This is the last of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

Identifying and making decisions of global scope and significance is challenging for two related reasons. Compared with a national board, the issues become more abstract and more complex at a global level. Both these challenges take us beyond our comfort zone and we have to work at making these shifts.

I will start by trying to write about abstraction in a non abstract way!

Getting clear about what the International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) wants to become, getting a view of the whole global system, simplifying it well, and connecting it to reality on the ground, is a harder job than doing this for a national board (and it is not easy there!). The international board needs to ensure that over-arching systems are in place to achieve the alliance’s strategy and these systems will be more complicated, and the discussion of them will end up being more about systems of systems, at a global level. Secondly, the global board needs to be clear how it wants different parts of the alliance to work together or to instead have the freedom to function independently but also manage quality and risk.

Systems-of-systems issues include how different international systems interconnect (such as advocacy and delivery and the development of people within the agency) and the intersections between national systems and those operating across the alliance– for example, how international campaigning or programming priorities affect those within a particular country or region. For a national board the focus is more on single systems or the interaction between simpler systems.

Describing a system is describing an abstract model of what actually happens; describing and making decisions on systems of systems involves abstractions of abstractions. It often makes our heads spin to try to think this way and to relate this to the realities on the ground for our organization.

Greater complexity adds a further challenge. Most of the issues that INGO boards need to focus on are ones where the relationships between causes and effects are not clear. It may be possible to use data, experts, or research to make some links between causes and effects clearer or these may only become visible after the event. Either way, international boards are negotiating zones of high uncertainty and the very human tendency is to pretend we can know or control more of the situation than is actually the case.

The irony is that as we strive for greater reach and effectiveness, and try to wrap our arms around more of the challenge, we get to hold onto less – more aspects of our work elude our grasp or need to be let go of for the governance role to be done well – and what we do manage to hold onto seems more slippery – we can be less confident about maintaining our grip!

International board members find themselves trying to hold onto enough to be effective and informed while also reaching further afield to be able to see the larger systems at play. All of this happens with high levels of uncertainty. This reinforces the need for international boards to build in ways to reflect, re-assess, and learn as they navigate across these uncertain terrains.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

This is the fourth of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

The central governance questions for any board are: What are we trying to become? Where are we going? These are the core questions for the board of an International Non-Governmental Organization (INGO) too but the international context may make them even harder to answer.

Burkhard Gnärig, Executive Director of the Berlin Civil Society Center, challenges global board members to answer the question: “what are the GLOBAL decisions my organisation has to take?” and then to make sure that these can be taken from a truly global perspective. The international board needs to be clear about what its INGO is there to do and what the board of the INGO needs to govern. What value is the international board seeking to add to the work of the whole INGO? What is its role and its reach?

Once you have a sense of these questions, you have to be sure you are doing the right work. Observers of board performance often point to boards spending too much time on reworking the past and responding to the present and challenge them to instead lift their focus to work on shaping the future. Different advisers suggest rules of thumb of between 60-80 per cent future-focused and 40-20 per cent on the past and present.

How would your board ratios compare? How would the ratio be for INGO boards if the ratios were recast to follow Burkhard’s prescription? What if we aimed for 70 per cent of the time of the INGO board being focused on the future global issues the board needed to address? And what if we added a performance measure that we were addressing these issues from truly global perspective?

There may be some stellar INGO boards already achieving this level of performance. Well done if you are. Care to share your secret? Email me on keiath@cultivatingleadership.co.nz. For most of us this is more a noble aspiration. But what might you need to do to achieve a performance like this in your board over the next three years?

At the international level it is one thing to put future-focused global issues on the table. It is another to have the board achieve a global perspective on those issues. Getting to global brings more factors into play: the scale of the issues gets much larger, there are more intersecting factors and thus greater complexity, and decisions are more removed from the actual implementation and necessarily involve more abstraction. Boards find it hard to think strategically about global issues and how the specific work of the INGO will shape and be shaped by these global factors. In part boards find this work hard because staff find it hard. If it is hard for staff to get their arms, and their heads, around these global issues and their implications, then it is hard for them to shape up the issues and options in ways that boards can discuss them and work the issues through to an effective resolution.

One of the constraints here is that we are light on ‘theories of change’ or the logics for why we intervene in the ways we do and why that might be the most effective way to respond. We often do things because that is the way we have done them in the past or we have observed others doing them with apparent success or our partners or supporters might have been keen on these initiatives.

