Knowing for which problems and in which contexts political and adaptive approaches are likely to have comparative advantages over mainstream approaches is important. But an equally fundamental question is which kinds of contributions these approaches can be expected to make under these conditions. This section focuses on three potential contributions that PADA can make: improving short-term effectiveness, improving long-term effectiveness and reducing harm.
So far, studies of TWP have referred to the claim that the approach can improve the effectiveness of development projects (Dasandi et al., 2019; McCulloch & Piron, 2019, p.
O13; see also TWP Community of Practice, n.d.). However, to be able to decide whether PADA really is more effective than mainstream approaches, we need to know what
“effectiveness” refers to. One of the most important distinctions is between short-term and long-term effectiveness (McCulloch & Piron, 2019, p. O10). In this paper, short-term effectiveness refers to outcomes that contribute to the solution of a problem and have immediate developmental benefits. Certain laws, like the land rights law in the Philippines, creative administrative approaches, or campaigns for the recovery of unremitted funds are examples of this. Long-term effectiveness, on the other hand, means that a project has contributed to reducing rather than deepening the institutional capability trap. Realistically, that means that it has introduced or supported an institutional process that has taken on a self-sustained dynamic towards reducing the capability trap. Or, from a broader systems
16 Honig refers to two projects on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in South Africa.
In direct comparison with each other, the top-down management and control approach used by USAID was much more successful than the navigation-by-judgement management strategy employed in DFID’s project (2018, pp. 112-122).
perspective, “that institutional relationships have begun to shift in ways that make breakthroughs [in their relationships] more feasible in the future” (Booth & Unsworth, 2014, p. 7). To be clear, PADA is not a silver bullet and the more complex a problem is and the more unpredictable a context, the more difficult it is to achieve both short-term and long-term effectiveness. But based on the argument made and the evidence presented so far, PADA is more likely to be effective under these conditions compared with mainstream approaches.
Short-term effectiveness
Because political and adaptive approaches are still relatively new, available studies focus on their short-term effectiveness. However, the evidence they can draw on is limited. Some case study findings, and especially the stronger counterfactual evidence discussed earlier, suggest that when these approaches fit the problems and contexts, they can indeed produce better results than mainstream approaches. Because both TWP and PDIA grant local development agents substantial discretion to navigate by judgement, strong additional support for the claim is provided by Honig’s (2018) finding that projects that use this strategy are more likely to be successful when project verifiability and environmental predictability are low. Beyond that, however, more systematic research, including direct comparisons of mainstream and political and adaptive approaches is necessary to build a strong evidence base for comparing their respective advantages under different conditions.
A key problem for both research and policy is that these approaches differ from each other in ways that are so fundamental that different metrics have to be used to measure their performance. And some of the metrics and methods more suitable for PADA are yet to be developed.
Long-term effectiveness
How is PADA likely to fare on long-term effectiveness and institutional impact? As a study of World Bank projects (Andrews, 2018c) and the evaluation of GIZ’s governance work stream (GIZ, 2020) show, the lack of impact is a weak spot of institutional reform projects.
While making this kind of impact is a lot harder than achieving short-term outcomes, that makes it even more important that donors are clear about what kinds of impact they want to achieve and how they think they can do so. Unlike mainstream approaches, political and adaptive approaches not only enable but explicitly encourage projects to adapt project objectives, theories of change, strategies and even interventions throughout the project in response to changes in the context and in response to lessons learnt from iterative experimentation. This does not guarantee that they will eventually have a bigger impact, but it enables projects to develop more realistic context-specific expectations, to better navigate risks, to explore opportunities when they arise, and perhaps even to help create novel opportunities themselves.
A better understanding of the context’s political dynamics and the close collaboration with local agents are two of PADA’s comparative advantages that enable long-term effectiveness and impact. In the case of PDIA, external agents regard themselves merely as facilitators of a process owned and driven by local actors. If successful, these interventions strengthen institutional capability both in the short run and especially in the long run by motivating and empowering them. But because long-term evaluations with a focus on institutional impact are
rare, apart from being methodologically challenging, these potential comparative advantages may not be empirically tested any time soon.
