Dan Banik and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård discuss locally led development, how to bridge the gap between research and policy, and the future of foreign aid.
The global development domain currently faces huge challenges. Apart from trying to stimulate economic growth and ensuring a fair distribution of the benefits of that growth, national governments and their international partners must also tackle complex conflicts, provide humanitarian assistance, and not least address the harmful impacts of climate disruption. What then should the role of external actors be? How can good intentions be best mobilized into effective actions on the ground?
Håvard Mokleiv Nygård is a Deputy Director-General of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Norad, where he directs the Department of Knowledge. Until a few years ago, he was Research Director at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), where his research focused on armed conflict and political violence, peace building, and patterns of democratic development. Twitter: @havardmn
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Key highlights
Host:
Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod
https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/
Banik It’s lovely to see you, Håvard. Welcome to the basement.
Nygård Thank you so much Dan.
Banik Is there a difference between the term foreign aid and what you guys at NORAD talk about, which is more development cooperation? Is that a more politically correct word these days? I know it's been used for a while, but what is the scene at the moment, is it more correct to say cooperation than aid?
Nygård First of all thank you for having me and it's a pleasure to be here on the podcast. It's kind of interesting we still use the word “bistand” in Norwegian which directly translates to aid, but when we talk about Norwegian aid and quote unquote internationally, it's always now development cooperation. The general thinking is that aid was something we gave to them, but development cooperation is something we do together very much in the spirit of sustainable development and all of that. A part of this is politically correct, a part of it is maybe even a little vogue, but also because it's not just us giving money to poorer countries it is a joint effort for sustainable development. So that's why development cooperation is a more fitting term some of the time.
Banik I'm thinking also how in the last few years many countries are saying that for this to be truly equal, the partnership, we have to have other people, other countries, other actors should be able to influence the policy process. The fact of the matter, and I'd like to hear your views on this Håvard, is that whatever we give in terms of aid or development cooperation comes, of course, from the taxpayer, say here in Norway. There is often this feeling that the money we give should reflect our values, so there is always, as I see it, some sort of an implicit conditionality. It's not based on what others necessarily only want it's also shaped increasingly in fact quite a lot by what we consider to be important. That creates I suppose this tension between the term aid and cooperation
Nygård We've been on a tour this year throughout several of our partner countries, African countries talking about the future of development aid and to hear their views, what should the future of development aid or development cooperation look like? There are a few very interesting things that come out of that. When you ask leading thinkers in countries like Uganda, Ghana and Kenya what they think should be the basis or the integral parts of development assistance there's a few things that we don't do anymore that they have very high up on their list. So, for instance, Norway hardly does any direct budget support anymore, it used to be that a big part of our aid and a big part of many countries aid was basically giving money directly to other countries state budgets, we don't do that at all anymore. If you ask Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning, leading economic thinkers in countries like Ghana, they will say please bring back direct budget support. We stopped doing that for various reasons, one particularly important reason is that it was too sensitive, because you are to some extent then responsible for whatever that country does. I think this is an interesting dilemma, because now on the one hand, the countries want direct budget support, the research-based knowledge base for budget support is solid, it's very effective development aid, according to DFID, it's a so-called Best Buy for economic development, but we don't do it anymore for domestically political reasons. That is a fundamental dilemma of development cooperation, it is, as you say our money, it is taxpayer money that is supposed to help other countries on their terms. We know one of the so-called effectiveness principles that the global aid community has agreed on is that aid should be locally led and we all agree that aid should be locally led. But there's a limit to that when it when it crashes with our political priorities and then our political priorities win the day and locally led take a back seat.
Banik That is exactly the tension I see because we can say that we can consult others but at the end of the day, there are political constraints, there are other issues. One thing I thought of when you were saying that the Ugandans were talking about budget support, another thing that we don't do these days is infrastructure, which is where the Chinese have excelled of late, particularly on the African continent. You went on this tour, what else did they say apart from budget support? What else did they say that your partners in many of these countries what did they want from you that you are not doing anymore apart from budget support? Is it about money always or is it about the sectors that should be prioritised?
