What Is Development?

8/16/12
Owen Barder

This is the first of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity theory
for development. These posts draw on a new online lecture by Owen Barder, based
on his Kapuscinski Lecture in May 2012 which was sponsored by UNDP and the EU.
In this post, Barder explains how complexity science, which is belatedly getting
more attention from mainstream economists, gives a new perspective to the
meaning of development.
View presentation in PDF form
The Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen has twice changed our thinking
about what we mean by development. Traditional welfare economics had focused on
incomes as the main measure of well-being until his ground-breaking work in the
1980's which showed that that poverty involved a wider range of deprivations in
health, education and living standards which were not captured by income alone.
His capabilities approach led to introduction of the UN Human Development Index,
and subsequently the Multidimensional Poverty Index, both of which aim to measure
development in this broader sense. Then in 1999 Sen moved the goalposts again
with his argument that freedoms constitute not only the means but the ends in
development.
Sen's view is now widely accepted: development must be judged by its impact on
people, not only by changes in their income but more generally in terms of their
choices, capabilities and freedoms; and we should be concerned about the
distribution of these improvements, not just the simple average for a society.
But to define development as an improvement in people's well-being does not do
justice to what the term means to most of us. Development also carries a
connotation of lasting change. Providing a person with a bednet or a water pump
can often be an excellent, cost-effective way to improve her well-being, but if the
improvement goes away when we stop providing the bednet or pump, we would not
normally describe that as development. This suggests that development consists of
more than improvements in the well-being of citizens, even broadly defined: it also
conveys something about the capacity of economic, political and social systems to
provide the circumstances for that well-being on a sustainable, long-term basis.
Mainstream economics has had a difficult time explaining how economic and social
systems evolve to create this capacity; and, in particular, our economic models
have struggled to explain why some countries have experienced rapid economic
growth while others have not. In part this is because economists have generally

stuck to models which can easily be solved mathematically. In the meantime, there
has been a growing movement in physics, biology and some other social sciences,
often called complexity science. Some economists notably Eric
Beinhocker and Tim Harford have started to make a compelling case for bringing
these ideas more centrally into our analysis of economic and social systems; and a
new volume of essays from IPPR later this month will call for complexity to be taken
more seriously by policymakers. But with the honourable exception of Ben
Ramalingam, who has a book coming out in 2013 and has published on this topic for
ODI, there has so far been very little work specifically on how complexity theory
might be useful in development economics and policy.
My Kapu?ci?ski Lecture earlier this year was an effort to explore the implications of
complexity thinking for development economics and development policy. I've made
this talk available as a narrated online presentation which lasts about 45
minutes. You can watch and listen online; listen to the audio only - for example in
the gym - by downloading it from Development Drums or via iTunes; or you
can download the transcript and slides.

Complex does not mean complicated

It is not news to anybody working in development that the problems are
complicated in the sense that making progress involves tackling lots of different
problems. But saying that the economy is a complex adaptive system implies
something rather specific about its dynamic properties. We are using complex

adaptive system here as a term of art to describe a particular kind of non-linear

