Anyway, I think it’s only fair to question the motives of NGOs, as long as we also accept that altruism also exists.

Wondering to myself if your emphatic statement holds true (in my experience):

“What gets measured gets done”

What a donor requires you to measure is a good proxy for what it wants to show/claim is accomplished through its ODA; I guess that’s true to some extent.

I think that M&E often tells you about an input, what the implementing agency has directly done, but as you yourself have pointed out ambiguous, irrelevant, and indirect indicators can render the exercise meaningless. Oftentimes, the indicators fail to support the objectives – which is another problem. For instance, let’s say the goal is the ubiquitous ’sustainable livelihoods’. If your indicator is number of people provided vocational training, this only tells you the people who received training. The quality of the training, the quality of participation, whether/how many of those people got a job, and whether their employment outlook has changed – all unanswered. So you know what has been done, but perhaps more importantly, what you also know is all the specific things that may not have been done!

I will look into that IDEO toolkit – I don’t know what it is, but aid and development could learn a lot more from the private sector about M&E, customer satisfaction, and shorter (and perhaps fatter) management structures where senior managers listen more to their target group.

JB

By the way does anyone have any experience with IDEOs toolkit for assessing customer needs and designing systems from the bottom up? I’ve been thinking of working with them on something.

I’m sorry but I think it would suit the author of a blog, which is virtually all about political economy to be somewhat ‘hung up’ on such a distinction.

From the same bloke who wrote White Man’s Burden (which I thought excellent by the way!), I find it interesting that he is more concerned about NGO accountability and incompetence. Easterly is right to question (and incriminate) the lack accountability and impact of NGOs. But I don’t think the NGO or ‘implementing partner’ of foreign assistance (e.g.UN/CAP projects/funding, World Bank, USAID, etc.) is really the right altitude at which to cause the change he has in mind.

By the way, I assume Easterly mainly has International NGOs in his cross-hairs, although the issues remain relevant for national-level NGOs.

As a field practitioner, I don’t want to dismiss the ‘Code of Conduct’ idea, but it’s the kind of thing that emanates from a conference/seminar/committee/report and proceeds to swiftly gather dust. Sorry.

The problem lies, more often than not, with the origin of the funding. I refer to the municipal institutions administering overseas development assistance. The problems are firstly, human resources, then lack of direction/clear objectives, and lastly good old fashioned apathy. Aid and development, when it’s done well, is hard yakka. It’s not four nights-a-week dinner parties, and meeting-upon-committee-upon-working-group of inertia. If it is the latter, then don’t expect your NGO implementing partners to be all that crash hot. I’ve met some remarkable people in the industry, and all of them are accustomed to hard work of the ‘rolling up your sleeves’ variety. They are very often highly cynical of the industry, which is unfortunate.

As for clear objectives – so many donor staffers have an almost flippant attitude to what they wish to achieve in that context. Too often projects are important for shallow political reasons (e.g. Senator so-and-so is hassling us), or this is aligned to the XYZ instrument/framework, or worse still, for very wooly humanitarian reasons fed by media attention.If ‘Claire’ the donor project manager does not know what her government and the host country want to change, then how can any of us reasonably expect the implementing NGO to know? Conversely enough, these NGOs play the game so well, they can be far clearer than the donor about what a project is supposed to do.

And lastly, if the donor doesn’t really give a sh-t about impact and accountability, then neither does the implementing NGO. That sound harsh, but it’s common sense.

Accountability is a multilateral and muncipal dilhemma. States and the UN need to get serious about who they employ, at what level they craft objectives and implement them (and not sacharine lip service, i.e. Bottom-Up planning processes, Mainstreaming, etc.), and certain key institutions and senior positions (and therefore leaders) need new blood or some other way of staunching the apathy that flattens so many otherwise good intentions. Intentions, I hasten to add, that the poor sods back home (regardless of where you are – at the beneficiary or benefactor end of the spectrum) are ultimately paying for in tax or inadequate results!

JB

Would make a more interesting target as far as manipulative self interest of its bureaucracy and dominant member states. Or is one too afraid to touch at the heart of the monster, given its long reach?

SS

I don’t get hung up on “political economy” vs. “public choice”. Historically, they are related schools of thought addresssing similar issues. I think the economics profession currently treats “political economy” as a catch-all term for the set of ISSUES, and the schools of thought are subsets of that general field.

“political parties, including those considered socialist, can not be democratic because they quickly transform themselves into bureaucratic oligarchies”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Michels

It was written in 1911 & he was a student of Max Weber.

You have clearly confused some of your readers with the reference to Public Choice, which is – rightly so – perceived as an extreme version of leave ti to the market argument. The public choice are so obsessed with preserving undistorted market incentives that they:

a) always argue against any government intervention beyond the minimal state;

b) when the state is beyond minimal (i.e. failed) they argue for private ordering (and against interventions of international organizations);

c) when they see no distortions to market incentives then the arrangement must be ‘optimal’ and we should not tinker with it (e.g. if markets produce extreme inequality of income it is OK, even it it threatens elementary political stability).

I found public choice analysis dull, because it always boiled down to either ‘do nothing’ or ‘do markets’ policy recommendations. Is there more into it?