Questioning Builds A Way

In the recent past, I have been increasingly interested in exploring alternative models to initiate, trigger, promote self-sustaining socio-economic change.

Sometimes, I feel that, in the world of international non-governmental and multilateral organizations, we have become so established in our own ways that we may be lacking a sense of self-critique. Some refer to us as being an industry; an industry that may be sustaining itself, having become its own raison d'être.

When engaging in a discourse on development and its practices, one quickly realizes how social and economic change dwells at the intersection of different domains: i.e., availability (or lack of) external opportunities and resources; communal histories, traditions and customs; and most importantly the personal conviction that change is innate and individuals could become something different from what they are at the present time. In other words, we partake in a historical process of co-creation.

We are incarnate beings, after all. We belong to history (and traditions) before history belongs to us. And that is the platform on which we exist and relate to each other. This is our window into the world. Yet, our needed finitude (in whatever form and shape it may manifest itself) does not completely and permanently define who we are (our being and aspirations) and what we do (our actions).

Ultimately, the question that I am entertaining lately is whether the established paradigm for international development, as practiced by most INGOs and Multilateral Organizations (i.e., the World Bank and its sister organizations, the United Nation constellation, etc.) provides an efficient and cost-effective platform to trigger and support long-term local change.

In the previous entry on this blog, I shared an insightful article from the Financial Times that suggested the need to perhaps ground social change in individual entrepreneurship, which is, in turn, the manifestation of personal agency.

This opens the door to a current and different domain of practices (which I will discuss and analyze further in subsequent postings) referred to as social entrepreneurship. For the time being, I would like to simply set the ground of this future conversation, by defining the terms and concepts.

Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of individual and societal change.

While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors. The main aim of a social entrepreneurship as well as social enterprise is to further social and environmental goals. Although social entrepreneurs are often non-profits, this need not be incompatible with making a profit. Social enterprises are for ‘more-than-profit,’ using blended value business models that combine a revenue-generating business with a social-value-generating structure or component.

Re-Examining the International-Non-Profit Model

There is an ever increasing questioning of the traditional models of development. While not all favor the pure profit approach, many argue that there is a greater role for regulated market-based approaches to global problems. If such models prevail, the question for big INGOs and international public sector institutions is how to fit into the new development landscape.

I am proposeing below a very compelling article on this topic by Sarah Murray published on the the Financial Times on May 28, 2009.

Enterprise introduces a whiff of revolution
By Sarah Murray
Published: May 27 2009

In her book Dead Aid,* Dambisa Moyo calls for the end of aid to Africa within five years. Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda – which has halved aid as a percentage of its gross domestic product in the past decade – recently argued in the Financial Times that aid creates instability and dependency while failing to reduce poverty or disease.

Ms Moyo and Mr Kagame are among those questioning traditional models of development. While not all favour the pure for-profit approach, many argue that there is a greater role for market-based approaches to global problems. If such models prevail, the question for big non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international public sector institutions is how to fit into the new development landscape.

The prospect of long-established institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) simply disappearing seems remote. And certainly, the idea of ending aid to Africa in five years is an ambitious one.
The global downturn has shown that multilateral institutions remain critical, particularly in a crisis, when they have the ability to direct massive funding flows to not only the developing world but also to mature countries. Iceland, for example, has recently been forced to accept a $10bn bail-out led by the IMF.

Nevertheless, moving rapidly into the donor agencies’ sphere is a group with very different modes of operation. They include social entrepreneurs, NGOs using market-based models and large non-profits such as the Gates Foundation. Multinationals are also recognising that they can help foster economic development while turning a profit.

Some organisations are using innovative approaches: in India, a pay-per-use model is how the Byrraju Foundation is delivering clean water to 850,000 people in the state of Andhra Pradesh. If 500 households buy one 12-litre container of water per day, the filtration plants cover their costs, according to a study by Monitor Group, a US consultancy.**

Meanwhile, multinational businesses are joining the battle against poverty and disease. Companies such as Exxon Mobil have become significant forces in combating malaria while in India, Hindustan Unilever’s Shakti programme expands both rural incomes and its market penetration by training village women to distribute its products.
“Business and society have to go through this utterly profound management transformation to move away from a few people running everyone else,” says Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka the pioneering social entrepreneurship non-profit. “Because that model can’t function in a world with rapid change coming from all directions.”

In contrast to the more nimble social entrepreneurs, organisations such as the World Bank and the UN can seem lumbering and out of touch. Some believe this stems from outdated management processes and sprawling bureaucratic structures.
A report*** from the Low Level Panel – a network of volunteers working for UN reform – found that a whistleblower policy for UN Secretariat staff reporting irregularities took more than 16 months to agree, even though the Secretary-General described it as high priority.
The report highlights other problems. “We were told that new administrative staff wishing to join the United Nations Development Programme must demonstrate their prowess on a typewriter, and complete tests in manual arithmetic,” write the authors.

