Integrating research and governance

Sounds great. But how do you do it? How can we as researchers for development do projects that have an impact on governance in the countries we work in? Or, is there a problem in this question already, as it sounds like: First we do research, then we go and have an impact.

Should the question rather be: How can we integrate our research projects into local needs and structures in such a way, that research questions are relevant, methods appropriate, results understandable and inviting our partners to act on them…

WITHOUT (!)

doing embedded research (like embedded journalism) that just finds out what the powerful wish to hear and serves particular local vested interests?

I have promised to write about this question and am planning to interview governance actors in Ghana about their experiences with research - and talk with researchers about their experiences with trying to have an impact.

As I am developing an appropriate tool I am toying with the idea of asking people about their best and worst experiences, following an approach developed by a group around the German organizational psychologist Siegfried Greif who analyzed the success and failure of organizational restructuring in the corporate world.

And I’m drawing a Net-Map reflecting on my own experiences in Ghana. What I end up doing is to fill the whole surrounding space around the map with my written comments about the links that are positive drivers and those that are obstacles for integration, note down the many remaining questions and more general observations about this slowly evolving fruitful collaboration. With this added qualitative commentary the map looks so much more informative and self-explanatory than a map that just consists of actors and links.

Podcast on Maize and Chicken in Ethiopia

“Wow, we learned more about chicken than we ever asked for…” my colleague David Spielman joked after a week of Net-Mapping poultry and maize innovation systems in Ethiopia. You can listen to the (more serious) rest of the discussion by clicking on the media player below (or here) . The project is still in progress, so the case study is not completed yet - but I will up-date you as we go.

Looking for free and easy SNA software

I use Visualyzer for visualizing and analyzing my Net-Maps and I love it. But while there is a free trial version, in the end it is a software that you have to purchase. As I want to further spread SNA literacy in developing countries, I am looking for free software that is at least as user friendly as Visualyzer, which means having a rather intuitive and visual user interface. Any recommendations?

Give and take

I am so excited! By posting the invitation to our Net-Map training on the email lists of MandE (Rick Davies’ great Monitoring and Evaluation platform) and KM4Dev (Knowledge Management for Development) I have spurred an absolutely unexpected wave of reactions. We offer the option to participate in the workshop online and I have received applications from as diverse countries as Zimbabwe, Nepal, UK and Bangladesh. But what really thrills me are the answers to my questions: “What is your background, have you used social network analysis and/or participatory approaches before, how do you think you will use Net-Map in your work?”

I get the feeling that we will have a group of students, scholars and practitioners with a diverse range of practical and academic experiences and I believe that I will learn about as much from my participants as they will from me. And, as some of those interested in the training live in really incompatible time zones (Who wants to be in the office 3 a.m. to attend a seminar?), have unreliable internet access or busy schedules, we are planning to record the workshop and burn it on CD for those who could not attend.

Why the prospect of meeting these diverse participants online and off-line excites me? Because, of three hypothesis about innovativeness of networks and the points where innovation happens in the network:

The strength of weak ties (A classic, here (429 K) a paper where Granovetter revisits his own argument): You get your new ideas/contacts/perspectives from those people you don’t interact with every day (your closest friends and colleagues will have a very similar knowledge and contacts as you have, as you have spent so much time exchanging information already).

Innovativeness of heterogeneous networks: Most networks have a tendency to mature towards a state of homogeneousness. That’s great for stability but a killer for innovation, because no-one is there to challenge your beliefs or cross unusual thoughts to breed new ideas.

Innovativeness through networks with open fringes, that are dynamic over time: A network that can accommodate and release members in a flexible way over time, will be able to learn from the freshness of their experience and maintain a regular influx of new ideas and new connections.

By the way, a great post on the art of having innovative ideas: “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” by Mark Gould

Web-Find: One small project

I love blogs of people who graze the web for us and find the most amazing links. Reading around in Simon O’Rafferty’s research blog, I stumbled over “transformative innovations” and ended up here , at a place where architectural design and the lives of the poorest and homeless meet.

Validate the map before you start driving

Imagine the following scenario: You are on a conference call with your colleagues and you plan how to get to the central market square of the city. What you don’t know: Each one of you is looking at a street map of the city - unfortunately, not of the same city. While you start giving each other directions, you first grow slightly irritated and finally think something must be seriously wrong with your colleagues - or maybe they are just plain stupid? And: Will you ever get to the square together?

This would be a strange way to do project planning? It would, wouldn’t it.

However, when it comes to the social landscapes of our projects, this (often) seems to be exactly what we are doing, we start planning our concrete strategic interventions without even trying to find out whether we are navigating with the same map. After mapping water governance in Ghana, one of my interview partners insisted: “This is how it is! Everybody will see it this way!” Just to be shocked a few weeks later, when we had a group mapping workshop, where we displayed the very diverse maps that these team members had drawn and asked them to map together.

Process Mapping

Regina Birner (IFPRI) has been one of the first people to really push me to go forward with Net-Map. And right from the beginning she has been bugging me: But how to I look at processes with this, not just snap-shots in time? One option is a time series of Net-Maps as discussed earlier. But now there is something else cooking.

I caught her freshly returned from India and she is excited: “We did Process Mapping there and it was amazing!” What I love about it is that Net-Map turned into Process Mapping because this was needed to understand really pressing questions and not just because it is fun to play around with methods.

So, while Regina has promised to write more extensively about it, here the basic steps of what she did to understand the program implementation of a rural employment guarantee scheme in India:

She asked the interview partners, to tell her the story, while she wrote down actors and drew the network links between them accordingly. Each new actor was written on actor cards as he or she came up in the story and as the actors were linked, the interviewer would indicate next to the link, what the flow was and when (e.g. the date when someone told someone else about an idea, gave an order to them or received funding to do something). All this ended with the question of how influential the actors were in the process and putting them on influence towers.