Nygård It's about the sectors and it's also about our aims and our priorities. We have a lot of issues that we want to pursue when we do development cooperation, important issues related to human rights and equality, these things that are integral to our way of thinking. Sustainable development from the point of view of many developing countries, a more primary concern is economic transformation and economic development. To some extent there's a sense that we sometimes don't have our priorities straight and then we would argue about the factors that lead to sustainable development. We're going to argue these factors, human rights, etc are integral to sustainable development, but that creates tensions, and creates interesting dilemmas. So, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people that work in the Norwegian aid sector are fundamentally, deeply motivated to do their job they want to improve other countries, they want to help other people that's their motivation, that's why they joined the effort that's why they took the job and that's what would motivate them every single day. But at the end of the day, we don't answer to the people of Uganda, we answer the MFA which answers to the Parliament which answers to the to the Norwegian taxpayers. That's the chain of command whether we like it or not, and that's always going to be an inherent tension both for aid, as an industry, and also for everyone who works in this system.
Banik I think that is a very good point because that leads me to this issue of what is effective aid. We could have and we do have situations where certain things are known to work because we academics have done research and we think it's a rigorous study, there's sound evidence. Just to give an example of what you just mentioned, the budget support, if DFID says the FCDO has found that it is a great intervention there are all of these reasons why we stopped doing it, as you were saying that, well, we can't hold them to account the money will just disappear in the government coffers, but some of the best or the most convincing arguments for budget support is that one boosts the legitimacy of the state, it is not about getting the NGO's more recognition or Norway or the development partner donor country more recognition, you are strengthening in some cases a weak state, a fragile state. But the flip side is of course that some of this money can end up in the wrong priority areas, and there may be a corruption scandal and then it's more difficult for the donor to justify. But returning to the idea or the fact I suppose, that many of the people working like you in the system are motivated, how does one tackle this dilemma that there may be certain things that are known to work and yet one can't do these things, is there a way around this?
Nygård That's a good question. I think on the one hand we take the issue of locally led development extremely seriously in Norwegian development corporation, this year NORAD and US Aid has done a big push to get other donors to agree to what we call a donor statement on locally led developments that was actually just announced during the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation summit in Geneva in the middle of December. The idea of that statement right is to get donors to agree on a set of core principles, basically on how to do locally led development.
Banik So this is different from in Paris in 2015 it was more about donors coordinating their strategies, this one is how we could get much more local involvement?
Nygård Yes so in Busan, in Paris the so-called effectiveness criteria has always said that locally led development is better than non-locally led development. But in humanitarian aid sometimes we have this split between long-term development and humanitarian aid. In humanitarian aid you have the grand bargain, which is a framework, a set of principles for how to operationalize essentially locally led development, we don't have that for long term development we have this overarching ambition or principle that locally led is better but what that actually means in practise is less certain. Let's take in an obvious example, Norway channels around 60% of our development cooperation through multilateral agencies so what does it mean when we say, on the one hand, that we are for locally led development, but at the same time we channel so much of our funding through multilateral organisations?
Banik Right, and then negotiating and bargaining power of countries vis a vis these powerful multilateral institutions is different.
Nygård Absolutely and even for Norway, the bargaining power in some of these organisations is quite small. Then you can think of what the bargaining power for Ghana is, so that means, for NORAD and for Norway if we're taking locally led development seriously a core question for us will have to be, what does that mean for what we say to UNDP? The directives that we give to UNDP, the policies or the guidelines that our MFA take to the boardrooms of the of the UNDP and argue for how they should work. It's been a shift definitely in NORAD, it doesn't implement any of our own programmes, in contrast to, for instance, the ISET in Germany or old DFID, we work through partners and that means we're always at least one step, usually much more than one step removed from the other countries and that can make rhetoric and discussions about locally led development seem very abstract, very theoretical, and getting to grips what it actually means in practise, that's the hard part.
Banik Thinking about another concept that NORAD was talking about 20-25 years ago, which was ownership, which a lot of donors still talk about. The question I have for you, Håvard, is when we talk about locally led development, it almost seems like if donors are talking about it, it's like donors are going to somehow facilitate this, that for me is something weird, it has to come from below. So going back to the term ownership, if I believe in something I'm a local elite and I'm really committed and I have a vision and I want to push a certain agenda I'm politically enthusiastic I show a willingness and then you come and you say, OK, you're impressed with my vision and we can do business together and you can maybe fund some of these efforts. But this presupposes, at least in my book, that it isn't a process that is facilitated by donors, it comes from below or from within from the national leadership. It also presupposes a political settlement that there is, as you may have heard, one of my previous guests, Stefan Dercon, talks about the development bargain, that people agree in society that this is a way to go. So how does this square then, this ownership and this political enthusiasm with what you and your colleagues at some of these other donor countries have thought about locally led development?
