The People, Power, Politics Podcast

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How can going inside the political mind help us to better understand development?

Transcript 

00:00:01 Intro Jingle

Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham.

00:00:14 Nic Cheeseman

Hi everyone and thanks so much for joining us today on the People Power Politics. I'm particularly excited to introduce somebody whose work I've admired for a long time, Greg Powell, who's the founder and board chair of Global Partners Governance practice, GPG, a social purpose company that provides support to politicians, ministers, officials and many others to strengthen systems of governance and around the world, and who's probably best known for being someone who's worked in many different countries, in particular in a lot of countries, had very difficult times in their lives at periods of political and economic reconstruction. Greg has just put out a great new book, Inside the Political Mind, which has already been selected as one of the best new politics books in the Financial Times.

00:00:55 Nic Cheeseman

So Greg, welcome to the podcast. One of the things that I wanted to ask, you know, just to kick us off is given how busy you are and how many different countries I always hear you're, you're heading to, how did you find the time to actually sit down and write the book and what made you want to take time out of your busy travel schedule to actually sit down and put something like this on paper?

00:01:14 Greg Power

Thank you. It's lovely to be with you and thank you for the kind words. It's I mean that's a good question. It was partly, I mean you will know yourself that when you've got a book in your head, you feel it needs to be written and nobody else had written it. So I thought and the the longer it went on, I think it's like for lots of doctoral students. And the longer your thesis goes on, the more fear you have that somebody else is gonna write what you've got in your head. And so I had to do that, but it was a product of partly as you say, the experience of working in more than 60 countries over the last 20 years and being quite frustrated by the way in which politicians are often perceived, I think they're often caricatured as you know, very venal and self-serving, but also the extent to which the international community and international assistance is often focussed on the wrong things in trying to strengthen and support the development of political systems in other countries, and the book is largely about that, that challenge. How do we get better at supporting politicians to strengthen their own political systems in places where it really matters?

00:02:18 Nic Cheeseman

Let's now let's just go a little bit deeper into one of the key points that you said there that I think will strike people. That's that the international community doesn't help people in the way that's most effective. And it sounds like from what you're saying and I know from having read some of the book that it's not even learning to get better over time that your critique is actually in a sense, we're stuck in a pattern of behaviour that isn't very productive, and there's two different parts of that that I think people might be interested in. I mean, first, exactly what is it that's going wrong? And second, given that it's been going wrong for a little while, I mean, after all, some of the places you're talking about in the book, like Iraq, are not new issues, why hasn't the international community been able to improve some of that and learn some of the lessons? Obviously, you've put them in the book, but you've presumably communicated them to people verbally before. Why is some of this so sticky and so difficult to actually improve and reform?

00:03:11 Greg Power

That I mean that second part of the question is is probably more difficult to answer than well they're both difficult, both difficult questions. The second part, I mean there there's a whole political economy of the way in which international aid agencies work, which perhaps we can come on to. In terms of, I mean, just the way in which this work has been approached. It's it has got gradually better, I think over the last last 20 or 30 years, but there is still a preference for building institutions in other places which look like the institutions that those countries have themselves without thinking about the individuals inside those institutions who ultimately have to make them work.

00:03:50 Greg Power

And there is still a tendency, I think, to assume that surely everybody supports democracy because it's a good thing and there is this principled approach, which often there's an assumption that this will override any sort of personal interest or the politics that is going on in a different country and the assumption is often with lots of international assistance, you know, you throw enough money at a problem get the rules right, train the people inside, give them some resources. It's bound to work. What could possibly go wrong? And it it what it doesn't engage with is the dynamics of politics. It's it's what I call in the book it's institution building from the outside. Coming with ready made structures which look like the parliaments, the ministries in our own countries and trying to put them in another place and assume they're going to work in exactly the same way.

00:04:40 Greg Power

And of course they don't because political institutions only get stronger when politicians want to make them stronger and in lots of the places that we work the incentives aren't there to do that for all the reasons that I explained in the book, which I'm sure will come on to, but I think there is a there's a real challenge there. And to partially answer your, the second part of your question about why it's got stuck is because there is often a tendency with international assistance to start with what what we've got rather than what the people on the receiving end of it actually need. Now with in my organisation there is we have a cardinal rule that every single piece of work starts with two questions. When we're working with politicians, ministers, civil servants in whichever country it is.