system which turns up everywhere in nature from waterfalls to ant colonies.
The presentation begins with the charming story of a British design student, Thomas
Thwaites, who tried to build a toaster from scratch. It turns out that this is very
difficult to do: to build something even as simple as a toaster requires a lot else to
be already in place in your economy and society. An economy consists of a series of
people, firms, products and institutions which interact with each other, each
adapting to their changing circumstances as they do so. In the presentation I
explain how this network of adaptive agents interact with each other to create a
complex adaptive system of the kind studied in biology and physics.
The mainstream economics profession has been slow to take up these ideas, but
fortunately scientists have been studying complex adaptive systems for at least
thirty years and they have made considerable progress in describing their
properties. Despite the huge diversity of these systems in nature, they have some
important characteristics in common, by virtue of their underlying mathematics.
There are good theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking that economic and
social systems might share these characteristics, and the real-world trajectories of
economic and social systems appear to fit the properties of complex adaptive
systems better than they fit the simple, linear models of mainstream economics.
Development as an emergent property of an economic, social and political
system
One of the key lessons from complexity theory is that complex adaptive systems
can have system-wide properties which do not correspond to the properties of
individual components. (This is only possible in non-linear systems, since linear
systems are by definition a weighted sum of their parts.) For example, we think of
consciousness as a characteristic of a human brain; but it makes no sense to say
that a particular brain cell or synapse is conscious. A thunderstorm is a
characteristic of the weather, but we cannot say that a particular molecule in the air
is, or is not, stormy. These phenomena which are called emergent properties
are not the sum of characteristics of individual parts of the system: they are
consequences of the way that the different parts of the system interact with each
other.
In the talk, I argue that development is an emergent property of the
economic and social system, in much the same way that consciousness is an
emergent property of the brain. This seems obvious, and yet it is a surprising
departure from the way most economists have normally described development as
the sum of economic output of all the firms in the economy, or the sum of human
well-being of the citizens of a nation.
Development is not the sum of well-being of people in the economy and we cannot
bring it about simply by making enough people in the economy better off.

Development is instead a system-wide manifestation of the way that people, firms,

technologies and institutions interact with each other within the economic, social
and political system. Specifically, development is the capacity of those systems to
provide self-organising complexity. Self-organising complexity in an adaptive
system is never designed or deliberately built: it comes about from a process of
adaptation and evolution. It follows that if we want to accelerate and shape
development, we should focus especially on how the environment can be made
most conducive for self-organising complexity to evolve.
This view of development as an emergent property of a system fits with the
common-sense definition of development described earlier. Development is more
than improvements in peoples well-being: it also describes the capacity of the
system to provide the circumstances for that continued well-being. Development is
a characteristic of the system; sustained improvements in individual well-being are
a yardstick by which it is judged.
This has important implications for development policy, both for developing
countries themselves wishing to put their economy and society onto a path of faster
development, and for outsiders who want to help that process. We are at an early
stage of exploring those implications. In my next blog post I will look at one
particular implication of the application of complexity theory to development: it has
both positive and negative implications for the UK Governments emphasis on a
golden thread of institutions which they claim runs through all successful
economies.

All That Glisters: The Golden Thread and Complexity

8/26/12
Owen Barder
David Cameron co-chairs the UN Panel on the future of the development
agenda, so his 'golden thread' view of development is likely to have a
global impact. In the second of three blog posts looking at development
policy through the lens of complexity thinking, Owen Barder asks whether
the British government's golden thread is good development policy. He
concludes that though it has much to commend it, it also has significant
weaknesses.
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, wants us to stop talking simply
about the quantity of aid we give, and:
start talking about what I call the golden thread, which is you only get
real long-term development through aid if there is also a golden thread of

stable government, lack of corruption, human rights, the rule of law,

transparent information.
This is not a new wheeze: Mr Cameron has been talking about the golden
thread since before he became leader of the Conservative party. Given
that he is a co-chair of the UN High Level Panel on the global development
agenda after 2015, we can expect to see some of this thinking in that
panels recommendations.
Mr Cameron's approach resonates with the thinking of other world
leaders. On stepping down as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair
said that he believed that:
Open v closed is as important today in politics as left v right. Nations
do best when they are prepared to be open to the world. This means open
in their economies, eschewing protectionism, welcoming foreign
investment, running flexible labour markets. It means also open to the
benefit of controlled immigration.
Similarly, US President Obamas administration has given firm support to
the Open Government Partnership, a voluntary alliance of 55 countries
which are committed to making themselves more open, more accountable,
and more politically inclusive. At its inaugural event, President Obama
said:
the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open
societies, and in open governments. And I challenged our countries [sic] to
come back this year with specific commitments to promote transparency,
to fight corruption, to energize civic engagement, and to leverage new
technologies so we can strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own
countries.
Though the views expressed by Mr Cameron, Mr Blair and Mr Obama are
not identical, they have in common the idea that societies and economies
are more likely to develop when they are more accountable and
open. There is no single, complete statement of the golden thread policy,
but Mr Cameron has described in various speeches what he calls the
'enablers of development: transparency, openness, accountability,
empowerment, freedom, rule of law, property rights, absence of
corruption, free media, free and fair election, trade, flexibility and civil
society.
Critics dismiss the golden thread as a nave restatement of economic
liberalism: that is, the largely discredited view that developing countries
are poor because they have bad policies and institutions which trap them
in an inefficiently low equilibrium far away from the economic frontier. In

