“Aid on the Edge of Chaos” review
We, the donors to charities and NGOs, are responsible for allowing them to flourish. This cannot be done if we stifle the conversation, shove it down into a disused drawer, forget it existed for a while, and suddenly remember it when politically expedient. It also can’t be done if we tightly define the parameters, shrink down the allowed outcomes to only the “most efficient” and turn away to more important matters once we’ve transmitted the directives. Aid of the Edge of Chaos” by Ben Ramalingam is about foreign aid, overseas projects, and the management of such, which only some readers will partake in directly. But we all have the ability to choose where our money goes, and therefore we are observing the book’s drama from the sidelines with interest, if we care about outcomes for poor people.
“Aid on the Edge of Chaos” is a complex book about complexity. Ramalingam’s point is that the aid world is complex and we’d better learn to live with it. Linear thinking, exclusively top-down management, inflexible plans, cross-context-mass-produced programs and overly simplistic models are five examples of thinking that need to give way to better approaches.
Let’s take linear thinking for example, and imagine that you happen to try a Pennsylvanian Classic Mint Chocolate, thereafter falling in love. You find them online at a single retailer and eventually get to the stage where you are ordering 5 boxes of Pennsylvanian Classics per week for various reasons. You would assume the amount you spend goes up steadily, and if you were to draw a graph of amount spent vs number of boxes, it would go in a straight line. However, little did you know that these chocolates are only produced by a small chocolate shop who is steadily running out. In reality, the graph might curve upwards because decreasing supply drives up the price. Then perhaps it will dramatically dip since the shop owner has decided to scale up production. Even this simple situation is unexpectedly non-linear.
Linear thinking is not just a mathematical problem, it’s a problem with conceptualising aid. We like to think that if we invest x dollars, we can save y lives, or bring z people above the poverty line, in a linear way. However, things are rarely that simple. Scaling up an operation can lead to better or worse results, and can even reverse previous efforts! (Think about over-reliance on antibiotics and how that can strengthen the bacteria attacking the body). We, the donors, love linear thinking because it allows us to have a clear picture of the value of our investment in meeting our goals. This rigid utilitarianism can be its own downfall.
The other aforementioned habits of aid organisations (top-down management, inflexible plans, cross-context-mass-produced programs and overly simplistic models) are perfectly understandable in the context of manufacturing cars. Of course, the capitalist symbol of Henry Ford is discussed in the book. Mr Ramalingam notes that even this extremely successful businessman was not able to extend his methods to all areas of business. Likewise, when applied to aid these habits have failed with such stunning regularity it’s a wonder that we haven’t done something about it. One further wonders why the already significant body of academic literature has done so little to change our habits. Some of Mr Ramalingam’s findings can help in beginning to uncover why.
According to the book, the hierarchy of aid influence often runs similarly to this (from bottom up, where NGO is non-governmental organisation and IDO is international development organisation, southern refers to the Global South and northern refers to the Global North): southern NGOs → northern NGOs → IDOs → donors → political powers. These political powers also have immediate electoral demands and other interests, including constituents who could be thought of as the final link on the chain. With so many layers, the level of connection from bottom to top cannot be considered functional. Those at the bottom claim that those at the top have no understanding of the reality on the ground. A tension is created.
The tension between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy manifests itself in various ways. An inquiry into the DFID (UK Department for International Development) showed that the policy it generated had a huge range of objectives, and some were seemingly unrelated to anything with real, tangible benefit to recipients. This kind of thing was referred to as "policy turbulence" and was an overwhelming experience for people who came into contact with it! These policy initiatives are clearly not always desirable for those tasked with carrying them out. For example, aid programs are reluctant to bring in accountability measures because that will make them statistically accountable to people who don’t understand the situation in all its complexity on the ground. People that live in these recipient countries might observe, along with the Mr Ramalingam, that some of these policy goals (for example the Millenium Development Goals) are often met at the expense of other initiatives which were not mentioned in the goals, often leading to a net outcome which is neutral, if not actually negative.
