Net-Mapping with a New Stakeholder Group: Neighborhood Store Managers and their Clients

(Guest Post by Jarret Cassaniti from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communication Programs)

Each time I deploy Net-Map I learn new things. I have found the systematic revelation of connections between stakeholders in digital health, family planning, and meatless diets captivating. 

My most recent work with Net-Map was with an entirely new stakeholder group, neighborhood store managers and their clients. This work revealed two hidden actor types: the city council, and school teachers. My article, Influence Networks Relating to Health Knowledge Among Nairobi’s Micro-Retailers and Their Clients includes a robust discussion of how these and other actors are well-positioned to improve health-seeking behavior in Nairobi’s informal settlements. 

Alongside top-up cards, packets of condensed milk, and batteries in small shops across Kenya are health products. The bars of soap, nutritional supplements, and toothpaste make these neighborhood vendors natural candidates for a health promotion role. 

But do the retailers have the interest and capacity to play this role? And would their customers seek information from them and trust the responses? In 2018, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Projects (CCP) joined Transform in Kenya, a project led in part by Unilever and DFID, to find the answers to these questions. 

Net-Map was chosen as a formative research tool because of its visual nature, easy-to-learn process, and multiple layers of analysis. 

I spent one day leading a facilitator training and the next four in Nairobi’s informal settlements. I helped 76 members of two online community networks, UAfya and UJoin, draw eight influence maps.

Each day I reveled as the conversations between participants reached a crescendo at the end of the Net-Mapping process. When the facilitators asked the segmented groups to analyze, and then compare their completed maps, we witnessed bonafide knowledge sharing and exchange. 

Prior hours of analytical thinking paired with the visual aspect of Net-Map gave participants a shared language and the confidence to express their unfiltered reactions. It was during this stage of the process that the Nairobi city council and school teachers were revealed as important hidden actors. 

The city council has high levels of influence in the community and is well connected. They are in a unique position to endorse and elevate shopkeepers as reputable health promoters. School teachers are influential to shoppers and are also well connected through children. They are well-positioned to encourage shoppers to go to shopkeepers for health information.  

With both high levels of influence and numerous connections, these actors could help Transform deliver a lasting impact through the power of inclusive markets. These conclusions were validated through the digitization of maps and statistical analysis completed through DataMuse.  All maps and the influence/connections matrix were published in a March 2021 article in the Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management. 

Since being trained by Eva and Amit in 2014, I’ve become the go-to Net-Map expert among my colleagues at CCP and I’ve had the privilege of implementing Net-Map activities in Tanzania, the US, Nigeria, and now Kenya. As I watch participants develop maps through their own hands I am invigorated. I am also gratified to know that Net-Map has joined the ranks of other research methods among my peers working in health and inclusive markets. 

My experience in Kenya and the resulting article have bolstered the nascent body of knowledge surrounding neighborhood stores and online communities promoting health. I hope that others will use this research to develop new questions for additional research and use the findings to implement innovative projects around the world.  

Pivoting from development to humanitarian aid

When the locusts descend or a deadly contagious disease like Ebola or the Coronavirus hit a country, everyone and everything is somehow affected. The impact on the farmers or those infected is immediate and obvious, but, like a tidal wave, the shock ripples far beyond where the problem is most visible.

Development organizations that focus on developing sustainable and self-reliant communities, often have a long term vision: Don’t give someone a fish but teach them how to fish. Which is a great philosophy to hold on to in stable(ish) times, but when these shocks hit that are bigger than one person, much bigger than one community, an insistence on remaining slow and steady would be an insistence on looking away while people die.

But how, in the bureaucratic realities that characterize international development, do you shift your approach, or add a humanitarian dimension at the speed necessary and while remaining accountable and strategic?

I recently talked with a colleague at USAID about using Process Net-Map to better understand the process from early warning to decision making around a crisis modifier to getting the needed help to people on the ground. How does information flow from the field staff of implementing partners, to their decision makers, to the donor agency? Who carries the decision making process through the agency an how? And finally, once the decision is made, who needs to work hand in hand to get commodities to the people who need them?

Process Net-Map allows participants to map a process like this not as a simple flow chart, but in the messy complexity it really takes, where a whole network of actors is involved, often more than once, the formal bureaucratic process is supported (or not?) by more informal connections of trust, information flow or conflict and there may be systematic bottlenecks in the system that can only be identified and remedied once you see it all laid out in front of you. And in a process that has a number of distinct parts to it, you can clearly identify the influencers for each one:

• Who influences that the warning signs about the crisis reach the relevant decision makers?
• Who influences that the decision to modify the support is made?
• Who influences that humanitarian support reaches those in need swiftly?

