Category Archives: inclusion

Protecting the guardrails of America’s democracy –  some lessons from South Africa

February 13, 2025 By in democracy, governance, inclusion, institutions Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Now what? Four weeks into the Trump administration, a wrecking ball threatens to wreak havoc with millions of peoples’ lives. A  sense of urgency is in the air. Indeed, we urgently need to bear witness to the emerging scale of disaster.  But holding open the door to a hopeful future needs more than urgency.  It needs  clarity of goals, tactics and  strategy – plus a longer-term vision that looks beyond the immediate crisis. To help bring clarity, it can be helpful to make comparisons.  

In seeking to understand America’s challenges,  I have long looked to South Africa’s decades-long struggle to establish and sustain its own democracy. A recent effort contrasted how polarization and inequality interacted. My task here is  the more immediate one of seeking fresh insight into how a democracy can respond to a wrecking ball taking aim at its institutions. The search yielded  four lessons of relevance to America’s current moment. First:

  • For the next 21 months,  the unwavering navigational north star is to get  to the  November, 2026 midterms with the machinery of electoral democracy still fully functional – avoid being knocked off course by even the most venal provocations. 

In April 1993, a team of far-right assassins that included a former member of the white apartheid parliament murdered Chris Hani,  a  popular, senior leader of the ANC’s left-wing.  At the time, South Africa’s  recently unbanned African National Congress was in the midst of fraught, on-and-off  negotiations to  end apartheid – but until a new constitution could be agreed on, power remained in the hands of the apartheid-era National Party. When news of the assassination broke, the country erupted in rage; the stage was set for crackdown.  Instead, in a masterful display of statesmanship, Nelson Mandela went on national television and successfully redirected attention to the journey ahead. The country’s first democratic elections, held in April 1994,  resulted in a massive ANC victory, with Mandela sworn in as national president.

Decades after its inspiring transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa confronted a new challenge to its constitutional order – and again demonstrated the centrality of  the electoral process to its defense.  Jacob  Zuma, the ANC leader who acceded to the presidency in 2009,  was increasingly using state power in personalized and often corrupt ways, under the guise of a populist anti-elite agenda. Given the ANC’s continuing electoral dominance, defeating Zuma’s successor in a national election (Zuma himself was term-limited….)  was not a plausible strategy.  In selecting a successor,  the ANC itself had to decide whether to re-embrace the democratic constitutional order. This it did. Cyril Ramaphosa, a central protagonist in the crafting of the constitution in the 1990s,  won the November 2017 (intra-party) electoral contest to become Zuma’s successor by a hairs-breadth –   and then decisively won the 2019 national elections.   Ramaphosa’s victory not only underscores the centrality of elections in pushing back against tyranny, how he won underscores the relevance of the second and third lessons.

The second lesson is largely familiar:

  • Leveraging checks and balances  lays important, necessary ground for victory in the struggle against tyranny – but its victories are not in themselves decisive.

In the 2010s, South Africa’s defenders of democracy brilliantly used checks and balances institutions to push back against state capture. The pushback included brave, determined inquiry from the ‘Public Protector’, an official, but arms-length  agency with a mandate to investigate abuse of power; investigative journalism, underpinned by university-based researchers whose efforts added to the credibility of efforts to document what was happening; and a high-profile  public inquiry led by the Deputy Chief Justice of the country’s supreme court.  Four weeks into the Trump administration, similar momentum is building in the United States. The courts are intervening; elected Democrats in the House and Senate are becoming increasingly emboldened and forceful in mobilizing resistance; citizens are spontaneously coming out in support.  But experience in South Africa and elsewhere shows that more is needed.

The result of a too-narrow pre-occupation with tactical victories can all-too-easily be to win many battles, but lose the broader war.   Hence the third lesson:

  • Keeping democratic space open requires a coalition that is broader than the usual fault lines of political partisanship –   a  sense of urgency and willingness to act not only from ‘natural’  opponents but from elite actors for whom it is more expedient to stay silent.

