Evidence to policy. Truth to power.
"Policy" as an institutional process is a nebulous mixture of concepts, thinking, ideology, values, pragmatism, interests and, hopefully, evidence: prior, during, and afterwards. This mix constitutes the true rationality of any policy process and generates stakeholders at different stages of formulation and conclusion. Typically, such stakeholders are arranged sequentially across the policy cycle as well as compartmentalised into sectoral responsibilities. This frames the room for initiative and implementation as well as responsibility and accountability (or avoidance thereof) for outputs and, more importantly, outcomes. These are the elements of governance which occur within political economies characterised by inequalities of class, status, and power. The more recent claims made by governments the world over for "evidence-based" policy seem like hubris when this social complexity is acknowledged: a Foucauldian attempt to rhetorically disguise naked politics in pursuit of legitimation, often a process of pursuing specific interests but presenting them as universal.
Thus, for the researcher and social analyst, any claim to influence policy prescriptions and outcomes via the presentation of evidence must be treated with suspicion, since the policy path is not linear but twisted. Attributing impact is nigh on impossible. The only reasonable claim is that of "participation in a process" alongside other players. With these caveats, I can briefly illustrate some earlier policy participation in Bangladesh as part of seeking to be applied, useful, and practical to those I care about.
My participation began by interpreting the significance of our findings in Exploitation and the Rural Poor (BARD, 1976 and 1978). If the cooperatives were being captured by the relatively well-off families in Cumilla's minifundist conditions, then how could this be an appropriate model to roll out across other more unequal regions of quasi-feudal Bangladesh? This conclusion was reinforced by emerging data on landlessness and a later paper by myself—Rural Class Formation in Bangladesh (1981), informed by Abu Abdullah's work. This analysis undermined the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development lobby which wanted to replicate the Cumilla model all over the country. The debates were difficult, and inconvenient for the liberation narrative of a homogenous nation of small family farmers. In terms of causation, my work, together with data from 1977 on the extent of rural landlessness for whom these cooperatives policies were irrelevant, helped to convince well-placed senior bureaucrats that replication should be abandoned.
From these beginnings, attention turned to developing opportunities for the landless. My "sponsor" in the Government of Bangladesh (secretary of agriculture, following a stint in rural development) asked me for ideas for the landless, given the Washington Consensus push towards privatised groundwater irrigation for the emerging irri-boro season. My agrarian knowledge led to a paper on "landless irrigation" whereby landless groups could own shallow tube wells and sell irrigation water to farming peasants with fragmented plots in a "command area." With the government's approval, I took the ideas to Proshika, which pursued this productivity inclusion approach over the 1980s and into the 90s, despite some opposition from the appropriate technology lobby which considered modern, mechanical, and expensive technologies beyond the capacity of the poor to manage.
During the 1980s, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency was supporting the then Local Government Engineering Bureau (LGEB) with infrastructure expansion via labour intensive rural work. SIDA was pursuing rights ("decent labour") for rural earthworks labour. Given the landless irrigation model, did I have any parallel ideas? I wrote a paper on counter-information and functional literacy so that labourers on site could avoid being cheated. The thinking went further into the idea of "Labour Contracting Societies," so that groups of labourers could take on contracts themselves and cut out rent-seeking intermediary contractors and labour sardars. It became a case of progressive policy thwarted by corrupt vested interests, as reported in Whose Ideas, Whose Interests? (UPL, 1994).
Evidence has to be mediated to policy through processes of advocacy entailing sustained dialogue and trust. And where friendships develop as a function of regular contact, this can be enjoyable between mutual enthusiasts as can happen between colleagues anywhere.
In the late 1980s, after 14 years, I was asked by UKAid to see if I could find a pro-poor angle for the construction of a large-scale, public-sector fish seed multiplication farm (in Parbatipur of Dinajpur district) to support local village expansion of fish culture. I quickly learned that this project was imitating already existing private sector arrangements and was thus flawed. Someone had not done their homework and had to be ticked off! However, my research team developed the idea of using the local poor bepari (who collected seed, fry, and fingerlings from Parbatipur station arotdars to trade among villages) into extension workers for the programme, trained to offer technical advice about rearing the fingerlings species they were selling. We published Trading the Silver Seed (UPL, 1992) to describe all this.