Nygård Well to be really honest to some extent it doesn't square. You mentioned local ownership, whenever we talk about locally led development, you very quickly realise that we are having a lot of the same conversations over and over and over again. We call this something else, in the past, it was local ownership or something like that, now we call it locally led development. When we were at the GPEDC, the summit in Geneva, we had a meeting among the Nordic countries that to some extent think quite similarly in terms of what locally led development means, some nuances but pretty similar. We presented this donor statement to all them and the Finns were in the room and the Finns in contrast to some of our other Nordic neighbours have a tendency to be honest, really honest which can be refreshing, so they just ask point blank, isn't this the emperor’s new clothes? What's actually new in this donor statement? And the truth is that there's not a lot of new things in that donor statement there's a lot of old ideas in new framing or new clothing. I don't think that's in itself is a problem. It's something about an idea whose time has come, maybe that's now, and something about where you see momentum, where you see the windows of opportunity that can change over time and I think there's a real window of opportunity now to do something differently with locally led development. But core to our thinking in this is what I think is originally another power slogan of we have to shift the power, that means that we have to shift the power to local elites. Then again shift the power is something that is very easy to say, but what does it actually mean in practise? It means that we have to take some of our power and give it to someone else. That's extremely hard to do for anyone and especially maybe countries that in practise might mean something like giving your seat at the table at an important multilateral gathering to a South based representative instead. But I think if we're actually going to get anywhere with this agenda it will have to involve filling this shift the power slogan with actual meaning, and I don't think we're there yet, but we're having at least good conversations and then we'll see.
Banik I think it is important sometimes to repeat something to reiterate something, this is what the UN often does, and if you look at the first statement of anything it's the first pages. We reiterate we reaffirm and sometimes, if things are forgotten, it makes sense to talk about those things. Maybe there will be a subtle nuance, so I think this is a great move I'm just curious as to how this will be operationalized in practise and going back to how we started the conversation it is that inherent tension that local elites may want something that you are not comfortable giving, how is that impasse resolved. I was thinking about another concept, at least one of those development jargon, the fashionable buzzword that we often like, empowerment. We talk about empowerment as in you empowering me in relation to my life, but you don't often necessarily want to talk about how I am empowered in relation to you, the donor, there's often this tendency I noticed that we're talking about ownership, empowerment in local society vis a vis local leader. But this kind of international accountability, what are we doing, and can we be criticised, we as donors, I think that is also something I hope is discussed when one talks about local led development.
Nygård No, absolutely and this is a fascinating not just question but dilemma. Going back to Stefan Dercon’s book on development bargain, to strip it down to its core, Stefan basically says that if you're working in a country where the elites haven't agreed on a development bargain, you're wasting your time, you're wasting your money. I'm sure there is not a development bargain in all of the countries that we are working in, there is political infighting and where we often come with quite heavy normative agendas. One thing is around human rights, but also other issues related to equality, youth, female empowerment, etc that are not uncontroversial. So how do we ensure that we don't simply take our ideas and impose them on other countries, it's an inherent tension and dilemma. How do we empower the elites that should be empowered because they've actually made a development bargain, empowering them instead of undermining them, which a project can also do in a worst-case scenario, these are these dilemmas in development cooperation that it's extremely important that we are cognizant of. It's a dilemma that I wish were a bigger part of the discussion around development cooperation in the Norwegian public and in every country's public but which we don't very often discuss, and which tends to take a back seat instead of being front and centre.
Banik One of the things I notice, Håvard, is that the discourse, the global discourse has become increasingly pessimistic especially during the pandemic and also afterwards. Aid coming from certain countries, the taxpayers often ask why should we give free money or in terms of, say cash transfers and we'll return to cash transfers. We know cash transfers work, but the very idea that we're going to give free money, doling out to people, there's just something wrong, if we are to get money ourselves, that's fine but to give our money to someone else is wrong. I notice that we're trying to, not we, but you guys in the agencies you're trying to make a more persuasive case to the taxpayer that whatever is provided in terms of support, whether it is aid or Development Corporation, whatever is effective, it works. My personal experience, especially from Norway, is that you in the in the political scene, you would have certain politicians and their parties talking about or harping on about perhaps the scandals or what doesn't work, and in that process, one stops talking about maybe 95% of the things that work. I would like to hear your views on what you consider to be effective development aid, what works, not just in NORAD Håvard, but what is effective aid?