If all those involved in the process sit at the table, one thing this mapping can do, is open up the black box. So when I hand over my information to another actor or organization, and all I know is “and then we wait” – I can understand what happens as I wait for a decision, and how I may support those making the decision through the information I give them. Because it is one common characteristic of these complex, multi-actor processes that everyone knows a lot about the things that happen close to them, and has a fuzzy knowledge at best, about those that happen further away.

 

How to use Net-Map in Monitoring and Evaluation

Are you planning or implementing complex projects, that aim at social change? Are you wondering how innovations spread through a given social system? Or maybe connecting people to opportunities or strengthening the networks of the people you work with is an explicit goal of your work?

In all of these cases, Net-Map may be a useful tool to establish a baseline and keep track of the social and network changes that happen, as you do your work. I have recently been asked by a number of colleagues about the use of Net-Map in M&E and my advice to them may be useful for you too.

• Be intentional and get a baseline at the beginning. This might sound rather basic, but I have interacted with a lot of teams who were very excited to Net-Map the impact of their interventions but had nothing to compare it to. If you don’t know how the networks looked before you started, how much can you learn from a snapshot, just one point in time?
• Put hard work into finding the right big question: “Who influences XY?” This is where most mediocre Net-Map studies start, with a question that is not quite on target, often too big (sometimes too small), two or three questions in one or using language that is easy to misunderstand. Pre-test and see if it works. Often at the beginning of a project you may need to start with a broad general landscape question, just to know where you are. Follow it up with a second session that asks a specific question closely linked to your project, so that it will be valid as a baseline.
• Engage a broad enough range of participants, that they will show you your blind spots and give a balanced picture. Don’t just hang out with your friends and group-think. As you do more than one Net-Map over time, for M&E, will you be able to re-assemble the same group or at least a group of similar constellation?
• Don’t just Net-Map. This is a tool that is great for telling you about the HOW and WHY, especially if you have a good interviewer who will dig deep into the qualitative discussion of the map and take good notes of it. However, for the most part Net-Map is not a tool to tell you a lot about the WHAT, to answer whether you have achieved your goals. Ensure to combine it with a solid methodology to evaluate the results achieved. Also, I rarely use Net-Map in a large, quantitative approach – but having it either inform a quantitative evaluation or be informed by it, can enrich both.
• Use Net-Map as a tool for learning, not just for proving. As your project engages with local stakeholders, having a Net-Map landscape in mind can help you be more strategic and flexible and be less surprised by the way they react.

I know a lot of practitioners out there have used Net-Map in M&E context and would love to hear from your examples. Either in the comments or as a guest post.

Strategic engagement – with snakes, elephants, baboons, mosquitos and meercats

I am just back from work in Southern Africa. And while I was in a specific country with it’s specifically difficult political context, the question that keept us awake at night was rather universal: How can we influence without much formal authority? How can we achieve the greater good (as we define it, anyway), when doing so will cut off streams of illicit benefits for many people in high position?

Then I found a simple solution, fixed the situation and all is well, world saved.

No, not quite. Rather, I led my participants deeper into the complexity of their challenge (identifying who the actors are, how they are connected, what their influence and goals are, a.k.a. drawing a Net-Map stakeholder map). Then I provided them with guidance to prioritize and strategize for most effectively engaging with their stakeholders.

We divided the stakeholders in

• Elephants: high influence, positive
• Meercats: low influence, positive
• Snakes: high influence, negative
• Mosquitos: low influence, negative, and
• Baboons on the fence: high influence, undecided

And for each, there are a number of strategies to explore:

Elephants: High influence, positive toward your goals

• Give them credit, let them lead
• Frame the issue for them, share information
• Engage consistently, regularly
• Manage possible power struggle between positive high influencers
• Build diverse coalitions:
  • Diverse power sources,
  • diverse motivations,
  • shared goals.

Meercats: Low influence, positive toward your goals

• Can you increase their influence?
• They can be connectors and information gatherers
• They might have helpful friends
• Build coalitions – strength in numbers
• Remember: “A leader without followers is just someone taking a walk”

And, don’t underestimate them: threat or belief can activate unexpected strength -see below, together they can kill a snake…

Snakes: High influence, negative toward your goal

• Watch your back – protect yourself
• Avoid – focus on other issues for now
• Seek unexpected common ground
• Explore their networks: Who do they listen to? Who commands them?
• Explore win-win and trade-offs
• Undermine their narratives
• Weaken their coalitions

 

 

Mosquitos: Low influence, negative toward your goal

• What do they care about? Can you entice them to your side?
• Are you sure they are weak?
• Watch out for influence increase over time
• Interfere with their coalition building
• Can you safely ignore them for now?

 

 

Baboons on the fence: High influence, undecided about your goal

• What do they care about? Can you entice them to your side?
• Are you sure they are weak?
• Watch out for influence increase over time
• Interfere with their coalition building
• Can you safely ignore them for now?