Direct and indirect harm
With regard to harm, this paper distinguishes direct harm – or harm that causes immediate damage – and indirect harm, which decreases institutional capability over time and, thereby, deepens the capability trap. Somewhat surprisingly, the most comprehensive study of TWP in development assistance to date concludes that “the primary function of TWP may not in fact be aid effectiveness per se, but rather avoiding the well recorded pitfalls and negative unintended consequences of ‘politically blind’ aid” (Dasandi et al., 2019, p. 163).17 This is an important point because development projects that do not achieve their goals are not
“only” ineffective – these interventions in polities and bureaucracies with millions of dollars over many years can be incredibly harmful. Especially in contexts where institutions are weak, direct harm caused by development projects and donors may include the diversion of critical government resources away from more important issues by excessive and uncoordinated reporting and accounting requirements, for example. Insisting on procedures that are not in line with or even contradict local processes are another case in point.
Unfortunately, even though these problems are well known, and attempts have been made to address them, recent years have seen little progress with donor harmonisation and seriously taking the “absorptive capacity” of partner countries into account.
For institutional reform, however, the indirect harm caused by mainstream development assistance may be even more damaging. By arriving with pre-planned projects and solutions, development agencies actively disempower the very agents that are in charge of development. This is done by prioritising international best practice solutions over home-grown solutions that local agents could have developed, or by primarily talking to senior politicians and bureaucrats and seeing mid- and lower-level officials as mere implementing partners. Given the overall power inequality between development partners, this approach can effectively undermine a government’s capability to feel in charge and actually be in charge of and analyse their development problems and, perhaps with international support on their own terms, develop their own solutions. This is especially the case when development projects are not few and far between but have become a local constant, often without taking the lessons learnt (or not learnt) by earlier projects and other donors into account. It is not surprising that these constellations frequently produce reform fatigue, frustration and cynicism on the part of local public officials rather than actual reforms.
The potential of political and adaptive approaches to do less direct harm and especially less indirect harm to institutional capability may well be, therefore, at least as important a contribution as improving short-term and long-term effectiveness. But while it is common to evaluate whether development projects were effective or not, the same care is not usually taken in investigating the damage they have done or have avoided. In addition to that, it is necessary to more systematically and more forcefully apply the “do no harm” principle that
17 In their long-term assessment of the differences that TWP made to DFID-funded work in Nigeria, Williams and Owen make a similar observation: “Yet the real gains of TWP may be to a significant extent invisible, in terms of bad work avoided and wastage prevented” (2020, p. 14).
has been common in humanitarian assistance for decades now (Anderson, 1999) to development assistance in general and to institutional reform projects in particular.
In conclusion, under certain conditions, political and adaptive approaches to development assistance are likely to have comparative advantages over mainstream approaches in terms of short-term outcome effectiveness, long-term institutional impact and avoiding direct and indirect harm. And while it is understandable that current TWP studies try to build the case for PADA on the (short-term outcome) effectiveness claim, the ways in which political and adaptive approaches differ from mainstream approaches is so fundamental, that other contributions they are likely to make should be more strongly emphasised and further explored. This incomplete yet broader set of contributions may even attract development agencies, practitioners and developing country governments who are unfamiliar with PADA but for whom long-term institutional impact and harm reduction are priorities.
6 Conclusions
Political and adaptive approaches in development assistance are still relatively new. This paper has suggested that rather than expecting them to improve aid effectiveness in general, three questions should be asked to specify for which problems and in which contexts they may have comparative advantages over mainstream approaches, and what their main contributions may be under these conditions. Based on theoretical discussions and a review of available evidence, the conclusion is that political and adaptive approaches seem to have comparative advantages over mainstream approaches when either the problem is complex, the context is difficult to predict or the problem and its solution are contentious. Under these conditions, PADA is likely to improve short-term outcome effectiveness and long-term institutional impact. It may also reduce direct and indirect harm, which weakens institutional capability and, thereby, makes developmental institutional change less likely.
