Understanding the political and bureaucratic authorizing environment
The process of convening meetings and workshops was not difficult, and if we were just focused on this the exercise would have been easy. However, the goal of shifting behavior and decisions made this much more complex. Achieving this goal meant that the work needed to influence decision-makers, and the decision-making process, and we struggled with understanding who these agents were and how they could be influenced. We worked with political economy analyses and other externally written materials to try and navigate this terrain, but found this ‘homework’ was only of limited assistance. This was most apparent when, even after the message of reform gaps was well received by both the official authorizers and technocrats, we faced the reality that these agents would not change their PFM reform approach (and opted rather to continue with their previous Vision). This suggested we did not know enough about the decision-making process, incentives of agents in such process, or how to influence the incentives of agents.
In retrospect, having seen what emerged after the workshops (and with many other PDIA experiments that we have undertaken), we have learned that our initial work overemphasized the importance of ‘us’ (the external agents) in this work—and thus overemphasized the importance of ‘us’ navigating the political and bureaucratic authorizing environment. What matters more is that the PDIA intervention sparks new ideas and engagements by local agents, which empower and inspire and enable these agents to manage their political and bureaucratic authorizing environment differently.
Dealing with ‘the messiness’ of problem driven conversations
Broad-based problem-driven conversations are not common in the development community, especially when they are focused on ‘the problems’ of past reforms and policies (and gaps and weaknesses of such). These conversations are also quite difficult, given that they bring to the fore realities that many agents would rather keep quiet or leave unspoken: realities about missed opportunities, perhaps, or failures in design or implementation, or weak leadership, and more. Dominant agents can become defensive in these conversations, or undermine new voices, or try to impede the sensemaking process that a problem-driven process requires. Less dominant agents can hold back in offering views or contribute to this sense-making process.
Given such realities, we struggled to facilitate a process that afforded a balanced narrative on the past reforms, that encouraged those who had been involved (‘you have done a lot that is working, but there are gaps’) but also promoted an urgency to shift approach (‘there are significant gaps that won’t be changed through a strategy of ‘more of the same’’). We also struggled to facilitate a conversation of many voices, offering different perspectives that generally lacked objective evidence. The result of this, at many junctures, was a ‘messy’ discourse that emphasized the ambiguity of reality and the tensions of change and power dynamics one finds in most governments. This was a struggle to manage, especially in a context where control and stability and ‘endorsement of the status quo’ was quite important. At times, donors invited to the workshops expressed real concern about the messiness of these conversations and even suggested that we as facilitators were ‘losing control’ and ‘wasting people’s time’.
Over time, we at the Building State Capability program have learned that there is no way to ‘miss the messiness’ in a problem-driven process, and that there is more room for such messiness than many in the development community would imagine. Ambiguity and disagreement can be powerful instigators of questioning and change, and even empower local agents to pursue different ideas and relationships in the pursuit of change. The key, we have found, is to manage the ‘heat’ of the conversation and to ensure inclusivity (where no one is identified as a villain and no one is identified as a saint, but everyone is treated as a resource and potential change agent).
Reflecting on our role, as external agents
We at the Building State Capability (BSC) program are not insiders in the Mozambican PFM reform process. We are located far away and do not have the same interests, incentives or personal and political investments as local insiders. However, we find ourselves working in quite deep and personal ways with insiders, trying to promote a reflection on the problems they face and to mobilize new ways of engaging with those problems in the future. We constantly struggle with our role, as external agents engaging so closely with internal agents. In this Mozambican engagement, we were working closely with a large international donor (the World Bank) that also has a complex role as an external player—informing and funding government reforms and working alongside other international bilateral and multilateral agents—but with a strong local presence. In this context, Matt Andrews struggled to work out if our appropriate ‘seat’ was on the government side of the negotiation table, acting as an external facilitator (or therapist) helping insiders ‘see’ their problems, or across the table from the government, as an external expert advising or educating the government insiders about their problems (from the global or even donor perspective).
The intervention actually saw us playing both roles (in the two stages), with different kinds of strengths and weaknesses. The first stage of work (the small, authorizers presentation) saw us acting as more of an ‘advising or educating’ outsider (an international academic entity working with a global donor, and using internationally endorsed data to show ‘the problem’ in the PFM reforms). The work we did in playing this role was important in gaining some authorization to engage broadly, but in hindsight it did not convince local agents to change. The second stage of work (the broader workshop) saw us playing more of an external facilitator role, drawing opinionbased evidence from insiders about their problems, and fostering a conversation amongst these outsiders about their own evidence. The work conducted under this approach was more messy at the time but led—ultimately—to more influence amongst local agents (with the emergent internal audit activities and PFM project coming from such engagement). In reflecting on this experience, and other PDIA work, we have found that external agents are always moving between roles, and should most importantly be aware of these roles and not presume how they are engaging or engage passively, which usually manifests in taking an ‘expert’ or ‘advisor’ role. We have also found that the PDIA work is most effective when we are playing the role of facilitator, and not expert, and ‘give the work back’ to the insiders.