It takes courage to override expediency and party loyalty and lead with principle. In 1930s Germany, expedient silence (indeed, often, tacit support)  on the center-right opened the door for Adolf Hitler, and all that followed. 2010s South Africa, by contrast, saw some inspiring examples of courage. Veteran leaders of the ANC (including Pravin Gordhan; Ahmed Kathrada;  and  Mavuso Msimang to name just a few) were willing to override lifetimes of loyalty and take a high-profile principled stand against state capture in favor of constitutional democracy.  In the USA, principled Republican leaders  who took a stand against Richard Nixon in the early 1970s showed similar courage. But in today’s United States, aside from a few lonely voices, the silence from the center-right is deafening.

The combination of a multi-front effort to leverage checks and balances institutions and mobilization of a broad coalition may be enough to eke out an electoral victory – but it has not been enough to decisively turn the tide. Both the 2019 South African and 2020 U.S.,  elections enabled a temporary pause in attacks on constitutionalism. But more than a pause was needed. Hence the fourth lesson:

  • A vision of democratic renewal is key to a decisive victory against encroaching tyranny – more than short- and medium-term band aids are needed.

On offer in South Africa’s 1990s “rainbow miracle” was not only formal constitutional change, but hope – “a better life for all” as per the African National Congress’s campaign slogan. Indeed, after decades of stagnation, the first fifteen years of democracy witnessed a steady acceleration of economic growth, and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But by the time Zuma acceded to the presidency, the promise had reached its sell-by date. Ramaphosa promised only a return to the earlier formula, and his presidency has turned out to be a time of muddling through. Viewed from the vantage point of 2025, parallels with the Biden presidency are clear.

For an electoral victory to result in a decisive political realignment, it needs to build credibility on two fronts – inclusion, and public governance. South Africa’s early successes centered around an expansive “we” – underpinned by an economic program that addressed many everyday concerns of working people. In the wake of 2024’s electoral shock, the Democratic Party in the U.S.  seems increasingly to be learning the lesson that the cobbling together of multiple disparate parts does not add up to an expansion vision of ‘inclusion’. To  win credibility with the electorate the message needs both  sharpening  and  consistent championing by credible messengers.

As for  the capacity to govern, a distinctively American challenge is to break through the relentless drumbeat of political demonizing of the public sector. But the challenge goes well beyond messaging.  All-too-often,  the result of a progressive vision of governance in which one good thing is added on top of another is way less than the sum of its parts – each good thing is accompanied by a small dose of administrative process, and the cumulative sum of the good things is sclerosis. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan makes the point pithily:

“A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party…. Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work—clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids. You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.”

In 1860 when Abraham Lincoln became president, he described America as “the world’s last best hope”. That is how it felt to me when I came to this country almost five decades ago. Is the vision of America as a beacon to the world coming to an end? Is there no alternative to angry, chauvinist isolationism? Making it through the present moment without deepening disaster requires tactical resistance – but it also calls for more.   We also need to raise our sights. What kind of country do we want the United States of America to be?

The public domain and the quest for renewal

January 9, 2024 By in adaptive, bureaucracy, inclusion, legitimacy, participation, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Changing times bring changing questions. For decades, my work has focused on incremental ways to improve development and governance  in the midst of messiness. Now, though, in many countries these are times of decay and rage.  When and how the fever will break is unknowable. So for now I choose to look beyond incrementalism  and explore the broader challenge of better understanding – and fostering – renewal.

In exploring renewal, I take inspiration from the work of the great twentieth century social scientist Albert Hirschman. (See here,  here and here.) Hirschman   identified  three distinct phases in a (repeating) cycle of political, social and economic change:  a phase of vibrancy, underpinned by hope;  a phase of disillusion, anger and conflict; followed (if a continually deepening downward spiral can be averted) by  a phase of renewal. In  recent papers, I explored how this Hirschman cycle has played out in recent decades in South Africa and in  the USA. In both countries, the cycle was driven by changes in two sets of  perceptions – in the tolerance for inequality, and in perceptions as to the legitimacy of the public domain. Citizens  have become increasingly skeptical as to the public sector’s effectiveness, and increasingly question whether the purposes the public sector pursues are ones for which it has a mandate, and are in the national interest. 