00:05:23 Greg Power

And those two questions are: what are you trying to achieve? How can we help you achieve it? And you you start from the problem and you build outwards, and the the book makes reference to I'm sure you you know Joseph Henrichs’ book The WEIRDest People in the World where he talks about, you know, weird psychology, weird standing for ‘Western, educated, industrialised, rich and and democratic’. And his argument is that we think, you know, the we people from weird countries think they know, actually they're not. And he talks about the fact that in terms of international assistance and assuming that institutions gonna work the same way in other countries ignores how our own institutions evolved in the first place, they didn't start from, you know, sitting down and rationally designing a set of rules and processes and procedures.

00:06:11 Greg Power

They started from what he calls a process of myopic groping. You're fumbling. You're trying to fix problems. You're dealing with what matters today. Those turn into into norms, into values and then then into rules and laws and gradually get the institutions evolving from them. But they are designed, they come from the problem. They are built outwards from the problem with that, a society needs to solve. What international assistance is doing mostly is reverse engineering and starting with the institution and trying to fit it to the problems that exist in any particular country.

00:06:41 Nic Cheeseman

So let's let's take a practical example of that. You know, in the book you you provide lots of great examples from around the world. One of the earliest examples is from Iraq, and talking to representatives of the UK and the US, both of whom had a different vision but both of whom I suspect you're going to tell us, didn't have quite the vision you wanted them to have, and then you also talk about, you know, MPs and and legislators, representatives and the demands on them, what their supporters, what their voters actually want them to deliver. So if we were to go back to that moment in Iraq or, you know, we could do another example from a similar country. As you say, there's a tendency from the donors to say right, we need to have a parliament that looks a bit like one of our parliaments, supreme court that looks a bit like one of our supreme courts and so on. If we were to take your sort of suggestions in the book, you know completely to heart and go and try and do it the other way around. Not retrofitting, but starting at the beginning. What would that actually look like in terms of an approach? What would we have started from in Iraq rather than starting from those models?

00:07:44 Greg Power

Well Iraq provides quite a strong theme throughout the book because it as I explained from the beginning, the thinking behind the book started prior to 2003 and the invasion of Iraq because I was, I was a previously a special advisor working for Robin Cook, who in 2003 resigned over the invasion of Iraq from the British government at the time and from 2008 onwards, we've been working with the Council of Representatives, with the parliament there. What was really striking about that that process actually of working for Robin in the first place I had, prior to that been working in sort of think tanks and the campaign world and thinking very clearly about what needed to be changed in terms of the British constitution, democracy and reforms to parliament.

00:08:27 Greg Power

Once I got inside government as a special advisor, those problems look very, very different. What looks easy and straightforward and rational as a solution from the outside once you're on the inside of government looks very, very different and much more complex and not as obvious as you think it is. Once I started doing international work especially in Iraq that hit me even harder. This sense that and being you, you mentioned that that anecdote which is at the beginning of the book, being in what was then the American Embassy in 2008, which was housed in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces at the time very odd situation to, you know, surroundings to find yourself in, surrounded by dusty soldiers and members from the State Department and elsewhere in constant buzz of helicopters going on around you.

00:09:12 Greg Power

But what I was in, I was in a meeting with officials from both the State Department and USAID and from the British Embassy, all of whom were talking about, you know, what needs to be done for Iraq? You know what sort of systems they needed? You know the laws that needed to be parked really quickly. And what struck me in that meeting was that no thought was given to what the politicians who would have to pass these laws might think of this. But also, there was a massive gap between that conversation in the American Embassy and the conversations that I was having with Iraqi politicians who faced a whole long list of problems that their voters were coming them to which rate, you know, on the very basic level, you know, having enough electricity to run your air conditioning unit in the 50 degree heat in Baghdad or being able to go to a hospital and get a clean syringe or just getting to hospital in the first place. These are the practical problems which politicians are expected to solve not just in Iraq, but in almost every single country in which I've worked over the last 20 years.

00:10:09 Greg Power

They are faced with very, very tangible, practical problems. Their interest in the constitution, in the design of the institutions will stretch as far as those institutions can help them solve their problems, because ultimately they will be held to account by their voters as to whether they're fixing their problems or not. And so there is a need and the book explains this towards the the the you know the last section of the book. You need to align those very pressing and very pertinent political problems that need to be fixed every single day. But you need to help the politicians fix them today, but in ways that make those problems easier to solve tomorrow so that they are developing the skills, the institutions, the the, the strategic responses to them, which they can't do on their own and on the day.