Regina said that doing this was really helpful to understand the details of the administrative process, discuss sticking points, bottlenecks and alternatives and be sure to avoid misunderstandings and generalized statements that mean nothing. So instead of saying “the community requests this from the administration” you find out who exactly went to whom to ask for what. From my own experience I know it is easy to sit in an administrators office and be flooded with “development speak” that sounds great and tells you nothing about what actually happens. So there it pays that drawing it is kind of pedantic and to the point.

The other thing that is great about following the process with your mapping is that you are not pressing your structure on the interviewee but follow the natural flow of how someone would tell you a story.

How they - by mistake - gathered data about “Who takes how much bribe in the process?” is a different story that Regina will tell us in another post next week.

Net-Map Training in Washington

You want to learn how to use Net-Map in your own specific context, get a first idea of the social network measures we use to understand our data, be guided through the process of data entry and ask me all your remaining questions?

Why not participate in our IFPRI seminar:

Net-Map Tool-Pool Training for Research and Impact Management

on the 14th May in Washington DC?

The seminar has two parts:

Part 1: An Introduction to Net-Map (12:30 PM to 2:00 PM)

Part 2: Practical Training on Net-Map (2:30 PM to 4:30 PM)
(GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

This seminar is aimed both at researchers and practitioners who want to use influence network visualisation in their work. It does not require previous knowledge in Social Network Analysis.

Go here (236 K) to find out more, and contact me at ifpri-netmap@cgiar.org if you want to either participate in person or via the internet.

Networks, control and the fear of loosing it

Talking with Nancy White and reading her last posts about community management triggered a whole network of thoughts around why the idea of a network organisation and network structures appeal to some people (and some organizations) while they make others shudder.

And I think this has a lot to do with the balance between control and trust. Network memberships can be temporary, the strength of links between nodes often depends on their own willingness and motivation to maintain them, linking unlikely parts of a network can lead to explosions of creativity and innovation (but also to uncontrolled flows of gossip), multiple connections in a densely knit network reduce the control that individual actors have (reducing their betweenness centrality), informal networks can outweigh the formal ones… etc. Scary stuff.

People who look at the world through a frame of mind that puts control in the center, will realize that a vibrant network is out of control. If you believe that people only do things because of fear of punishment or fear of being found out, again, in a complex network structure (such as “the real world”) it is even difficult to track down cause and effect.

But what happens if you use a different tint of sunglasses and look at your network as if you trusted that people have motivations that go beyond the fear of direct punishment? All of a sudden you can see the great opportunities that arise from pairing the unusual, from the speedy informal exchanges and those links that are maintained and backed by intrinsic motivation of the actors involved. And instead of the fear of loosing control and ending up in chaos you might start thinking in metaphors of growth (as in the way plants grow), add your contribution to the network and see what happens.

And all this reminds me of something I observed in Ghana, where my friends had a very long term perspective on the give and take in their social networks: One friend came out of a poor household and the other boy often shared his lunch with him when they were kids - which was in the hunger years of the 80ies and thus more than just a friendly gesture. Now 20 years later the poorer friend has a good and stable job while the other one floats in and out of employment and hits one hard rock after the other. So his old friend gives him money to open a little store - not because he thinks this is an economically sound investment but because what goes around comes around… one day. You don’t count the amount you give or how long it takes that something comes back to you but just invest into the network whenever you have something to give and hope that it will take care of you the same way.

While this sounds like a romantic story with a slight “noble savage” tint to it, I am sorry to inform you though, that my friend has transformed the shop into his bedroom - so while he is not earning any money with it, he at least has a place to sleep…

Now, what I am really interested in is what happens if you take a middle ground between trust and control, which deserves a lot of self discipline (as it is so much easier to see everything either black or white). I don’t know but I will think about it some more…

Response to “Do African villagers learn less from Net-Mapping than African policy makers?”

I’m happy that Prakash Kashwan takes up this question and adds his own experience, as you can see below, because the question is still out there and I have not found an answer that really satisfies me. I like his notion of community members actually simplifying matters for the researcher, who is a rather ignorant non-expert when it comes to matters of the community. I’m curious to hear more from Jennifer Hauck, who is just returning from the field (rural northern Ghana) where she used Net-Map in a second step (after the data collection) as a tool to facilitate group formation of local fishermen. And I feel the urge to go back to doing Net-Maps on the community level to figure out more about what they can do there…

Prakash Kashwan writes:

This is indeed an interesting puzzle. Influence mapping has a lot in common with Venn Diagram technique used in PRA techniques, where it is used side by side with mapping exercises. We know mapping is always a big hit with the communities - it really gets them going. Wood even used maps to discuss the impact of civil war on communities in El Salvador. Maps that her communities drew are available here <http://www.cambridge.org/us/features/wood/default.htm>. Coming back to the difference between mapping in general and influence mapping may really have to do with how community members process information and knowledge. These differences may go much beyond whether they relate to paper maps or not. After all, PRA maps are also drawn on paper sheets most of the times. I could quickly find at least one paper <www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-2451.00393> discusses how mapping was more helpful in developing farmer’s meta cognitive skills compared to Venn diagrams.

This reminds me that many a time, we researcher need to render concrete the information/knowledge that community members may have held only in abstract. This is rather counter-intuitive but there have been many situations where I have felt that I was forcing my respondents to simplify their thinking (for my consumption) in a flash. This may not be easy at all, and I suspect parts of influence mapping may also be affected by similar issues. Many a time, community members are often part of very complex networks. In any case, this is worth putting in some serious thinking and very important for all of us who interact with rural/indigenous communities in a variety of situations.