Others point to a lack of entrepreneurial culture within some institutions. “There is a danger that all innovation in the field is coming from outside the traditional donor agencies,” says Raj Kumar, president of Devex, a recruitment and business information service for the international development community. “People feel constrained and unwilling to develop new ideas or new projects.”

Gavin Power, deputy director of the Global Compact, the UN’s corporate citizenship network, argues that part of the problem is the highly-centralised management of many institutions. “Too often the large multilaterals have top-down approaches and have designed things in New York or Washington DC,” he says. “The shift needs to be towards more locally designed solutions.
There is evidence that this is happening. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, is re-shaping the “colonial model” Dorothy Berry, the IFC’s head of human resources, says governed the institution in the past. “That is an outmoded concept,” she says. “The challenging but really exciting part is how we remain an agile flexible organisation that can support our clients in a rapidly changing environment.

“To do so, the IFC has been stepping up recruitment efforts within client countries by, for example, targeting business-school graduates in countries such as India and China. “We are making a big attempt to become a truly global organisation – rather than one that is Washington-centric with outposts in different countries,” says Ms Berry.

Some institutions are also recognising their potential convening role in market-led initiatives. This is something the United Nations Development Programme is doing through its Growing Sustainable Business initiative. The idea behind the GSB is that the UNDP can broker partnerships between companies and NGOs or local government agencies to accelerate the provision of goods, services and employment in poor countries.

In Africa, one of the GSB partnerships – between Unilever, the consumer products group, and social and environmental institutions – is developing the Allanblackia tree into a new crop that will be a supplementary source of oil for Unilever products as well as an additional income stream for farmers who have traditionally relied on cocoa.

Meanwhile, the World Bank, through its Development Marketplace, is promoting social enterprise through a competitive grant programme that funds early-stage projects with the potential for development impact. It is seeking proposals, for example, from organisations in South Asia to help deliver nutrition to pregnant women, babies and children under the age of two.

However, Mr Kumar argues that global public sector organisations need to integrate this kind of approach into the way they operate. “[Development Marketplace] is one of a few examples,” he says. “And it seems to be a separate entity from the rest of the bank instead of mainstreaming that culture in every operation of the bank.”
Mr Kumar suggests that donor agencies could give local units access to relatively small sums of money to develop innovative pilot projects in partnership with social entrepreneurs or non-profits. “They should have the ability to write a cheque for $50,000 without going through 10 audit committees,” he says.

Creating “teams of teams” within large organisations Mr Drayton sees as one way forward for multilateral institutions. “The team is either a success or failure,” he says. “But if it succeeds, the people on it are then on a career path, running project teams as opposed to trying to run a 19th century repetitive function bureaucracy – the world doesn’t work that way any more.”

*‘Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa’, Dambisa Moyo, Allen Lane, January 2009

**Emerging Markets, Emerging Models: Monitor Group, March 2009

***Low Level Panel: Practical steps to a more effective and efficient United Nations

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Effective Development Needs to Enter Existential Sphere

The discourse and practices around sustainable development cannot be limited to the boundaries of neo-classical economics or the promises of technological transfer. To make individual and communal development effective and complete, we need to enter the sphere of existential meaning and belief systems.

If the work in development were to be stripped of any reference or space for existential reflection on one's belonging to a communal experience, history, culture, tradition and ultimately beliefs and ethics, it would deny the transcendental and ethical dimension of human experience and, consequently, loose its grounding.

Debates around the need to refound the economic and financial foundations of society have mushroomed lately, sparked, perhaps, by the devastating flaws of the current systems and principles.

I am reporting below on a debate that caught my attention. It was first published by the Italian scholar and journalist Sandro Magister on June 6, 2009 (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it).

The scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, in a pivotal 1967 essay, presented what was later called the Böckenförde paradox: the thesis according to which "the secularized liberal state lives by presuppositions that it cannot guarantee."

On January 19, 2004, then-cardinal Raztinger and philosopher Jürgen Habermas used this thesis as the starting point for a debate in Munich on the theme "Ethics, religion, and the liberal state."

So, in an article for Süddeutsche Zeitung, also published in Italy in May 2009 by the journal Il Regno, Böckenförde applied his paradox to capitalism as well, but in much more devastating terms.

In his judgment, the principles on which the capitalist economic system is founded can no longer stand. Its current collapse is definitive, and has revealed the inhuman foundations of this system. The economy must therefore be rebuilt from the ground up, not on principles of egoism, but of solidarity. It is up to the states, and European countries in the first place, to take control of the economy. And it is up to the Church, with its social doctrine, to accept the testimony of Marxism, who saw correctly.