Nygård That's the that's the million kroner or 40 billion Norwegian kroner which is the budget question. Let me start from a slightly different angle, Statistics Norway every other year they do a survey of Norwegians attitudes to aid development assistance. An extremely interesting picture emerges from that survey, on the one hand, support for development assistance in Norway is extremely high, around 90%, and it's increasing over time, people believe or support that we're spending a lot of money on development assistance. It is actually among one of the most popular programs the Norwegian Government runs. It's basically development assistance and kindergartens, that's what Norwegians love the most. But at the same time, this study also shows that a large and growing proportion of Norwegians don't believe that aid actually produces results, produces few or no results.
Banik That’s a contradiction.
Nygård Absolutely a contradiction. I am absolutely convinced that over time those two figures can't trend in opposite direction, it is going to undermine support for development assistance. I'm also concerned that that means that actual support for development assistance in Norway is a mile wide and an inch deep. We saw that in Sweden now, Sweden is going to cut their development systems quite dramatically over the next few years there was no opposition in Sweden to that, getting it through was quite easy for the government. The same has happened in Denmark and the same has happened in the UK. So that means we have to sure up support for development assistance.
Banik How much is this because of lack of knowledge?
Nygård I think a lot of is lack of knowledge. When we talk about development assistance in Norway the debate is almost only about the level of the aid budget. We talk about how much money we spend, we don't talk at all as much as we should about what we spend it on. Aid debates in a way are either we should spend more or we should spend less or there's been some kind of scandal that frames the discussion, we hardly ever talk about what are the big aims we want to achieve and how do we achieve them, what is effective aid? But what we do know from a big body of research is that there is a lot of aid that is extremely effective, and we also know that at a top level there is a robust relationship between development assistance and economic development. I think it's incumbent on us to tell that story, and in an evidence based and knowledge-based manner to communicate to the Norwegian public about what is this development assistance actually achieving? How we are we achieving it and how could we do even better? And I think part of that story as well has to be that you know where to some extent, we're all in this together it has benefit for us that poor countries get richer; then you get trading partners, you get markets etc. It's not like this is simply money down the drain, we get something out of it, and we also get peace and stability out of it, which is definitely important.
Banik I think some of the challenges of communicating that positive narrative is that let's say the media is not interested in the success stories it's almost like it's expected to work, so it's far more sensational to talk about what doesn't work and that's what is ingrained in the brain of the reader that ohh, there's this one guy who's corrupt and he used aid money to buy a private jet and he's a bandit, and therefore everyone else is like that. I think it is extremely important and I've tried to do this by developing a teaching module called what works in development because I don't think we should be naive and just talk about the success stories we should absolutely address the challenges, but we need to highlight what works. But in this context Håvard I also think we have to be more honest, perhaps just like the Finns you were talking about, we should be open to talking about also the challenges. I notice that in the aid industry, not just in this country but also elsewhere there is this tendency of not talking about what doesn't work, and one of the main reasons is the fear that this will create bad publicity you may lose support among members who are contributing with money or from the government that is supporting you, and this is particularly, I suppose, a challenge for civil society organisations that you want to highlight the rosy picture and in doing so, I think it creates a problem of legitimacy. I'm just thinking that if you are a voter and you think, OK, I'm getting proper information, balanced information of what works and what doesn't I may be more willing to be convinced that it is effective.
Nygård That is an integral part of NORAD’s mandate, is to communicate in a knowledge based, evidence-based manner about what works and what doesn't work and be open and transparent about how we spend money, what we spend money on, what we achieve and what we don't achieve. But you know as you say whenever there's public debate, it's driven by scandals. One thing I really, really wished for, we have some really high quality, extremely professional civil society organisations in Norway that are big internationally in the in the aid industry, they have different ways of working and what I really would have wished is that every once in a while we had debates in the Norwegian public about what's the best way of doing it and Norwegian Church Aid is doing it in this manner, and the Norwegian Refugee Council is doing it in this way. What are the pros and cons, why are you arguing that this is the best way of doing it, why are you doing it in that way? I think that could be extremely good.