My new research, introduced in this post,  focuses on the ways in which interactions between citizens and the public sector shape perceptions of legitimacy – in particular whether  “socially-embedded bureaucracy” might help turn around disillusion with the public domain.  As defined here (and elaborated in this accompanying paper)  a socially-embedded bureaucracy (SEB) is characterized by:   

“problem-focused relationships of co-operation between staff within public bureaucracies and stakeholders outside of government, including governance arrangements  that support such co-operation”.   

At least on the surface, initiatives that strengthen SEB seemingly have the potential to help renew the legitimacy of the public domain by cultivating trust – and thereby reinvigorate society’s capacity to  achieve win-win outcomes to mixed motive bargaining challenges – not only at the micro-level, but systemically as well.  

Notwithstanding its surface plausibility, the case for championing SEB is far from open-and-shut.  On the one hand, among protagonists of SEB, enthusiasm all-too-easily outruns both the empirical evidence and conceptual clarity. On the other, SEB is inconsistent with mainstream conceptions of public sector governance; as a result  its potential is all-too-easily dismissed.  My new work  aims to help put the empirical and (especially) conceptual platform of SEB discourse on a sounder footing. The work addresses two inter-related questions:

  • At the micro-level: Can SEB help improve public sector performance?
  • At the systemic level: Insofar as SEB indeed can help improve public sector performance, might it also transform perceptions more broadly, and in particular help renew the perceived legitimacy of the public domain?

To begin with the micro-level,  as the figure below highlights, the contrast is stark between SEB and conventional notions of  how public bureaucracies should be governed.  In the conventional view, governance is organized hierarchically, with a focus on ‘getting the systems right’  Citizens engage upstream in the chain via their selection of political representatives who oversee both policymaking and implementation. The tasks of public officials are defined by legalistic, rule-bound processes, which also insulate public bureaucracy from political interference. Civil society’s  governance role is to bring pressure from the demand-side to help ‘hold government to account’.  By contrast, SEB is problem- rather than systems-oriented; it incorporates horizontal as well as hierarchical governance arrangements; interactions (both within the bureaucracy and at the interface with civil society) are less legalistic and more adaptive, oriented towards  deliberation and fostering initiative.

These distinctive characteristics potentially enable SEB to improve public sector performance via three channels which are unavailable to insulated bureaucratic hierarchies:

  • SEBs potentially can foster synergistic gains from co-operation between public bureaucracies and non-governmental actors;
  • SEBs potentially can  transform the governance arrangements for monitoring and enforcement from a morass of red tape to trust-building interactions between public officials and service recipients; and
  • SEB potentially supports developmental alliances among reform-oriented public officials and civil society actors – thereby enabling an unambiguous focus on the (developmental) public purpose, while obviating the risk of capture.  

(See the accompanying ‘microfoundations’  paper for more details.)

The above is not intended to imply that SEB necessarily is superior. Social embeddedness risks  adding messiness in contexts where the priority task is to enhance bureaucratic coherence; it risks enabling new modes of predatory capture of public resources. But, as recent syntheses of the empirical evidence underscore, it does suggest that it is, at the least,  premature to be dismissive of SEB’s possibilities. Don’t risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

At the systemic-level,  a very different (and again controversial) case for SEB emerges. As the background paper explores, social learning and an associated cultivation of ‘pro-sociality’ is central to the micro-level argument. Might such learning  cascade upwards to the systemic level, and  help buttress citizens’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the public domain? Answering this question calls for careful unbundling of interactions between public effectiveness, trust, trustworthiness, social cohesion and legitimacy  – a task I will take on in a subsequent blog (and accompanying background paper).   For now, what can suffice to make the key point is to contrast two contributions, fifteen years apart, by Margaret Levi, former president of the American Political Science Association.