the 1980s this thinking led to a set of policy prescriptions known as the
Washington Consensus, which is generally regarded as having been a
failure.
But it would be unfair to confuse Mr Cameron with Marty McFly, getting
into his DeLorean to return to the 1980s. In his 2005 speech Mr Cameron
made it clear that he was advocating economic empowerment, which he
explicitly contrasted with the economic liberalism which was the
intellectual underpinning of structural adjustment programmes. So what's
the difference? Economic liberalism is a set of prescriptions intended to
remove obstacles to enable firms to be more efficient and so increase
economic growth; economic empowerment as defined by Mr Cameron is a
set of ideas about what is needed for the economic and social system to
improve itself more rapidly and more fairly. This is not merely a semantic
difference: the golden thread focuses on openness, transparency,
accountability and a free press, none of which was ever part of the
Washington Consensus. That gives grounds for optimism that the golden
thread heralds a new and welcome focus on how economic and social
systems change.

To the extent that the golden thread focuses on what it takes for systems
to change themselves, it fits comfortably within the mainstream
development consensus which emphasises country ownership that is,
the hard-won lesson that lasting change comes from within developing
countries, rather than through policies imposed from outside. With its

emphasis on transparency and accountability, the golden thread approach

can be interpreted as looking for ways to strengthen and accelerate those
internal evolutionary processes, rather than imposing new policy
prescriptions. (See Alan Hudsons work on open development for more
about the importance of open governance.)
Furthermore, though this is not the basis on which the golden thread has
been explained, the focus on how systems change is consistent with the
idea that development is the emergence of self-organising
complexity which brings about vast improvements in human well-being. In
complex systems successful transition happens more rapidly and more
successfully when economic and social systems are able to adapt and
evolve, and when that evolution is driven by an evolutionary fitness
function which reflects societys values and priorities. (For more
explanation, see my online presentation about complexity and
development.) The enablers of development described by Mr Cameron,
Mr Blair and Mr Obama are all very plausible candidates for the kinds of
system properties which might accelerate the emergence of self-organised
complexity.
So the golden thread has much to commend it. But as it is currently
articulated, it has three important shortcomings, which will be fatal if they
are not addressed.
First, as currently articulated the golden thread talks more about free
markets, jobs and growth than it does about other ways to encourage
social and economic change, such as reducing inequality, tackling the
power of vested elites, providing social protection and safety nets, or
ensuring a strong voice for civil society. There is a streak of laissez faire in
the choice of policies which does not do justice to the idea that we can
and should shape evolutionary processes. In biological evolution we have
had to accept survival of the fittest as our fitness function; in economic
and social evolution we can be more deliberate about shaping the fitness
function to take us in the direction in which we want to move. People on
the right tend to focus on the need for innovation and selection to
accelerate evolution, but often pay too little attention to the need for
society to shape the direction. People on the left, by contrast, tend to pay
too much attention to determining the destination and too little to
nurturing the dynamism and creative value of the evolutionary process
which will get us there.
Second, the golden thread as it has been articulated so far does not say
anything at all about the need to make changes to the global system as
well as within developing countries. As several people commenting on
the first post in this series rightly observe, the interdependence of

systems does not stop at national borders. Global systems and

institutions, and the policies and behaviour of rich countries, have an
important influence on the evolution of economic and social systems in
developing countries, and the principles of the golden thread apply just as
much at global level as they do at the level of the nation state. For
example:

If open, legitimate and accountable institutions are important, this

also applies to the institutions which set international economic
rules such as on tax, trade and corruption (in contrast to the secret
negotiations on ACTA, for example); rich countries should stop
stitching up appointments to top international jobs; encourage their
companies to pay the appropriate level of tax in developing
countries (as recommended last week by an influential committee of
the British House of Commons), so that a social contract of domestic
accountability can emerge; and continue to reform aid to make it
less likely to undermine domestic accountability.

