Posts tagged ‘Jeffrey Puryear’

Jun 4

IDRC has been keeping ideas alive -literally

IDRC has made a rather interesting claim: Canadian support to researchers in the 1970s and 1980s Chile kept ideas alive, quite literally.

Few scholars were more under threat than social scientists, whose probing work often challenged the regimes themselves. About 3,000 social scientists left Chile after the 1973 coup. In 1980, more than 500 professors were fired from Chilean universities in a single semester.

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IDRC responded by approving a special program of grants to research centres and individual researchers in Chile. Support also went to researchers in Argentina and Uruguay, which were in similar turmoil. The goal: preserve the spirit and skills of independent inquiry against determined and entrenched military dictatorships.

Of course IDRC was not alone in this. Other funders played an important role too. And most important of all, the academics that IDRC and others supported were there to be supported. Since the 1950s, the Chilean government had invested quite heavily in its social sciences, founding and funding entirely new careers and setting up several new academic departments and research centres across its universities.

Chile, by the time Pinochet came to power, had the best academia in Latin America.

An excellent account of all this is provided by Jeffrey Puryear in his must read book: Thinking Politics: intellectuals and democracy in Chile. In his book he argues that the most important contribution that think tanks made to Chilean politics was not intellectual but psychological. Through their meetings and events they helped to develop the spaces and values necessary for democracy. This, more than any specify policy change (impact in donor-speak), is think tanks’ added value to Chilean society.

Mar 23

A ‘punchy’ think tank debate

Some time ago I reported on the Battle of Ideas organised in London where a number of think tanks went at each other on key policy issues. The programme for this year is now out. Another good idea comes form the British think tank Policy Exchange: The Policy Fight Club.

This might seem like a gimmick but it is actually a particularly interesting approach to addressing the public education role of think tanks. Think tank events are often organised as key note speaker-led panels: one main speaker, some commentators, then the audience gets to ask questions. But real policy debate is nothing like that. Policy debate is messy and chaotic -it is often confrontational. And when it matters most it is even more polarised.

So think tanks have a duty (I think, you might disagree) not just to present information but to present it in a manner that contributes towards improving the quality of the debate -and the policy process.

As Jeffrey Puryear argued, the most interesting and valuable contributions of think tanks may not be intellectual but psychological: the hundreds of events and seminars that Chilean think tanks organised throughout the 1980s helped to restore the mutual trust and understanding missing from Chilean politics and that had led to the rupture of democratic order.

Learning how to develop and use arguments, how to adapt them, communicate to different audiences, incorporate new ideas, defend one’s own beliefs, etc. are not matters that should be quickly dismissed. How we communicate is as (if not more) important than what we say.

Mar 18

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Evo, think tanks and policy in Bolivia

Something for the weekend: This paper on the role of think tanks in Bolivian politics by Rafael Loayza Bueno and Ajoy Datta, has just been published by ODI. It was a particularly satisfying moment when Rafael, after working on it during a Hansard Fellowship internship at RAPID, told me that when I first suggested that he should write about think tanks and policies in Bolivia he thought nothing would come out of it; he had proven himself wrong.

Why is this important? Well, because it is a small step in making this a ‘researchable issue’ (as Norma Correa said). Now Rafael is back in Bolivia thinking of think tanks.

The paper is an interesting account of the role of research in Bolivian policymaking -something many people would doubt given the strong ideological messages we hear about how policymaking is done there.

On the surface, the role of knowledge and evidence in Bolivia’s political landscape appears to be minimal. However, over the years, international donors have invested plenty of economic resources into developing think tanks that produce both knowledge and evidence. This paper seeks to examine the utilisation and impact of this knowledge in Bolivia’s recent political history, as well as any links with political institutions. It explores how Evo Morales came to power through the support of indigenous social movements and their relationship with think tanks.

But think tanks are also ideological (and so are donors, as Rafael has found out) and so their contribution to policymaking cannot be dismissed on these grounds. On donors:

International actors played a key role in supporting the production of relevant knowledge. Neoliberal think tanks received funding from the World Bank, the IMF, IADB, CAF while think tanks in support of indigenous social movements received funding from several European donors. They also received support from the Anti-globalisation movement and the World Social Forum (WSF). And just as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz provided policy inputs during the neoliberal era, celebrity academics such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt came in support of Evo Morales’ political project. Think tanks often provided cadres of policy-makers in both the neoliberal era and once Morales assumed presidency.

This is very important because the involvement of these very same actors can explain the rise of experts and think tanks in much of Latin America. Roderic Camp wrote that the political elite in Mexico came from fewer than two dozen, especially Ivy League, universities. And Jeffrey Puryear’s account of the rise of think tanks in Chile also draws a straight line towards a small number of institutions in the United States and Europe (although this is a much more diverse landscape than the one presented by Camp). What is significant here is that when donors say that they do not do politics they are either lying or refuse to see the obvious truth: research is political.