In 2007, Levi (with co-authors Karen Cook and Russell Hardin) argued that  a pre-occupation with relationships of  trust between civil society and public bureaucracy is at best a distraction – and  at worst a way of weakening rule-boundedness and increasing the risk of capture. Their critique is captured vividly in the title of their  book, Co-operation Without Trust.  Championing institutionalism, they determinedly push back against a too-easy extrapolation from micro-level success stories of co-operation to the systemic level:

“When we are assessing the reliability of governments and politicians, what we ultimately put our confidence in is the quality of the institutional arrangements within which they operate…. At the personal level, relational trust makes our day-to-day lives richer and more manageable. More often, however, and in many varied contexts, we co-operate without trust.”

The above argument is eminently plausible in contexts where institutions are strong and stable. It holds up less well, however, in contexts where a downward spiral of accelerating distrust in the public domain is underway, with institutions increasingly under threat. For one thing, institutional guardrails have turned out to be more fragile than many (myself included) might have hoped. Further, as I explore in a forthcoming paper with South African civil society activist Mark Heywood,  in contexts of declining state capability a pre-occupation with ‘holding  government to account’ can have the unintended consequence of making public officials feel increasingly beleaguered and reluctant to experiment, while fueling civic disillusion.

Once disillusion and institutional decay have taken hold, the necessary first step in fostering reversal is not yet-another -round of institutional engineering, but rather to find ways to renew hope in the possibility and desirability of achieving collective gains through co-operation,. In that spirit, and in contrast to the 2007 book, here is what Levi and Zachary Ugolnik argued in  2023 in the lead article of an ambitious 2023 exploration of pathways to “creating a new moral political economy”: 

“A new moral political economy….[will be centered around]….some form of sociality and cooperation….It demands attention to the governance arrangements that facilitate, even generate, prosocial behavior”.

There are, to be sure,  many ways to foster pro-sociality that have little to do with the interface between public officials and non-governmental actors; nothing in Levi and Ugolnik’s  2023 argument makes an explicit case for SEB. But, especially in light of the micro-level positive potential of SEB,  the notion that sustained efforts to foster pro-sociality  at micro-level might cascade upwards into systemic change should,  at the very least, not be dismissed out of hand. At the systemic level, too,   it is premature to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

Finally, returning to the two questions posed earlier, insofar as the answer to both is “yes” – “yes, SEB improves public sector effectiveness” and “yes, SEB can also buttress systemic-level legitimacy” – a third question naturally arises: Might problem-level SEB provide a platform for a systemic-level transformation of the interface between citizens and public officials? Here (as a prelude to further work, some already underway…..) are four places where one might look for answers:

  • Bottom-up: The accretion of experience and learning at the problem-level might inspire others to initiate similar initiatives. Over time, multiple small initiatives might add up to more than the sum of their parts, with  a new set of ideas, offering a new vision of what is possible, taking hold. (I plan to explore this via a new round of empirical research, focused on responses to the twin affordable housing and homelessness  crises in Los Angeles County.)
  • Inside-out: Fostering deliberation and SEB within bureaucracies by championing changes in overly-rigid and overly-hierarchical rules, and in organizational culture. (Efforts to foster relational governance within the rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy of South Africa’s Western Cape province comprises an intriguing example.)
  • Outside-in: While some civil society activists might respond skeptically to SEB as counter to a perceived mission of holding government to account, others might shift from a confrontational to a more co-operative vision, centered around building cross-cutting problem-solving-oriented coalitions, including with reform-minded public officials. (The forthcoming paper  with Mark Heywood explores this possibility.)
  • Top-down – via political and social mobilization, with  micro-level SEB successes preparing the ground  for new transformational acts of both social and political leadership. 

Might forward-looking political leaders embrace an electoral and governance platform centered around a vision of partnership between the public sector and non-governmental actors?  And what are the prospects for myriad concrete, deliberative and problem-focused civil society initiatives serving as potential building blocks for a broader social movement?  Mobilization centered around deliberative problem-solving would be a radical departure from contemporary pressure-cooker discourses which thrive on raising rather than reducing the temperature. But, as Robert Putnam explored in his 2020 book, The Upswing,  it has happened before, and might happen again:

“A distinct feature of the Progressive Era was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship…Progressive Era innovations were a response – seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety……[Similarly], our current problems are mutually reinforcing. Rather than siloed reform efforts, an upswing will require ‘immense collaboration’,  [leveraging] the latent power of collective action not just to protest, but to rebuild….”