00:10:56 Nic Cheeseman

Now I guess you know one of the things that that perhaps will raise in the minds of some of our listeners and it's a question that's often posed to me, so I'll pose it to you is, you know, does that mean that actually we shouldn't be involved that, you know, the idea of us being parachuted in as experts or the international community or as the US or the UK into a country after conflict or, you know, after a democratic crisis, to advise on building back that actually, that process is itself, you know, harmful or damaging or at the very least, you know, doesn't actually achieve anything. And that precisely because we need to develop something that's more grounded and more rooted in local cultures, history, understandings, it would be more effective if simply we pulled out, or we simply provided funds without conditions and without suggesting exactly what political system should look like. Do you do you do you have any sympathy for that kind of argument? And how how likely do you think it would be for the kinds of solutions that you're talking about to be found in the absence of international intervention?

00:11:58 Greg Power

I think the problem is more the the way the work is currently designed and delivered than the notion of international assistance itself. I'm having similar conversations to you in many, many different parts of the world about the the extent to which you know solutions need to be homegrown and absolutely driven by the people who understand both what needs to be done and the implications of the changes that they need to to implement, because ultimately it's the people that we're working with it who are gonna have to live with the consequences of whatever changes they are seeking to implement. That said, in every country in which I work, the politicians that I'm working with want that international experience. They want an external perspective of, you know, how do we, how do we address these problems? I there's there's a couple of anecdotes in the book. I mean, one of the reasons I set up my organisation in the first place, 20 years ago now when the context was slightly different, but when I had been a special advisor at Westminster, we had a constant flow of delegations from all around the world coming to Westminster and Whitehall and looking to talk to politicians with the experience and often, you know, in the UK context, they were admiring the stability and the certainty of of of of British politics because it's it's missing in lots of places as well, we’ll leave aside what's happened in the last five years in the UK, which has sort of deviated from the from that, that tendency.

00:13:15 Greg Power

But what they tended to get rather than helping them to manage the problems which were important to them, what they got was a tour of the building and an explanation of how the legislative process worked in Westminster. What they wanted was to talk to people who had different experience, who could talk to them about how they managed similar problems. Wasn’t about telling them you should do it this way. But just that pooling of expertise. And I I again with my organisation, I'm not, I'm not shy about our expertise. I think we're pretty good at what we do. But being an expert is not the same as telling other people what do. In every single place we recognise we we come with a certain amount of expertise, but the people we're talking to, whether it's in Baghdad or Lilongwe or Tirana, have a degree of expertise and amount of expertise which is entirely beyond our reach because they understand much, much more how politics actually works and what is actually needed to be done.

00:14:12 Greg Power

Our job is to serve those purposes and their interests. We are there as their servants to help them envisage and then implement the sorts of changes that they would like to see. To yeah to answer your question, I think it's less about the principle of international assistance than the way it's being done, and it has to start with the individuals you're working with rather than the institutional design, which is what has tended to happen.

00:14:36 Nic Cheeseman

Now, one of the things I'd like to ask you about is a is a debate that's been happening recently in Kenya, but I suspect probably a debate that's been happening in a lot of places, which centres around constituency development funds. So for those who don't know who are listening to us, never heard of a constituency development fund, there are various different models, but the basic idea is that a certain amount of money is ring fenced for spending on development in the constituency, i.e. the electoral constituency and most of the time this is controlled informally or formally by the MP. Maybe it might be by committee, maybe it might be a by a group. But generally speaking, it's sort of politically controlled money delivered to the constituency and it can range from very small peanuts to very large amounts of money to millions of pounds a year.

00:15:22 Nic Cheeseman

Now there's two kind of arguments about this in places like Kenya. One argument is this institutionalises a slush fund. It generates a system in which MPs know that they have money available for development activities, but those resources are naturally subverted and diverted into all sorts of other things like building patronage, building clientelistic links, winning elections, and so this effectively institutionalises the problems in politics. The alternative position and the reason of course constituency development funds were introduced in places like Kenya is that this gives MPs actual state money rather than having to go cap in hand to the President, rather than having to steal money through corruption, that can be budgeted and can go through participatory budgeting process that can be audited.