Böckenförde's anticapitalist "manifesto" brought reaction, in Italy, from some prominent economists such as Luigi Campiglio, vice president of the Catholic University of Milan; Dario Antiseri, a philosopher and follower of the liberal economic school of Vienna; Flavio Felice, a professor at the Pontifical Lateran University and president of the Tocqueville-Acton study center; Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a banker and economic commentator for L'Osservatore Romano.

In particular, Antiseri objects that "restoring Marx today is like continuing to be Ptolemaic after Copernicus and Newton"; that "individualism is the opposite of collectivism, not of solidarism, and this is possible only if there is the creation of wealth to be shared, as takes place in capitalist societies"; and finally that Benedict XVI cannot be expected to distance himself from "Centesimus Annus" by John Paul II and from "Rerum Novarum" by Leo XII, with its "lucid and impassioned defense of private property."

Flavio Felice contests Böckenförde's unrealistic vision of an "angelic economy" as an alternative to a capitalism that is identified with pure lust for gain. And regarding the salvific control of the state over the economy, he points out that the encyclical "Centesimus Annus" by John Paul II, in paragraph 25, warns against precisely this danger: "When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a 'secular religion' which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world."

Ettore Gotti Tedeschi observes that Böckenförde lashes out against a capitalism of Protestant origin, dominated by man's egoism and inability to do good. But he does not realize that there is a capitalism in keeping with Catholic doctrine, which the popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II have denounced for its errors while appreciating its basic validity, linked to private property and freedom of investment and commerce.

In an article in Il Sole 24 Ore – Europe's most widely circulated financial newspaper – Gotti Tedeschi maintained that the current global turbulence does not arise from excessive greed or the lack of rules. These have aggravated the crisis, but did not cause it. The real cause was the reduction of the birth rate, and therefore of the human capital that alone was capable of ensuring the necessary growth in production.

The frontal attack that Böckenförde brings against capitalism must in any case come to terms with the answer that "Centesimus Annus," in paragraph 42, gives to the question of whether capitalism is a system that corresponds to "true economic and civil progress."

The answer of the encyclical is the following:

"If by 'capitalism' is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a business economy, market economy or simply free economy."

In his article, the German scholar asks the social doctrine of the Church to awaken from its "Sleeping Beauty slumber" and apply itself to a "radical refutation" of capitalism, made obligatory by its current "evident collapse."

From the Financial Times: Governments struggle to assess aid effectively

Sir, After the heated rhetoric on FT.com   from such eminent experts as Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterley about Dambiso Moyo’s book, Dead Aid, Mo Ibrahim is to be congratulated for restoring sober thought and analysis to the debate about the value of aid (“Good governance will bolster African aid”, May 28.)

His points that Ms Moyo’s proposed solutions may not be realistic and that aid alone cannot be either the solution to or the cause of Africa’s problems are well-taken.

However, like Ms Moyo and Messrs Sachs and Easterley, he seems to treat aid as fundamentally different from the other sources of development finance that African countries utilise. It is not. Like these other sources – for example international capital markets, foreign direct investors, remittances etc – it entails both costs and benefits.

This means that, like them, there will be some occasions when aid, despite its costs, will be the best source of finance for the particular purpose, and some situations in which it will be an inappropriate source. Identifying the most desirable times for utilising aid requires governments to dispassionately assess both the explicit and implicit costs and benefits associated with the offers of aid that they have received, and of the alternatives to those offers. It also requires negotiating the best possible deal with the chosen source of funds.

Unfortunately, some governments do not do this, either because of governance problems, as Mr Ibrahim suggests, or because they lack the resources required to make the necessary assessment and to negotiate effectively with their counterparts. This failure can be remedied if the relevant government officials are provided with the technical knowledge and resources needed to undertake this analysis and negotiation exercise, and are reminded that it is possible, and sometimes desirable, to decline offers of aid – just as they might decline offers from the private sector or from non-governmental organisations.

It would be a fortunate result of the debate on aid, which Ms Moyo’s book has stimulated and your newspaper has promoted, if Mr Ibrahim and all the experts who have participated in this debate were to contribute to assisting African governments to become more discriminating in their assessment of aid proposals, and more effective in their negotiations with their aid donors.

By Daniel D. Bradlow, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Not the Average Cup of Tea

International Aid during Economic Hardship

Institutional Learning and Practice: Some Preliminary Thoughts

The concept of learning organization is not a new one. It flourished in the 1990s, stimulated by Peter M. Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and countless other publications. The result was a compelling vision of an organization made up of individuals skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge to their daily practices. These people could help their organizations cultivate tolerance, foster open discussion, and think holistically and systemically. Such learning organizations would be able to adapt to the unpredictable and changing environment more quickly, more effectively, and more efficiently than their competitors could.