It may be a struggle for the board and staff to identify actions that will have the greatest impact on the INGO’s mission and then making sure those actions are done well. Almost inevitably, these theories of change will start out being uncertain, incomplete, and experimental. The international view also may be that the theories cannot be worked up at the global level and the role for the international board may be to ensure this work is being done at whatever is the appropriate level – regional, country, thematic. The biggest wins come from the board and staff going through the process of trying to think more clearly about what needs to be achieved and what actions will be most effective.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

This is the third of a five-part series of blog posts by Keith Johnston on the role of international board members in the governance of international NGOs.

By Keith Johnston

A consistent endeavour is for each organisation to be more representative of the whole world in which it is working and to be able to draw on a much more international range of thinking in its leadership. All the major INGOs are moving to be more diverse at multiple levels. Governance has been one of the slower areas of change. Here it no longer works to be just “male, pale, and stale” (Author’s disclosure: I am male, pale – although tending to pinkish – and trying hard to be more ripe than stale).

The drive to greater diversity brings its own challenges. First it is not always easy to achieve a practical working diversity given the current structures and locations. Different INGOs are taking different approaches. These include: establishing national affiliates in a wide range of countries, including all of the elements of the network in governance, or changing the makeup of boards and committees, or relocating key international offices to be more global.

Having changed the forms of the organisation to be more diverse, how does it work in practice? Often a central paradox arises. The INGO needs to be more diverse to be more global but including more diversity in the group means it is harder to achieve coherence and especially the coherence needed to take on the large global issues of eliminating poverty or injustice, advancing human rights, tackling climate change, and protecting the environment.

Also different forms of diversity bring differing challenges. How much are board members there to represent different constituencies? How might differences in money and power be dealt with? How are conflicts best addressed?

Having built in necessary diversity you want the spectrum of views to work for your alliance. This can often be very hard, and literally ‘disagreeable’, work. We pay lip service to diversity yet often underestimate the depth of the differences that exist in culture, values, experiences, and mindsets. To build a trusting and truly diverse board takes conscious and consistent efforts.

It is also the case that diversity is, in part, valuable because it increases the possibilities of conflict . The INGO needs to lift its game to use that conflict constructively. However, because INGOs tend to put less time into their governance than national NGOs (it is often harder to get people together) and the board members often know each other less well, they are less well equipped to create the trust and mutual understanding needed to achieve cohesion amid diversity. These practical difficulties and the pressures to take a representative approach can drive INGO boards to make lowest-common-denominator compromises. These are LCDs that do not light us up!

Managing these paradoxes will be central to the longer-term success of INGOs. Leaders need to be explicit in addressing these governance issues and also in equipping their board members, the new ones and the old hands, to take a whole-of-alliance view.

A working paper I have prepared on this and related themes – “Acting Globally – Thinking Globally” – is available here.

Keith Johnston has served as Chair of Oxfam International since 2007 and is a partner at Cultivating Leadership.

Until recently, branding was a dirty word in many nonprofit organizations. Not anymore.

Branding used to conjure up images of profit-driven marketing executives sitting in high-rise offices of the likes of Coca-Cola and MacDonald’s. The few nonprofits that adopted branding early on were suspected by others to compromise their ethical values and to loose track of their social mission.

That was yesterday. Today, an increasing number of nonprofit organizations are embracing the concept of branding. These organizations believe that a brand is not only a tool to enhance their fundraising and visibility but also a way to drive their mission and impact more broadly.

This is the conclusion of a newly released study by the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. Based on an 18-month research project involving 73 interviews with practitioners and scholars in 41 organizations, the study analyses current attitudes and branding practices in the nonprofit sector. It proposes a valuable framework to think about the specific role that brands play for nonprofit organizations.

As Nathalie Kylander and Christopher Stone write in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “the models and terminology used in the nonprofit sector to understand brand remain those imported from the for-profit sector to boost name recognition and raise revenue. Nonprofit leaders need new models that allow their brands to contribute to sustaining their social impact, serving their mission, and staying true to their organization’s values and culture”.

Kylander and Stone, in collaboration with colleagues at the Hauser Center, developed a conceptual framework designed to help nonprofit organizations do just that. The framework is called IDEA, which stands for Integrity, Democracy, Ethics and Affinity. In short, Brand Integrity means that the public image of the organization is aligned with its mission. Brand Democracy means that the organization trusts its constituencies to communicate the organization’s core identity, without the need of centralized control on how the brand is presented. Brand Ethics means that the brand reflects the core values and culture of the organization. Finally, Brand Affinity means that the brand promotes collective interests and attracts partners and collaborators.