00:16:09 Nic Cheeseman

And it creates an opportunity for them to deal with the needs of their constituents, which are very practical needs and very basic needs. It takes away the pressure on the MP to be the sort of welfare state in and of themselves, the individual handing out money and supplying all of these things, and therefore it breaks the tie between the MP and constituents in terms of that sort of informal relationship, it breaks the tie between the MP and the President in terms of the need for those resources, and so it actually creates the potential in the longer term for a kind of move away from corruption and patronage based politics, even though to do that, it kind of institutionalises it. Now I'm interested, you know, going from what you were saying a moment ago about Iraq and how we align incentives, would you see something like the constituency development fund as productive in the sense that it aligns those incentives to MPs to their role, to the institution, and it does give them the resources to deal with the public? Or do you think that's still actually problematic and in some ways it's not doing the kind of things you're talking about in the book? I'm interested where you've come out on that.

00:17:14 Greg Power

I'm gonna give you a third angle. This is there's a chapter in the book. There's a chapter in the book about about constituency work, and I've always been fascinated by this. Because you talk to politicians everywhere where there are constituency based electoral systems, this is what defines them. This is where they do the work that actually they think really matters, which gives them a degree of personal satisfaction. And also it's it's, it's how they get elected. Their voters will judge them more on what they're delivering locally than what they're doing in Parliament, even though, again, going back to the some of the the the problems with international assistance, most parliamentary support internationally is built around, you know, well MPs need to be doing holding the government to account and doing legislation. Yes, fine. But and for reasons explaining the book, which, if we've got time, I can go into but but I'll I'll stick your point about CDFs, they they tend not to do that their focus is going to be on the constituency.

00:18:02 Greg Power

The problem is that locally, politicians can't ever completely solve the problems which their voters are coming to them. There's an assumption everything that that politicians do, well, they giving people money or getting them jobs or paying for ambulances or paying for funeral costs or tuition fees for kids. This is routine stuff for politicians in most of the places in which I work. It's often seen, as you know, connected quite closely to vote buying or clientelism. Actually, it's far more nuanced than that. There's much more going on than simple vote buying or simple, simple transactions. CDFs, the constituency development funds seem to be viewed as you're saying, as you know, just extending some of that ability to buy local support by doing local things.

00:18:54 Greg Power

My problem with it is less about that than it is. It's not solving, it's not the right solution to the problem. The fact that politicians are so overwhelmed with cases at the local level is because the state isn't working properly and where the state is weak, politicians are expected to fill the gaps in that state provision, and they do so by giving people immediate relief. As one MP in Tanzania said to me, look, some people who come to me if I don't give them money, they're not gonna eat today. So what else do I do in that situation? However, I know I'm not solving the problem because those same people are gonna have to come back to me in a week, two weeks, a month. But also they're gonna go tell their friends and they'll come to me as well. So I'm increasing demand without the ability to increase supply. Now the constituency development funds fit neatly into that logic. If politicians cannot afford to help all the people that need to be helped, surely the good idea is well, give them more money to do it because it's valued by the local people. The problem is it's still not solving the problem and as I explained in the book, constituency development funds are in many ways the worst of both worlds in that they are large enough that voters they look like a large sum.

00:20:03 Greg Power

What they tend to do once they see the era in place is increase those local expectations as to what the MP can do on the same logic you you the more you build motorways, the more cars will be driven to fill those motorways. Constituency work seems to work on the same basis as that. But the second problem is it's still not getting the strategic solutions to those problems, because the reason people are coming to MPs to help you know for ambulances or funeral costs or tuition fees is because there is a lack of proper state provision around health and education and all the other needs that that people need, and that can only be solved at the national level. Now what I suggest in the book is MPs because they are talking to constituents every single day, sit on a ton of evidence and a ton of expertise about how the state is failing.

00:20:51 Greg Power

That evidence should be fed back into the system. It’s beyond the reach of the civil servants and the ministers who are making policy and deciding spending decisions. That evidence needs to go back into the national system so that you make better policy, but there's a disconnect in almost every single country in which I work, between between those two things. So I think it's the jury. The honest answer is the jury is out on CDFs more generally, it depends on how they're run and where they work, but they they are not a long term solution to the challenges that most of the politicians and states in which I work face.

