1 Introduction
Since the late 1990s, the dominant paradigm in international aid—of planned, external interventions to achieve pre-determined results—has been critiqued as inadequate for addressing the complex problems in different aid contexts. At the crux of the dissatisfaction with the managerial and technocratic orthodoxy of aid, is its inability to deal with the problem of context; its dislocation from the unending diversity and complexity of ‘real’ life, of everyday practice. Such a critique is not exclusive to aid; it has been attributed to social policy more generally, and education specifically. Strategic plans, evidence-based policies, best practice governance structures, and well-designed interventions are persistently seen to fail in the face of context, with such failure typically blamed on people acting ‘not as planned’ within context. This chapter contends that the so-called failure of aid relates to an inadequate theorizing of context, which relates to the substantialist underpinnings of aid. In contrast, a relational perspective, as promoted by complexity and systems theory, and integral to the epistemologies of many recipients of aid including those of indigenous Pacific peoples, will be explored as offering an alternative account of social continuity and change. Also explored are the implications of a relational approach to aid, using the case study examples, concluding with an argument for harnessing the value of both relationalist and substantialist perspectives for aid.
This chapter comes from the experience of having worked as a manager of education aid for some years, during which I have continually grappled with the practical and ethical challenges that arise when attempting to enact principles of complexity and relationality within the workings of aid agencies. The chapter was stimulated by my ongoing dialogue with colleagues about the limitations of the current ways of thinking and doing that dominate aid management, and is an attempt to provide a theoretical framework for understanding why this is, despite the common knowledge that such ways are unhelpful at best. The paper is also in response to a dissatisfaction with the argument, and indeed common practice, that working in relational ways needs to remain ‘hidden’, with aid workers forced to subvert the system in order to work in relational ways (Eyben, 2010). Instead the paper’s conclusion takes a relational perspective, arguing for valuing the dialectic of substantialist and relational perspectives on aid.
2 The Problem of Context in Education Aid
The concept of context occupies a central place in both the comparative education and international aid fields. As Cowen (2006) argues, comparative education:
[…] always deals with the intellectual problems produced by the concept of context (the local, social embeddedness of educational phenomena) and transfer (the movement of educational ideas, policies and practices from one place to another, normally across a national boundary); and their relation. (p. 561)
Countless research papers, program evaluations and individuals’ experiences demonstrate that deep understanding of and engagement with context is critical for the design and implementation of international development interventions, including those focused on education (Samoff, Leer, & Reddy, 2016). The ‘problem of context’ has received particular attention in recent years in relation to teaching and learning interventions, where empirical research has provided overwhelming evidence that context matters, and that teaching and learning are contextually contingent (Guthrie, 2011; Tabulawa, 2013). As Vavrus and Bartlett (2012) argue:
Ways of knowing about pedagogy—including those ways sanctioned through government-sponsored teacher education programs and nongovernmental professional development projects—are inextricably linked to, and constrained by, cultural, social, and material contexts. From this perspective, theories of knowledge and knowledge production occur within and are shaped by context; epistemology is local rather than omniscient. (p. 638)
Furthermore, research has identified a lack of attention to context as a key reason for limited impact and/or unsustainability of reforms and interventions aimed at improving learning and teaching in ‘developing’ country settings (Crossley, 2010). Context has been shown to matter at multiple levels: at the level of epistemology, of what defines effective teaching and valued learning in the classroom, as well as ‘what works’ in terms of interventions aimed at changing existing teaching and learning practices in schools (Vavrus & Bartlett, 2012). As a result, there has been a shift over recent decades in both the international aid and comparative education fields towards seeking out contextually appropriate ‘best fit’ rather than a universally generalized ‘best practice’ (Coxon & Munce, 2008; Crossley, 2010).
However, while there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of understanding context and designing aid interventions for context, this is typically based on a limited theorizing of what ‘context’ as a unit of analysis is (Cowen, 2006; Dilley, 1999). Looking through aid program designs, reviews or reports reveals that context is most often treated as a set of describable features of a bounded place/space, which, once described, are either to be responded to or to be placed in the risk matrix to be managed and mitigated. This conceptualization of context presumes that context is bounded; that it is possible for the aid manager or consultant to ‘know’ the context and to develop a unitary, coherent analysis of that context in a documented form, from which contextually appropriate actions and reactions can be deduced (Stephens, 2007).
