Duncan Green's Blog, page 77

How did the Randomistas get so good at influencing Policy?

phenomenally successful snake oil salesmen and women, persuading large chunks of Big Aid to adopt their approach to what constitutes evidence and truthiness. If you want to learn how they did it, try reading their 3 part blog post from Innovations for Policy Action (IPA), one of the main RCT thinktanks, introducing their 2025 strategy, with a particular focus on ‘co-creating’ research with the institutions and people that you are seeking to influence and doing that right from the start.

Two things caught my eye: their Theory of Action, and their guide to deciding how to prioritize among all the potential avenues for influence. The Theory of Action pays more attention than previously to the demand side – helping policy makers use the evidence you are churning out, summarized in the lower rows of this table:

Choosing what to prioritize means identifying issues that tick all 4 blobs in the diagram.

A body of evidence to build on:One single study doesn’t often present the best policy opportunities. This is a generalization, of course, and there are exceptions, but typically our policy teams pay the most attention to bodies of evidence that are coming to a consensus. These are the opportunities for which we feel most able to recommend next steps related to policy and practice—there is a clearer message to communicate and research conclusions we can state with greater confidence.
Relationships to open doors: Our long-term in-country presence and deep involvement with partners through research projects means that we have many relationships and doors open to us. Yet some of these relationships are stronger than others, and some partners are more influential in the processes we want to impact. We use stakeholder mapping tools to clarify who is invested and who has influence. We also track our stakeholder outreach to make sure our relationships stay strong and mutually beneficial.
A concrete decision or process that we can influence: This is the typical understanding of a “policy opening,” and it’s an important one. What are the partner’s priorities, felt needs, and open questions? Where do those create opportunities for our influence? If the evidence would indicate one course of action, but that course isn’t even an option our partner would consider or be able to consider (for cost or other practical reasons), we have to give the opportunity a pass.
Implementation funding: In the countries where we work, even when we have strong relationships, strong evidence, and the partner is open to influence, there is still one crucial ingredient missing: implementation funding. Addressing this constraint means getting evidence-based programming onto the agenda of major donors.

Thoughts?

 

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What Brits say v What they mean: a handy translation guide

The BBC was kind enough to link to one of my posts this weekend – cue big bump in traffic. Unsurprisingly, it was not some worthy discussion of adaptive management, or research for impact, but a funny: A handy guide for our fellow Europeans, and others trying to fathom weaselly Brit-speak, first published in 2011.

Seems particularly relevant to the nightmare negotiations in the months to come, and I assume a lot of you weren’t reading this blog in 2011, so there seems no harm in a bit of recycling.

Nicholas Pialek (now at WaterAid) first sent it to me, but it was one of those internet memes, and we could not identify its origins – if anyone can say who first wrote it, I would be more than happy to credit them.

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Book Review: A Savage Order, by Rachel Kleinfeld

Rachel Kleinfeld is speaking in London tomorrow (Thursday 17th January) from 17.30-19.00. Book here

In A Savage Order, Rachel Kleinfeld casts an unflinching eye on the many ways in which human beings physically hurt each other at a societal level. Not just war, but the much more ubiquitous everyday violence that springs from political and social breakdown, or organized crime. More positively, she seeks to understand and draw lessons from those countries/regions that have turned things around, moving from high to at least moderate levels of violence – including contemporary cases like Georgia, Colombia, Sicily and Bihar, along with some extraordinarily violent chapters of US history. She compares these with similar places that stayed bloody:

‘I delved into why Naples remained Mafia-ridden while Sicily’s mob was cowed. I contrasted Colombia with Mexico to understand why the latter remained rent by bloodshed while the former was able to end the world’s longest-running war. In the United States, the ‘Wild West’ became safe a few decades after the Civil War. Why did the South become more violent as war receded, and why is it still the most violent part of the US today?’

