NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
International Humanitarian Assistance: ?Best Practice? and Eternal Dilemmas of Practical Action
By Raymond Apthorpe, Department of International Relations, Australian National University
KeywordsInternational humanitarian assistance, Best practice
Summary
?How to? manuals of ?best practice?(BP) iterate unproblematic ?tools? without the tears of either philosophy or politics, and are devoid too, while focusing on organizations and resources, of institutional and discourse analysis. Nevertheless, such BP manuals have their uses for trainers and trainees; but there are some caveats.
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The ?how to? manuals of ?best practice? (BP) that I have in mind iterate unproblematic ?tools? without the tears of either philosophy or politics, and are devoid too, while focusing on organizations and resources, of institutional and discourse analysis. Nevertheless, such BP manuals have their uses for trainers and trainees for example in international aid and other public management fields (aid field managers of various kinds tend to deny they ? and certain codes of conduct - are of value in their daily work). But some BP efforts too are much less useful for pedagogical purposes than others. Indeed similarly that choice morsel of fortune-cookie comment (to repeat it, how captured by our nuggets of wisdom we all are!) itself scarcely means much whether it is about the enjoined ?good habits? of responsible behaviour themselves or ?clear thinking? about them.
But there are some caveats. In the first place how seriously BP is worth taking could all depend on whether at least it would bring strategy in, as well as policy, programme and project, while leaving so much else out.
The world of international aid ? ?Aidland? - spawns many ?guidance? materials. Some have to do with humanitarian emergency relief. Others are about economic development, or governance, or peacebuilding (with typically all confused together in the worst of what is self-labeled ?do no harm? ? a handy cop-out if ever there were one for international aid agencies who ought rather to go to ?do some good?). That commissioned and published by the Development Aid Committee of the OECD on evaluation and validation tends to be strong on projects, weak on policies. On programmes of projects (ie. same theme or same sector collections or ?palettes? of projects) on the other hand, mostly there is only ?work in progress?; on the strategies of policies (ie. the priority-setting and leadership that ? along with programme and project - are required for the objectives of policy to have any chance of being attained) matters are mostly ?in deficit?.
In fact, you?ll find that on ?strategy evaluation? there is no entry at all in the DAC/OECD vade mecum on kinds or types of evaluation. And for once google-ing didn?t help much when I went there. Is there any readily available well developed BP on ?strategy evaluation? for aid studies anywhere that, first, responsibly compares and contrasts strategy with policy, programme and project evaluation, and then goes on to tell ?how to? do it? It seems not.
The reasons for such paucity, where evaluation is approached as management by another means, could be twofold. First, for international aid as other public provision management, critical and realistic programme and project evaluation tends to be more (politically and otherwise including philosophically and ethically) shall we say amenable than either policy or strategy when it comes actually to undertaking such assessment. Second, the same applies to the commissioning of policy and strategy inquiries as to actually carrying them out: management doesn?t out-source to a point where its hand that feeds the dog might be bitten off.
The crux for these two pages is then: where BP overlooks strategy ? or rather allows it to be covered over in an optic which focuses only on policy, programme and project or some combination of these ? it falls short of even mentioning, let alone pondering and probing, the eternal dilemmas of practical action (i.e. the conundrums such as recognizing where, also if you are lucky how, compromise is not the enemy of the best). Thus in what sense if any can the received BP about international humanitarian and other aid at least claim to be about actual practice at all so long as it doesn?t address the dilemmas we live and work with and through, and over and under, in our bearable heaviness of being?
Where there are such recurring, because they are eternal, dilemmas of practical action, along with contradictions, paradoxes and other ironies of that ilk, it is not BP tools and techniques, but practical philosophy, ethics and politics, that have more to offer. ?Tools language? is about ?mechanisms? and a physics/mechanics sort of instrumental causality. It privileges ?engineering? and the quantitative, and gets away with this by leaving the plane of institutions, discourse, dialogue and negotiation out in the cold, appearing to deem it negligible. Tools language can get you into and, if you are lucky out again from black boxes, but policy and strategy boxes ? where, that is, either is boxed at all ? are more likely to be purple like Pandora?s not black.
In the second place - but that?s it folks, my space is up, and no room for any scholarly apparatus either!
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