If trade and economic openness are important, wealthy nations

should to more to open their own markets to trade from developing
countries and get rid of agricultural export subsidies which deprive
developing country food producers of the ability to compete.

If property rights are important, then rich countries should

recognise that the people of a country, not their illegitimate leaders,
own their own natural resources, and so treat everybody who buys
oil or minerals from unelected governments as as handling stolen
goods.

If transparency and fighting corruption are important, the OECD

countries could require their companies to publish all the details of
the payments they make to developing countries (the new US rules
announced are a good start which Europe should follow). The UK
could also join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, to
demonstrate that it takes seriously the idea that a nations
resources belong to its people (again, as recommended by the
International Development Committee.) The UK has given a
commendable lead on aid transparency, but there is still a lot of
work to do before all the resources within developing countries,
whether raised locally or provided from outside, are fully
transparent to their citizens, and rich countries have a big role to
play.

If due process and the rule of law are important then wealthy
countries could tackle financial havens and improve information

exchange between tax and law enforcement authorities to enable

them to enforce their tax laws and to prevent criminals from
laundering stolen assets.

If openness and exchange of ideas are important then rich countries

could make it easier, not more difficult, for people from developing
countries to study abroad in schools and universities: a study by
Spilimbergo shows that developing countries which send more
students to study overseas in democratic countries tend to become
more democratic themselves; the UK could improve its immigration
policies for people from developing countries; and rich countries
could stop the gradual erosion of technology transfer through more
and more excessive enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Third, and probably most important, the golden thread has more to say
about desirable dynamics in society than it does about how to bring them
about. We have had more failures than successes trying to bring about
institutional and political reform in other countries. There is a danger of
going straight back to failed efforts to transplant institutions from one
situation to another. (Section 5 of the presentation discusses the danger
of isomorphic mimicry, a term coined by CGD Fellow Lant Pritchett to
highlight the repeated failure of this kind of intervention.)
Understanding economic, social and political change through the lens of
complex adaptive systems should make us more modest about our ability
to change those systems directly. It is generally impossible to design and
engineer change in a complex adaptive system. As I point out in the
conclusion of the presentation, it follows from a complexity view of
development that outsiders would do better to think about whether they
can nudge systems towards having the right kinds of dynamic properties,
including greater capacity for experimentation, feedback and learning, so
that systems can evolve these kinds of institutions on their own. That
humility seems to be largely missing from the golden thread narrative,
which seems to be presented as a universal blueprint for success. It is
those questions of feedback to which I will turn in my third blog post in
this series.
Mr Cameron's golden thread fits well with the view that we should do what
we can to help change occur from within, not impose it from outside. It
emphasizes the importance of institutions and policies which may
strengthen and shape change. In this respect, it fits well with a complexity
view of development. But to be a credible basis for a development policy,
it will need to embrace a broader understanding of how societies change
(e.g. attacking privilege, not just further liberalising markets), recognise
the need for changes in global systems and in the behaviour of rich

countries to improve opportunities for change in the developing world,

and display greater humility about the role that outsiders can play.
An edited version of this article appears on the Guardian Global
Development website.
Authors:

Owen Barder
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Complexity, Adaptation, and Results

