One thing is valuable to keep in mind when engaging in any form of support to civil society is that all governance reforms, including those needed to improve the civic space, are complex and inherently political and as such reform efforts must be led by local actors. The role of international organization, such as Global Integrity, is to support those local actors and their efforts. How? For us is through supporting adaptive learning.

I very much like your post. I think our training often lack any context awareness and rarely are designed to teach a specific skill. Training that just introduces concepts are not actually training one IN anything, particularly when we have no idea if the concept is actually relevant to the audience’s context.

Your post also brings to mind some of the work colleagues in USAID are doing. The focus is on improving an organizations fit to the local system, assuming that improving adaptiveness and connections between organizations is more useful than trying to teach best practices.

This document is illustrative: https://usaidlearninglab.org/sites/default/files/resource/files/ads_additional_help_lcd_1.13.2017.pdf
But I would just highlight this list from the Table of Contents:

Capacity Development Considerations
a. System-dependent
b. Complexity
c. Interrelationships
d. Timeframe
e. Responsiveness to change
f. Local ownership and capacity development
g. Timeframe

Lilych, I wonder whether starting with defining roles and responsibilities, introducing new approaches/technologies, etc. sets us up to get caught in the same project thinking that is ultimately unhelpful. Spending more time understanding how things actually work can help us see what is actually working (and by what logics), what’s not working and why, etc. and can help us move beyond that deficit lens that assumes ‘we’ are bringing something others lack. Similarly, matching outputs to outcomes becomes tricky. Of course, we should have a theory of how we anticipate change/outcomes might be possible in a given context, but we should accept that we often don’t know what will work. Here, I found useful a paper by Teles and Schmitt called ‘The elusive craft of evaluating advocacy,’ which demonstrates how difficult it is to match inputs and outcomes in relation to advocacy/public policy/social change. It’s a literature others might already be much more familiar with but I found it offered some interesting ideas.

Robin, as you say, avoiding the pitfalls of conventional CD in our own day-to-day is astonishingly difficult! I also find it very easy to revert to trainings or substituting capacity that, when I think about it, I know don’t really work. Maybe we need some kind of reminder/prompt on the wall above our desks that push us to sense-check this sort of defaulting thinking and make sure we’re all applying what we actually know. But I also know from my own experience that the very tangible constraints of time, budget, competing priorities, etc. can also encourage a reversion to conventional CD. Those things are harder to budge.

And Rick, thank you for that reference – I am going to go and check out that report now!

I am not as wedded to systems thinking as the silver bullet though. Prefer learning by doing approach focussed on specific problems rather than shooting for the holy grail of systemic change. In the latter, I find that you never fully understand the system as it is always changing (mainly in the informal side), and even if you could it does not mean you will know what to do to successfully chart a course leading to reform. Paralysis by analysis.

There is more thinking that could be done on why donor’s stay in the safe space of technical interventions. Partner national sovereignty and donor national interest often make strange bedfellows.

I wrote this about Globalization last year, I really think you might find it interesting. I hope you take the time to read, it was my first and only attempt at writing a satirical article: https://altmedi4.com/2016/12/16/satirical-meet-the-other-globalists-a-conspiracy-inside-a-conspiracy-inside-a-conspiracy/

Really it’s all about Rodrik’s Trilemma: pick any two from nationalism, democracy and globalisation – you can’t have all three.

That said, the post is (in my opinion) relevant as the REAL Centre is an exception to the rule. There are an awful lot of (ed) research projects out there – i.e. iPads in [add remote, impoverished area where the buildings are not electrically grounded here], which almost religiously equate activity with impact, very much to the long term detriment of the wider communities of their research subjects. In the case of the project mentioned above – which has been touring the conference circuit for a straight year and a half to much applause – any attempts at politely suggesting that TCO be taken into account are generally sniffed at and accompanied by a generic remark along the lines of “iPads are a revolutionary technology and – according to our preliminary research – we have reason to believe that they are going to transform education in country X”. This is usually followed by some OLPC bashing which completely ignores the fact that, unlike the iPad, those devices were built for dust and durability. Similarly to the iPad, the cost was generally too high/ the financial model was not sustainable (I’ve never managed to get to that point before having the mic confiscated). It is entirely possible that someone will get another research grant out of it by demonstrating an increase in learning outcomes (since the students in the pilot study went from having no books to using interactive iOS apps daily I’d say this is a given…and coincidentally so do their preliminary research findings :-)).

Unless Government Donor X and Research Institute Y intend to support said program from now until the end of time there will be an impressive collection of discussion papers, blog posts, PPT slides and frequent flyer points to show for it but no long term impact. This could have been established before the concept paper was drafted if the suggestions in the blog post above had been taken into consideration.
Unfortunately this is not an isolated example…

Best,

Benita