The study should be commended for analyzing and framing the features of branding in a way that is palatable to the non-profit sector. It is a welcome and fresh look at branding, which will surely help drive the conversation forward.

However, as I was reading the various case studies, a number of questions arose, which are left unaddressed by the study:

1- The cases analyzed in the study look at large, Northern-based, well-resourced organizations, coalitions or campaigns (Amnesty International, WWF, Publish What You Pay, The Girl Effect). These are backed by tens of millions of dollars coming from public and private donors. It is crucial to expand the analysis to include the role of brand for groups based in the global south. Can any organization afford the efforts and expertise needed in developing an iconic brand? Are the benefits of a good brand equally important for all organizations, operating under widely different political, cultural and economic circumstances? Is it more important for international NGOs than for local, service-delivery type of organizations?

2- Another, related question is: Is it always worth the effort? Could it be counterproductive to have a strong brand, especially for organizations operating under authoritarian regimes? Operating under the radar – rather than building credibility with the government or donors – may be the key to the long-term survival and effectiveness of NGOs operating in adversarial legal environments. I am thinking of for instance groups working to promote women’s empowerment in Islamist countries.

3- One could argue that the organizations and campaigns described in the study have governance arrangements and financing mechanisms that are quite similar to those of for-profit corporate entities. Their top executives often come from the private sector. Corporate lawyers and investment bankers sit on their board. They are primarily concerned about the long-term sustainability of the organization’s finance and image. In this context, it makes sense for them to adopt a concept – branding – that was developed in the private sector. It is a language that speaks to them. But what about the hundreds of thousands of grassroots charitable organizations? What types of challenges may they face in convincing their staff, executives, board members, partners and constituencies of the necessity of adopting a strong brand? Is this framing useful at all to them?

4- Finally, more rigorous research needs to be undertaken on the impact of branding on an organization’s effectiveness. Under what conditions will a brand successfully foster the implementation of the organization’s mission? There is no internationally agreed standard against which to measure organizational effectiveness in the non-profit sector. However, it would be interesting to assess in more detail the extent to which good brands encourage organizational cohesion, public mobilization, member engagement, public recognition, movement building and sustainable social change.

Branding in the nonprofit sector is a work in progress. Eight years ago, I worked as a program officer at WWF. On a sunny afternoon in September, I boarded a private cruise boat in the Baltic Sea with our special donors and board members. We were all wearing life jackets with the emblematic panda and trying to spot an endangered species: porpoises. The purpose of the trip fitted well with the image most passengers had of WWF: on organization dedicated to species conservation. They were surprised to hear that my job entailed securing an international agreement at the International Maritime Organization in London for safer shipping on the Baltic Sea. The objective was to protect the marine ecosystem needed for the porpoises to survive. Yet the link wasn’t obvious to our most ardent supporters. The powerful brand of WWF – the panda – was failing to capture and communicate the evolution and the breadth of our work.

As the case study conducted by the Hauser Center shows, WWF has made some remarkable progress since then. And so have many other organizations. Much remains to be done though to align one’s internal identity with external image, values and mission. The challenge for WWF and others will be to convey increasingly complex socio-economic and political issues through a simple and compelling idea – the brand!

Elisa Peter is a mid-career fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held December 2011 in Busan, South Korea, was a landmark event where civil society participated in negotiations on the new direction for international development cooperation on an equal basis with governments and donors, the first such time in the history of these OECD-led events.

It concluded with a compromise and mixed results for civil society organisations (CSOs) (1). One important gain is the acknowledgement in the outcome agreement of the International Framework for CSO Development Effectiveness, as a reference on best CSO practices and conditions required from governments and donors.

Accompanied by two Toolkits to help CSOs put it into practice, the International Framework is the outcome of a three year consultation process with thousands of CSOs across the globe and the first ever global statement from civil society on the effectiveness of its work in development. As such, it represents a legitimate reference for CSOs at national, regional and international levels.

But while putting the International Framework into practice is now a priority for civil society organisations across the globe, the enabling environment in which they operate continues to deteriorate in many countries.
Indeed, the issue of an enabling environment proved to be one of the stumbling blocks for civil society at the Busan forum. “By participating in high level negotiations on aid and development for the first time, people’s organisations can take credit for cementing democratic ownership and human rights in the Busan Outcome Document – but more work needs to be done on advancing favourable conditions for civil society,” said Open Forum co-chair Emele Duituturaga in response to the newly agreed Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation.