Such a perspective emerges from the epistemological underpinnings of international aid, which persistently:
…emphasizes universal over contextual knowledge, a knowledge system that is deductive and oriented to general predictive models, and that constantly organizes attention away from the contingencies of practice and the plurality of perspectives. (Mosse, 2011, p. 87)
This knowledge system, which underpins not only international aid but is a fundamental element of the tradition of western liberal philosophy and science, has been usefully described as substantialist (Emirbayer, 1997). According to Eyben (2010), “A substantialist perspective sees the world primarily in terms of pre-formed entities in which relations among the entities are only of secondary importance” (p. 385). Substantialists see the world in terms of entities, to which specific characteristics are ascribed and predictions made about how those entities will behave, as well as how they will relate to other entities. The preoccupation in international aid discourse and practice with categorizing, classifying, and predicting—as manifested in log frames, stakeholder analyses, and endless labelling such as in the dichotomies of rich and poor, developed and developing, is the result of a substantialist perspective. From a substantialist viewpoint, the problem of context is solved by obtaining a sufficiently comprehensive knowledge of the social, political, and cultural institutions, and the actors within a context, and of the inter-relationships between them, from which predictions can be made as to how they will behave and be influenced. A substantialist account does not deny the importance of relationships and interdependencies between entities, and the way in which entities are influenced and shaped by such interactions. The key feature of substantialism is that it always begins with the entity; relationships are secondary.
3 A Relational Perspective on Aid
In contrast to this dominant substantialist perspective on context, is a relational perspective on the world in which things (people, communities, identities, institutions, structures) “are understood and observed as they relate to or are a function of other things” (Eyben, 2010, p. 387). The elemental unit of analysis becomes not the things themselves, but the relations between them, which are “seen as a dynamic, unfolding process” (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 287). Similar to substantialist perspectives, relationality has a long history in western liberal philosophy dating back to the Greeks and has been the pre-eminent mode of understanding the world in a number of other philosophical lineages, including those of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific region. Many Pacific scholars have written about the primacy of relationships and relating within Pacific epistemologies, in which there is greater concern for “meaning and relevance than with classification and definitions” (Thaman, 2003, p. 165), and the way in which relationships between people, cultures, and the natural environment provide the space through which meaning is continually created and recreated (Johansson-Fua, 2016). The absence of separation between knowledge and the knower, and the connections across time and space prominent in the indigenous epistemologies of many Pacific peoples exemplify relational ways of understanding the world (Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001).
Importantly, relationality is more than just giving attention to relationships. While the importance of relationships in aid is well accepted, typically this is from an instrumentalist perspective; having ‘good’ relationships between aid donors and recipients is useful for achieving development outcomes (Eyben, 2010). Relationality, however, means taking relations as the “point of departure” for enquiry into and accounts of the world (Dillon, 2000, p. 4). It is about focusing on relations as “pre-eminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding, ongoing processes rather than as static ties among inert substances” (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 289). Here, the ideas of complexity and systems theories1 are helpful in further articulating a relational perspective on the world. I use ‘complexity and systems theories’ here to describe a collection of principles, ideas and frameworks that are highly inter-disciplinary and that since the mid-20th century have become a recognizable alternative, or at least complementary, paradigm to the dominant reductionist model of a predictable world in which change occurs through linear causality (Ramalingam & Jones, 2008). These approaches, which have gained much attention within aid and education over the last 10–15 years, view the world in terms of complex, unbounded systems in which the components are interconnected and defined by their interactions with each other, rather than by properties of the components themselves (Kuhn, 2007, p. 182). The patterns of change and continuity in society are therefore a result of these interactions, and operate in non-linear, adaptive, and emergent ways (Ramalingam & Jones, 2008). In particular, the primacy of relations and principle of emergence means there is “no guiding central hand in the evolution of the system” (Snyder, 2013, p. 11). A relational perspective on the world therefore also demands a focus on understanding the world by what is, rather than on predefined expectations of what ought to be based on assumptions of how entities will behave and for what purpose.