9/7/12
Owen Barder
In the last of a series of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity
theory for development, Owen Barder and Ben Ramalingam look at the implications
of complexity for the trend towards results-based management in development
cooperation. They argue that is a common mistake to see a contradiction between
recognising complexity and focusing on results: on the contrary, complexity
provides a powerful reason for pursuing the results agenda, but it has to be done in
ways which reflect the context.
In the 2012 Kapuscinski lecture Owen argued that economic and political systems
can best be thought of as complex adaptive systems, and that development should
be understood as an emergent property of those systems. As explained in detail in
Bens forthcoming book, these interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors,
whose actions are a self-organised search for fitness on a shifting landscape.
Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterised by
explosive surprises and tipping points as well as periods of relative stability.
If development arises from the interactions of a dynamic and unpredictable system,
you might draw the conclusion that it makes no sense to try to assess or measure
the results of particular development interventions. That would be the wrong
conclusion to reach. While the complexity of development implies a different way of
thinking about evaluation, accountability and results, it also means that the results
agenda is more important than ever.
Embrace experimentation
There is a growing movement in development which rejects the common view that
there is a simple, replicable prescription for development. Dani Rodrik talks of one
economics, many recipes. David Booth talks of the move from best practice to best
fit. Mirilee Grindle talks of good enough governance. Bill Easterly has talked of
moving from planners to searchers. Owen Barder has called for us to design not a
better world, but better feedback loops. Sue Unsworth talks of an upside down view
of governance. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock aim to
synthesize all this into their proposal for Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation.
These ideas are indispensable in the search for solutions in complex adaptive
systems. In his 2011 book Adapt, Tim Harford showed that adaptation is the way to
deal with problems in unpredictable, complex systems. Adaptation works by
making small changes, observing the results, and then adjusting. This is the exact
opposite of the planning approach, widely used in development, which involves

designing complicated programmes and then tracking milestones as they are

implemented.
We know a lot about how adaptation works, especially from evolution theory. There
are three essential characteristics of any successful mechanism for adaptation:
1. Variation any process of adaptation and evolution must include sources of
innovation and diversity, and the system must be able to fail safely
2. An appropriate fitness function which distinguishes good changes from
bad on some implicit path to desirable outcomes
3. Effective selection which causes good changes to succeed and reproduce,
but which suppresses bad changes.
These principles are reflected in the six principles for working in complex systems
which Ben set out in a Santa Fe Institute working paper with the former head of
USAID Afghanistan, Bill Frej. They also run through the ideas in the must-read recent
paper by Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock which sets out four steps for iterative
adaptation in the case of state-building and governance reforms:
1. focus on solving locally nominated and defined problems in
performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged bestpractice solutions);
2. create an authorizing environment for decision-making that encourages
positive deviance and experimentation, as opposed to designing projects
and programs and then requiring agents to implement them;
3. embed this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid
experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from
evaluation);
4. engage broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate,
relevant and supportable.
So there is now some convergence around these ideas, all of which focus on the
importance of experimentation, feedback and adaptation as ways of coping with
uncertainty and complexity.
The role of results in adaptation
Andrew Natsios, a former Administrator of USAID, fired a celebrated shot over the
bows of what he calls the counter-bureaucracy (the compliance side of the US aid
system). He says:
Let me summarize the problems with the compliance system now in place:

Excessive focus on compliance requirements to the exclusion of other work,

such as program implementation, with enormous opportunity costs

Perverse incentives against program innovation, risk taking, and funding for
new partners and approaches to development

The Obsessive Measurement Disorder for judging programs that limits

funding for the most transformational development sectors

The focus on the short term over the long term

The subtle but insidious redefinition of development to de-emphasize good

development practice, policy reform, institution building, and sustainability.

The reason for most of these process and measurement requirements is the
suspicion by Washington policy makers and the counter-bureaucracy that foreign
aid does not work, wastes taxpayer money, or is mismanaged and misdirected by
field missions. These suspicions have been the impetus behind the ongoing focus
among development theorists on results.
These arguments made with particular authority by Natsios resonate strongly
with the views of the growing movement for more experimentation, adaptation and
learning. But does that mean as is often implied that it is inappropriate or
impossible to pay attention to results?
If anything, the opposite is true. All three steps in the adaptive process variation, a
fitness function and effective selection depend on an appropriate framework for
monitoring and reacting to results. Natsios himself calls for a new measurement
system. But as Ben argued last year we must ensure that the results agenda is
applied in a way which is relevant to the complex, ambiguous world in which we
live.
Results 2.0: thinking through a complexity-aware approach
A meaningful results agenda needs to take account of the diversity of development
programmes, and the need for a more experimental approach in the face of
complex problems. A good place to start is to borrow some approaches from
academia, civil society and business strategy. This work suggests that a complexityaware approach to results needs to get a better handle on need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the problem we are working on,
(b) the interventions we are implementing
(c)

the context in which these interventions are being delivered.

