Institutions eat interventions for breakfast

This is what a development expert looks like

An article in the new republic has been circulating recently in the global development circles called "Stop trying to save the world--how big ideas are destroying international development." It contains a lot of useful reflections on failures in development and how certain paradigms perpetuate them.  While I agree with his analysis for the most part, I am troubled by his lack of discussion about the importance of local institutions in identifying and scaling effective strategies.

The author Michael Hobbes opens by picking on playpumps (a device like a carousel that would make providing a village's water supply literally child's play), which were a massive development fail--despite celebrity backings and the like--that will always remain a good target for mocking.  Although I should add that before we all feel good about ourselves for learning our lesson, this soccer ball that creates electricity through play is still getting coverage (even though it costs $60 and breaks pretty fast....especially if you kick it around!).

He writes, "I came out convinced that the problems with international development are real, they are fundamental, and I might, in fact, be one of them. But I also found that it’s too easy to blame the PlayPumps of the world. Donors, governments, the public, the media, aid recipients themselves—they all contribute to the dysfunction. Maybe the problem isn’t that international development doesn’t work. It’s that it can’t."

The issue that Hobbes really focuses on is evidence: how do we know that an intervention works?  Even if the research is conducted to show that student attendance benefits from deworming, does that justify scaling it up nationally?  

As he puts it: "What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket."

When is there enough proof that one can stop working about evaluation and just focus on delivery?  This is especially true at the international level; maybe students in Nicaragua would benefit from textbooks, students in India need lunch, and Kenyan students need deworming medications.  Therefore should we spent the effort, time, and money to collect research on each unique location?

Hobbes has a healthy awareness of how incredible difficult these questions are.  After discussing the limited proof from many meta-studies on the link between deworming and school attendance, he still concludes:

"There isn't time to evaluate each organization in the world meaningfully; to create the unique list of questions that incorporate its theory of change, strategy and effectiveness.  So we use these shortcuts instead.  "Overhead," the percentage of money spent on an organization's internal processes--HR, administration, etc.--has for many donors become a proxy of efficiency."

I was originally tempted to write off Hobbes' article as the same old criticism that dozens have written before, but he throws in some new insights.  For example, the unexpected consequences that elude our most sophisticated predictions:
"My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant."

In conclusion: we need to see development as the layering of many smaller, effective interventions instead of just the ONE BIG IDEA that will transform everything overnight.
Hobbes writes, "This isn’t a criticism of the projects themselves. This is how social policy works, in baby steps and trial-and-error and tweaks, not in game changers. Leave the leaps and bounds to computing power. If a 49-cent deworming treatment really does produce a $30 increase in wages for some of the poorest people on Earth, we are assholes for not spending it."

I agree with most of what Hobbes says, but it's an incomplete analysis.  What he and many others gloss over is the critical importance of the actors: WHO is choosing and delivering the intervention?  Some institutions have developed a deep understanding of communities and complex ecosystems--they can't necessary articulate all they know, but "they know it when they see it."  And a lot of the decision makers in BIG IDEA world--often sipping lattes in Washington, Seattle or New York (just to pick on a few!)--don't know it when they see it, or worse, see it when it's not there.

The idea that the development community should focus on interventions or even technologies and spot the winners is itself problematic. Donors need to get better at spotting leaders and organizations that routinely find and implement effective solutions, and support them to expand their efforts and/or find solutions to other pressing problems.  These are actually capabilities that are extremely valuable, especially when paired with the political savviness to keep stakeholders, like the national government, happy.

So don't try to say, "This is the solution," but say, "I think Institution Y is most likely to find something that works, so let's give them a shot."  Invest a bit in research and knowledge management along the way and you're likely to learn lot.  And frankly, given the cost of randomized controlled trials, this has got to be a cheaper way to go.

This requires two major shifts in conventional development thinking. The first is narrow focus on interventions, or even slightly broader "science of delivery" (which says that "how" is as important as "what"). This may work for medicine, but it doesn't work for organizations operating in the complex social systems of communities and in larger political ecosystems. There's far too many variables and interactions to try to account for.  WHO, not just what or how, is fundamentally important and probably should be the first question, not the last. Before you can worry about the last mile, you have to run the first 25.2.

Secondly--and this is perhaps the elephant in the room--development agencies need to acknowledge that they are not necessarily the smartest people in the room.  I think it's unlikely that the solutions to the problems in Karachi come from a classrom in Palo Alto.  Not impossible, but unlikely.  If we saw a health problem in Boston, wouldn't we turn local institutions like MIT and Harvard as a first source of support?  Expect leaders at Mass General to have something pretty important to say? So there needs to be much more openness to the fact that local knowledge and practical experience are REALLY valuable, potentially the most valuable skills. More so that fancy diagrams on powerpoint slides, inspiring elevator pitches, and camera-ready executive directors fresh out of design school (again just to pick on a few!).

Let's hope that 2015 has less emphasis on big ideas and more on star organizations.