Banik We've tried this once with your colleague, my current doctoral student, Nikolai, we wrote an op-ed piece about one particular kind of support that civil society organisations in Norway were receiving from NORAD and that led to an uproar. How dare we even question that? So, there are obviously vested interests in the aid industry it could be academics, civil society, whatever we don't want uncomfortable questions being asked. That that is one thing, the other one I was thinking about is also being exposed to new forms of doing this development corporation and one topic I know has got more attention now than before and that has to do with the role of southern NGO's that have often argued that we take all the risks. We do all the work and you guys in the North, the northern partners, get all the credit, get more money, it should be a more fair distribution of aid. Is that something that that aid agencies talk about, that rather than just channelling resources to multilateral institutions or our domestic NGOs, maybe we should give more money directly to people there in the field.
Nygård This is going back to our discussion on locally led development, the question is how much do we channel through multilateral organisations? How much do we channel through the Norwegian NGOs and how much is funded directly are key questions. The Norwegian civil society organisations are always going to be a big and integral part of the Norwegian aid industry. I think there's scope to do more what we call direct funding, actually giving money directly to local in the proper sense of the word civil society organisation.
Banik Why do you think we moved away from that Håvard?
Nygård The aid budget grew, NORAD and Norwegian aid had to go through different modus operandi for grant management. We are now completely reliant on working through partners, the entire industry and I don't mean industry with bad connotation, has a professionalised a lot. Submitting an application to NORAD going through all the hoops and ladders and chutes and ladders, qualifying, following up results, reporting requirements, etc. That requires a really professional organisation there's a lot of local organisations that don’t have the capacity to get funding from us directly, which I think is an interesting dilemma in itself.
Banik Because they may be doing very good work.
Nygård Absolutely. I think there's an extreme case to this and we've mentioned cash transfers already, it turns out simply giving money directly to poor people is among the most effective forms of development assistance there is. But remember when people started doing this, the argument was no, no, you can't do that they're going to waste their money, they'll be lazy they're going to buy booze and narcotics or whatever. It turns out, surprise surprise, they know what's best for themselves and it now turns out that cash transfers don't just have immediate effect they let people lift themselves pull themselves out of poverty long term, it has a host of indirect effects related to health and education, it even leads to local business development, it leads to much more local business development and microcredit, which is quite interesting.
Banik And less work for the donors.
Nygård Much less work. We have quite a lot of experience in Norwegian aid doing cash transfers in humanitarian settings, we have much less experience in long term settings now we have got a directive from our MFA to do much more in long term development settings. So that means say it opens up a new chapter for us, what does this mean, who are the partners that we're going to work with to accomplish this? What's the role of government? Norway has a welfare state a cash transfer is basically a welfare system. So, do we help other countries build similar welfare states and then channel cash through them? Or how do we do it? It's interesting.
Banik Mildly put. If you think about a country that is Norway's donor darling Malawi, they have some very good experience with unconditional universal cash transfers. I've spoken about this with Ugo Gentilini, one of my previous guests from the World Bank, who leads the social protection team there in terms of cash transfers. Some of the challenges are the recruitment or the targeting criteria, how do we identify the ultra-poor, how are we going to actually give the money in the absence of an ATM machine or a bank, is it to be transported, is it going to be based on mobile phone transfer, then there is technology, etc. But I think cash transfer is actually a great case where one could, as a donor, do something about local ownership and some sort of a budget support, a hybrid form. You're not giving money directly to the government, but you can say I'm giving money for this cash transfer program which may or may not be projected as coming from the government, so the receivers don't need to necessarily know it is coming from Norway. If it is seen to be coming from the government, it boosts the legitimacy of the government and it could lead to strengthening of administrative capacity. But sometimes I feel Håvard some of these programmes that work well, such as cash transfers, they presuppose that there is administrative capacity there and to build that capacity for a government is much more long term, so yes, it may work in some places, but when you try to replicate this in other contexts without that required infrastructure and capacity then that becomes more of challenge.
Nygård Absolutely, and which is probably also the reason why a big focus on cash transfers has been in humanitarian settings where you bracket the whole state capacity long term development part. So that's when we are developing our strategies around social safety nets, which we call it at NORAD. Then the issue of how do we strengthen state capacity to deliver, to manage is absolutely critical and this has many facets, it's things that we take for granted like a census, a registry that you actually need to ensure that you target the ones that you target, that you reach the ones you want to reach. That has to then be part of the aid programme to ensure that you build that capacity and not just send funding. I think also for us an absolutely central dilemma, we've talked a lot about different dilemmas, is so many of the countries that we're working in now is the jargon word that I'm not a big fan of in development circles is Nexus countries. Countries that at the same time both have, humanitarian conflict crises and where we have long term development projects. It used to be that these were separate, you had countries that were undergoing conflict where the humanitarians were, and then the conflict ended and then the long-term development people moved in. Now you have protracted crisis countries that move in and out of crises and the humanitarian and the long term is basically layered on top of each other. That means that you can't have a humanitarian cash transfer programme that just comes in, fixes the problem and then moves out because that might undermine long-term development. At the same time, as the neutrality and everything that is so central to humanitarians has to be protected in a world where you at the same time as you're doing humanitarian assistance also you have to do a long-term development.