The resulting book is a brilliant combination of academic rigour, fascinating case studies and fine writing. She summarizes her conclusions in five ‘guiding ideas’:

Violence as a Governing Strategy: Democracies become engulfed by violence in two situations. One when states are too weak to enforce order. The other when politicians abdicate the monopoly of force and collude with violent groups to maintain power.’ She calls this state of complicity ‘privilege violence’ and concludes that it often spirals out of elite control and triggers a blood-soaked genie that is very hard to put back in the bottle. ‘Violence that began with the state saturates society.’ In Sicily, a Mafioso explained ‘Bandits, police and mafia are one and the same, like Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’
Societies Decivilize and Recivilize: When people lose trust in their governments and fellow citizens, violence becomes normalized and impunity grows.
The Middle Class is the Fulcrum of Change: the middle class rouses only when its sense of invulnerability breaks, but at that point they can break good or break bad – pushing politicians to end violence, or demanding greater repression to bring an illusory ‘peace of the graveyard’. It takes the right kind of leadership to make sure they choose the former path.
Governments need Dirty Deals, Centralization and Surveillance. You can’t reverse decivilization by playing nice. ‘Pragmatic leaders must make peace treaties and offer amnesties to the worst violent groups to buy the bureaucracy time to repair’. But the kind of hyper-energetic bully who can drive through reforms in a fractured system all too easily becomes an authoritarian nightmare (like Georgia’s Saakashvili). ‘The leaders who pull their countries out of violence often become reformers and transgressors, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’
States and Societies Recivilize together. Social movements play a vital role in preventing reformers turning into tyrants, making sure the initial crackdown is followed by a return to civilization. Great quote from Abraham Lincoln: ‘with public sentiment, nothing can fail, without it, nothing can succeed.’

Mikheil Saakashvili: Jekyll or Hyde?

This all has serious implications for policy at national and international level. For a start, she sees the key to ending violence as a combination of ‘morally murky’ Dirty Deals and mobilizing the Middle Class – neither of those are to be found in the international development script, eg the Sustainable Development Goals. She is very direct on this: ‘Activists can remain untainted by compromise, or they can win.’

She is an unabashed fan of reformist leaders – the chapter on Politicians is a particularly good reformer’s handbook:

‘Effective politicians need vision, a commitment to reform and strong management skills. But they also need the moral flexibility to undertake Dirty Deals to fight violence. And they must rely on their personal energy and direct accountability to rebuild a government that earns the citizens’ trust.’

The way such reformers succeed is by blowing up the status quo, not tweaking it:

‘In countries that have a predatory elite, the incremental model doesn’t work. It takes massive change on many fronts simultaneously to disarm entrenched interests long enough for reformers to gain a foothold.’

The reformer’s repertoire needs to include quick wins (to build morale and momentum) and a keen grasp of the political importance of symbolism – building the gondolas to connect Medellin’s shanty towns with the city centre; arresting a few of the big fish to show that things really have changed.

As for outsiders, she sees a limited but important role in 3 areas: help the middle class awaken and organize, eg through education; support the ‘Dirty Deals’ but make sure they transform into legitimate governments (some very astute advice on designing such deals to make sure they end up somewhere good); and put the North’s own house in order on areas like illicit capital flows, aid and trade.

Here’s her conclusion:

‘There is nothing inevitable about a country caught in Privilege Violence finding its way to relative security. It’s a stumbling, staggering journey, not an elevator ride. Many countries have yet to take the first steps. Courageous leaders and equally brave followers have to decide that they are willing to put themselves in danger to seek better lives for themselves and their countrymen. Pragmatic movements must team up with flawed, self-interested politicians. Savvy politicians must craft deals with terrible, violent individuals, bargains that are necessary and yet leave blood on their hands. Where governments grow repressive, a new round of citizen protests is needed to right the ship.’

Powerful arguments, riveting case studies, rigorous scholarship, great writing – a brilliant combination.

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Africa in 2019: 7 trends to watch, by Apollos Nwafor

Pan African Director:

‘There are several issues that put Africa in focus this year:

Reform at the African Union: The reforms agreed by the heads of state at the extraordinary meeting in November 2018 highlight a shift in the political governance and funding of the AU. The reduction in the commission’s leadership to 6 and the commitment to retaining Africa’s top talent, gender parity, accountable and effective leadership as well as transparency raises the hope that we will begin to see more progressive policies that are pro-poor and deliver better for the continent. This is further strengthened by the financing reforms, which will see the AU being financed by its member states rather than by external aid agencies.