00:21:23 Nice Cheeseman

I think I think that's a really interesting point. I mean, I guess the challenge is going back to what you encouraged just to do in the book in terms of thinking about, you know, the incentives and the beliefs. The challenge is that so few of the politicians would probably believe that that kind of feedback process would work in the short run that they would probably be reluctant to give up the CDFs. They would say to you probably, Greg, you're totally right. It's not solving it. We need state led provision from the top. But you know, I would suspect that most of them would be very skeptical about the ability of doing that in less than 10, 20 years. And so their willingness to give up the CDF might be might be limited. But I think your criticisms are absolutely right.

00:21:57 Nic Cheeseman

I think the one thing I would say about the CDFs and the countries where I've seen where the amount is quite high, I do think it's creating more interesting legislature so for example in Kenya, the legislature has done some interesting things in the last few years. Whether it's, you know, past private members bills or capping interest rates, you know all the way through to to other kinds of processes within parliament and not to say that all of those have been good or productive. But I think some of the capacity to do them has been because that that financial link between the present MP was at least to some extent weakened, and so I think that is something that sometimes we overlook a little bit about, actually enabling legislatures to work on their own volition rather than being dominated by the President because everyone's financially dependent on the President.

00:22:42 Nic Cheeseman

But let's let's take that on sort of another level that there's a great line in the book, which I think is fundamentally true of of all societies and all times. And and it's something that people I think often struggle to to grasp, which is that norms are more important than rules or we might say, particularly in your case, the norms are more important than institutions. People, I think often struggle, you know, to understand easily what is meant by a norm and why, you know, norms being more important than institutions is so important in something like development. So. So maybe give us an example of, you know, a kind of key norm that you talk about in the book or the kind of norms you you find. And why those are more important to pay society, you know, attention to and to build from them, starting by imposing the institutions you've talked about already.

00:23:26 Greg Power

Well I mean the analogy that that I use in the book and and seems to go down well with anybody who's who's travelled anywhere, is that that politics is is like traffic in the sense that wherever you go in the world, the road design is pretty similar. The road furniture looks broadly similar everywhere you go. There are white lines down the middle of the road there are traffic lights and busy junctions. There are stop signs, but learning to drive in a different city is less about the formal rules of the road than it is about understanding what's in the head of every single other driver in that city. So if you go from driving in London to Delhi or Nairobi or Kampala or Cairo or any any any number of different places, learning to drive there is far less about the formal rules that, in theory, govern what you should be doing than it is about the norms and values.

00:24:16 Greg Power

Now the thing is, those those norms evolve over time because of the difficulties of driving in places where the traffic is permanently clogged, you know where there are junctions that are problematic. Whatever it might be and drivers learn to find work arounds and as they develop, you know they're they're developed by millions of interactions between different drivers at certain junctions over time and norms start to develop right. This is acceptable in this place. This is how you learn to drive here. The politics works in the same way that although the institution institutional structures might look very similar, the way in which they work is a product of those millions of interactions between politicians with each other and politicians with their voters. And what I say in the book is that understanding how politicians go, especially where you know just as where traffic systems are suboptimal, you know, drivers have to find ways of working around the system rather than going through it.

00:25:12 Greg Power

In political systems where the state is weak and isn't, it isn't doing everything it should be doing. Politicians again have to find work arounds and voters will expect them to do that. That's what they vote for them for. They want politicians who know how to get around the system rather than get through it and norms evolve. What I explained in the book is that you know, you have to understand the logic of political behavior in relation to three things. One is political advantage. Of course, politicians will always have one eye on, what is this gonna do for my electoral chances in the next election? But that's only part of it. The second thing is to do with the norms, the values, the social expectations, what the voters expect, and in many places you know where political institutions, democracy is only a few decades into existence, the role of the local politician draws very heavily on much longer standing traditions about the role of the local leader, which is often to provide for and protect.

