The ROACH argued that public-sector organizational performance (the quality, quantity and relevance of the services, products or regulations of a unit, an organi-zation or a network of organisations) is a good focus for any dialogue about past and present capacities, as well as possible desirable future ones. It then added that change can occur in the various internal ‘capacity parts’ (‘push approaches’), or in the external context, whether in the form of changed regulations, articulated de-mands from citizens/consumers, or changed governance (‘pull approaches’). Final-ly, we suggested placing an analytical focus on the options of changes in the ‘func-tional-rational’ as well as ‘political’ dimensions, providing four fields for possible change (and possible CD support from donors), as shown in the table below.
Four dimensions of organisational change Focus on the ‘functional-
rational’ dimension Focus on the ‘political’ dimension
Focus on organisation- internal factors
Focus on changes in the task-and-work system in the organisation
Focus on changes in the distribution of power and authority, conflicts, and the pursuit of different interests
Focus on organisation- external factors
Focus on how changes in external factors and incentives will affect the task-and-work-system dimensions of organisational capacity
Focus on how changes in external factors and incentives will affect the distribution of power and authority, conflicts, and the pursuit of different interests in the organisation
(Mastenbroek 1995; Boesen and Therkildsen 2004)
Recognizing that change must largely be an endogenous affair, we affirmed that the role of donors should change from one of implementers to one of engaged partners able to stimulate change without trying to enforce it. This would require donors to obtain a better and more intimate context-specific knowledge of capacity develop-ment opportunities and constraints. We thus hypothesized that donors should be:
■
■ looking for possible rather than desirable capacity development under present and foreseeable conditions in any given country.
■
■ considering a much wider range of factors and issues that determine actual capacity and performance than those that are immediately observable in appar-ently poorly performing individual organisations.
■
■ analysing if and how outsiders such as donors can support and encourage ca-pacity opportunities, provided that the preceding analytical work indicates that such opportunities exist. (Boesen and Therkildsen 2004)This was explicitly a strong argument against poorly informed and naïve donor support to CD through short-term technical fixes in individual organisations. But we also argued strong-ly against falling into the opposite, cynical trap, where CD is deemed impossible because of ‘politics’ dismissed as simply implying opportunism, clientelism and corruption, or because of ‘the nature’ of the state and society in poor countries.
Instead, we advocated a pragmatic, patient, systemic approach to CD and CD support which focused on change in outputs from organisations and organisa-tional networks.
We were thus riding the wave of political economy assessments informed by insti-tutional economics and political science (Dfid 2003; SIDA 2006; Unsworth and CRU 2007), but adding a perspective on organizational and reform politics that derived from mainstream organisational sociology and the organizational development lit-erature. We expected that this would allow a focus on the specificities of incentives, interests and power in and around organisations, thereby escaping the already then common perception that political economy analysis was interesting, but difficult to make operational (Dahl-Østergaard et al. 2005).
Good theory and guidance, but ...
Alas, despite the efforts and the uptake of the ROACH approach by other organisa-tions such as the EC, it cannot claim to have changed their CD business significant-ly. The same is true of the efforts to promote CD spearheaded by OECD-DAC over the years from the Paris Declaration to the run-up to the Busan conference: they claim the existence of an international consensus, largely along the lines sketched out here (DAC 2006; OECD/DAC 2011; OECD/DAC and LENCD 2011), but with little success as measured in evaluations and studies (see footnote 1).
The push for context-sensitive, incremental and politically informed approaches has continued (Levy and Kpundeh 2004; Levy 2007). The realization that institutional and governance forms and appearances may overshadow actual functions or per-formance has informed both analysis (Harth and Waltmans 2007) and recent pro-posals for action (Andrews et al. 2012). This latest addition advocates, both con-vincingly and in some detail, a problem-driven iterative approach (PDIA) to enhance performance that encourages local experimentation and trial-and-error as opposed to grand reform designs (also discussed by David Booth, this volume). In particular, Andrews et al. (2012) warn against ‘isomorphic mimicry’ where organisations or states embark on reforms or change that will give them the apparent features of democracy, acceptable governance, decent public financial management, strategic plans etc., but where in reality they keep on functioning driven by underlying patri-monial and institutional logics that do not put a premium on performance. They thereby find themselves locked in ‘capability traps’, the way out of which is, accord-ing to the authors, to abandon ‘best practice’ solutions in favour of a focus on local-ly appropriate solutions to specific problems; to seek an ‘authorizing environment’
for experimentation; to have short feedback loops; and to involve of a broad range of local actors in the reform efforts, as opposed to a narrow set of ‘experts’.
This approach is not seen narrowly as focused on ‘capacity development’ under-stood as (technical) improvements in the different parts of the ‘machinery’, ‘organ-ism’ or ‘ecosystem’ of organisations or network of organisations. It focuses on solv-ing performance problems, but on dosolv-ing so in a manner that effectively builds on and strengthens the capabilities of local actors.
While Andrews et al. continue to see a space for aid agencies in the pursuit of such approaches, others have more reservations, arguing that donors have adopted an unfounded trust in principal agent approaches that overlooks the nature of the col-lective action problems that hinder performance and the application of the tools and tricks of traditional public-sector bureaucracies (Booth and Cammack 2013). They argue that donors may often do best by staying at arm’s lengths, or at least working very differently. This has recently been summarized in the call on donors to work to support ‘politically smart, locally led development’(Booth and Unsworth 2014).
Booth and Unsworth find evidence that donors can contribute when they are politi-cally astute, adopt iterative problem-solving and stepwise learning, and broker rela-tionships to discover common interests. Notably, however, to scale-up the success-ful cases will require that donors abandon practices that assume development progress to be simple, predictable and deliverable from the outside.
Ole Therkildsen contributed to the issue in the same vein in 2012, when five major European research programmes issued a joint statement claiming that a funda-mental shift in aid philosophy in the OECD countries is required, away from aid as principally a financial transfer and towards a clearer recognition of the role of insti-tutions and the relevance of institutional change. These programmes argued that this would enable donors to pursue ‘good fit’ approaches by unpacking the political incentives and interest (Booth and Therkildsen 2012). The attempts to make politi-cal economy analyses ‘actionable’ for donors are also continuing at full speed (Bat-ley, McCourt et al. 2012; Hudson and Leftwich 2014)
These newest insights, approaches and toolboxes for reform and capacity develop-ment are, however, additions only. The PDIA recognizes that it does not add signifi-cant new elements to what has been advocated rather incessantly over the last fif-teen years. It is therefore appropriate to ask whether these renewed claims on donors to change their practices or even their fundamental philosophies are likely to have a greater impact than previous such claims, or whether there are some capa-bility traps at other levels and places in the international aid system that impede the application of such politically informed, context-sensitive, locally led incremental approaches?