Unpredictability is and will very much still be with us. However, the ideal of the learning organization has not yet been realized. Some factors have impeded progress:
• First, many of the early and current discussions about learning organizations were praises to a possible better world rather than implementable procedures and actions. They lacked a sense of pragmatism and the ability to translate them into concrete steps necessary for moving forward.
• Second, the concept was aimed at CEOs and senior executives rather than at an organization-wide culture and practice to which every and each individual could partake and contribute.
• Third, there has been a lack of process and outcome indicators and other tools by which change could be assessed overtime. Thus managers of smaller departments and units, where critical organizational work is done, had no way of assessing how their teams’ learning was contributing to the organization as a whole. Further, the lack of standards and tools for assessing lead to claim progress without delving into the particulars or comparing themselves accurately with others or with the set goals.


In the strategy of the organization where I work, we state that we intend to be “known for the quality of [its] work with children, which is rooted in a deep understanding of children’s experiences of deprivation, exclusion and vulnerability.” Such recognition [brand], we want to found on demonstrable and accurately assessed results of the impact of our work.

Our institution embraces as its core intent and primary objective a rich and complex task: the holistic growth and promotion of children to become agents of their own development, and – as they enter adulthood – to the development of their communities and future generations. Such an ambitious and demanding task requires a twofold approach:
• a continued, accurate and comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness and efficiencies of our deliverables in the field;
• which ought to be linked to an ongoing comprehensive organization-wide reflected learning and system analysis to increase our knowledge, understanding, efficiencies translated in very practical and usable ways.

The practical challenge we are facing seems to be as how best we can bring together facts and personal learning as primary information sources, in order to collectively make sense of what they mean and then translate the results into a greater capacity to be agile. In other words, how we can we transform information into organizational change in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our deliverables in the field. In both the private and the non-profit sector, the term organizational learning has arguably become a metaphor for managing change – which may retain even greater relevance in our context given its nature and complexity.

Organizational research over the past two decades has revealed three broad factors that are essential for organizational learning and adaptability: a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes and practices, and leadership behavior that provides reinforcement.

A supportive learning environment: some preliminary observations

To learn, individuals [as well as children or youth] cannot fear being judged or marginalized when they disagree with peers or authority figures, ask naive questions, own up to mistakes, or present a minority viewpoint. Instead, they must be comfortable expressing their thoughts about the work at hand.

Learning occurs when people become aware of opposing ideas. Recognizing the value of competing functional outlooks and alternative worldviews increases energy and motivation, sparks fresh thinking, and prevents lethargy and drift.

Learning is not simply about correcting mistakes and solving problems. It is also about crafting novel approaches. Employees should be encouraged to take risks and explore the untested and unknown.

Time for reflection. When people are too busy or overstressed by deadlines and scheduling pressures, however, their ability to think analytically and creatively is compromised. They become less able to diagnose problems and learn from their experiences. Supportive learning environments allow time for a pause in the action and encourage thoughtful review of the organization’s processes.

Concrete learning processes and practices: some preliminary observations

A learning organization is not cultivated effortlessly. It arises from a series of concrete steps and widely distributed activities, not unlike the workings of business processes such as logistics, billing, order fulfillment, and product development. Learning processes involve the generation, collection, interpretation, and dissemination of information and understanding. They include experimentation to develop and test new products and services; intelligence gathering to keep track of competitive, customer, and technological trends; disciplined analysis and interpretation to identify and solve problems; and education and training to develop both new and established employees.

Leadership that reinforces learning: some preliminary observations

Organizational learning is strongly influenced by the behavior of leaders at all levels. When leaders actively question and listen to colleagues—and thereby prompt dialogue and debate—people in the institution feel encouraged to learn. If leaders signal the importance of spending time on problem identification, knowledge transfer, and reflective post-audits, these activities are likely to flourish.

Organizations are not monolithic: some preliminary observations

Managers must be sensitive to differences among departmental processes and behaviors as they strive to build learning organizations. Groups may vary in their focus or learning maturity. Managers need to be especially sensitive to local cultures of learning, which can vary widely across units.

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Sources

Garvin, D.
1993 Building a Learning Organization. Harvard Business Review.

Garvin, D., Edmondson, A., Gino, F.
2008 Is Yours a Learning Organization? Harvard Business Review.

Herda, E.
1999 Research Conversations and Narrative: A Critical Hermeneutic Orientation in Participatory Inquiry. Wesport and London: Praeger.

Senge, P.
1990 The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. New York: Double Day.
2006 The Necessary Revolution: How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world. New York: Double Day.

Spear, S.
2004 Learning to Lead at Toyota. Harvard Business Review.