Complexity theory originally comes from science/biology and is just beginning to be applied to social sciences, including development.  It recognizes that the contexts in which we work are complex – multi-polar, diverse, often chaotic, etc., and that changes occurring within these systems are therefore usually non-linear, emergent, unpredictable, and experienced or viewed differently for the various people and groups who experience it (i.e., multiplicity of knowledge).

The implication for monitoring and evaluation is to further emphasize methods that realistically recognize these complex social systems and the underlying unpredictability and diversity of outcomes and perspectives for the various actors within them, and looking for the changes that our programs can help trigger within these wider systems. This isn’t new to the field of evaluation: our traditional mixed-method evaluations which incorporate surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews and other methods, when done correctly, do often succeed in drawing out diverse viewpoints and effects on different individuals and groups.

However, there are other methods that fit more naturally with complexity and are being increasingly mainstreamed relief and development agencies.  These approaches distinctly recognize the complex and unpredictable nature of program contexts, and therefore seek to measure changes in ways that:

-          are beneficiary-led:

-          recognize and celebrate the diversity of actors/views/experiences;

-          look for emergent trends and evidence of change, often in unpredictable and unintended ways:

-          assess change from the distinct viewpoint of different types of individuals and groups,

-          do not seek to predict outcomes or pre-ordain indicators of success as viewed by outsiders;

-          look for “resonance” of certain themes or indications of change across groups and contexts; and,

-          lend quantitative and qualitative results through systematic analysis and interpretation.

Techniques which specialize in fitting into a complexity theory lens on evaluation and meet some or all of the characteristics above include:

-          Most Significant Change;

-          Outcome Mapping;

-          Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) ;

-          Locally-developed indicators;

-          Self and peer-evaluation;

-          Photo voice;

-          Some applications of Appreciative Inquiry;

-          Other forms of participatory action research with emphasis on ongoing learning and reflection.

These techniques are gaining increased acceptance because of their unique ability to “tell the story” of how change really happens on the ground while emerging with a robust mix of quantitative and qualitative data.

For a more complete view on complexity theory and its application to M&E the following report by Wageningen International.  For additional background and presentations on suggested tools and approaches, you may also check out:  http://www.odi.org.uk/RAPID/events/Complexity/.



Interaction has just published a progress report on their perceptions of the state of foreign assistance, almost one year into the Obama administration.  Even if you don’t have time for the full report – take a look at the cover sheet which divides areas into ‘improved’ ’stagnant’ and ‘deteriorated’ in terms of progress on the particular issue and allows you to then read in more detail on each section – from Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment to Sudan to NGO and military relations. The report points out that the biggest obstacle to significant progress being made is the fact that as yet, no administrator for USAID has been appointed.

The book, Made to Stick: Why some ideas thrive and others die by Dan Heath and Chip Heath isn’t directly about the world of humanitarianism but the issues it looks at are fully relevant to us as we strive for both scale and sustainability in our programs. If we could really understand what makes ideas live on (and/or what kills them) and then apply it to our programs we would really be on our way to making a difference. The book outlines six principles for successfully getting an idea to take hold – summarized in the link below.

To read more about the book and decide whether you want a copy yourself read either this review from Time magazine or this summary.

Reuters provides an interesting humanitarian story tracking service, Alertnet.org’s World Tracker Service, that charts the rise, retention (and fall) of 107 English-language media sources from around the world. Reuter’s codes then chart the humanitarian issues, providing an interesting look at why and how the general public cares about or follows certain stories. During August 2009, swine flu received the most attention, particularly on August 12, 2009 when the 107 news sources contained 123 articles on the subject. Was the attention merited? Well, on August 12, 2009 the WHO published its sixty-first update on the pandemic H1N1 and confirmed cases in the following countries: Timore-Leste, Pakistan, Kirabati, Maldives, French Guiana, Falkland Islands (UKOT), Wallis and Futuna. The day before, The New York Times reported that the family of the first deaths of swine flu in New York planned to sue the city for wrongful death, and CBS had a story on flying rabbis praying for the demise of the virus. Also Costa Rica’s president Oscar Arias announced on August 11 that he had contracted H1N1.

The second largest amount of coverage was “Afghan turmoil,” which spiked in attention from August 16 to August 21 leading up to the August 20 elections. While the election results are still unconfirmed, coverage dropped from around seventy stories per day during the aforementioned five day period to eighteen mentions on August 22 before ending the month with thirty seven stories on August 31.

Somalia generated thirty-nine stories on August 4, its high for the month before coverage declined to average one to six stories for the remainder of August. Coverage of Iraq regularly ebbed and flowed beginning the month with thirty four mentions and ending it with only four. Around the anniversary of the South Ossetian war in 2008, coverage spiked on August 6 and then sunk to zero on August 15. Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentencing by the Burmese junta on August 11 drove news mentions from only two on August 10 to twenty five the following day. By the 15th, Myanmar was back to only two mentions in the news.