Economy: The dismal performance of some of Africa’s largest economies in 2018 does not inspire confidence for this year. Nigeria has endured a questionable slow recovery from a recession caused by falling oil prices, as has Angola. South Africa entered recession for the first time in a decade. However, the year countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Ivory Coast achieved growth of over 4% in 2018 promise to become more inclusive in sectors such as health and education. We look towards seeing more mid-economies rise this year, with most of them within West and Southern Africa. As economies grow, it is remains important that we continue to advocate for inclusive economic growth and that African countries prioritize the effective utilisation of its domestic resources to deliver for its citizens.

DRC: But which one?

Politics and democratic governance: More than a dozen national elections will be held across Africa in 2019.  Africa’s democracy is facing some of its biggest tests. Countries to watch are Nigeria, Tunisia, Guinea Bissau, Libya and South Africa. They present hot spots for possible unrest and election-related violence, which will have a particular impact on women and girls. This year has begun with tensions and pockets of violence in DRC due to the elections. Sadly, it is aggravating the already fragile situation in the country from the Ebola outbreak, which is increasing despite efforts by external aid agencies including Oxfam. There are reports that in Eastern Congo, one of the most notorious armed groups has increased its acts of use of rape and sexual violence against women and girls – a report which the government has denied. As I was writing this, the electoral commission has just declared Felix Tshisekedi as the winner of the 2018 elections but the Catholic Church and some observers have challenged the results, raising tensions and possible outbreaks of violence. In the past few days there was a failed coup attempt in Gabon, reflecting the growing unrest within the country.

As elections are part of the democratic process, they also present an opportunity to improve Africa’s dream of self-reliance, peace and inclusive democratic governance.  This further raises the call for strengthening civic space, human and peoples’ rights in the continent. Our role as facilitators and conveners cannot be overemphasised here.

There are ongoing political reforms in a number of countries across the continent. These include possible constitutional reforms in Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Cameroun and the referendum in Libya. In Ethiopia, the political reforms are revolutionary and breath-taking in nature putting the ruling coalition under strain. It is one country to watch this year given its leading role in fighting Al-shabab and its strategic role in IGAD and the South Sudan peace process. But the Inter-communal tensions that have been flaring in Ethiopia since 2017 and the increasing demand for autonomy by the sub-regions raise lots of concerns.

Peace and Security: While there were concerted efforts to bring peace to South Sudan in 2018, there seems to be donor fatigue for the process, after at least 6 failed peace deals – the current deal has very little to show so far in terms of implementation. South Sudan remains one of our key focus areas in 2019 as we engage with Civil Society organisations in the country advocating for inclusive peace. In Nigeria, the tension between the locals in the oil rich Nigeria Delta and the federal government has increased over the government’s failure to fulfil its promise to clean up the oil pollution and increase social investments and infrastructure in the region. This is in addition to the ongoing Boko Haram terror. Ethiopia has had pockets of violence and conflicts over land in 2017, which have not abated. The situation in Somalia seems to have taken a new turn, with the government declaring the UN Secretary General’s special envoy Nicholas Haysom persona non-grata, accusing him of interfering in the internal affairs of the country. Other hotspots in 2019 include Cameroun, South Africa, Gabon, DRC and Mozambique, all of which we will continue to monitor closely.

Civic Space: The increase in the number of laws and policies closing and shifting civic space remains a huge threat to voice and public accountability. The ongoing clamp down on fundamental rights and freedom of association and expression in Nigeria, Niger, Uganda, Mozambique, Cameroun and Rwanda, as well as the upcoming elections in at least 12 countries this year, raises the need for a continuous engagement in existing space and creating new spaces (formal and informal).

BRICS– China continues to spread its tentacles across the Continent and this continues to be a cause for concern. In September 2018, the Chinese President pledged $60 billion in financing for projects in Africa in the form of assistance, investment and loans and this has raised fears of ‘neo-colonialism’. African citizens from across the continent have begun to question the sudden ‘interest’ in Africa by China and other BRICS countries. This call for action and a demand for information from citizens is a driver for change. African states must begin to disclose to their citizens pertinent information regarding Trade and Infrastructure agreements and Funding that they are receiving from the BRICS. There is an opportunity to analyse the existing data and develop information that African citizens can utilise to demand changes from their Governments.