Banik This is a particular challenge Håvard because in the aid world one is often, at least traditionally, one has been obsessed with the exit strategy, you want a clear in and a clear out strategy. But when the exit is unclear because the humanitarian the short-term merges into the long-term need then you're there forever, and that is more difficult to convince the taxpayer. It's like being in Afghanistan for the Americans and you're stuck there, and the taxpayers are saying come home and when you do decide to come home, everything collapses.
Nygård One part of this is it's always easier to make the case for humanitarian assistance because the needs are in your face, they are short term you don't have to argue for effectiveness, it's this person needs food.
Banik It's also very visible, it's visible suffering and you and everybody says, we have to of course there's no other way out.
Nygård Even aid critics in Norway say they support humanitarian assistance. But this problem with the overlap of humanitarian and long-term is only going to get worse. The World Bank did a fascinating study where they showed in 2000 80% of extremely poor in the world, lived in politically stable countries, the countries were stable with no conflict, but they had a lot of poverty. In 2030, according to projections from the World Bank, that picture is almost going to be flipped on its head. In 2030, according to World Bank estimates, two thirds of all extremely poor are going to live in conflict and fragile countries. That means that we've gone from a world where the humanitarians had their set of countries and NORAD had its set of countries to in 2030 is going to be the same countries and we have to create systems and create structures where we don't undermine each other, but we don't think long term and where we actually are able to build capacity and sustainable development. In some of these countries where the regimes are, to put it diplomatically, hard to work with, doing capacity building for the government of Mali is bordering on impossible for a donor such as Norway where human rights are so central to what we're doing. So how do we then work to ensure long term capacity? Well, civil society is obviously one avenue to support, you can support civil society even in those countries, and civil society is going to be important also after the crisis has ended. At the same time, you have to always look at ways in which to support state capacity, since that's going to be what ensures long term development.
Banik So when we want to talk more about the positive story, convince our taxpayers that it should not just be about the money, how much money or the percentage of GNI, but it should be more about effectiveness. We need information, we need rigorous evaluations and I know that you've been particularly interested in promoting rigorous randomised controlled trials, the gold standard from the medical field to figure out what works. But that is also many would say, not the only way of assessing effectiveness, we should use different techniques, it isn't just RCTs we should rely on and there are many things like political participation or empowerment that is very difficult to measure. What are your thoughts there in trying to uncover more knowledge about what works and using perhaps a whole variety of techniques to create that evidence?
Nygård That's a good question. I guess to some extent, I've almost been portrayed as randomista. Honestly so I think there is absolutely scope to do much more high quality randomised controlled trials in Norwegian development aid to ensure that we do get really, really, really high-quality information on what works and what doesn't work. What is really, really nice about an RCT is that it sometimes tells you, no, this didn't work, and a dream scenario is to get to a point where you're rewarded as a partner to Norwegian development aid. If you're rewarded for running an evaluation that shows that, oh, this thing that we thought would work really well, it doesn't work at all we're not going to spend any more money on it let's do something else instead. I think a lot of our partners now would be absolutely terrified to notify NORAD that it turned out it that it didn't have any effect at all, so getting to a point where failure is rewarded.
Banik Is that possible with RCT?
Nygård It is to some extent, and we want innovation, we want to take risk if we're serious about that, then we have to be serious about celebrating failure and making sure that that's not the end of the conversation with our partners, but the start of the conversation. So, I want to make sure that where and when appropriate, we use RCTs to get that quality knowledge, but RCTs will always only be a part of the puzzle. They are extremely good at what they're good at and they're extremely poor at everything else, there's a lot of stuff that we want to achieve that is societal level changes, where you have to do completely different forms of evaluations. There's long term development that we want to see where an RCT is sometimes not feasible or appropriate at all and then sometimes we have to understand much more deeply how the change happened. We want to understand much more deeply how it affects people and this means basically that to get to a point when reaching development aid is much more knowledge based than it is today. I'm not saying that it's not today, but I'm seeing there's scope, room for improvement then we have to use the entire toolbox. I think the problem today is that 95% maybe more of the evaluation toolbox now is key informant interviews. There's room and scope for key informant interviews, but social science and the other sciences have developed so many other methods that are extremely good at what they do, so let's use them for what they're worth.