There is work to be done………….

Active citizenship when bureaucracies are weak – some school-level lessons from South Africa

May 3, 2017 By in governance, inclusion, institutions, Uncategorized, Working with the Grain Tags: , , , 1 Comment

Bureaucracies, we have learned, are embedded in politics. How, then, to strengthen public services in messy democracies? In settings where public hierarchies are weak, can participatory governance provide an alternative entry point? Recent results from a research project I have been leading on the politics and governance of basic education in South Africa suggest an intriguing answer. (The research is part of a  broader, global initiative sponsored by the University of Manchester-based Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) programme.)

South Africa’s Eastern Cape province provides an ideal setting for exploring these questions. As the ESID approach (laid out here) underscores,  two sets of variables that have a powerful influence on  bureaucracies  are: (i)  the inherited institutional legacy, and (ii) how elites interact with one another. On both counts, as the ESID working paper,  The governance of education in the Eastern Cape, by Zukiswa Kota, Monica Hendricks,  Eric Matambo and Vinothan Naidoo details, the Eastern Cape scores badly. The province’s bureaucracy is a patchwork, built largely around two patronage-riven structures inherited from the apartheid era. Electorally, the ANC was dominant – but in practice it comprised  an overall umbrella under which inter-elite conflict was endemic.

The combination of elite fragmentation and a personalized bureaucratic legacy left the Eastern Cape’s Department of Education (ECDoE) bedevilled by  divergent and competing regional interests, organisational cultures, and patronage ties. The national government tried to intervene, and for a few years it temporarily took over administration of the ECDoE. But this did not stem the crisis. Provincial politics proved too powerful. After a few years, intervention was scaled back, having had only limited impact on the crisis.

This brings us to the question of whether, in weak governance settings,  participatory governance could be an alternative entry point. The 1996 South African Schools Act delegates authority both to provinces and to school governing bodies (SGBs) in which the majority of positions are held by parents. In principle, this governance framework creates the potential for horizontal governance to serve as at least a partial institutional substitute for weaknesses in hierarchies. To explore this possibility,  in a second ESID working paper (School governance in a fragmented political and bureaucratic environment), Lawule Shumane and I explored in depth how governance played out over time  in four  schools in the Eastern Cape’s Butterworth district. In two of the four cases, participatory school-level governance turned out to provide a useful platform for pushing back against bureaucratic dysfunction.

In the first case, the school-level institutional culture was one where all stakeholders – teachers, the SGB, the extended community – felt included.  This inclusive culture provided a powerful platform for managing the recruitment of teachers (and, when the time came for leadership succession, of the school principal) in a way that assured a continuing commitment to the educational mission of the school. One interviewee illustrated how this participatory culture operated with the example of how new staff are inducted into the school’s organisational culture:

“The principal will call newly appointed staff to a meeting and introduce them to everyone. At this meeting the principal will welcome the new staff member to the team and inform them on school culture…. he will often say ‘Mr. or Ms. so and so, at this school we are a family and if we have problems we deal with them openly. If there is unrest, we will know it is you because it has never happened before’.”

The second case is more ambiguous.  The principal who set in motion the school’s long decline was appointed in the late 1980s, and remained in the post for over two decades. In the latter-1990s she purchased and moved to a home in a coastal town 100 kilometres away. From then on, using  one pretext or another, she was, for  much of the time an absentee principal. This continued for about a decade (!!!). The school went into a downward spiral, with the number of students falling from close to 1,000 in the early 1990s, to a low of 341 in 2011.