Africa’s rising debt: As of last year, Africa’s external debt stock stood at US$524 billion (this excludes Northern Africa, which is about US$151 billion). The debt profile is alarming especially as these amounts do not include Chinese debt, which stands at US$154 billion and is growing at alarming rates. As at 2018, China became the single largest financer of infrastructure in Africa surpassing the African Development Bank, EU, World Bank and G8 countries combined. Chad, Eritrea, Mozambique, Congo Republic, South Sudan and Zimbabwe were considered to be in debt distress at the end of 2018 while Zambia and Ethiopia were downgraded to “high risk of debt distress”. This risks higher levels of inequality and poverty without any strong and realistic plan for economic recovery and growth.

While these challenges are worrying, they present an opportunity for us to rethink our role and approach to fighting poverty and injustice in the continent. We are very hopeful that with everyone on board including our partners and allies, we will make a significant contribution to addressing these issues.‘

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Links I Liked

Others look more like the cartoon, right. Guess I’m a bit of both.

In London and in need of brain food? New World Disorders, a week-long series of LSE events exploring how social science can tackle global issues. 25 Feb – 2 March, free to attend and open to all.

The Boston Dynamics robots just keep getting more and more terrifying (especially the dogbot) ht Mashable

The squeeze on civil society in Brazil has begun through a temporary decree to supervise and coordinate INGO and NGO activities ht Mandeep Singh Tiwana

Meet Oxfam GB’s new boss, Danny Sriskandarajah, who started last week

What are the limitations to ‘working with the grain’. Thoughtful from Brian Levy.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder, Ivanka Trump is rumoured to be in the running to run the World Bank

Staying with Trumpy things. First the Daily Show uncovers a 2004 video of Donald Trump saying ‘’If there’s a wall in front of you, go over it, go through it, go around it’. Then there’s 1958 film about a con man named Trump (no relation, obvs) who fearmongers blue collar townsfolk into building a wall they don’t need. One man stands against him when all else fails. In the end, Trump tries to skip town—but gets arrested. Spooky. ht Qasim Rashid

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Audio summary (8m) of FP2P posts for week beginning 7th January

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Book Review: Can We Know Better? by Robert Chambers

has made him a cult figure on large parts of the development circuit, North and South. His latest book, Can We Know Better?, builds on a string of publications going back to 1983 (Rural Development: Putting the Last First).

The new book takes aim at the aid business (both donors and academics), where ‘error, myth, biases and blind spots are deeply endemic; widely accepted and required procedures, approaches and concepts of rigour distort vision and diminish effectiveness; the power of funding often carries conditions that misfit complex realities.’ Recognize any of that?

He follows a fairly traditional format: the first half critiques what the orthodoxy is doing wrong; the second half offers his proposals for ‘knowing better’.

Large parts of the critique will be familiar to regular FP2P readers. The ‘insidious creep’ of ever-more mechanistic methodologies (RCTs) and procedures (logframes).  At both national and international levels, the aid business uncritically embraces mistaken approaches (take a bow, Structural Adjustment Programmes); endlessly recycles mistaken claims until they become accepted as fact (post-harvest losses of 30%, when the real figure is more like 7%), and rejects heresies for far too long, until the evidence becomes overwhelming (e.g. System of Rice Intensification). He does acknowledge progress though, for example on how the sector addresses issues of gender, inequality and power.

These errors rely in turn on ‘strategic ignorance’ (’deliberately not knowing’), which is driven by the yuk factor of things like open defecation; the rewards and punishments of career advancement and funding for research or programmes and the mechanics of the aid business: disciplinary bias, the nature of ‘rural development tourism’ – to approved projects, near the capital city, during the dry season; the need for simple, endlessly repeated narratives, stories and statistics that inevitably oversimplify complex realities.

That last bit caused me some discomfort: simple narratives may do violence to reality, but they are often essential to influencing decision makers and the wider public. Academics endlessly splitting hairs and inventing clunky neologisms like ‘knowledges’ may get closer to an always elusive reality, but they struggle to take non-specialists with them or counter the seductive simplicities of the bad guys.

