NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Partner Organizations and Unhelpful Help
By David Ellerman, University of California at Riverside (formerly World Bank)
Email: david@ellerman.orgKeywords
Partnership, World Bank, Unhelpful help
Summary
This article examines various forms of unhelpful help that can emerge from so-called ?partnerships?. One form of unhelpful help with partner organizations is to treat them as repeater stations for the ?correct messages? being sent from the center rather than as potentially autonomous learning organizations. Another form of unhelpful help arises when a development agency wants to create a partner organization rather than partner with an existing organization with indigenous roots.
The setting is a development assistance agency such as the World Bank Institute (formerly EDI) working to develop the capacity of various partner organizations in developing countries. Often the most salient lessons are negative ones where the development assistance is actually a form of unhelpful help [1], i.e., assistance that does not increase and may even impair people?s ability to help themselves.
As an educational institution, the World Bank Institute (WBI) should, in theory, help its counterpart or partner organizations to become learning organizations with the capacity to learn on their own. While that may be the espoused theory, the actual theory-in-practice was largely to see partner organizations as repeater stations in the transmission of the ?correct messages? from the center (e.g., the World Bank) to the developing or transition countries. Here is the language from the WBI describing to the Bank?s Board this process of going from the initial training courses given by WBI to their trainers in the partner institutions who will replicate the messages in wholesale training courses.
These relationships evolve as follows. The partner institutions send some of their faculty to attend the course that they propose to replicate. Then WBI trainers and partner staff work together in the design, joint delivery, and adaptation of the course. Initially, the partner institution receives strong support, followed by a gradual reduction over three years, by which time it is expected to take up full responsibility for program delivery. From this point on, WBI limits its role to supervision, monitoring quality, network facilitation, and updating training materials.
They learn to ?replicate?; they don't learn to learn. To people from post-socialist countries, this is a COMINTERN transmission-belt style of operating but with the Bank?s partner institutions presumably parroting the Right Messages. Thus one form of unhelpful help with partner organizations is to treat them as repeater stations or missionary outposts for the Correct Messages being sent from the center rather than as potentially autonomous learning organizations.
Another form of unhelpful help arises when a development agency wants to create a partner organization (to show it made a difference) rather than partner with an existing organization with indigenous roots. This can even take the form of creating a ?ghost? or ?virtual? partner organization. One method was to relabel every individual who has attended a course as a ?member? and every group that provided a classroom and coffee as a ?partner organization? in the (virtual) ?Agency Training Network? (insert name of the appropriate ?Agency?). There is no actual funded and staffed partner organization; it is only a manner of speaking (like referring to all the people who ever attended a course on Underwater Basket-Weaving as the ?Network of Underwater Basket-Weavers?). Every training course held by the agency can then be described as a ?meeting? of the ?Agency Training Network?.
Eventually some of the alumni-trainees can be hired as consultants to repeat the standard courses without a task manager from headquarters being present (a ?remote control course? in agency argot!). Thus ?local knowledge capacity? is created and leveraged by the ?Agency Training Network? to broadcast the main messages on a wider scale in the client country (all paid for by the agency in competition with local training institutes trying to run their own courses on an local basis without foreign subsidies).
These games can also have quite an adverse effect on actual capacity building. Here is an example. In Russia during the 1990s, the Morozov Project had a national center in Moscow and had at its peak 65 staffed and self-supporting training centers franchised throughout Russia. The Project had some initial assistance from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and USAID but it was largely self-funding from user fees and local Russian funds. The Morozov Project was a natural partner for WBI (and the Bank as a whole) for training programs that would have impact all over Russia. Yet in the mid-1990s, when an attempt was made to hook up WBI (then EDI) with the Morozov Project, it was strongly (and successfully) resisted by task managers who wanted to continue ?delivering? their own courses in Russia as before. The ?argument? was that EDI had already built a ?Training Network? in Russia; so there was no need to support the ?rival? of the Morozov network that was not built by EDI (being the result of largely Russian efforts). The EDI Training Network was just a way of speaking about all the people who attended and organizations that hosted the EDI courses; it was not an actual partner organization at all.
A related form of unhelpful help arises when a development agency creates and incubates an organization that is supposed to be eventually ?kicked out of the nest? to become a genuine local organization. The foreign agency is to provide first stage funding for a new institute, think tank, or organization in the country where the domestic government may make a ?matching contribution? of unused building space. The salaries in the organization are comparable to the international standard in order to attract the best and brightest of the local talent and thus to embellish the agency?s success story in the country. The public relations story is that here is a tangible result of the agency?s work in the country; it would not have otherwise happened. However, the agency?s clear sponsorship and ?ownership? over the organization limits its influence in the domestic debates (imagine an EU, Russian, or Chinese-funded think tank in Washington churning out position papers on American political issues). Since the helper-agency was using its direct power and resources to ?make things happen?, the resulting local organization has little domestic roots and less sustainability if weaned off the international funds.
The idea, of course, is that the external initiative of the ?missionary outpost? will eventually be ?internalized? in the country, will be funded through internal sources, and thus will be successful ?local capacity building.? But years later, these organizations are still annually knocking at the door of the World Bank, or US, European, or Japanese foundations or agencies to fund their activities. Domestic funding would probably not provide anywhere near the expected ?international? level of salaries and might have unacceptable strings attached. Any local private wealth would probably rather fund its own initiative. Rather than face up to taking a fundamentally wrong approach, the preferred approach of the international agencies is to redefine ?sustainability? as meaning not moving to domestic funding but moving to co-funding by some other sources in the international sector. Thus the international agencies can take in each other?s laundry by picking up some second or third stage co-funding on each other?s projects and thereby show that their projects were ?sustainable?.
Footnote
[1] See: Ellerman, David 2005. Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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