In 2009, frustration at the principal’s continuing absence finally boiled over. A group of parents and some SGB members met, and jointly reached the view that a new principal was needed. The ECDoE district office was not supportive. In response, the parent community blockaded the school, preventing the principal from entering. The district office kept her on as a displaced teacher, reporting to the district office, until her retirement in 2010. The SGB  subsequently selected as principal an internal candidate who had shown a commitment to try and make the school work during the grim period in its history. All, including the broader community,  worked together to try and turn things around.  Between 2011 and 2015  the number of pupils in the school rose  from 347 to 547.

To be sure, these intriguing cases do not imply that horizontal governance is a panacea in the face of bureaucratic dysfunction. Two of Levy-Shumane’s case study schools seemed trapped in a low-level equilibrium of capture, centred around the principal and teaching staff in the short term, with the collusion of the school governing body  and the broader community, reproduced via a captured process of principal selection – and with low morale, absenteeism by students and teachers and crumbling infrastructure the all-too-common consequences.  More broadly,  systematic analyses show that the impact of efforts the world over to strengthen participatory governance of schools  has been mixed.

But the Eastern Cape school-level case studies offer a key insight into why evaluations yield mixed results – and what might be a way to improve the outcomes. The key differentiator among the cases  is not  ‘capacity’.  Rather, the influence of horizontal governance on performance (for good or ill) depended on the relative influence of developmental and predatory stakeholders. Parents know whether teachers show up, and whether they bring honest effort to their work.  What matters for the efficacy of participatory, school-level governance is power.

This is where active citizenship can come in. The crucial task for initiatives aimed at strengthening horizontal governance is to help empower developmental actors within SGBs, parents and the broader community – helping to build networks that link SGBs with one another as a way of  sharing learning as to ‘good practices’, and potentially providing mutual support in the face of predatory pressures.

Support for school-level governance is no panacea. Children indeed gain when teachers improve their skills, and when schools are better resourced. However, trying to get these things by changing how bureaucracies work is, at best, a slow process. Bureaucracies are embedded in politics;  far-reaching improvements depend on very specific, and very difficult-to-achieve, political conditions.  But there also is abundant evidence that  a non-hierarchical entry point for improving educational outcomes has real potential to achieve gains – not always-and-everywhere, but in some schools, some of the time. Perhaps it is time to complement ongoing efforts to strengthen hierarchy with something different.

A somewhat different version of this piece appeared on the South African online Daily Maverick news and opinion website, under the title, “To help Eastern Cape schools, add a dose of active citizenship”

 

Reframing democratic development — vision, strategy and process

April 7, 2015 By in democracy, development, governance, inclusion, institutions, Uncategorized, Working with the Grain Tags: , , , , , 15 Comments

no_easy_walk_to_freedom How,  in today’s complex and uncertain times, can those of us working at the interface between governance and development sustain  what the great twentieth century development economist, Albert Hirschman, called  “a bias for hope”?

In two recent blog posts (click HERE and HERE)  I took stock of the evidence as to the extent of governance improvement between 1998 and 2013 among 65 democratic countries (the large majority of which made their initial transition to democracy subsequent to 1990). The results left me feeling even more skeptical than when I wrote Working with the Grain as to the practical relevance of maximalist “good governance” agendas. We need an alternative approach.

To tease out an alternative, it is useful to begin with the classic three-part tripod for orchestrating change – clarifying the vision, developing a strategy for moving towards the realization of that vision,  and delineating step-by-step processes for facilitating implementation. Using this lens, the classic ‘good governance’ discourse turns out to be all vision, empty of strategic content, and counterproductive vis-à-vis process.

‘Good governance’ generally directs attention to the destination, to   how a well-functioning democratic society is supposed to work — and seeks to motivate by cultivating dissatisfaction with the gap between the destination and the way things are. Yes – electoral accountability, a strong rule of law, a capable public sector, robust control of corruption, and a ‘level playing field’ business environment are all desirable.  But the institutional underpinnings for many of these are demanding – and advocates generally stop short of laying out any practical program for getting from here to there. With no proactive agenda for action, the all-too-common result is to end up fuelling  disillusion and despair, rather than cultivating hope.