The book’s chapters suffer from some dense and jargon-strewn abstracts. Robert doesn’t seem to care and acknowledges no trade-offs between simplicity and impact, perhaps because he is less the advocate, more the practitioner – never happier than sat under a tree or in a hut, discussing the context-specific details of sanitation, seeds or health services with people on the ground.

Instead of simplistic narratives, Robert offers maxims; broad, subversive questions (‘Whose Reality Counts?’) and rules of thumb (heuristics) for people wishing to ‘know better’. There are dozens and dozens of these, and some of them are pretty forgettable. But a few lodge themselves in the memory, becoming a reminder of the need to do things differently – the two I use most often in my daily work are ‘handing over the stick’ and ‘uppers and lowers’.

So much for the take-down – what is Chambers proposing instead? He clusters his ideas into three chapters: Redefining rigour for complex systems; an elegy for participatory methods (his life’s work) and then a set of heuristics for knowing better.

In reclaiming rigour, Chambers sets up a crude but effective contrast between linear ‘Newtonian’ and ‘Complexity’ approaches (see table). His ‘canons for rigour’ include ‘eclectic methodological pluralism, seeking diversity, improvisation and innovation, adaptive iteration, triangulation, inclusive participation, optimal ignorance and experiential ground-truthing.’ That list sums up my slight frustration with the way he writes – to the converted, each of these ideas is rich and practical, but taken as a list, it is too easy for your eyes to glaze over at all the insider jargon and word-play.

The chapter on participatory methodologies is wonderful – Chambers sees a veritable explosion of them, his knowledge is comprehensive, his passion contagious. He singles out participatory info tech, participatory statistics and Reality Checks (researcher immersions in communities) as three of the most promising.

His final message is captured in five ‘fundamentals for a new professionalism.’

Words and concepts matter because they become a trojan horse for particular ideas, values and behaviours, whether good or bad (e.g. he regards the encroachment of business language into the aid sector as a ‘dysfunctional linguistic trap’)
Ground-truthing: ‘being in touch and up to date with ground realities, through direct, face-to-face interactions, listening and learning with people, especially those who are last, in their living environments.’
Facilitation as the core skill of the new professional, the way to transform power relations and ‘hand over the stick’: he thinks expanding the number of great, skilful facilitators is one of the greatest challenges facing the aid sector.
Reflexivity: ‘critical reflection on how we form and frame our knowledges.’ Chambers puts reflexivity into practice in the book, wrestling with his own biases and prejudices (there’s a great bit in his IDS podcast where the interviewer asks if the real audience for the book is actually his younger, arrogant, colonial administrator self). He quotes Eric Hoffer: ‘In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.’
Principles, Values and Passion: Chambers celebrates (rather than denies) passion and emotion.

Here’s his lovely final para:

‘What we can do depends on who we are and where we are. Innumerable small acts mount up and reinforce one another. From whatever we and others do, large and small, we can strive to learn and find better ways of knowing and doing. Ideals like equality, justice, well-being for all and putting the last first will always be there for us to strive towards. As our unforeseeable 21st Century unfolds, it is a privilege to be explorers looking for good ways forward. The enthralling adventures of our human struggle to know better and do better should have no end.’

And the podcast – highly recommended

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World Bank President Jim Kim resigns: what’s his legacy and what happens next?

and what happens next? Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam’s Washington DC office, gives a steer.

On Monday when I drafted Oxfam’s reaction to news of World Bank Jim Kim’s abrupt and unexpected departure from the World Bank, I said he was leaving behind a lasting legacy. And he is. But it’s a mixed bag.

Jim Kim started his tenure by pushing through a strong new Corporate Strategy for the World Bank Group. One World Bank Group where all arms of the Bank would work in harmony to achieve the Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity. Sound like obvious goals for an institution with an explicit mandate to combat poverty? Well, sure, but what JYK did was push through concrete targets and create a framework in which every Bank operation would have to be tied to those goals explicitly.

Now, how that plays out, how much flexibility there is, how things are measured (we wished the shared prosperity goal had been more about tackling inequality – i.e. not just looking at the bottom but the top as well) is a different story, but it was a big move for the Bank.

He’s Behind You….