00:26:06 Greg Power

Voters want politicians who can get around the system and who look like they have money or can access money to fix the problems which voters think need fixing today and those norms and values shape everything. Whatever a politician does has to be socially approved in that sense, not if they're if they're entirely venal and self-serving. They probably won't get elected. It has to fit in with the the the norms and values of of the context which operates in. The third thing which is often overlooked is personal reward. What do politicians find personally satisfying over time? Because you know, in any job you want a degree of satisfaction from it, and they will do things which they feel they are achieving something in and those three things are key to understanding it. So the norms and values are are central to to all of that. And that means then, as the book explains in the third part, if you're trying to strengthen those institutions, you're working with behaviour far more with the formal rules. The, I mean the challenge is one, which is similar to how do you change your culture of driving in a particular country, once those patterns are set, they are difficult to shift. Often you can change rules which will nudge people to certain different types of behaviour, but ultimately it's all about behaviour that you need to change and that's what the book is fundamentally about.

00:27:16 Nic Cheeseman

I think that's a brilliant point and it's one of the most important things I think that you bring out in the book and it's something that I see as being so true in a lot of my work. We wrote a book called The Moral Economy of Elections a couple of years ago, and one of the points that we were trying to make there is that if you try and deal with electoral bribery by assuming the politicians are corrupt individuals trying to bribe voters rather than that voters expect certain delivery from politicians and that politicians have to comply with that to have a chance of getting elected. You're going to fundamentally misconstrue what's happening, and you're going to design solutions that voters are either going to ignore or actually going to think in some cases, I actually don't connect right to the moral worldview that's prevailing. And the point that you made in the middle there, I think in the second I think of the points is a really important point to bring out that that that set of relationships has a kind of potential moral power or authority because of being seen as being acceptable.

00:28:15 Nic Cheeseman

And so one of the things I think that can be really valuable is to try and tap into that. So for example, one of the pieces of work that we did was looking at under what conditions is handing out money acceptable and not acceptable. And one of the things that's obvious and you'll know this already, is that when you have a politician who goes to a constituency who's in a long term relationship of care, who provides a number of different types of goods, from schools to hospitals, clinics, that politician handing out money is legitimate because it's legitimated by that whole relationship. And that then has a kind of moral authority and people who take that money feel like they should go and vote for that politician.

00:28:51 Nic Cheeseman

But if you have someone who turns up in a constituency with a truck full of money from the capital, sponsored by the President, who has, you know, dodgy ties is rumored to have been involved in the military, probably doesn't necessarily spend that much time in the constituency, hasn't got this long history of relating to people and building things. That money is then seen as vote buying, and it's seen as illegitimate and actually almost lose votes every time you hand that money out. And so the the ability to understand how you would actually engage in that context, to reduce vote buying is fundamentally about understanding those two patterns of behaviour and the differences between them, but also the fact that actually one of those behaviours is seen as being locally legitimate, you know, and moral and the other is, and that that is created within that context. And that doesn't mean that people who accept the money from the politician, and not in other ways democrats. It doesn't mean they don't believe in elections or they don't believe in democracy or the constitution. But this is the concept of of good leadership there. And as you said, there's a very good reason for that, which is the state isn't providing and this person is.

00:29:55 Nic Cheeseman

And I think as you say, I think one of the failures you know of many of us, of researchers of, of development organisations, of the media is often to be able to understand the local rationality and the local morality of these things. And it's bizarre in some ways, because as you say, you know, it's equally true of the UK and the US, we have exactly the same kind of understandings and beliefs. It's just that, you know, when we see them elsewhere, perhaps somehow they seem bizarre and exotic, and we forget the fact that we have just as many bizarre and exotic ones. So I think that to me is is a really critical point. Now we talked at the very beginning about persuading people to shift their ideas and and to come around to sort of new ways of thinking and that's, you know, that's quite a good example I think in terms of the vote buying and you know, we could think about then in other kinds of areas perhaps, you know, anti corruption work and so on, where in some ways the kinds of messages that people put out haven't necessarily changed very much over 25 years, when actually the literature and the research on social psychology norms, behaviour has moved tremendously. What do you think might need to happen? You know, beyond everybody reading your book to get that kind of, you know, change of behaviour within our own organisations. I mean, do we almost need to sort of take development organisations themselves and actually do a kind of ethnography of them do a a political economy analysis of effecting change within USAID, FCDO wherever else it might be and actually almost treat those institutions as the puzzle, rather than that, the countries that they're working in.

