Navigating Complexity in International Development: Facilitating Sustainable Change at Scale

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Navigating Complexity in International Development


Facilitating sustainable change at scale
By Danny Burns, Stuart Worsley Practical Action PublishingCopyright © 2018 Practical Action Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85339-851-3


Contents
Figures, Boxes and Tables,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Participatory research projects,
Acronyms,
1. Failures of top-down development planning,
2. How change happens,
3. Catalysing large-scale and sustainable change,
4. Seeing the system – participatory systemic inquiry,
5. Systemic action research,
6. Nurtured emergent development,
7. Power in transformative change processes,
8. Participatory processes in development,
9. Implications for development,
Index,

CHAPTER 1
Failures of top-down development planning
International development is not working. Externally defined expert-driven plans continue to override the reality of the local context and intervene in ways that are either irrelevant or damaging. This chapter examines iconic strategic planning approaches: big push thinking (Millennium Villages) technically driven programming (Green Revolution), good governance programming, and rights-based approaches, and concludes that lasting results have been elusive because our approach to development is rooted in flawed assumptions.
Keywords: planning failure; top-down development; big push; Green Revolution; good governance
http://dx.doi.org/10.3362/9781780448510.001

Defining development 'problems'
Across the world, people and nations are facing huge challenges. Our climate is changing and temperatures are rising, principally as a result of human activities. This affects water supply, food production, health, and peace. Mitigation and adaption will be required at local, national, and international levels. Increasing urbanization is creating unprecedented concentrations of deprivation whose hallmark is poverty and social unrest. Whole cultures are being threatened by powerful new governance systems, with ancient systems such as pastoralism now facing an uncertain future. War is becoming more prevalent, with social and political unrest in the Middle East spreading at an alarming rate. Pandemics are becoming more common, with new diseases and new resistances. Water scarcity affects more people than ever before. The need for development interventions that enable humankind to meet these challenges is more critical now than at any time in our history.
Development organizations have tried to bring about lasting and sustainable change to improve people's lives. Vast sums of money are spent on reducing poverty, promoting rights, stimulating economic growth, reducing inequity, reversing environmental damage, and promoting good governance. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Co-operation Directorate (2014), in 2013 almost US$135 billion official development assistance was spent, yet much of this has had minimal impact on the lives of marginalized people and those living in poverty.
To make improvements happen, development practitioners and investors analyse poverty, try to determine its root causes, define causal pathways and design interventions to fix these. Linear intervention logic is used to offer solutions that address critical problems in the causal pathway and thereby reduce or reverse bad effects. Impact is seen to be a direct result of intervention. Like other contemporary commentators such as Ramalingam (2013), we will argue that this does not make sense as change happens through far more complex processes. By failing to understand how change happens, development interventions are likely to be ineffectual or damaging.
A central feature of all development programmes is the definition of problems that need to be fixed, and the positioning of technical solutions to address these. Viewed by experts, development issues occur within a defined and subjectively bounded domain. Boundar