Alongside that, and in the wake of the happier and more optimistic days of the Arab Spring where the buzz phrase was “a new social contract”, under JYK’s leadership, the Bank approved a new Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement, something that would have been scoffed at just a decade earlier.

But after a few years of being at the Bank, JYK’s tone and language changed significantly: from fighting poverty to economic growth, from health, education and human development to human capital, from citizen engagement to private sector engagement. His increased attention to mobilizing private finance is not his agenda alone of course; this mandate was given to all multilateral development banks by the G20 with the Maximizing Finance for Development Agenda. Yet Jim Kim has run at lightning speed with this, moving the Bank in an unprecedented way, changing processes and incentives around leveraging private sector capital and paving the way for more investment in privatized social services,  which threaten to deepen inequality and exclusion.

The bag is even more mixed the deeper we look: while he has led the Bank with several strong climate positions like this and this and this, many have also blamed him for failing to take more leadership around the environmental and social safeguards review a few years back which resulted in a policy void of human rights language and dangerously flexible and vague standards. Both sets of decisions will have lasting impacts for years to come.

Now a lot has happened over the course of JYK’s tenure: the monumental SDGs and the Paris agreement were approved; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank came online; and we entered the era of Trump: an administration that has not been friendly to multilateralism (despite supporting a massive General Capital Increase for the Bank of $13bn in 2018).

At the same time, there has been an unprecedented displacement crisis. 68.5 million people have been forcibly displaced, 85% of them in developing countries and over half under 18. The Arab Spring turned into a nightmare winter in many countries, including Yemen, which is now the worst humanitarian situation in the world; and governments are closing down civic space around the world at an alarming rate.

This is not an easy world for advocates of multilateralism though its importance could not be overstated. As a major global institution with huge convening and financial power, it is crucial that the next leader of the Bank be up to the task. Critically, among the madness of

Yep, that’s him too

the times, they have to put communities in poverty at the heart and center of all decisions.

So, how do we get there?

First on process. Let’s rewind to 2011, in the run-up to JYK’s appointment:

After years of pressure to move away from the unspoken agreement of always having an American president, the Bank announces new procedures for the selection of the World Bank president.

2012: Civil society and academics push for a merit-based, open and transparent World Bank president selection process. One that is open and where it is not pre-determined to be the American nominee.

Jim Kim is put forward as the US nominee. He has some serious competition in Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and José Antonio Ocampo, who also make it to the short list. But bam! He is selected. Many felt that it had been a sham and that he had been the pre-destined winner all along, and despite his credentials, the process was heavily criticized.

Fast forward to JYK’s reappointment in 2016 and the Board announces that this will be an open process, yet nobody apparently is put forward as an opposing candidate and Jim Kim is swiftly voted through as the sole contender.

In 2019, we now have another opportunity to get it right. The Board has announced they are starting the selection process. This means that once the time comes, any government can put forward a candidate. But the process must be truly open and not just in theory. The US nominee, whoever that will be, cannot be the predetermined next president of the World Bank.

The person chosen through this selection process must be qualified: I’m crossing fingers for someone who has, among other qualifications, a demonstrated commitment to fighting poverty and inequality, with a commitment to human rights principles, who cares about the planet we’ll leave behind for future generations, who believes in multilateral cooperation, and who will put women and communities first. In my mind, that shouldn’t be a tall order for the leader of an i

Who’s next?

nstitution mandated to fight poverty.

One grain of optimism: given the White House’s detachment from all things multilateral, this might just be a moment when the Bank can finally make these kinds of changes. Clouds, silver linings etc.

Our best chance is if governments around the world quickly put forward qualified candidates to help ensure a competitive and merit-based process. Let’s get this right.

The post World Bank President Jim Kim resigns: what’s his legacy and what happens next? appeared first on From Poverty to Power.

World Bank President Jim Kim resigns: what’s his legacy and what happens next?

and what happens next? Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam’s Washington DC office, gives a steer.

On Monday when I drafted Oxfam’s reaction to news of World Bank Jim Kim’s abrupt and unexpected departure from the World Bank, I said he was leaving behind a lasting legacy. And he is. But it’s a mixed bag.