This gives us three dimensions ranging from simple problems and interventions in
stable contexts through to complex interventions in diverse and dynamic contexts.

Between a rock and a hard place

Down in the bottom left-hand corner are simple problems and stable settings. This
is where Plan and Control makes most sense. Tradition results-based
management approach, the more conventional unit-cost based value for money
analyses and randomised control trials work especially well. (Classicists among you
will recognise the hard rock of Scylla.)
At the top right we have complex problems, complex interventions in diverse and
dynamic settings. (A lot of donor work in fragile states and post conflict societies are
in this corner). Here the goal is Managing Turbulence. In this space, everything
is so unpredictable and fluid that planning, action and assessment are effectively
fused together. To deliver results in this zone, we need to learn from the work of
professional crisis managers, the military and others working in highly chaotic
contexts. (This is the whirlpool of Charybdis.)
In between is what we have called the zone of Adaptive Management. Here we
may find ourselves managing a variety of combinations of our three axes. In our
view, the vast majority of development interventions sit in this middle ground.
In this messy, non-linear world the challenge is to tread a careful path avoiding
narrowly reductionist approaches to results without surrendering to excessive
pessimism about our ability to learn and adapt. In practice this means a more

adaptive, experimental approach, trying out multiple parallel experiments,

monitoring emergent progress, rates of success and adapting to context. Real-time
learning is essential to check the relative effectiveness of different approaches,
scaling up those that work and scaling down those that dont. It is a learning
process which is essential for donors and more importantly for the governments
and institutions of the developing world.
Adaptive management must engage the three drivers of evolution:
1. Variation which means participants must be given space to experiment
and engage in positive deviance. The key is to liberate people
implementing programmes from the conventional requirements to follow a
preconceived plan, while retaining accountability of donors to their domestic
constituencies. Development agencies and their partners can be given room
for manoeuvre and experimentation if they are held to account not for their
activities and spending according to a plan, but for the results they achieve
or fail to achieve.
2.

An appropriate fitness function which means that socially-useful

changes are distinguished from ineffective or harmful changes. This in turn
requires society to agree either in advance or at least in retrospect what
constitute useful changes, and to assess whether those changes are coming
about. For five decades the development industry has been inconsistent
about what constitutes success, has failed to measure overall progress, and
has eschewed opportunities to learn more about effects of different
interventions through various kinds of rigorous impact evaluation.

3. Selection which means that changes that bring about improvements

according to the fitness function are reproduced and further adapted, while
bad changes, policies or institutions are either reformed or brought to an
end. This requires a greater focus on evidence-based policy making, and that
decisions about programmes and interventions must be more strongly linked
the results they produce. The development industry has traditionally been
insufficiently effective at taking success to scale, and insufficiently ruthless
about failure.
Getting REAL with Results-Enabled Adaptive Leadership
Tracking results (and linking money to results) are often considered most
appropriate for the simple stable situations in the bottom left hand corner of the
cube. This is where it is easiest to attribute impact to the intervention. It is in this
corner that we find piece rate systems: the manufacturer knows full well what the
production function looks like for sewing machines and machinists and uses the
piece rate system to motivate greater effort from staff.