Therefore, complexity and relationality approaches as conceptualized above, and their attendant focus on practice and process, represent a fundamental challenge to the substantialist perspective dominant in aid. Again drawing on Eyben (2008), if we are to take a relational approach to aid:
It would mean us making sense of ‘aid’ not just as a thing in itself—money and technical cooperation—but also as patterns of social relations that both shape and are shaped through the giving and receiving of money and people. From this perspective, it is these ‘social connections and relations’ to quote Karl Marx that are what constitutes the international aid system—connections and relations that tend to get neglected through a substantialist focus on the resources and the architecture. (p. 9)
Similarly, as Sanga has argued, the dominant “bricks and mortar” mentality of aid focused on modalities and structures, can be contrasted with a relational perspective of aid as fundamentally a relational process of “people giving to and receiving from each other” in which Sanga (2016) (rhetorically) asks “might it be that we (aid givers) are changed by our encounters with aid recipients? Might it be that the flow of transformation is not one-way?” (p. 12).
Accepting the “radical relationality” (Dillon, 2000, p. 4) that underpins complexity theory therefore means not just seeing relationships as useful instruments for achieving change or adopting ‘adaptive management’ techniques to better manage a complex and diverse, yet always bounded and statistically definable, context. A relational lens requires a re-conceptualization of context. A relational perspective reframes context as much more than a static entity which aid agencies can describe and reduce to a set key features from which particular actions or reactions are inferred. Rather, to quote Dilley (1999), context is “a process or set of relations, and not a thing in itself” (p. 5). It demands less effort on setting boundaries and categorizing contexts in order to then predict, plan, and manage these entities. It demands more effort into engaging deliberately and self-reflectively, within ever-dynamic webs of relations. Ultimately, a relational perspective encourages a recognition that it is not the forms of aid that matter—the projects, the budget support, the policy dialogue—but the relational space created within and through relationships of aid (Sanga, 2016). From this perspective, it is the relational processes that are involved in the ‘business’ of aid that lead to change, not the entity of aid itself.
Critically, a relational perspective on context demands that aid agencies and those who design, manage, and implement aid projects recognize themselves to be part of the context, not separate from it. This challenges the historically prevalent positioning of the ‘recipients’ of aid as reliant on external consultants and advisers to bring necessary knowledge and expertise for development. From a relational perspective, the ‘experts’ are also learning and changing through the relational processes of aid. To bring this back to the themes informing this book, a key implication of what relationality means for aid is the importance of self-reflection, of learning and of humility (Baaz, 2005; Sanga, 2016).
4 The Tension of Relationality in Education Aid
I have outlined what a relational perspective is and what it might mean for aid. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore the potential for relationality to gain greater sanction within education aid, and the challenges involved, using the case studies as illustrations. As noted at the start, many aid workers and programs embrace relational perspectives. However, such practices have historically not been supported, or even sanctioned by, the management systems and dominant discourses of aid (Eyben, 2010). But are we beginning to see a change in official aid discourse, and if so, what practical challenges and possibilities does this bring?
In recent years, there has been a visible shift in education aid discourse, from grand plans and static log-frames to iterative, adaptive management with regular feedback loops and local-level problem solving, designed to respond to the emergent properties of context and political dynamics. As one example, the Australian government, the largest aid donor in education in the Pacific region, in its strategy for investment in education states that “education systems are complex and interdependent” (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade [DFAT], 2015, p. 9), and recognizes system-based approaches and “fit for purpose” investments that are “grounded in context, politically responsive, flexible” as key principles for effective education aid (Mc Nichol, 2017). Notions of co-design, collective impact models, coalition building, and ‘locally-led problem solving’ are increasingly framed as the new and better version of participatory development, effective relationships and ownership.
The case study interventions drawn on for this book are examples of this shift, using adaptive approaches, co-design processes, principles of relationality and context, and a focus on the integrity of implementation rather than fidelity to a pre-determined design. The New Zealand government’s willingness to invest in a design-based research intervention that required an iterative approach and deliberate resistance to specify solutions at the outset (as elaborated in Chapter 4), suggests an increased acceptance of principles of complexity and relationality in education aid. This was further affirmed by the same donor’s decision to support follow-up larger-scale interventions in Solomon Islands and Tonga which took these principles further. The interventions focused on outcomes that are valued and meaningful within the context and identified through relational processes of researcher-practitioner dialogue.