00:31:31 Greg Power

Yeah, that's a that's such a big question. Yeah. Yes, I think ultimately I I think the reason I'm hesitating with that, yeah, with that, yes is I'm not I'm not sure how you even start start that process of getting the the aid agencies to change. I think the the the last part of the book is about what I what is called in the book ‘institution building from the inside’ as opposed to institution building from the outside. And the central argument in the book is that the that I quote a behavioral psychologist and behavioral economic economist called Rory Southern in the beginning of the book, who says you should never denigrate a behaviour until you've worked out what purpose it really serves. There will be a logic there. You need to start with that logic. You need to work out what's going on before you do anything, I mean, that's the real challenge I think for for aid agencies and international assistance is to work out actually what's going on and what matters to the people that you are there nominally to try and support rather than coming in and telling them you should be doing this, you're doing it wrong, you need to do it differently. Start with the problem. The why, why they're behaving the way they're behaving and the problems that they're dealing with on a daily basis.

00:32:40 Greg Power

Then the the central argument in the book is that you need to align the interests of the politicians with the longer term interests of strengthening the institutions of state. It's it's a it's one, it's a massive collective action problem. Lots of other authors have written about this about the challenges. If you want to get elected, there are things you need to do today which come at a cost of building the institutions, which ultimately will solve these problems in the long run. As I was saying about the constituency work. You need to, you need to be able to align those interests. And what I talk about are those four principles at the end of the book about how political reform tends to happen.

00:32:16 Greg Power

The first is individuals over institutions. The second is you that you need to align personal interest with political principle. Political institutions only get stronger when politicians want to make them stronger, and in many places they don't because making them stronger will often mean, as you said earlier, means they don't get reelected. Thirdly, all reform is about reciprocity, about reciprocal exchange at some level. You need to be bargaining negotiating. In in democracy, nobody gets what they want. That's the point of democracy. Nobody gets exactly what they want. You have to give up something and you have to understand the process of reform is not an exercise in perfect but an exercise in reciprocal exchange. And then, fourthly, think big, act small, sort of refer to the work of Balagy and Diplo on a lot of this stuff, you know, looking at stuff locally rather they they say in one of their books that the the whole principle of international aid often seems to be we shouldn't do anything unless we can do everything. Well, actually do small things.

00:34:17 Greg Power

Most change tends to happen by things working in small spaces and expanding outwards and and developing from there. All of that, then, is underpinned going back to your question about what needs to change with aid agencies. Despite the progress that has been made over the last 20 years or so around political economy analysis from drivers have changed to the most recent iteration of PDIA and everything else. Aid agencies still don't get politics because politics is ultimately about power and politicians are in the business of winning power. A lot of the political economy stuff is very good now at understanding incentives. But ultimately, it's about power. Politics is about power, and that's the challenge. Ultimately, the the best protection from populism, from polarisation and the promotion of democracy, is having a cohort of progressive politicians who are good at politics and politics involves some stuff which aid agencies are still quite squeamish about because it is about a fight for power.

00:35:14 Greg Power

And that's, I think is the the big challenge there. And this is why I hesitated right at the beginning, whether any of this will will make a difference to the way that aid is delivered, but ultimately going back to one of your previous questions about the role of outside assistance at all. It it is down to the the politicians in that country to decide how change is going to happen. The job of outside assistance is is to enable and facilitate that change because ultimately, those are the people who will, as I said earlier, have to live with the consequences of any change.

00:35:43 Nic Cheeseman

So to give people a positive take home because we've talked a lot about the challenges, we talked a lot about how things are going wrong and it's also true as you know that you know aid agencies do a lot of good and there's a lot of, you know, very smart people trying to use these new ideas in them. Maybe you know, maybe we could end by an example you've seen in the last 5-10 years of where you think things worked really well and may actually we could see a combination of donors, you know, good advisors, you know, politicians in the country who wanted to constructively use that opportunity have actually, you know, created something that's lasted that was of real need.

00:36:16 Greg Power

I think the the the book contains a number of different examples. At this stage they all tend to be small, partly you know I'm trying to have an uplifting ending rather than sound, but part of the problem is the way that aid is delivered and also the book I should I should be very clear, the book is not about international assistance. The book is about how politicians think and how that offers us a new insight into the way that change happens and offers the prospect of a different approach to reform, and by extension, a different approach to to pushing for change. But you are seeing in a number of different countries, and I I touch on these examples in the book of politicians at the local level who are deliberately doing things differently, who are avoiding previous traps and getting away from that constant having to give people money in order to fix things today, but finding different ways of doing so from the example in Ghana where you know that such was the pressure on MPs to pay for hospital bills or pharmaceutical costs that they they were developing community hospitals. In Uganda a few years ago, there was an example where, you know, many listeners will will understand that President Museveni has been in power for a long time. And the NRM has been in power for a long time. A few years ago the, the when the budget was up for discussion members of his own party actively went against his orders and moved sections of the defence budget to the health budget to find a more strategic solution because they were having to pay for ambulances, as I said earlier.