But in the complex world of development, we do not know the production function
and we cannot readily attribute progress to any particular intervention.
Furthermore, we often do not know where we are in the cube. We sometimes have
reliable evidence about the value of a particular technology (say, a nutritional
supplement or a bednet) which suggests we are down in the bottom left hand
corner of predictable and attributable results. But when we introduce the messy
reality of needing to inform people about the product, overcome resistance to
change, of managing production and distribution and creating incentives for
effective delivery, we rapidly find ourselves in a much more complex world.
So most of what we do to promote development is not in the bottom left hand
corner: our interventions operate in the world of adaptive management and
complexity. The main value of a results focus in development not squeezing greater
efficiency out of current service providers: rather it is in enabling people to
innovate, experiment, test, and adapt. The challenge here is to ensure that we
have a focus on results which supports, rather than inhibits, effective feedback
loops which promote experimentation and adaptation. This requires a new and more
innovative toolkit of methods, and most importantly an institutional and relational
framework which uses that information to drive improvement. We call this resultsenabled adaptive leadership (because it has a nice acronym: REAL).
What might results-enabled adaptive leadership look like in practice? The Center for
Global Development is currently exploring two specific ideas which we believe fit
well with an adaptive, iterative and experimental approach to development : Cash
on Delivery Aid and Development Impact Bonds.
If you believe that development is a characteristic of a complex adaptive system
then both of these ideas are attractive because:

They explicitly focus on independently verified, transparently reported

outcomes and impact that is, appropriate measures of what society is trying
to achieve rather than inputs and outputs which are thought to be
correlated with progress (but may not be, especially in a complex system).

They avoid the need for an ex ante top-down plan, log-frame, budget or
activities prescribed by donors. Because payment is linked only to results
when they are achieved, developing countries are free to experiment, learn
and adapt.

There is no attempt to follow money through the system to show which

particular inputs and activities have been financed; it is important for
governments to learn about whether certain activities are working, but it is
futile for donors to speculate about the extent to which those changes would
happen without them.

They automatically build in a mechanism for selection by shifting funding to

successful approaches and bringing failed approaches safely to a close
(something which development cooperation which has traditionally found it
difficult to do).

In a recent talk at USAID, Nancy Birdsall issued the following rallying cry: Its time
to stop worrying about getting what were paying for, and start paying for what we
get. This principle also underpins another initiative with which CGD is associated,
TrAiD+, which calls for the creation of a market of global results in which investors
could choose what type of projects to fund, based on results achieved. Given the
growing role of business and philanthropy in development, this approach may well
prove to be attractive to many funders.
These are examples of how a focus on results could help, rather than hinder, the
process of adaptation and experimentation in development. That does not mean
that these are the only or even the best approaches (though CGDs Arvind
Subramanian teases his colleagues for offering cash on delivery as a solution to
every problem).
Conclusion
The growing movement towards experimentation and iteration is driven by a
combination of theory and experience. Though these argument have rarely been
explicitly framed as a response to complexity, as a whole they are entirely
consistent with the view that development is an emergent property of a complex
system. We in the development community have much to learn from other fields in
which thinking about complexity is further advanced.
Many development interventions operate in the space between certainty and chaos:
the complexity zone which in which we believe that adaptive approaches are not
only effective but essential. This is often presented as a decisive argument against
results-based approaches to development. We argue that, on the contrary, a focus
on results is an indispensable feature of successful adaptive management. The
challenge is to do this in a way which avoids simplistic reductionism and promotes
an approach which focuses on outcomes rather than process, monitors progress,
and which scales up success.
We are conscious that this falls well short of a detailed blueprint for how this might
work in practice. As they say in the world of tech: that is a feature not a bug. As
Alnoor Ebrahim of Harvard University, one of the leading authorities on
development accountability, puts it: there are no panaceas to results measurement
in complex social contexts. A nuanced approach to results must be based on a
thorough assessment of the problems, interventions and contexts. Our point is that
there is no contradiction between an iterative, experimental approach and a central
place for results in decision-making: on the contrary, a rigorous and energetic focus
on results is at the heart of effective adaptation.

Consistent with our view that success is the product of adaptation and evolution of
ideas as well as institutions and networks we look forward to comments,
improvements and corrections to these ideas so that we can get past simplistic
extremes on either side and build a shared understanding of how to make this work.
This is the last in a series of three blog posts based on Owen Barders presentation
on complexity and development. The first blog post asked What is Development?.
The second blog post looked at the UK governments golden thread approach to
development through the lens of complexity.
Ben Ramalingams book, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, will be published by Oxford
University Press in 2013.
Authors:

Owen Barder
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