently seeing.

I’m struck by the way Australia has a leading aid agency in terms of thinking about fragile states and arguing that aid leads to regional stability. Focusing on reforming failed institutions and working politically to create stability is doing aid differently. The focus is on areas where we know least about systems, and bringing new ideas to create change. Australia is a stronger country for putting national interests first and ensuring the country is not surrounded by a region that is permanently in chaos.  

It was that part of the Australian aid program, in fact, that funded my book.

On your visit to Australia you are speaking with the research sector about your book. Is there enough engagement between research and on the ground development to better enable change?

At first sight you would think collaborations between the two sectors would be a no-brainer. Practitioners have boots on the grounds, which academics don’t have — and academics have very good rigour, methodology and an ability to establish the facts. Combining the two ought to be a marriage made in heaven, but it is often quite dysfunctional.

The incentive systems within academia are long-term, based around career development through publication in specialist journals, and academics are very risk averse in terms of reputation. Practitioners are very impatient. Many are skeptical that there is an external truth out there that can be determined, and are often driven by fad and shift to prominent issues or ideas.

It has worked where you have hybrids that can move between the two worlds, where there is a shared task, or where academics are working on someone else’s agenda.

The Asia Foundation, for example, received funding from DFAT to find academics to accompany their advocacy programs in 14 countries. The idea was that academics would be a fly on the wall and come in every few months to provide feedback on how the work was progressing. And it has worked — they have found common ground and a rhythm. Real-time accompaniment has real potential and it is something we are looking at more in Oxfam.

How do you think the move towards greater engagement of the private sector and wider collaboration in aid programs facilitates creating sustainable change in developing countries?

There is an increasing focus on multi-stakeholder engagement programs, and some of them are pointless while others are useful. We’re beginning to learn which is which.

One thing you need for them to work is an agreed, shared, specific problem that you are trying to solve.

Getting a group together to share ideas is a terrible way to spend an afternoon. Gathering people to crack labour standards in Bangladesh is useful. A specific problem with a broad range of stakeholders, not just NGOs, can start the process of change.

Following on from this book, what are the next steps for research or testing to building strategies and models in development for lasting change?

There is a whole body of thinking, which the book is just a component of, telling NGOs to be agile and move forward systematically and iteratively. It is a much better approach that trying to predict everything in advance.

What the task ought to be now is to find out if any of this works and where it works. That means real-time research that has no clear end goal. And this experiment needs to occur in a range of settings — development, advocacy, humanitarian, fragile states and non-fragile states.  We need to get out there and watch what happens.

And it all needs to be open access — just like my book.

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