I just finished reading Geoff Dabelko’s “The Periphery isn’t Peripheral” on Ensia. In this piece, Geoff diagnoses the problems that beset efforts to address linked environmental and development problems, and offers some thoughts on how to address them. I love his typology of tyrannies that beset efforts to build and implement good, integrative (i.e. cross-sectoral) programs. I agreed with his suggestions on how to make integrative work more acceptable/mainstream in development. And by the end, I was worried about how to make his suggestions reality within the donors and implementers that really need to take on this message.

Geoff’s four tyrannies (Tyranny of the Inbox; Tyranny of Immediate Results; Tyranny of the Single Sector; Tyranny of the Unidimensional Measurement of Success) that he sees crippling environment-and-development programming are dead on. Those of us working in climate change are especially sensitive to tyranny #2, the Tyranny of Immediate Results. How the hell are we supposed to demonstrate results on an adaptation program that is meant to address challenges that are not just happening now, but will intensify over a 30 year horizon? Does our inability to see the future mean that this programming is inherently useless or inefficient? No. But because it is impossible to measure future impact now, adaptation programs are easy to attack…

As a geographer, I love Geoff’s “Tyranny of the Single Sector” – geographers generally cannot help but start integrating things across sectors (that’s what our discipline does, really). In my experiences in the classroom and the donor world, integrative thinking eludes a lot more people than I ever thought possible. Our absurd system of performance measurement in public education is not helping – trust me. But even when you find an integrative thinker, they may not be doing much integrative work. Sometimes people simply can’t see outside their own training and expertise. Sometimes they are victims of tyranny #1 (Tyranny of the Inbox), where they are too busy dealing with immediate challenges within their sector to think across sectors – lord knows, that defined the last 6 months of my life at USAID.

And Geoff’s fourth tyranny speaks right to my post from the other day – the Tyranny of the Unidimensional Measurement of Success. Read Geoff, and then read my post, and you will see why he and I get along so well.

Now, Geoff does not stop with a diagnosis – he suggests that integrative thinking in development will require some changes to how we do our jobs, and provides some illustrations of integrative projects that have produced better results to bolster his argument. While I like all of his suggestions, what concerns me is that these suggestions are easier said than done. For example, Geoff is dead right when he says that:

We must reward, rather than punish, cross-disciplinary or cross-sectoral approaches; define success in a way that encourages, rather than discourages, positive outcomes in multiple arenas; and foster monitoring and evaluation plans that embrace, rather than ignore, different timescales and multiple indicators.”

But how, exactly, are we to do this? What HR levers exist that we can use to make this happen? How much leeway do appointees and other executive-level donor staff have with regard to changing rewards and evaluations? And are the right people in charge to make such changes possible? A lot of people rise through donor organizations by being very good at sectoral work. Why would they reward people for doing things differently?

Similarly, I wonder how we can actually get more long-term thinking built into the practice and implementation of development. How do we really overcome the Tyranny of the Inbox, and the Tyranny of Immediate Results? This is not merely a mindset problem, this is a problem of budget justifications to an often-hostile congress that wants to know what you have done for them lately. Where are our congressional champions to make this sort of change possible?

Asking Geoff to fix all our problems in a single bit of writing is completely unfair. That is the Tyranny of What do We do Now? In the best tradition of academic/policy writing, his piece got me thinking (constructively) about what needs to happen if we are to do a better job of achieving something that looks like sustainable development going forward. For that reason alone it is well worth your time. Go read.