Why do we keep missing the forest for the trees?

For the past 15 years, I’ve worked to pursue reforms in how the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partners collaborate to achieve development progress. The reform with the greatest traction and uptake was the use of a political economy lens to shape programming — seeing change as a matter of winners and losers, and understanding their incentives, not technical knowledge transfer. Although USAID has been dismantled, the purpose and values that drove so many of us to dedicate our careers to international development endures. In such efforts, it will be vital that change agents think and work politically (TWP).

TWP is Gaining Ground — But Also Losing Focus

Political economy approaches have come a long way — from being a niche toolkit to influencing how development is talked about across agencies and sectors. It’s well-aligned with adaptive management, systems thinking, and localisation agendas.

But too often, TWP is siloed — treated as one more box to tick, or one more specialist to hire, rather than a fundamental rethinking of how change happens. It’s also in tension with other trends — like rigid “evidence-based” programming that rests on apolitical theories of change and linear logic.

Tactical vs Strategic Thinking: A Crucial Distinction

The crux question is whether those who fund social change initiatives will fully accept the realities of large complex systems. We need more attention to strategic TWP — that is, using political economy thinking to reframe what our goals should be in the first place, rather than tactically to make individual decisions towards pre-set results (see box 1 below). TWP can help in properly defining effective assistance as that which helps contribute to systemic change that will sustain over time. We have to reckon with the reality that outside contributions are small.

Rather than define down the pond until we can ensure we make change in a puddle, we need to figure out how to support meaningful contributions to sea-changes. Instead of counting how many people a project has touched, we need to discuss how much we’ve improved the odds of more significant changes. This shift to swim in the ocean of messy reality rather than prove we made change in a carefully-controlled pond would have huge implications for our efforts to know what is valuable in our work.

At USAID, I have long felt that we have struggled to properly articulate ‘what the work is’. I question whether we’ve known what our most important outcomes have been even as we have run ourselves ragged driving projects forward. Orienting international cooperation toward strategic value will open space for TWP. Strategic work should aim to add heft and dynamism to reform agendas or movements supporting meaningful outcomes, without seeking to dictate or control how those groups pursue their paths.

Metrics Are a Barrier — And an Opportunity

The Achilles heel of funding these types of strategic efforts have always been accountability. USAID preferred simple, countable metrics, even where those metrics biased programmes toward short-termism. The most important shifts — institutional norms, new coalitions, strengthened feedback loops — rarely showed up in those metrics. Political economy insights should inform support for platforms for connection, learning and adaptation that help resituate agendas and reforms, which lots of evidence suggests is valuable for how institutions co-evolve and adapt.

In the future, I hope partnerships with joint discovery and learning will drive more authentic accountability. Stakeholders in donor countries should be investing time and energy because it benefits their own efforts to address complex challenges, from public order to electricity grids to health surveillance.

By putting these avenues together, centering work around partnership with stakeholders, and embracing complex theories of how change happens, donors can contribute meaningfully to the odds of significant change – allowing TWP to be part of a strategic shift towards local realities and mutual accountability.

This post was originally published on the LSE Activism, Influence and Change Programme blog here.