 

 

By grouping our stakeholders according to their influence and their relationship to our goal, we became much more specific when developing engagement strategies. And calling our important stakeholders baboons or meercats also added a level of levity to the discussion that made us breathe more freely under the weight of our near impossible task. What are your strategies for engaging elephants, empowering meercats, swaying baboons, neutralizing snakes and protecting yourselves from mosquito bites? I am sure the above isn’t complete yet, so I am curious to hear from you.

Agricultural Extension in Ethiopia through a Gender and Governance Lens

This paper uses Net-Map for qualitative data collection on the use of agricultural extension in Ethiopia, especially understanding the role of women (authors: Tewodaj Mogues, Marc J. Cohen, Regina Birner, Mamusha Lemma, Josee Randriamamonjy, Fanaye Tadesse and Zelekawork Paulos). Here the abstract:

“Drawing on a household survey collected in eight woredas in seven Ethiopian regions in 2009, as well as on qualitative fieldwork in four of the eight woredas, this paper provides analysis of agricultural extension delivery in Ethiopia. While overall extension services are relatively accessible in Ethiopia, there are differences in access between men and women, and particularly stark differences by region. Individual visits by public sector extension agents to household farms are by far the most common mode of extension delivery; alternative modes of extension (either in delivery method or type of service provider) play a rather limited role. Using the method widely applied in the “Citizen Report Card” approach, questions to farmers regarding satisfaction with services yielded near 100 percent reporting of satisfaction; however, the study also showed relatively low uptake of extension advice. This suggests the need to revisit or refine the Citizen Report Card method of eliciting satisfaction with services in this type of empirical context.

Women’s groups (e.g. the women’s associations at the kebele level in rural areas) may be a promising approach to reach women with extension services; in some of the study sites, they were able to successfully link extension agents with women farmers and circumvent the socially sensitive issue of (male) extension agents providing advice to women one-on-one. However, the use of women’s associations also for other matters, e.g. political mobilization of women, may weaken their promise in expanding access to extension services for women farmers.

Finally, making agricultural extension demand driven remains a challenge in Ethiopia. While there is strong political will to expand agricultural extension in Ethiopia, the strong standardisation of extension packages arising from a pronounced top-down nature of public service delivery makes it difficult to tailor agricultural extension to farmers’ needs. The incentives of extension agents are set in a way that they try to maximize farmers’ adoption of standardized packages. The packages have become less rigid in recent years, with a menu of options now available to farmers. However, even the more diversified menu cannot substitute for the microlevel adaptation, the process that would make new inputs and practices more credible to farmers, and which only extension workers and their farmers can feasibly manage.”

Networks, gender and race in job-seeking in rural America (Missouri)

How do the networks of black and white, male and female job-seekers differ? And: Does that makes some of them more successful than others in finding a job? Jenine Harrison and her co-authors have interviewed job seekers in rural Missouri and drawn Net-Maps that indicate clearly which contacts are male/female, black/white to understand these questions better.

The abstract of their paper: Higher rates of unemployment are found among African-American men in rural communities in the US. As part of a community-based participatory research project, we sought to identify characteristics of job-seeking networks of African-American and white employed and unemployed men and women in a rural community in Missouri. We collected ross-sectional quantitative and qualitative information about job-seeking networks through in-depth interviews with 9 local residents. Descriptive network measures were used to compare the gender, race, and employment status of the people comprising participant job-seeking networks. A novel network approach was used to simulate a whole network from individual networks depicting likely patterns of job-seeking relationships across the community. Unemployed participants had larger networks, with the exception of white women. Men had more racially homogenous networks than women; many networks had no racial diversity. Men had longer relationships than women, while women had stronger relationships. Employed participants had more linkages to alters with connections to community organizations
than unemployed participants. Unemployed participants had many connections, but lacked connections to the right people and organizations to aid in their job search. Increasing employment opportunities in this community, and similar communities, will require effort from job-seekers and others to develop new relationships, programs, and policies.

How to get strategic insights from Net-Map

Just a bowl of spaghetti with toys on top?

So, you have done the mapping, in front of you a messy bowl-of-spaghetti-with-toys-on-top-diagram and your participants or clients ask you:

 

So what do we do now? What does this mean?