With Iffath Sharif, I co-edited two books on microfinance (in 1997 and 2002) which effectively judged the claims made for it. In our first book, Who Needs Credit (UPL, 1997), we concluded that its success was more in providing liquidity management to those highly dependent upon hand-to-mouth, seasonally influenced incomes enabling them to break free of usurious mahajans, than in generating new incomes from self-exploited labour. The second book, Challenges for Second Generation Microfinance (UPL 2002), confronted the model of poor people's savings under-performing by being recycled by MFIs into loans for other poor people's low productivity activity (albeit vital activity for subsistence and mahajan avoidance). Were poor savers being trapped below higher-value returns by these recycling finance arrangements?
I was significantly involved in the international review of the Flood Action Plan in 1995, which concluded by rejecting much of the Canute physical structures paradigm in favour of disaggregated coping solutions. Many vested interests within the government and among the engineering consultancy community internationally were furious with our critique.
Despite my extensive association with NGOs, especially Proshika, in the early 90s I wrote States Without Citizens: The Problem of the Franchise State, which pointed out the contradiction between donor support for improved governance and accountability of state practice and the simultaneous support for large NGOs to provide non-rights-based essential services to the poor, effectively substituting for what the state should be providing to its entitled citizens. Poor clients had no recourse to complaint about services (quality, access, inclusion) since NGOs were really charities operating in a voluntary, philanthropic way. This issue remains.
Personally, with the policy issues outlined above, from the late 1970s, I interacted quite strongly with the agriculture ministry as well as the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Co-operatives at the secretary level. The secretary for the former was Obaidullah Khan, who had switched from Rural Development, with the late Anisussaman going in the opposite direction to Rural Development (see a very appreciative recent obituary by Khalid Shams in The Daily Star). I felt shuffled between these two officers in the secretariat, seeking joined-up thinking. I also spent time with joint secretaries. This was a remarkable experience for someone in their late 30s. And oddly, perhaps arrogantly, I did not feel the privilege at the time. That dawned on me somewhat later, when writing Staying the Course: The Journey of a 'Bengal' Civilian. That says quite a lot about youthful assertion and confidence. But I did have exposure to share when in the secretariat because I was working so much with Proshika from 1980 onwards that I was mainly outside Dhaka! These two remarkable CSP men wanted other lines of knowledge from outside their own rigid hierarchies, and they wanted "truth to power" which they rarely received from their own junior staff, except a few confident high-flying joint secretaries.
I had both access and ongoing dialogue. I brought books for Obaidullah and Anis from the UK. The relationship with Obaidullah was a more informal friendship, meeting often in his official residence on Minto Road. With Anis, it was a little more formal, in the office, in his durbar! I met ministers too, drafting some speeches for them when they were attending international conferences to be addressed in English. I was even an advisor to Obaidullah and his team at the annual World Bank Aid Review in Paris, where we all convened, somewhat to the surprise of the World Bank delegation. So there was trust, too.
However, in the mid 1980s, I felt increasingly bothered about this proximity to a military regime (Ershad's) and withdrew below the radar to concentrate on working with Proshika and some related assignments with donors, which kept me in touch with the government.
The lesson from this experience is that evidence has to be mediated to policy through processes of advocacy entailing sustained dialogue and trust. And where friendships develop as a function of regular contact, this can be enjoyable between mutual enthusiasts as can happen between colleagues anywhere. In addition to offices, tea, and informal dinners, more recently a couple of us from the University of Bath, together with BIDS, have been invited to present our extreme poverty research to All-Party Parliamentary Group MPs in the Jatiya Sangsad. In parallel, we convened workshops for joint secretaries across relevant ministries, having drafted digestible "manifesto" materials.
Advocacy is an art requiring techniques and resilience, which many academics do not acquire and even disdain. However, in Bangladesh, many academics are very active in the realms of public discourse.
Two final points about means and ends: We should not forget the power of journalism and media speaking "truth to power," even under hostile conditions. And, finally, my substantive purpose which links the above together? Always to extract the poor from exploitative situations. Support services have a role in that, but also powers of action and protest.
This is the second instalment of a series of conversations on development issues between the author and The Daily Star.
Dr Geof Wood is a development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is also emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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