We should be paying more attention to political foundations and the work they have done to develop political systems -including research capacity.

Andrew Rich, Donald Abelson and Kent Weaver have written about the role of ideology in gatekeeping key policy spaces such as Congressional and Presidential Commissions in the United States. What gets you in, then, is your affiliation; what you do with it is another matter.

Rafael traces the development of Bolivian politics and pay particular attention to the shift from class-based politics to identity-politics. Think tanks are not excluded from this and their roles have changed accordingly.

He concludes that:

Think tanks in Bolivia have thus had influence on politics and policy-making since 1985, but only due to their connections with political parties, social movements and the executive. Therefore thinks tanks, though often subordinate to political interests, can be classified as principal actors in the Bolivian political process.

The paper is written in English and in an ODI Working Paper style and so, I am sure Rafael won’t mind me saying this, quite a lot of the personal learning process is lost in translation. We are currently working on a new version in Spanish for a book on the political economy of research uptake in Latin America funded by the Evidence based Policy in Development Network. Read this, but if you can read Spanish, look out for it when it comes out later in the year.

Feb 23

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Evaluation reading list, contacts and resources

A list of essential evaluation literature, and some contacts courtesy of Ben Ramalingam, Harry Jones, and myself. The list focuses on evaluation but I’ve added some that include reflections on the evaluation of the contribution of research on policy (although, be warned, their approaches do attempt to measure impact and will disappoint anyone who thinks that robust and meaningful ‘evaluations’ of the impact of research on policy are possible):

Top 15 Evaluation-specific references

1. Basil Cracknell, Evaluating Development Aid: Issues, Problems and Solutions – still one of the best books on the topic of aid evaluation

2. Chris Roche, Impact Assessment for Development Agencies: Learning to Value Change – very clear and lucid explanation of impact assessments

3. Michael Quinn Patton, Utilisation-focused Evaluation (a free-to-download checklist) – perhaps the world’s best known evaluator on how to ensure evaluations get used – essential reading

4. OECD-DAC (2008) Principles of Evaluating Development Assistance A useful statement of principles by the DAC donors – worth knowing about

5. Cynthia Clapp-Wincek and Richard Blue (2001) “Evaluation of Recent USAID Evaluation Experience”. U.S. Agency for International Development – an interesting study of evaluation in USAID, still relevant despite being 10 years old; or Richard Blue, Cynthia Clapp-Wincek and Holly Benner (2009) Beyond Success Stories: Monitoring and Evaluation for Foreign Assistance Results. An ‘updated’ version developed independently. There is also a Policy_Brief.

6. Feinstein, Osvaldo and Picciotto, Robert (2001) Evaluation and Poverty Reduction Collection of articles / short papers on a very comprehensive range of topics

7. Savedoff, William; Ruth Levine and Nancy Birdsall (2006) “When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation“. Center for Global Development Evaluation Gap Working Group – the paper which kickstarted much of the recent interest in RCTs

8. Ravallion, M (2008) Evaluation in the Practice of Development World Bank Policy Research Paper 4547 – sensible thoughts

9. Jones et al (2009) Improving impact evaluation production and use ODI Paper – the title says it all

10. Proudlock et al (2009) Improving Humanitarian Impact Assessment ALNAP Paper synthesising lessons from 4 case studies of impact assessments

11. Pawson, R (2003) ‘Nothing as Practical as a Good Theory’ in Evaluation 9, pp. 471–490 – a clear account of the role of theory in evaluation

12. Jones, H (2009) The Gold Standard is Not a Silver Bullet for Evaluation – Harry’s opinion piece advocating multi-methods in impact assessments

13. Bob Williams ‘Systems concepts in Evaluation‘ -The first systems publication to focus exclusively on evaluation

14. Michael Quinn Patton (2010) Developmental evaluation: Applying complexity concepts to enhance innovation and use.

15. Sarah Earl, Fred Carden and Terry Smutylo, Outcome Mapping: building learning and reflection into development programs.

General references on research influencing policy (assessing the contribution of think tanks to policy)

1. Donald Abelson, A Capitol Idea – on the role of think-tanks in foreign policy processes

2. Jeffrey Puryear, Thinking Politics – on role of intellectuals in transition to democracy in Chile

3. Daniel Ricci The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks that reviews the rise of think tanks and, unintentionally offers a way to assess their contribution to democratic policy making in what he calls ‘The Great Conversation’.

Three people worth contacting

1. Michael Quinn Patton – the leading thinker & communicator on evaluation issues

2. Niels Dabelstein, former head of Danida evaluation, running the evaluation of the Paris Declaration

3. Gunilla Törnqvist – current head of SADEV – the Swedish Agency for Development Evaluation.

Five key links worth checking

1. Outcome Mapping Learning Community

2. A tip a day by and for evaluators

3. Monitoring and Evaluation News

4. ALNAP

5. Impact Evaluation, Development Effectiveness (3ie)