One of the key civil society expectations from Busan was a firm, clear and explicit commitment towards providing an enabling environment for civil society, in the face of a wave of restrictions and attacks on CSOs across a wide range of countries.

“The evidence was clear and compelling. Since 2008, although governments made explicit commitments to provide an enabling environment for civil society, civil society around the world has seen a regressive trend of shrinking space, and is facing various legal, policy and regulatory barriers as well as unwarranted harassment and persecution” explains Netsanet Belay, Policy and Research Director at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

After intense advocacy and lobbying by civil society, the Busan outcome document, in paragraph 22(a), made reference to agreed international rights as the basis for defining an enabling environment for civil society. CIVICUS applauded this move, but remains unconvinced about the likelihood of impact on the ground.
Evidence suggests that key principles of the aid effectiveness dialogue, including the principles of alignment, harmonisation and domestic ownership of aid are being used contrary to their intention by governments to justify restrictions on CSOs’ access to funding and their right to operate without unwarranted interference.
Belay explains, “We are dissatisfied about the lack of specific minimum standards on a civil society enabling environment in the Busan outcome document. We were also concerned about the overemphasis on governments’ understanding of development results during the negotiations.” Paragraph 11(b) of the Busan outcome document stipulates that all development actors, including CSOs, should ‘align their efforts with the priorities and policies set out by developing counties’. We hope this statement will not lead to governments encroaching upon the independence of CSOs, their role as watchdogs and their pursuit of innovation.”

When it comes to measuring the provision of an enabling environment by governments and donors, civil society also highlights the failure of Paragraph 22 to refer to compliance with internationally agreed rights ‘in law and in practice’, which can only hinder efforts to hold governments accountable to these commitments.
CSOs, as recognised development actors, have shown their commitment to improving their effectiveness in development through their constructive engagement in the Busan process, and must continue to be included in the dialogue. However, global partnerships and international negotiations will only be successful when the enabling environment for CSOs is fully respected.

Without guarantees for an enabling environment which respects the fundamental freedoms of civil society, CSOs are unable to play their full role as development actors.

(1) See civil society reactions to the Busan Partnership here.

CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is a global civil society alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society across the world.

Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness is a global fully participatory space run by and for civil society organizations to improve the impact of their development work and advocate for more favourable government policies and practices for CSOs according to the globally agreed International Framework for CSO Development Effectiveness.

Several years ago, I saw a presentation by Yale School of Management Economics Professor Mushfiq Mobarak about encouraging poor populations in Bangladesh to adopt clean stoves. Traditional stoves pollute air inside the home, causing respiratory illnesses and increasing cancer risk. However, households refused to adopt the stoves. Dr. Mobarak suggested several reasons households may choose against using a product that is good for them: perhaps the male household head makes all purchasing decisions, but he is least affected by polluted air and thus miscalculates the benefits of the purchase. Perhaps the health returns of the clean stoves appear too far into the future for households to value the product at its price today. Or perhaps the taste of food from the clean stoves was different – worse – than the taste of food cooked on traditional stoves.

If economic theory describes the first two reasons households did not purchase these stoves, the third reason, taste, seems to be a clear design flaw. Why was an economics professor conducting research to encourage households to use a product they simply did not like? Should the product not be redesigned to produce tastier food?

In fact, the problem that useful and important products fail to capture the attention of target audiences is not uncommon in international development. Economic theory can often explain, and eventually resolve, the unpopularity of these products. But development practitioners often find themselves pushing a product that nobody wants to use. This is not laziness on the part of designers for development. Rather, I would argue that successful innovation methods and the practice of international development are uniquely incompatible.

Successful innovation is the union of a vast and uninhibited universe of solutions with identifiable goals. Ideally, these two bodies of knowledge – the goal and the methods – reside in the same population. The iPod derived from Apple engineers’ passion for music and frustration with available portable music players. These engineers may not have known ahead of time that they sought a small rectangular device with a round control pad, but when they hit on it, they knew they had what they wanted.

This ideal union is perhaps rare. InnoCentive understands that people or firms who know what they want may not have the technical knowledge to design it and has built a successful business around connecting these two populations. Yet the InnoCentive model fails when users cannot accurately identify their need. Steve Jobs’ statement that it is not the consumers’ job to know what they want works for a company like Apple, whose designers are also its users, but presents a challenge to those designers working for a population to which they don’t belong.