While the evidence base is still too thin to conclusively confirm that the expectations and hopes invested in PADA are justified, the general and specific evidence assembled for this paper suggests that this is the case under the conditions and with the qualifications brought forward. This paper responds to the call for a more systematic, evidence-based discussion of the potential contributions of PADA and has developed a framework of specific theoretical claims with supporting evidence on which future researchers can build. It agrees with Dasandi et al. (2019) and McCulloch and Piron (2019) that more systematic and more rigorous empirical studies that investigate if and under which conditions PADA works better than mainstream approaches are necessary. More policy-based research is also required for developing new development programming tools and methods. Problem-driven adaptive and politically informed approaches require novel metrics and reporting formats. If learning and long-term institutional impact should be more central in institutional reform projects, these aspects must be accounted for and, eventually, evaluated. While there are no common
standards yet, several new tools and innovative procedures have been developed and tested in recent years.18
If the conclusions suggested in this paper are correct, the implications for evidence-based development policy would be huge. Because development projects beyond governance and public sector reform try to achieve institutional change of some kind, and because problem complexity is usually high and context predictability low, a large share of bilateral and multilateral development assistance would be affected. Political and adaptive approaches would have to be greatly expanded while mainstream approaches would become the exception rather than the rule for institutional reform projects. While this may well be the case, however, this paper’s overall conclusion is a more general one. The range of topics that development assistance deals with has steadily widened in recent decades and has become almost all-encompassing. In light of that, it is remarkable how little development programming and management have changed. While there have been modifications, the general model and procedures have changed so little that in many countries a project manager from the 1980s would not have a major problem understanding and implementing a project conceived in 2020. Development assistance itself is in need of institutional reform.
Mainstream models and procedures must be questioned because they have changed very little over long periods of time and because it is highly unlikely that the same programming approach works for every single one of the challenges that development assistance concerns itself with. Development policy needs a broader variety of clearly differentiated approaches and the evidence base and analytical capability to select those that best fit the respective problem and context for every case.19 While this paper has focused on political and adaptive approaches that may work better for institutional reform projects under certain conditions, other problems and contexts may require approaches with different qualities and comparative advantages.
Whether international development assistance is open to such fundamental change is not clear (Yanguas, 2018; 2021). Two trends are currently contradicting each other. At the level of development organisations, it appears that the need for greater political sensitivity, context-based problem-orientation, and procedural flexibility is increasingly being recognised, even outside the PADA community. The evaluation report of GIZ’s governance advisory services cited earlier, for example, makes several recommendations along these lines.20 And an earlier book on GIZ experiences with “smart implementation in governance programs” (Kirsch, Siehl, & Stockmayer, 2017) confirms that much of this is already being practiced in the field within the limits of the existing development system. But as long as these practices and approaches are not formally approved, they and the lessons learnt from them have to remain informal and detached from official reporting and programming.
18 There are too many to mention all of them. A small selection includes: “everyday political analysis”
instead of the more traditional political economy analysis (Hudson, Marquette, & Waldock, 2016), the
“searchframe” as an alternative to the logframe (Andrews et al., 2017, Chapter 8), “contribution analysis”
for adaptive management (Apgar, Hernandez, & Ton, 2020), learning-centred approaches (Valters, Cummings, & Nixon, 2016), “strategy testing” as a monitoring approach for flexible projects (Ladner, 2015), and monitoring and evaluation for adaptive development programming (Roche & Kelly, 2018).
19 In his book, Honig also argues that “tailoring management to suit the task” (2018, p. 105) has to be improved and that development organisations have to be made “fit for purpose” (p. 152).
20 However, it is quite peculiar that neither TWP nor PDIA are mentioned in the report and that the respective literature is completely absent (Kirsch, Siehl, & Stockmayer, 2017).
Because of these pragmatic practices within development organisations and their increasing realisation that the formalisation of these practices is possible with the political and adaptive approaches discussed, a shift towards more PADA at the level of development organisations seems conceivable. On the other hand, however, there are broader political developments that work against these trends. These include growing donor nationalism; the subordination of aid under foreign policy, like in Australia and the UK; and the increasing tendency of donors to unilaterally determine the topics they are prepared to support. Together with an overly rigid interpretation of results-based approaches,21 these political trends could potentially undermine or even terminate the growing awareness that PADA may be a useful addition to mainstream approaches to development assistance if the political dimension of development and the importance of context are taken seriously.
21 For results- versus adaptation-based ideas and approaches in development assistance, see Janus (2020).
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