Recent research by Barb Wigley of the Univ. of Melbourne suggests it’s actually the bad boss.  Wigley found aid workers often felt better prepared to manage stress related to violence and insecurity than stress from problems with managers and bureaucracies. She acknowledges the stress on managers coping with difficult situations and says that rather than bullying staff – often young or early in their development careers – managers require a keen sense of team dynamics in order to operate successfully in conflict contexts.  Think this is just a field issue?  Think again!  Wigley found aid workers were constantly frustrated about colleague dynamics in large organizations.  This article and Wigley’s research offer important insights into how culture influences organizations’ activities and performance, including staff retention and implementing change.  An important read whether you sit in Somalia or HQ!

http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/113829727990.htm

Oxfam is running a fairly scathing article on both the quantity of assistance to Afghanistan, saying that while the US alone spends $100 million a day on security in the country, all donors combined spend only $7 million a day on aid. In addition to that imbalance, the aid that is arriving is not having the impact it should, leaving a third of the population at risk of hunger and the country the ‘worst place in the world to give birth’, with a woman dying in childbirth every 30 seconds.

Read the article here.

When sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn coined the term “youth bulge” during the 1990s, he provided definition of a dual-sided phenomena that has repeatedly emerged throughout history.  Countries or regions which see population booms in younger demographics (such as the Middle East where 65% of the population is now under thirty), are privy to mass labor forces useful for fueling economies. However, if not properly supported the youth bulge can turn dangerous as in Kenya, a country which expanded from only just under 3 million people less than a century ago to nearly 37 million people as of 2008, with the average age around eighteen. Without sufficient opportunities, the concern is that many of these “idle youths” will turn to violent or extremist groups leading to outbreaks of instability and violence.

A recent article by the International Rescue Committee points out that 12 of the 15 countries with the largest youth bulge are also home to violent conflict and/or large displaced populations. It identifies the fact that a large youth bulge, coupled with lack of opportunity creates a high risk for destabilization. Furthermore, the fact that 50% of all aid education in the last ten years has gone to basic education is now creating huge pressure on post-primary education options as expectations are created through the education channels for continuing education and/or employment that are not necessarily being met.

The article has some interesting facts and examples (and makes policy recommendations) on the challenges of creating opportunities for young people at the same time as raising education levels.

To help mitigate circumstances and better infrastructure to better support this youth bulge, the IRC calls for both governments and NGOs to reevaluate their approach and aid for education. Whereas many education programs may be put up in response to emergencies, often the support and benefits are only short-term. In response the IRC calls for aid givers and providers should better align policy and foresight with humanitarian and development plans. Additionally, as the education system is improved, the economy must be strengthened to match and support its educated workforce. Thirdly, the education program in any given country must be accessible and relevant to the youth and the opportunities that await them.

The Humanitarian Policy Group’s Policy Brief 34 ‘Providing aid in insecure environments‘ came out in April 2009, updating their previous 2006 report of the same name with new data and analysis. It seemed like a good opportunity to review the (rather scant) and sometimes confusing literature on this topic. If you only read one of these papers, HPG34 is the one – it’s the most recent, and their dataset covers security incidents from 1997-2008. The data is drawn from reports from participating aid agencies including the UN, Red Cross and most of the major NGOs. Their findings are a little complex though – for all the headlines we see that humanitarian work is getting more dangerous, the data seems mixed. While at first blush their data seems to show attacks on aid worker have gone up sharply since 2006, with a big upswing in kidnappings, a close look shows that more than sixty percent of violent incidents occurred in three places (Darfur, Afghanistan and Somalia) – while that’s clearly bad for workers in those places, the story is different for the rest of us. When they take out these countries, the long-term overall major attack rate for humanitarians is actually declining, averaging 2.4 aid worker victims per 10,000 over the past three years, down from 2.7 for the previous three. Now there is a lot more too it, and of course, the fact that the attack rate has declined slightly does not necessarily tell us anything about whether the environment has become more or less dangerous. I’d encourage you to sit back with a cup of coffee and really dig in for yourself…

Next up, slightly buried in the American Journal of Disaster Medicine is an interesting paper that looks at mortality and morbidity from a number of causes (again using agency reporting, this time from 18 organizations culled from the usual suspects from the period September 2002-December 2005) Violence related mortality and morbidity of humanitarian workers. Their headline statistic of a rate of six intentional violence events per 10,000 person years, is, unfortunately, difficult to compare directly with others. It’s worth a read though, mainly for their more thorough treatment of disease and injury, and a pretty good treatment of the differential exposure of national staff. They also note, as do most other studies of this nature, that the road is still by far the most dangerous place for aid workers, presumably because of a combination of road traffic accidents and security incidents while traveling.