Jim Kim started his tenure by pushing through a strong new Corporate Strategy for the World Bank Group. One World Bank Group where all arms of the Bank would work in harmony to achieve the Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity. Sound like obvious goals for an institution with an explicit mandate to combat poverty? Well, sure, but what JYK did was push through concrete targets and create a framework in which every Bank operation would have to be tied to those goals explicitly.

Now, how that plays out, how much flexibility there is, how things are measured (we wished the shared prosperity goal had been more about tackling inequality – i.e. not just looking at the bottom but the top as well) is a different story, but it was a big move for the Bank.

He’s Behind You….

Alongside that, and in the wake of the happier and more optimistic days of the Arab Spring where the buzz phrase was “a new social contract”, under JYK’s leadership, the Bank approved a new Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement, something that would have been scoffed at just a decade earlier.

But after a few years of being at the Bank, JYK’s tone and language changed significantly: from fighting poverty to economic growth, from health, education and human development to human capital, from citizen engagement to private sector engagement. His increased attention to mobilizing private finance is not his agenda alone of course; this mandate was given to all multilateral development banks by the G20 with the Maximizing Finance for Development Agenda. Yet Jim Kim has run at lightning speed with this, moving the Bank in an unprecedented way, changing processes and incentives around leveraging private sector capital and paving the way for more investment in privatized social services,  which threaten to deepen inequality and exclusion.

The bag is even more mixed the deeper we look: while he has led the Bank with several strong climate positions like this and this and this, many have also blamed him for failing to take more leadership around the environmental and social safeguards review a few years back which resulted in a policy void of human rights language and dangerously flexible and vague standards. Both sets of decisions will have lasting impacts for years to come.

Now a lot has happened over the course of JYK’s tenure: the monumental SDGs and the Paris agreement were approved; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS New Development Bank came online; and we entered the era of Trump: an administration that has not been friendly to multilateralism (despite supporting a massive General Capital Increase for the Bank of $13bn in 2018).

At the same time, there has been an unprecedented displacement crisis. 68.5 million people have been forcibly displaced, 85% of them in developing countries and over half under 18. The Arab Spring turned into a nightmare winter in many countries, including Yemen, which is now the worst humanitarian situation in the world; and governments are closing down civic space around the world at an alarming rate.

This is not an easy world for advocates of multilateralism though its importance could not be overstated. As a major global institution with huge convening and financial power, it is crucial that the next leader of the Bank be up to the task. Critically, among the madness of

Yep, that’s him too

the times, they have to put communities in poverty at the heart and center of all decisions.

So, how do we get there?

First on process. Let’s rewind to 2011, in the run-up to JYK’s appointment:

After years of pressure to move away from the unspoken agreement of always having an American president, the Bank announces new procedures for the selection of the World Bank president.

2012: Civil society and academics push for a merit-based, open and transparent World Bank president selection process. One that is open and where it is not pre-determined to be the American nominee.

Jim Kim is put forward as the US nominee. He has some serious competition in Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and José Antonio Ocampo, who also make it to the short list. But bam! He is selected. Many felt that it had been a sham and that he had been the pre-destined winner all along, and despite his credentials, the process was heavily criticized.

Fast forward to JYK’s reappointment in 2016 and the Board announces that this will be an open process, yet nobody apparently is put forward as an opposing candidate and Jim Kim is swiftly voted through as the sole contender.

In 2019, we now have another opportunity to get it right. The Board has announced they are starting the selection process. This means that once the time comes, any government can put forward a candidate. But the process must be truly open and not just in theory. The US nominee, whoever that will be, cannot be the predetermined next president of the World Bank.

The person chosen through this selection process must be qualified: I’m crossing fingers for someone who has, among other qualifications, a demonstrated commitment to fighting poverty and inequality, with a commitment to human rights principles, who cares about the planet we’ll leave behind for future generations, who believes in multilateral cooperation, and who will put women and communities first. In my mind, that shouldn’t be a tall order for the leader of an i

Who’s next?

nstitution mandated to fight poverty.

One grain of optimism: given the White House’s detachment from all things multilateral, this might just be a moment when the Bank can finally make these kinds of changes. Clouds, silver linings etc.

Our best chance is if governments around the world quickly put forward qualified candidates to help ensure a competitive and merit-based process. Let’s get this right.