Communication between users and developers becomes particularly disconnected in international development, where policy and social programs originate from engineers and economists who are quite different from the populations they aim to serve, regardless of how much time they have spent living (even growing among) with their target users. When the objective is to develop a clean stove for poor households in Bangladesh, engineers focus on making that stove affordable to poor populations and functional in difficult weather conditions and low-tech societies. It is easy to understand how the question of taste could be overlooked.

More difficult to understand is why, once identified, resolving the issue of taste fell to a behavioral invention rather than to the product-development team. Presumably going back to the drawing table was too expensive for developers of a social product with limited budget. Dr. Mobarak’s paper ultimately concludes that his behavioral interventions can influence short-term take-up of the clean stoves in question, but not long-term use. Perhaps innovation-for-development methods need some innovating of their own.

UPDATE (February 20): Rema Hanna presented ongoing research about an implementation of clean stoves in India that had similar take-up problems at the Harvard Kennedy School last week. Her research, joint with Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone of MIT, concludes similarly that this is a design problem. The paper is not yet released, but any updates will be posted here.

Sara Nadel is a Doctoral Student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Hauser Center Doctoral Fellow for the 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 years. Prior to coming to Harvard, she was the Peru Country Director for Innovations for Poverty Action, an organization dedicated to rigorous research about development programs. Sara holds a BA in International Relations from Stanford University, and an MPA in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Nothing unusual in the title of the seminar that The Hauser Center at Harvard University put together just over a year ago. Everyone from academics to NGOs, government officials and even rock stars seem to have something to say on the topic. The innovation here was the choice of the lead panelist: Ndiogou Fall of Senegal, an authoritative and articulate representative of the burgeoning movement of Africa small producers who, in his words, “are both the prime victims of and the solutions to the problem of hunger”. Listening to the views of the actors most directly concerned by the problem sounds like common sense. But how often have you seen peasant leaders on stage at Harvard when food and development issues are under discussion.

Ending Hunger in Africa panel discussion, November 8. 2010, Harvard Kennedy School

The leap into uncharted dialogic territory paid off. Ndiogou Fall gave us the gift of a lucid, convincing and combative analysis of how African food security has deteriorated over the years and what is required for the continent to feed itself. The policies applied during and following the colonial period, from export-oriented specialization to structural adjustment and liberalization, have drastically dampened food production, barred small producers’ access to their own domestic markets, and reduced them to de-capitalized subsistence farming. The 2007-2008 food crisis and the attendant uprisings have had the salutary effect of dramatically exposing the failure of past approaches. What to put in their place? For Fall the horse to bet on can only be the small-scale family farmers who today provide food, employment and incomes for the majority of Africa’s population despite the neglect from which they have suffered for decades. With supportive policies and programs, and applying environment-friendly agro-ecological methods, it is possible to significantly increase smallholder productivity while helping to cool the planet and defend biodiversity.

But this requires a change of paradigm, Fall explains. African governments have to prioritize local and regional markets over the world market through trade policies that protect local producers, regulate supply, and build intra-regional exchanges. Agricultural policies formulated with the participation of all stakeholders are required. Infrastructure and communications need to be extended in rural areas and the rural economies strengthened by supporting producers to develop value chains that can generate employment and revenues. Small-scale producers need to access credit at reasonable terms – not the 25% interest rates they now have to contend with as compared with 5% in Europe. Land policies have to defend the right of rural people to the territories on which they live and from which they draw their livelihoods, blocking the galloping phenomenon of speculation and land grabs.

Ndiogou Fall passed away, prematurely and deeply mourned, on May 5, 2011. We pay tribute to his memory by making available the video recording of the Hauser Center seminar in which he participated. His message is an important one for Harvardians in a moment in which other voices advocate biotechnology as key to preventing hunger and news reports unveil the possible involvement of the Harvard endowment fund in land grabbing in Africa (The Guardian – June 9, 2011).

Nora McKeon was formerly responsible for civil society relations at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). She is the author of several publications on small farmers and food policies. Harvard Class of ’62.

The 17th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP17) is coming up, and no one harbors great hopes that the South African hosts will manage to cajole all major polluters into signing a legally-binding agreement to cut emissions. Civil society is rightly flummoxed at the glacial progress of negotiations, which never respected the pace set out by the Bali Action Plan of 2007. Failure to find common grounds on the future of the Kyoto Protocol killed off COP15, and the matter was essentially circumvented in Cancun.