00:37:42 Greg Power

And there's a whole series of these sorts of examples. The challenge is to take those. This is the think big act small. Take those examples of small change and turn them into things which have a wider, much wider impact, which can be replicated elsewhere. But more importantly, I think it's the principles which underpin the approach to political development and institutional change is it's about people rather the process there is still still a tendency, a preference for looking for procedural solutions to what are ultimately political and personal problems, and I think that's, that's where this work needs to go next.

00:38:17 Nic Cheeseman

Thanks, Greg. So quick final question, now that you've published this book and you know to considerable acclaim, you're tempted to write a follow up or is this going to be it for a little while?

00:38:29 Greg Power

Your your first question was you know, how did you find the time to do this and actually I thought I was probably talking to you about seven years ago about this book when it was first in my head. It's taking a while to come out. Yes, there there is lots of stuff here on which I'd like to build partly around again similar themes around around how politicians think and trying to unpack when political decisions are taken, why they are taken. What's going through the mind of the politician when they're behaving this way. The book is an attempt I mean, as you know having having read it. It sits between disciplines. It's it's, you know, partly about legislative studies. It's partly about International Development, partly about comparative politics, partly behavioural economics, partly change management. I think what I'd like to do next is bring some of the insights from behavioural science and from change management in the business world to International Development, because International Development has as as we've discussed has progressed a lot in the last 20-30 years, but it's still quite an insular field. There are lots of lessons and lots of parallels which could be brought from all different parts of the world and different disciplines which could make it more effective. So I think that's where that's where my head is heading next. So expect that book in a decades time.

00:39:38 Nic Cheeseman

Well, hopefully we'll be still going with the podcast and we’ll be able to interview you about it. I think that's that's exciting because I do think that one of the real, you know things I've learned over the years from a number of mentors, but also, you know, being in in places you know like Kenya and Zambia and Uganda, Malawi and trying to work out, you know what, what solutions might look like in different places for different problems is that they they come from the margins, right? They come from the intersection of different disciplines. You're not going to solve, you know, a major problem related to corruption or politics or representation looking at political science methods alone, you're going to have to bring in sociology ethnography, as you were talking about behavioral science norms, your business understanding, etcetera. It's that combination of different strategies.

00:40:22 Nic Cheeseman

Because the world is complicated, right? And it's messy. And actually if you try and solve it with one tool, it's a bit like trying to put up, you know, trying to decorate your entire house with a hammer. You you need the paintbrush. You need the spanner. You need the. And so I think that's one of the hardest things. Going back to what you were saying before, I think one of the things perhaps that, you know is is feasible for aid agencies, you know, understandably just to kind of, you know, to learn one new methodology, OK, political economy analysis or whatever it would be. But to then you know to then learn, OK, behavioral psychology, oh, change management. Uh, that that that becomes very difficult to to have multiple different methods that you're using at the same time. And so I think a book that kind of explains not only how we need all these different things but how we can use them coherently together. That would be a book that I'm sure will have just as big a a readership as this one.

00:41:11 Greg Power

I think I mean, I think the key thing underpinning everything you've said is understand the people you're working with, I mean and that that's at the root of all of those disciplines is ultimately understanding what motivates people, what matters to them and why are they doing what they're currently doing. And that that offers you a whole new way into solving problems rather than, as I said earlier, coming with pre packed solutions. Here you go. Here, here's your. Here's your answer to to that question and actually listening to to the question you are being asked and why it's being asked what sits behind that question. Genuinely fascinating area. I think there's lots and lots of fascinating work to be done in it.

00:41:48 Nic Cheeseman

Thanks Greg. Well thanks so much for talking to us today. Just to remind everyone, the book is Inside the Political Mind. It is available from all good book shops now and join us for our next episode of People Power Politics. Take care and see you soon.

00:41:59 Outro Jingle

Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics Podcast brought to you by CEDAR, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our centre and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.

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