There is, though, an even deeper problem with maximalist advocacy: it sells democracy short. In its essence, what democracy offers – and authoritarian alternatives do not – is an invitation to citizens to work to shape their own lives and to participate peacefully in the shaping of their societies, according to their distinctive visions of freedom and justice.  This journey is a challenging one – with much democratic ‘messiness’, and corresponding disappointment along the way. But no matter how challenging the journey, once the invitation to engage has been embraced, the personal dignity it offers cannot be taken away. This invitation, not empty guarantees of success,  is at the core of the democratic vision — its inspiration, its source of sustainability.

This brings us to process —  the second pillar of the change tripod. In the later stages of his career, Albert Hirschman turned his attention from trying to understand strategies for economic development, to trying to understand  how we thought and spoke about them. His  purpose, he asserted, was: “…. to move public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent postures of either kind, with the hope that in the process….participants engage in meaningful discussion, ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of other arguments and new information..”

 The renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, points to why the quality of discourse matters greatly.  “Peace”, he suggested  “is every step: “Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves…. here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see…. (in) every breath we take, every step we take….. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.” Insofar as democracy is an affirmation of dignity, its promise is not accessible only when some distant destination is reached. Its potential is also here and now — realizable through a process that, in and of itself, is an affirmation of that dignity.

Dignity also is central  to the third leg of the tripod for the orchestration of change –a strategy for democratic development which has the affirmation of human dignity at its heart. As an alternative to what one might call ‘Big-G’ reforms of governance systems,   Working with the Grain (Oxford, 2014) lays out a ‘small-g governance’ strategy for deepening democracy among countries which have formally embraced democratic forms, but whose practices fall far, far short of a normative ideal. A ‘small-g’ strategy focuses on a search for concrete gains vis-à-vis specific problems – and emphasizes the pursuit of these gains through active citizenship, through participation and engagement among equals.

The immediate goal of a  ‘small-g’ strategy is to nurture “islands of effectiveness” — to identify entry points for focused engagement among a variety of stakeholders with high-powered incentives to see the outcomes achieved.  Working with the Grain explores in depth a variety of potential entry points:

  • Public entrepreneurs at multiple layers of government can foster ‘islands of effectiveness’ even within a broadly dysfunctional public service —   focusing on achievement of a very specific public purpose (better schools, better infrastructure, less stifling regulation), and endeavoring to build within their domain both a team with the skills and commitment to achieve that purpose, and the network of external alliances needed to fend off opposition.
  • Civil society groups can forge a middle path of engagement —   neither locking-in to confrontational action, nor surrendering principle in search of the next donor- or government-funded contract, but rather focusing on the quality of service provision, both partnering with providers and holding them accountable for how public resources are used.
  • Northern activists can seek eyes-wide-open partnerships with globalized firms – anchored in collectively designed and transparent, mutually monitored commitments to, say, rein in bribe-giving, or to target exploitative practices vis-à-vis environmental protection, labor standards, and the extraction of natural resources.
  • Scholars and practitioners can monitor governance in ways that encourage a long view – foreswearing overheated rhetoric in the face of year-to-year changes in indicators of corruption, the rule of law, or government effectiveness, and using monitoring to provide a platform for nurturing constructive dialogue on trends, identifying lagging areas, and exploring how they might be addressed.

Gains from any individual initiative might initially seem small, but individual islands can pull a wide variety of related activities in their wake, adding up over time into far-reaching economic , social and political change – while affirming, at each step along the way, the positive promise of democratic development.

Vision, process and strategy become a mutually reinforcing pathway of democratic development. The vision brings the promise of dignity to center stage;  the process is one that systematically affirms that dignity; and the ‘small-g’ strategy  offers ample opportunity for the practice of ‘active citizenship’ for engagement among equals. Taken together, these elements perhaps indeed offer a new basis for sustaining Albert Hirschman’s ‘bias for hope’ — but in a different intonation from that usually evoked by democracy’s advocates.