Ironically, our lack of patience with the complexity of dealing with real people and real situations overseas has, in effect, compounded the complexity for those implementing and receiving aid. This “policy turbulence” when multiplied across many countries and many organisations, often overwhelms recipient countries with a huge number of (often conflicting) goals. Because the goals are decided in advance, and without sufficient knowledge of or consultation with the recipient countries, this can prevent the NGOs from having any cohesion. These recipient governments can have significantly less time to govern because they are fielding so many organisations and their goals, wishes and demands!
Understanding donor preferences helps to understand why we are so determined to keep it simple. Going beyond the book for a minute, I think most “economic north” or “first world” countries have no time or patience for development. It is not really on our agenda, or part of our political debates, and as such politicians are not only doing themselves a disservice politically by talking about it, they are arguably not representing their people. Until the conversation on aid becomes part of the mainstream political discourse of these countries, it is likely to be compressed into a tiny paragraph on page 35 of a newspaper that nobody wanted to read anyway.
Morose rumination aside, the book has an abundance of delightfully hopeful alternatives to our usual approaches to offer. I should also note - just because donors often want simple reports, I have no reason to assume that aid agencies really work in this simplistic way, and I am certain that many (who knows, perhaps most!?) are already using many of the following strategies. (I just don’t know yet). They include: agent-based modelling, the “positive deviance” model, network analysis, and systems thinking.
If part of the problem is our top-down, generic, one-size-fits-all solutions, then a great way to counterbalance that is the “positive deviance” model. This involves trying to find successful ways of managing a problem that are already practiced in a community, but that are just not widespread. Chances are, there is likely to be someone who is doing a fantastic job at managing a particular problem, but who has no platform to announce their success and help others achieve the same. Of course, the “positive deviance” model was only invented by accident, as a last resort, when the team were not given time to think of their own plan (hallelujah). They asked a village whether anyone had any good ideas to combat malnutrition and whether it was possible. Some of them practically screamed out "yes!" These mothers fed their children more than the usual twice a day and/or fed them some bugs that were on the crops. Using the same amounts of crops, these mothers had healthier children. By finding what is already working and seeing about scaling it up, positive deviance authentically engages with complexity by borrowing the authentic engagement of the people who have already been immersed in that complexity.
There are numerous other strategies mentioned in the book, often interrelated. If another problem is that there are too many agencies, organisations, government bodies, businesses and interest groups in a particular context, then a helpful tool might be network analysis. I’ll leave it to the book to discuss resilience in the face of shocks, the meaning between the number of connections between each node, etc, but it’s enough to say that it’s very powerful. “Agent-based modelling” predicts outcomes based on inputs to a computer program based on a large number of agents, who have been given very human decision-making attributes. These programs do not predict with certainty, of course, but they can unearth possibilities which can make for more resilient planning. To strengthen these models, games using the “Conmod” modelling tool allow users in target countries to play and therefore to better inform the inputs into these models.
The writing style of “Aid on the Edge of Chaos” is consistent with the message. Mr Ramalingam seems reluctant to summarise or re-explain the ideas that he has found in complexity literature, sometimes giving the impression that he's not fully abreast of the subject. That would be understandable enough because the book covers quite a range of subjects which all touch on or address complex phenomena. However, his approach is consistent with his message. A general reluctance to summarise or reduce complex topics is exactly the attitude that he recommends in aid work, so that we don't brush over details that might have an outsized effect on the outcome that we are interested in.
The tools Mr Ramalingam advocates are promising, but we need to use them, and use them to achieve ends that will help poorer people in these countries. We cannot keep hammering the same way at the bent nail of international development in good conscience. Environmental, social, political, cultural, religious and economic factors all interrelate in a complex ecosystem of causes and effects. It is simply naive to expect that the problems people encounter will be simple.