While the content of the answer will be different in every case, here are some guiding principle to direct your eyes and your thought when looking for strategic insights from a Net-Map: In general three issues are considered: Actor Influence, Goals and Connections, with the following lines of thought:

Influence

• Influential actors who can harm / support
• Increasing or decreasing actor influence
• Diverse sources of influence

Goals

•  Understanding reasons / motivations / fears / aspirations behind goals
• Working with, connecting, strengthening positive actors
• Dealing with, mitigating risk concerning negative actors
• Changing actor goals toward more positive

Connections

• Network patterns and their effects (e.g. centralization vs. decentralization, boundary spanners, disconnected silos)
• Tension or reinforcement of formal vs. informal links
• Connections which create destructive forces in the system
• Missing links
• Connecting positive actors (coalition), understanding negative coalitions, engaging mixed actors
• Dividing negative actors

Public Policy and the Idea of the Vietnamese State: The Cultural Political Economy of Domestic Water Supply

A Net-Map study on formal and informal water governance in Vietnam, by Nadine Reis and Peter P. Molinga:

Abstract:
Using Rural Water Supply (RWS) policy practices as a case study,this article shows that the disjunction between implementation as formally conceived and informally practised is not a question of ineffective policy cycle dynamics, but rather an inherent feature of Vietnam’s Cultural Political Economy. Drawing on critical realist approaches to social and state theory, we argue that formal and informal RWS policy practices, as a set of two interconnected spheres, serve as key, separate but connected, mechanisms for reproducing the distribution of material resources (primarily through the informal sphere) and the hegemony of ideas (primarily through the formal sphere) in Vietnamese society. We conclude that the formal, administrative practices of RWS policy are primarily to be understood in their function of reproducing the idea of the state and state legitimacy. RWS administrative practices function to sustain the core social and political order in Vietnam as institutionalised in “the state”, rather than being primarily oriented to improving rural water supply. The findings raise questions for donor-supported programs that focus on formal administrative institutions and practices for improving the performance of the water sector.

Join us: Largest international Net-Mapper meeting ever!

Wouldn’t it be great if Net-Mappers from all over the world could share their experience, learn from each other, build a common knowledge-base and just hang out and enjoy each other’s company? You might be working with Net-Map in your university, organization, consulting practice and maybe you are the only one excited by the participatory drawing of networks. Or, maybe a lot of your colleagues are excited, but they all have no clue how it really works, so you always have to be (or look like) the expert who knows everything. I am sure you have some great stories, lessons and results to share and together we might find the answers to your questions.

We (that’s Eva Schiffer, Jennifer Hauck, Amit Nag, Paolo Brunello and our Net-Mapping friends) are planning to have the biggest international meeting of Net-Mappers at the next Sunbelt Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis in Brighton, UK (June 23rd to 28th, 2015). In addition to hosting one (or two) sessions which will be dedicated to applying network knowledge, we are planning to host a Net-Mapper get-together as informal side-event of the conference so that we can all get to know each other and each other’s work and start working together more closely.

We will discuss whatever questions are at the forefront of our minds. For me there are three things I am really curious about:

• Learning more about all the great applications of the method to start having an extensive case collection.
• Strategies for working together to make Net-Map interventions happen and grow the community of practice. This could lead to developing a database of international Net-Map consultants so if any of us wants to implement something that is bigger than one person, we know where to go.
• Asking and answering questions about how to use and analyze Net-Map, moving the method forward and understanding it better.

To make this happen we need you. And you. And your net-mapping colleague too. If you are interested, please contact me directly. And submit an abstract for the Sunbelt Conference session on applying network knowledge.

Oh, and did I say that this is just the side-event? The main event is also pretty amazing. Sunbelt is the largest Social Network Analysis conference and it’s an great mix of the old gurus, the young geniuses, master’s students getting feedback for their half-done thesis, and everything in-between. Also, they have great hands-on introductory workshops on most of the common SNA software and approaches (including a Net-Map training) during the first two days of the conference. If you have never submitted an abstract to a conference and the task intimidates you, I am happy to talk you through it. And, surey, you can also come just as a participant, without presentation… but we would all be missing out, if you didn’t share your work. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Saving travel cost by Net-Mapping before you go

Saving cost and reducing travel are a big thing at the World Bank at the moment – as in many organizations. So while it was always requested to do your homework before going on a scoping mission, now this homework really has to be much more in-depth, everything you can squeeze out of your desk (research), do squeeze… It has to produce tangible outputs and prepare you as best you can to use your brief and costly time in the field wisely.

So we will pilot using Net-Map for this, sitting down with the project leader (based in DC) and maybe one or two colleagues who know the country and the sector well and to help them draw a map of the stakeholder situation as they see it. This will be a 3-4 hour meeting in our office – no plane ticket involved – a day or two of rough data analysis and visualization, then sharing the results (highlighting pain points and open questions) with colleagues on the ground in an online discussion.

It’s not a replacement for going to the field but it will help us get an in-depth first impression of the politics involved, help the project leader and experts structure their knowledge and share it and have something concrete to start the discussion with the people on the ground.

I will share how it goes and am curious if you have tried simmilar approaches. If you have, how have you dealt with the possible bias of the central perspective? How have you made the results easily approachable for the people on the ground and avoided that the first map was seen as the gospel? How have you dealt with open questions and guesswork?