Context matters for reaching the MDGs

A spectre is haunting donors – the spectre of insignificance. Once the world seemed to be on a rather straight path towards universal well-being: donors could provide investments to boost the economy (1960 and1970s), or pay attention to basic needs (1980s) or press for market and fiscal policy reforms (1990s). Today, donors herald the virtues of target-driven comprehensive planning with a focus on social sectors, embodied in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).

These efforts throughout the decades have been accompanied by mountains of training and technical assistance aimed at developing capacity. It has not worked very well because, put simply: context matters. The underlying complexity and dynamic, unpredictable interdependencies have risen to the surface. The world is an unruly place.

That context matters is hardly a new insight. But the implications are only slowly coming to the fore: donors are realising that they will not find a magic wand or global prescription or best practice by which they can unleash the change that will reduce poverty on a significant and sustainable scale. Context – the institutional, social, political, cultural and economic fabric of society – matters, and its significance is much greater than that of aid from external partners. Domestic dynamics in China, Vietnam and India linked to global trade and finance flows achieve stunning economic diversification, growth and poverty reduction – while most of Africa lags behind, despite decades of significant amounts of aid.

Donors, practitioners and academics have tried to find ways of dealing sensibly with the troublesome context. Power analysis, drivers of change studies, system approaches and political economy assessments have been around for a decade or more. They help their users to understand the context better, but they rarely lead to low-risk, high-impact venues of actions for donors. In recent years, there has been quite a search for more ‘actionable’ and ‘practical’ approaches to such context analyses – sometimes seemingly driven by the hope that more refined approaches to context analyses will ‘re-simplify’ complexity, restoring the lost reputation of traditional linear planning approaches based on simplistic cause-effect assumptions.

New analytical approaches and tools are, however, unlikely to make the spectre disappear. They may be useful: understanding the context does help to avoid huge errors when allocating aid. It may lead to a useful longer-term perspective, to ensuring the inclusion of the relevant local stakeholders and – fundamentally – to much more modest donor ambitions. An impressive number of staff members of donor organisations have consistently argued for this, knowing from experience that ignorance can coexist with good intentions, but it does not lead to sustainable results.

However, developing the capacity of donors to do less but to do it better is immensely difficult. The challenge is again the context, but this time the political and institutional context of donors. The political imperatives and incentives driving donor behaviour are based on a fundamental premise: external aid interventions, particularly money, can have a significant impact at societal level in a relatively short span of time. And while donors say they are ready to play second fiddle and let countries lead, they still want to attribute visible impact to their own work. Although perhaps saying that they are happy to ‘just’ contribute to outcomes and impacts, evaluations are still designed to demonstrate that impact can be attributed to donor inputs. It is politically – and mentally – extremely hard for donors (and their political masters, including taxpayers) to accept that context may matter more than aid, reducing donors to less significant – sometimes largely insignificant – players.

So, the problem for donors in dealing with context seems to be first and foremost dealing with their own context that forces them to try to do more than they objectively can. The challenge is to find ways to change the political and systemic factors that constrain the capacity and willingness of donors to act with modesty, realism and humility. This requires an environment in which their stakeholders are genuinely happy to be small contributors to processes that mainly depend on everything but donors and aid.

May the aficionados of capacity development, context analysis, systems thinking and power analysis therefore turn more of their attention to the donors and the systemic constraints in their domestic contexts. Such attention may question fundamental beliefs of the aid business – but looking at the spectre rather than ignoring it seems the better way forward.