Third on my list is a PhD thesis by Marianne Abbot breathlessly titled ‘Dangerous intervention‘, which is interesting because it takes a different methodological slant, using news media reports corroborated by agency reports between 1991 and 2004. One advantage of this is that it seems that national staff numbers are under-reported in agency reports, but not in press reports. Her analysis is pretty interesting, and there is a lot to digest. A couple of points stand out to me though, that she claims attacks have recently decreased since hitting an all time high in 2003, and that attacks have become more targeted, with relatively fewer incidents of random violent death.

Of course, these studies all share numerous methodological issues, including incomplete record keeping and reporting, problems calculating the total number of humanitarian workers, and no shared format for reporting. Particularly problematic seems to be statistics relating to national staff, which are often kept in decentralized ways. Nonetheless, the research on this important area does seem to be getting better, although it would be great to see more systematic sharing of data.

References

1.  HPG Policy Brief 34, April 2009, Providing aid in insecure environments: 2009 update Trends in violence against aid workers and the operational response. Abby Stoddard, Adele Harmer and Victoria DiDomenico

2.  HPG Policy Brief 24, September 2006, Providing aid in insecure
environments: trends in policy and operations. Abby Stoddard, Adele Harmer and Katherine Haver (nb this is provided for completeness – it is superseded by the 2009 update.)

3. Dangerous intervention: An analysis of humanitarian fatalities in assistance contexts. A dissertation by Marianne Abbot at Ohio State University in 2006.

4. Deaths among humanitarian workers. British Medical Journal Volume 321 July 2000. Mani Sheik, Maria Isabel Gutierrez, Paul Bolton, Paul Spiegel, Michel Thieren, Gilbert Burnham at the Center for Refugee and Disaster
Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.

5. No Relief. 2005. Surveying the effects of gun violence on humanitarian and development personnel. Cate Buchanan and Robert Muggah, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and Small Arms Survey.

6. Violence related mortality and morbidity of humanitarian workers. American journal of disaster medicine. E.A. Rowley.

A few recent articles in Praxis, a journal published by The International NGO Training and Research Center (“What is Distinctive about FBOs: How European FBOs define and operationalise their faith”, “Faith-based Organisational Development (OD) with Churches in Malawi,” and “Capacity Building and Islamic FBOs: Insights from Malawi,” ) highlight various issues that FBOs (faith-based organizations) face in defining their organizations. As NGOs and other humanitarian organizations confront questions about their field as a whole, FBOs additionally juggle their religious identity. Stirring the fire for these FBOs are issues concerning donors and funding, both private and institutional. Both Christian and Islamic FBOs have built-in communities of donors.  How this affects FBOs is illustrated through their means of receiving funds and their choice of partnerships. As noted in “Capacity Building and Islamic FBOs,” the zakat donation is often intended for Muslim beneficiaries, and because Islamic FBOs often receive fewer public grants, these organizations may face parameters on who they provide assistance to.  Some organizations have addressed this tension by dividing donations into zakat and non-zakat funding.
Similarly Christian FBOs can also impose restrictions on their funding sources and partnerships as they may choose to work with or for organizations or groups that share their same belief set or practices. For faith-driven donors, this move may reassert the FBO’s commitment to their belief system. As Rick James points out in “What is Distinctive about FBOs,” many donors “are asking agencies to clarify their values,” and organizations that fail to provide a clear definition may lose support. As such, the choice of partnerships and areas of focus may say more about the identity of the FBO than its methods.
However, this can be difficult as secular aid organizations and governments have increased efforts to engage and partner and fund FBOs in the past decade in recognition of the important role they play in humanitarian work. Two trends seem to have emerged in the past decade: the resurgence of faith in shaping aid and animating traditional donor institutions (e.g. DFID), along with global intra-faith partnerships that serve to combat extremism and promote global accord. Post 9/11, many prominent organizations have made efforts to engage FBOs and include matters of spirituality into the concept of aid-giving. While organizations such as the World Bank promote an active incorporation with faith-based groups through increased funding and partnerships, this heightened attention doesn’t come without issue or cost. Paradoxically, FBOs may downplay their religious affiliation to secure both legitimacy and funding outside of their donor-base, a cyclical problem. This returns FBOs to the question of balancing internal donors and religious identity and coherent mission with beneficial external partnerships and funding.

One of my favorite books on the cluster of issues around local / international organizational relationships and capacity building ‘Patronage or Partnership?’ is now available free on-line. It is a series of essays and case studies focusing on building capacity of civil society organizations in the aftermath of emergencies, edited by Ian Smillie for the Tufts Humanitarianism and War Project. Get the book here, either as html chapters, or as one big pdf.