While the interventions were explicitly aimed at improving children’s literacy learning, equally important were the relational processes for determining pathways to change. Critical within these was affirmation of people acting in relation to others and applying their agency to direct activity and change, rather than simply to participate in a pre-planned program. Described by Veikune as the “weaving” of academic and practical knowledge (as elaborated in Chapter 7), the co-design process based on locally collected and meaningful data ensured interventions were “woven with rather than for school communities” and recognized that “teachers’ knowledge about what sits behind the data is essential to weave into the analysis alongside ‘outsider’ researchers’ interpretations” (Veikune & Spratt, 2016, p. 77). A belief in the emergence and power of peoples’ adaptive capacity in context underpinned the intervention. In practical terms, this meant investing in relationships and, critically, in processes. Processes which allowed for dialogue, collective reflection, and sense-making as means to determine next steps within the (imagined) bounds of the program. But importantly also to provide space for those involved to (re)create their ways of relating to and in the world, all be it in ways that may or may not ‘count’ towards the reported objectives of the program. This involved a fluidity and blurring of boundaries such as insider-outsider (Chapter 3), knowledge and knowing (Chapter 9), that required continual negotiation by those involved. Such an approach required adaptive management and a high degree of trust by the donor; a willingness to invest in relationships and processes of shared learning, rather than in pre-defined inputs and outputs.
However, although there is increasing recognition within education aid discourse of the need for complexity aware and relational practices, there continues to be a tension with the continued power of substantialism in aid management. There is a risk that the principles offered by complexity and systems theories are being adopted as yet another form of orthodoxy of ‘what works’—another set of tools that can be applied in standardized ways to achieve the results they have set out to achieve. Some of the leading proponents of complexity theory in international aid foreshadowed this risk when highlighting their conundrum in developing a ‘toolkit’ for how aid agencies can adopt complexity approaches, recognizing that doing so is antithetical to “the whole point of complex systems that you can’t have standard approaches” (Green, 2014). Increasingly, aid managers and implementers are encouraged to plan for adaptation and emergent change, build coalitions, and include performance indicators for being responsive to context. As such, the principles of complexity are absorbed into the prevailing managerial framework of aid, while leaving behind their ‘radical relationality’. Still assumed is the dichotomy between those who design and deliver aid, and those that are to be changed by aid, and the ability of the former to plan and manage the ‘development’ of the latter. Aid workers are thus still seen as external to the context they are working within. Relationships are again instrumentalized as tools for effecting change, rather than seen as expressions of the relationality which gives meaning to, and is a primary force for shaping, our world.
The interventions explored in this book also serve to illustrate the challenges in trying to integrate relational approaches within the framing of development afforded to an aid-funded project. As was explored in Chapter 9, while those involved in the interventions (including aid agency staff responsible) were attempting to promote relational ways of engaging, this ran in continual tension with a need to conform to substantialist expectations. From a personal perspective as program manager, the experience required continual negotiation between a desire to trust in process and the value of adaptive learning, while also managing a sense of accountability for ensuring results were achieved and, in order to justify the expenditure of donor funds, to attribute such results to the success of ‘the program’. Thus, program documentation and reporting adhered to articulations of linear causality, suggested predictive ability, and managerial capability to manage risks of politics, relationships and ‘contextual’ factors to the achievement of development outcomes. As such, there was a disconnect between the written reports and the practice on the ground. This also fed into the often felt disconnect between aid agency staff based in-country who may be more observant to, and more supportive of, relational practices, and those in the head offices who are reliant on written reports and measurable indicators to assess success. This disconnect creates tensions in practice, but more importantly (as discussed further below), distorts understandings of ‘what works’ and limits learning.