In the meantime, 2012 is only a month away, and – doomsday previsions made by Hollywood blockbusters aside – calamity is about to strike. The Kyoto Protocol – flawed, limited, but also the only treaty to have ever committed countries to stabilize GHG emissions – is set to expire, and the political will among key players to sign an agreement at least as strong is nowhere to be seen.

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) will struggle to decide which advocacy strategy to undertake. In Copenhagen, the massive effort of mobilization raised awareness (and expectations), yet by CSOs’ own reckoning, probably helped the talks collapse. In Cancun a year later, the quieter effort to help build consensus so as to sow the ground for a comprehensive agreement in Durban didn’t quite work out as expected – consensus was reached, but only because most sensitive topics were deferred to COP17.

CSOs did score some successes in Cancun. Most were on questions of principle (for example on youth and gender involvement) or on technical matters: the Climate Action Network (CAN – a coalition of like minded NGOs) worked hard to prevent the agreement on Land-use land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) from being worded so as to provide loopholes for polluting countries. Civil society also embarrassed Japan into not vetoing references to a second commitment period (albeit failed to make that a durable position). It is however evident that CSOs were most influential over matters where political controversy was low.

Unfortunately, Durban needs to resolve the most politically sensitive issues:
1- what enforceable mitigation efforts countries should take,
2- and how to include in such a process big developing countries (and the USA).

Civil society can influence the process through three different channels: by appealing directly to public opinion, by lobbying negotiators, and by setting the discourse on an issue.

In the short run, work must be done on the first two. Mobilizing public opinion will be difficult in rich economies, where economic instability has long displaced environmental sustainability in the minds of most. Nevertheless, environmental NGOs could very well link up with the ‘Indignant’ movements across the world, whose broad discontent with the excesses of finance-driven capitalism is not incompatible with the environmentalist message of combating unnecessary consumption.

Whilst lobbying negotiators is probably the most direct way to influence the final agreement, this isn’t usually the channel for fundamental change. Either CSOs also act on domestic policy-makers, or else influencing negotiators with strict marching orders from capital will not achieve anything politically radical. Lobbying must be innovative to be successful: witness WEDO (Women’s Environment and Development Organization)’s capacity to insert 8 references to gender issues in the Cancun Agreements thanks to its financing and training women negotiators from low-capacity delegations.

What these two channels may achieve in Durban is unclear. Yet beyond COP17, CSOs must keep working on discourse. CSOs are a source of new ideas, and ideas can bring about change in politics. The formal adoption of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) in Cancun is but one example of CSOs helping craft a concept that becomes the backdrop for a UN decision. We are in dire need to think our way out of the impasse on a post-Kyoto framework, and CSOs are best placed to do just that.

As Durban approaches, should CSOs be ‘making more noise’? And what are the possible alternative scenarios that do not entail a second commitment period for Kyoto?

Alexios Mantzarlis is a Junior Analyst at The European House-Ambrosetti. He obtained a Double Master’s from the universities of Bocconi (Milan) and SciencesPo (Paris) with a thesis entitled: “Civil Society and the UN: developing a framework to measure influence in the intergovernmental decision-making process”.

The women are sitting in a circle on the ground under a tree. They were brought together by an international development NGO. An NGO staffer is facilitating the discussion and drawing lines on a large sheet of paper.

This could be in Bangladesh, Mali or Peru. All of us working in international development have participated in or seen photos of such meetings. They are a key element of what is called “participatory programs” and have become a popular tool in development processes. Arguably, the knowledge shared through these bottom-up processes informs development policies and practices that are better adapted to the local context and targeted to the specific needs of local people.

Two weeks ago, David Bonbright and Nicholas van Praag wrote on this blog, “it is easier to listen than to act on what you hear”. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has come to the same conclusion.

In its latest issue of “Participatory Learning and Action” (How wide are the ripples? From local participation to international organizational learning), IIED looks at grassroots participatory learning programs led by international NGOs (INGOs). The report looks at the impact of such processes on INGOs’ decision-making and strategic planning. It asks the following questions:

1. How do INGOs use and manage local, traditional knowledge?
2. Is this knowledge translated into wider organizational learning, and if so how – or why not?
3. Does local knowledge inform INGOs priorities and policies?