Banik I have to be honest that some of the evaluations that I have been, not a part of I don't do evaluations, but I've read evaluation reports, among others, from NORAD, I've given advice, been part of a reference group. I've not always been very impressed I feel that some of these evaluation firms it's just a copy and paste, it depends on the terms of reference they are also interested in making sure that if there are perhaps too critical, they may not get another contract. So, it just seems to be for me it's like a circus you want to be part of it and you write more of the same. I do agree that you just can't do the key informant interviews. These are people with a stake in it, who on Earth was going to say no, this one wasn't very successful. Unless you have a bone to pick with that if you were removed from the program, then you would say, yeah this really was bad. So, I think there's something about trying to find a way to get the evidence and as you said, it is really important for our partners or whoever we work with, including us academics if people could just say, you know what, I'm sorry, I wasn't able to do this that, we failed. It should not lead to total abandonment it should lead to an honest conversation. In fact, I would be even more willing to work with a partner if they say you know what, there were these reasons why we failed but if only we address this, it'll work. So, I think evaluation is important, but I think the key thing that you just said is that maybe we don't often want to talk about that lest we lose what we have got.
Nygård I think to build long term trust with the public that we're spending aid money well and it has effect then we have to communicate honestly about both what works and what failed and why and how it failed and then we have to be able to do that in a rigorous manner. For that to be possible, it can't mean the end of the relationship between the donor and the partner then we will never get that kind of information. NORAD’s evaluation department actually did an evaluation of evaluations, maybe we'll do an evaluation of evaluations of evaluations at some point. But anyway, so they evaluated all so-called program evaluations, specific evaluations are looking at a project or a program there's dozens of them conducted every year. The results from that or the findings from that evaluation of evaluations is absolutely depressing, it is low quality, it is sloppy craftsmanship to be honest, and there's recommendations and conclusions that are basically not connected to the empirics at all. But still, we're spending quite a lot of money on all of these program evaluations, and some of them are obviously good, but for many of them it's hard to see what they're actually giving us, they're definitely not telling us much about where we should spend the money or how we should spend the money differently or what we should cut and what we should scale and that's what we want to change now. We want to make sure that we have the kind of evaluation that we need and the kind of information and knowledge broadly that we need to say that, oh ok, this is the stuff that we are now fairly certain works, we're going to continue doing that, maybe scaling it up, here's a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem like it works at all, it's too hard to get to work we're just going to cut it, let someone else do, and here is all of the stuff that we have high hopes for, it's innovative we're not sure if it's going to pan out, it might be complete failures, but at least we're going to try and we're going to evaluate it rigorously and we're going to dump it and if it fails, then we're going to scale it if it works.
Banik As a donor agency, one has to be persuasive vis a vis the evaluator that one is interested in an honest evaluation, a critical, balanced, independent, just like us researchers it can't be a one side it shouldn't be based on me giving you a positive rating, because then you'll ask me again to rate you. I think one has to convince people that we're genuinely interested in the feedback, it's not an exercise of going through the motions which brings me to the final set of issues. One has to do with how you moved smoothly from being a top-rated excellent researcher at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo to this new position as the Director for knowledge at NORAD, how has that transition been for you? I'm curious because I don't know if I'd be able to work in your position and not perhaps have the freedom that I have to say exactly what I wish. So that's one thing I'd like to you to reflect on and finally how you see the future of the global development agenda now there's not so much talk about the SDGs we have just a few years left, 2030 is fast approaching a lot of us are talking about the post 2030 agenda. So firstly, how it has been for you to move between research and policy and secondly, the future of global development, as you see it.
Nygård It's been a fascinating and extremely interesting move. I think in Norway it's extremely rare, I guess especially when you've been in research as long as I had been to move out and go to policy.
Banik Why did you?
Nygård It's this push and pull factors, I was extremely happy at PRIO I still think it was a fantastic job, it was fascinating questions, amazing colleagues and everything. Then NORAD came along, you had this new strategy you had a new Director General of the NORAD who kept saying “fakta er makta” (facts rule).