Thus, even with some adoption of complexity ideas into education aid discourse, there is a continued drive for standardization of aid management, and for aid agencies to remain “the drivers of aid form” (Sanga, 2016, p. 10), as well as the arbiters of context. This runs in constant tension with the relational ways of seeing and engaging in the world of many “front-line” workers within aid bureaucracies and those they work with (Eyben, 2010, p. 383). In my own experience, the felt impact of this tension is actually amplified when relational ways of working are recognized as valued but not supported in practice.
5 Navigating the Tension
Eyben concludes that to maintain effectiveness of aid requires relational ways of working to remain ‘hidden’, arguing that, “Practitioners need just sufficient encouragement from top management—as well as from relational advocates like myself—to continue subverting the system for the system’s benefit” (Eyben, 2010, p. 394). However, such an approach places the onus, and risk of discipline, on individuals and those they are working with, particularly in the context of regular rotation of agency staff, short timeframes for interventions, and an almost unavoidable disconnect between aid staff in the field and their senior management residing in head offices. As explored in Chapter 9, ‘flying under the radar’ can enable relational approaches; however, this means that such ways of working are never ‘seen’ or learned from at an organizational level, and often are lost with the next change in aid staff. As Tamas (2007) argues, “Front-line workers’ discretional relationalism prevents the institution of aid from becoming more accountable—and by implication more effective” (cited in Eyben, 2010, p. 392).
It can also be argued, however, that surrendering completely to uncertainty and unending contextual contingency would undermine the useful functions that substantialist practices of standardization and ordering play in enabling public sector agencies to provide for citizens’ needs (Ramalingam & Jones, 2008; Stears, 2012). Such practices have value and are arguably necessary for the continued functioning of aid as an instrument of public policy (Eyben, 2010). Promoting a relational approach does not mean a complete abandonment of substantialist perspectives. As Fein (2015) has argued, “Rather than calling for an ontological either or choice between them…[we could]…come to see both views as complementary approaches, both contributing to our knowledge and understanding of complex phenomena and their dynamic interrelations” (p. 106).
It is this position that I would like to suggest as a constructive way forward; a middle ground where relationality at an epistemological level is explicitly valued. Moreover, that active efforts are made to consider the implications of relationality not just in instrumental terms but in terms of the fundamental ethics and values underpinning engagement in aid across contexts. Critically, this requires of those working in aid self-reflection, humility, and a willingness to be positioned as learners, learning from context. This means accepting the challenge as articulated by Sanga’s (2016) pertinent questions: “In our aid giving, are we willing to be truly changed by our encounters? Or are we merely recruiting more people to our ways of seeing the world?” (p. 13).
Note
While complexity theory and systems theory are combined for the purposes of this chapter, it is important to note that they are distinct (see Ramalingman & Jones, 2008, p. 5 for a useful summary of the distinctions). Further, the use of complexity theory here, rather than the also commonly used complexity science, is a deliberate decision given this chapter’s interest in the broader set of principles related to complexity that can be found in postmodernism and post structuralism, as opposed to the more narrow application of complexity science used within the physical sciences and mathematics.
References
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). (2015). Strategy for Australia’s aid investments in education 2015–2020. Retrieved from https://dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/Documents/strategy-for-australias-aid-investments-in-education-2015-2020.pdf
Green, D. (2014, May 7). Can complex systems thinking provide useful tools for aid workers? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/can-complex-systems-thinking-provide-useful-tools-for-aid-workers-draft-paper-on-some-dfid-pilot-experiments-for-your-comments/
Mc Nichol, K. (2017). Australia’s aid investments in education. Paper presented at the Education for Development: Towards 2030, Canberra, Australia. Retrieved from https://dfat.gov.au/aid/topics/investment-priorities/education health/education/Documents/australias-aid-investments-education.pdf
Stears, M. (2012). The case for a state that supports relationships, not a relational state. In G. Cooke & R. Muir (Eds.), The relational state. How recognising the importance of human relationships could revolutionise the role of the state (pp. 35–44). London: Institute of Public Policy Research.
Snyder, S. (2013). The simple, the complicated and the complex: Education reform through the lens of complexity theory (OECD Education Working Papers, No. 96). Retrieved from https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/the-simple-the-complicated-and-the-complex-educational-reform-through-the-lens-of-complexity-theory_5k3txnpt1lnr-en