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Why we finally need to face up to information fatigue in 2019 (and 3 ways to do it)

Guest post by Caroline Cassidy, a freelance communications specialist and associate for ODI and On Think Tanks

2018 was an intense year. On a personal level, I moved countries and became freelance, so that probably has a lot to do with it. But I don’t think it was simply that. Recently, every year seems to be intense. Communications plays a big part in this:  keeping up with the news, social media, friends, family, colleagues, world-wide doom and gloom. We are bombarded on a minutely basis from all sides. We’ve known this for years (and it’s nothing new, just ask Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, who complained in 1255 of, “the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory”).

We are all trying to keep up, and we’re exhausted. Over the year, I spoke to government policy-makers, senior executives, researchers, and communications staff in different countries and almost everyone is losing the plot in their own way. “I don’t have time to read anything”, they tell me. “I go from loving social media, to wanting to opt out,” I’ve heard. I could go on. And yet, here we are bombarding everyone with our communications, hoping that our data and messages will somehow slip through the cracks and get noticed.

Credit: David Sipress, the New Yorker

We keep ignoring this information fatigue, because we can’t seem to get off the horse. We’ve been behaving a bit like digital toddlers: not listening to our audiences as much as we should or taking the time to understand them properly, shouting our messages as loud as we can, embracing our short attention spans.  People are consuming information more quickly than ever  – our communications are often like “social snacking”. They can temporarily satisfy an audience but lack nutritional content.

It’s time to stop. We need to radically rethink our communications in 2019 and beyond. We must stop ignoring what is in plain sight and what we already know. Authenticity, values and personalisation are all essential components of any form of communications. Success is contingent on having depth. Communications needs to be human in nature (not solely based on stats), value-based as much as evidence-based, and led by the need for strong and long-term relationships. It also needs to touch us in some way – surprise, outrage, laughter. People want to be entertained and educated in equal measure, but also inspired.

Last year, the growth in the movement against plastic consumption was one of the best examples of what successful communications looks like. I’m pretty sure it didn’t begin with a barrage of tweets, a shiny report or in a conference. Communications were word of mouth, community driven and, in many cases, inspired by multimedia and a TV series with Sir David Attenborough (certainly in the UK).  Above all, it took time to reach this tipping point.

Obviously, not all communications are going to achieve this scale of success, but how do you move away from just producing white noise? Here are my three top tips.

Put more energy into getting to know your audience inside and out. Draw on the behavioural sciences in your comms, a trend that is on the rise across many sectors. It’s no longer enough to identify your audiences with a nice stakeholder map and decide how you want to reach them; to influence them, you need to know what makes them tick, a deeper, clearer picture of evidence users as human beings. What are their knowledge needs and preferences? Many NGOs and think tanks have been doing a fantastic job at this for a while now. Think psychology, psychographics, careful framing and mindful messaging. This takes considerable time and energy – there is no escaping that, but it does pay off.

Listen to your audience more. Sounds completely obvious, but we often don’t put in enough time listening deeply to our audiences. Even just simply asking what they think of our communications. Which leads me to…

Make your messages more participatory. We are so used to thinking of messaging as a type of broadcast. The plastic example

(https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding...)

became a global, but also a local-level conversation that we had with our close friends, peers, colleagues; a sharing of knowledge, values, urgency and something concrete that we could do something about. Yes, it was all backed up by evidence and the idea was pushed around the globe via social media. But it was the messages that touched audiences in a way that simply putting out information about how bad plastics are could not achieve. It became personal and adaptable.

These same principles apply no matter the topic or ambition. If you have a very technical, but important piece of research to feed into policy-making, you still need to find a way to make it strike an emotional chord. In philanthropy, Henry Timms talks about redefining the term “donors” as “owners,” to encourage greater interaction.

I don’t think for a minute that we should stop producing great infographics, easily digestible reports, building social media campaigns or thinking of innovative ways to get heard. This is all the backbone of success.  But we mustn’t forget the need for depth.

We are now in the age of digital adolescence. And as we all know, those teenage years aint easy- lots of growing pains. But they mean more conscious actions, long-term thinking, deeper relationship and above all, questioning of what has gone before.

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