Banik He's been on the show, and he's talked about that.
Nygård He would say that every other sentence and I got curious about what this means, and we had some conversations and I got convinced that, oh, maybe it's time to try something new, it would be fun to try something new.
Banik I'm glad you did that.
Nygård Well, I could take some of my research experience and use it for something else, but it's a completely different beast. PRIO is an independent foundation, less than 100 employees. I woke up in the morning and I could basically do whatever I wanted that day talk to whoever I wanted, write about whatever I want, start whatever project I wanted, approach any donor I wanted. Absolutely free range now I am at an agency that is part of a massive state Bureaucracy, an agency that reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a quite hierarchical structure.
Banik You have to be careful, a bit more careful.
Nygård Yes I have to think much more carefully about what kind of initiatives I pursue, how I anchor them in the organisation, what I ask permission for doing, what I don't ask permission for doing and I'm sure if you talk to Bård Vegar or some of my superiors and the MFA, they would say that the entrance has not always been frictionless. There's been missteps and there's been miscommunication and there's been stuff that's just completely not on my radar to think about, but which is important within a big bureaucracy. We're also trying to make quite big changes to how we work at NORAD, it doesn’t mean that how we did things in the past was wrong, it means that we want to improve how things are done and that's always hard to change an organisation even when with an organisation where everyone is enthusiastic about the overall ambition, how you do it, how you operationalize it is always going to create frictions. I'm still finding my footing and figuring out how to how to navigate.
Banik I think that could be a sobering experience actually also if and when you decide to come back to academia. I think for all of us and this is something I miss in Norway because like at Stanford, it was very common for people in academia to actually serve in the State Department and then to come back. I think that kind of experience from public admin is really good also when you come back and you don the hat of a researcher, maybe it sobers us maybe it makes us more democratic and less individualistic.
Nygård I think you're right and there's a lot of experiences that I've made already that I think would probably make me a better researcher, and at least I hope that having my research background in NORAD as the organisation is a plus to the organisation. There are some obvious things that I think I knew on a theoretical level before I started, but which I now appreciate much more. One thing is how rushed every process is, in research you have your time, you write an article, but especially when you deal with the MFA and the closer you get to policy making the timeline is so compressed. Everything has to be next day or two days at the very most for things that are big, big, big decisions and really appreciating that I think would be useful for researchers.
Banik So when we write the abstract, we should be better because some of your colleagues have told me that they only have time to read the abstracts, I have realised that maybe I should try and formulate an attractive abstract as possible.
Nygård Yes for sure.
Banik But the final thing about the future of global development, as you see it.
Nygård We've touched on some issues already. I think this issue of the overlap between long term and humanitarian conflict crises all happening in the same places, it's going to be absolutely defining for the next decade, 2 decades of development. Add to that climate change that's going to wreak havoc on many of the same countries that are today experiencing crises and conflict and where the needs for long term development are absolutely dire. Then you have big power rivalry which is increasingly defining development as well, China is now a global actor, what the competition between China and the US looks like in the next 20 years, I'm not sure what it will look like, but that is going to a large extent set the scene and define the boundaries for what we as a fairly small development agency can actually do in many of these countries. Maybe we'll move to a new Cold War, I don't hope so, but that's going to be a completely different world. Then is what we started with, shift the power and locally led it is simply not possible anymore to think that we are going to develop the South, it has to be development cooperation and actually figuring out what that means in practise, moving beyond the slogans that is going to be key for the future of development cooperation. Then I think the SDGs, the SDGs have to a large extent served us really well it gave us less focus than the Millennium Development Goals, but it broadened the agenda, it really emphasised this shared notion of we are all in the same boat which I think is key. I think the fact of the matter is that we are not going to meet the SDGs, not by 2030 maybe not even by 2040. There's definitely going to be scope to continue working on the SDGs also after 2030. But I think the process with the SDGs, the process of developing them was interesting.
Banik It was participation.
Nygård Yes and in complete contrast to the MDGs which I guess were basically thought of by Jeffrey Sachs in the back room at some point.
Banik The basement of the UN building.
Nygård Yes so to continue that past participatory process in a structured and manageable manner, that I think would be interesting and it’s the kind of thing where when the UN does it well it’s really good at it.
Banik Håvard it was wonderful to have you visit me today thanks for a wonderful, productive informative conversation, thank you very much.
Nygård Thank you so much for having me Dan.