The usual intonation of democracy advocacy is a drumbeat of exhortation, of a world on the march to some more perfect destination on the horizon. But, as per Albert Hirschman and Thich Nhat Hanh, hope can also come in a quieter pitch: softer voices, calming rather than raising the temperature, searching, encouraging deliberation, reflection, co-operation.  Over the past two decades, democracy advocates have been sobered by the messy complexity of what it takes to get from here to there. Perhaps going forward, it is not in the drumbeat of exhortation but in hope’s softer, quieter intonations that we will find our inspiration – and our staying power.

Duncan Green on Working with the Grain

January 6, 2015 By in development, governance, inclusion Tags: , Leave a comment

fp2p blogDuncan Green’s review of Working with the Grain on his widely read From Poverty to Power blog (CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE REVIEW) usefully points towards the two very different goals I aimed to achieve in the book.

One goal was to write, anchored in my lived experience, an accessible tour d’horizon of the current, cutting edge of development thinking and practice — and how it got that way. A second goal was to provide an analytically robust conceptual framework as a foundation for moving that thinking forward — bringing together  a variety of theoretical contributions which rarely are considered in an integrated way. As anyone who has labored through the work of Mushtaq Khan, Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson knows, this involves a lot of seemingly arcane terminology – but the payoff can be high.

I have tried to use the analytical concepts to help push the analytical foundation of development practice beyond the tired polarities of Bill Easterly’s best practice, technocrat ‘tyrant experts’ and his bold ‘searchers’, plunging, gloriously free, into the unknown. Rather, as the FP2P review highlights, I use the book’s conceptual platform to identify four distinctive country-types – each characterized by distinctive incentives and constraints to development policymaking and implementation. The aim is to give content to the idea of “good fit”, by exploring in depth how both reform priorities and effective approaches to implementation vary radically and systematically across the country-types — thereby directing attention away from off-the-shelf blueprints and hopefully laying out a practical, analytically grounded set of options that can help us engage constructively with the governance ambiguities of our early 21st century world.

South Africa — where democracy and inequality collide

January 1, 2015 By in anti-corruption, development, governance, inclusion, institutions Tags: Leave a comment

khayelitsha-cape-townAre governance and inclusion mutually reinforcing  or  at odds with one another? An optimistic perspective suggests that over time, participatory and accountable governance institutions will move economic policy and performance in a more inclusive direction. A  pessimistic view is that no-holds-barred contestation for limited elite privileges and increasing discontent among an excluded majority  will result in the gradual, cumulative erosion of governance institutions. Nowhere is this tension between governance and inequality starker than in South Africa; I’ll be heading back there in less than two weeks. (I spend part of each year teaching and researching, based at the University of Cape Town). While there, I  expect to post a number of blogs on how this tension is playing out. Meanwhile, as a baseline for forthcoming pieces, the links below will take you to two blog posts which I wrote from South Africa a few years ago – and which remain strikingly current.

The first post frames the tension between democracy and inequality from a broad, comparative perspective – highlighting some striking parallels between the way in which Mexico’s Party for Institutionalized Revolution (the PRI) governed the country for close to 60 years, and some emerging trends in South Africa under the African National Congress which, since 1994, has consistently enjoyed a sweeping electoral mandate. In Mexico, patronage came to dominate. In South Africa, will patronage, populism or a happy combination of inclusion and economic dynamism win the day? For further discussion CLICK HERE TO ACCESS MY POST FROM A FEW YEARS AGO ON “WHEN DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY COLLIDE”.  (Note: the Gini coefficient of expenditure inequality quoted in the piece, i.e. after taxes and transfers,  is incorrect; the correct number for 2010 is 0.66, not 0.59.)

The second post highlights the centrality of basic education (and skills acquisition more broadly) to reducing inequality – and points to some of the large, continuing challenges South Africa confronts in this area. (I currently am co-leading  a major research project on the politics and governance of education in South Africa and other developing countries, supported by the University of Manchester’s, DFID-funded  Effective States and Inclusive Development  programme – so more posts to follow in this area.)  CLICK HERE TO ACCESS MY POST ON “EDUCATION AS LIBERATION”. More on both topics in the next few months……but before leaving this site, do sign up to subscribe to my blog…..