IIED found that most, if not all, INGOs do want to hear and respond to the voices of the poorest and most marginalized. They strive to contextualise their priorities with strong local input. That is why they initiate and fund participatory learning programs.

Yet, it is difficult. There are practical knowledge management issues to systematic sharing of knowledge from local to national and international levels. It is challenging to move information across national and cultural borders, and to interpret and use that information outside of its original context. The report argues that this is not only a practical, technical issue: it is also one of culture, accountability and power. It is not just a question of whose voices can be heard, but of whose knowledge and opinion counts.

IIED identifies two clear trends in the development sector, which effectively create divided loyalties and accountability for INGOs:

1. The trend toward stronger, top-down management and greater professionalization of the development NGO sector, where staff are recruited and valued for their technical management abilities more than their personal commitment to social justice. Development is increasingly seen as a technical, rather than political, process. This culture avoids discussion of the politics of poverty or power and powerlessness and presents development as straightforward, linear and predictable.

2. For those organizations analyzing the distribution and impact of power structures on poverty through a rights-based approach, the difficulty lies in linking grassroots participation and policy advocacy. While participatory processes require slow and long-term relationships on the ground, policy advocacy tends to be carried out using complex, technical language, focusing on fast-moving and highly technical policy processes. Especially in large INGOs, where these two areas of work may be carried out by different teams in different countries, listening to the grassroots – from where INGOs derive their legitimacy as the ‘voice’ of civil society – and engaging in the global development dialogue can be difficult to balance.

I think that at the heart of the problem lies the tension some see between the relevance of traditional knowledge and the prerequisites of economic growth and poverty eradication. How much do policy makers truly trust the holders of traditional knowledge to provide solutions for the development of their communities?

The insight and analysis, evidence and stories generated during participatory processes are just the kind of information which good development policy and planning should be based on. International and local NGOs as well as international development agencies have a responsibility to bring grassroots knowledge and information to bear at the international level. The logistical and ethical issues in making such information available and letting people know that it is there are great. This is why tools are being developed to help INGOs in this endeavor.

Stay tuned for more on the issues of participation, listening and learning on this blog.

Elisa Peter is pursuing a Masters Degree in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a mid-career
fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group, organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center, will be held on Thursday, April 8^th from 4:00-5:00pm in Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The session will be lead by Shalaka Joshi, Vice President of Global Strategies, CSO Partners, and Salimah Samji, who was formerly a Program Manager, Google.org.

Please RSVP to Balu at ramaswami_balasubramaniam@hks10.harvard.edu .   

Shalaka Joshi began her career in social enterprise with the United Nations Children’s Fund.  She later worked with the Give India Foundation where she advised business leaders on innovative strategic philanthropy models, and Ashoka, a global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. Her private sector experience includes ICICI Bank – India’s largest private sector bank – where she led the process of integrating private sector partners into the Bank’s initiatives in health, education and micro finance. She also served as Vice President of the IFMR Trust, a for-profit social enterprise dedicated to ensuring complete access to financial services for rural India. She was part of setting up their Network Enterprises Fund(tm) – India’s first equity fund focused on fixing rural supply chains across 14 sectors. Shalaka is currently Vice President of Global Strategy for CSO partners, a non-profit collaborative focused on increasing the scale and effectiveness of Indian civil society.

Salimah Samji is currently taking time off after two years as a Program Manager at Google.org, leading efforts to develop the transparency and accountability initiative in India. She spent three years at the World Bank in South Asia (based in India) as a social/rural development and monitoring/evaluation specialist.  Born in Kenya, Salimah has a bachelor’s in mathematics from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a master’s in public administration in international development from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a qualified Casualty Actuary who decided to change careers after spending 18 months working in Afghan refugee camps with a Canadian NGO based in Pakistan.  She has worked in Kenya, Canada, USA, Pakistan, India and Tajikistan. 

More About the Study Group 

The Study Group on NGOs and Development is organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.  The group meets biweekly to consider, discuss and debate issues related to emerging paradigms in development, evolving roles of NGOs, and specific management, leadership and governance challenges.  The study group brings together interested students, practitioners dealing with these questions in real time, and academics investigating similar questions.  The goal is to create a climate for genuine discussion and lively exchange, in which all participants come to the table with a commitment to share, listen and reflect.  The study group is a space for building relationships, exchanging ideas and connecting real-world challenges to scholarly study of NGOs and their role in development.  Guests will serve as resource people and catalysts of discussion.