Why Capable People and Good Intentions Fail in Fragile States

Published on: Wed Oct 11 2023 by Charlie Goldsmith

Ink and Incapability in FCAS governments: or where there are many personally capable people, why do things sometimes just not seem to work?

Blackadder capacity, Baldrick-quality outcomes

A while ago, we wrote about the correlation, but not equivalence, between capacity (in principle), capability (in practice) and performance (actual outturn): https://www.abyrint.com/capacity-capability-performance/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CCapacity%E2%80%9D%20refers%20to%20what%20a,his%20or%20hers%20daily%20environment.

This difference is not a new observation:

• almost 2000 years ago, the ever-catty Tacitus dissed Emperor Galba (successor of Nero, and one of the eponymous participants of the Year of the Four Emperors) as “omnium consensus capax imperii, nisi imperasset” ≈ “everyone [would have] agreed he would make a great ruler, had he not been put in charge”
• A year ago, the UK saw Dr Kwasi Kwarteng, quiz champ, general public intellectual and literal author of the book on how not to undermine the value of your currency, when made Chancellor (finance minister), sack his most senior official on arrival, and put Sterling in the toilet some days later

As in the original “Ink and Incapability”, having Blackadder-quality capacity on tap does not always avoid Baldrick-quality outcomes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfZRwILOJFE

Good people, poor outcomes, FCAS edition

In Fragile States, we often see that it is not a lack of capable people in fragile state governments, but rather a lack of some kind of corporate institutional strength that would enable these capable people to translate good intentions and considerable personal qualities into good outcomes.

We also see the term ‘capacity development’ used, particularly by global North institutions, in a narrow way, with solutions proposed being workshops and training, which are in fact not what are needed.

For example, many of the Somali official counterparts that we work with would do just fine working in responsible roles in Global North local government; yet if you placed a reasonable person currently working in one of those roles in a Global South ministry, they would in no way succeed.

So this article tries to briefly look at:

• precisely what the missing ingredients are, whose absence leads to capacity, capability and will not consistently resulting in output performance
• if any of them can realistically be changed through technical assistance/globaldev engagement?

To keep things manageable, we’ve focused here on where capability exists but is frustrated, and left for another day those situations where capability is devoted to active obstruction, rent-seeking etc.

A. The missing ingredients

1. If the fish has rotted from the head too much, it is difficult to keep the fins and gills working well

If, as in South Sudan, you have set up a Treasury Single Account and then resources from it have been used for purposes other than those budgeted, no amount of personal qualities downstream can easily turn that around.

If, also as in South Sudan, there has been reluctance at the centre to enforce the conditions on which resources are provided downstream, then the rest of the system will take its cue from that: rectify the incentives, and good civil service work may be able to have its day.

Fortunately, the converse is also true, ethos, mathos and pathos and all that, and an example is the considerable resources and energy injected into the Sierra Leone education sector by President Bio and Minister (now Chief Minister) Sengeh, with 22% of government spend going to education and well-used, school fees remitted, and massive enrolment increase: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/23/sierra-leones-president-defends-large-education-budget-as-necessary-risk.

The problem for externals is that, qv Akerlof on “The Market for Lemons”, some of the finest pro-education and anti-corruption rhetoric comes from the most inveterate crooks – so you need to be quite discerning, over an extended period, in judging the quality of fish head you are dealing with – see below.

2. ‘Bad money drives out good’

When there are lots of people on payroll for a variety of reasons, not all of them related to the institution’s stated output, pay rates tend to stay low, reflecting, you might say, the output of the median staffer, not the output of the average, which is pulled up by the stronger achievers.

That means that pay does not incentivise capable people to stay – particularly if they are not supplementing it with the informal earnings opportunities that may be on offer for the less scrupulous. Instead, they are drawn towards the organisations that are willing to pay for capable people – NGOs and donors – who may then be sent back to build the capacity of their former, less promising, colleagues.

3. Basic operations unfunded

A key inhibitor of capable people’s output is having the skills and will, but not the basic operational conditions, to be able to prioritise appropriately, and be effective. Insufficient remuneration means you prioritise the tasks that will win you a per diem/DSA/sitting allowance from an external party over the tasks that are fundamental. You lack paper to put in the printer, fuel to put in the motorbike to go and inspect a school or clinic – or you ask the school or clinic being inspected to pay for the privilege, which kinda changes the dynamic.

The issue of per diem/DSA/sitting allowance culture is one that is persistent, disruptive and brings together this and the previous point – see e.g. https://www.u4.no/publications/benefits-and-drawbacks-of-per-diems-do-allowances-distort-good-governance-in-the-health-sector. Few would begrudge officials coverage of reasonable costs of off-site activities. But per diem culture creates incentives:

• For partners to outbid each other, and/or monopolise government colleagues, to progress their respective priorities; one multilateral agency has a particular reputation in this area
• For delay: another ‘séance de validation’ (DRC), another offsite, another conference in a town 1km over the distance from the capital that scores you an overnight per diem
• To over-inspect, and over-manage – when there is money in travelling, and no money in staying on seat, ill-paid seniors end up going on otiose, even counter-productive, monitoring trips

In Malawi, this issue has lasted a good 25 years, despite regular attempts by government and partners to fix its symptoms…

4. How do the incentives to fix, or admire, the problem, balance?

For some international partners, particularly humanitarian-focused agencies, headline numbers of those missing out on education or healthcare are useful for fundraising; the incentives to identify, document and lament the problem are more direct and quick-acting than those to fix it.

Similarly, Moral Hazard around well-meant support is convenient for some governments – as in the context of the recent Syria earthquake response.

B. Ways partners can help

1. An ongoing supportive relationship with reform actors

Money…

Reformers have significantly more clout if they can leverage, and be seen to leverage, additional resources: this can require a measure of agility from funders, because it means adapting your programming choices to the opportunities from time to time, rather than just getting four years’ of programming, to your own Ministers’ priorities, and through to the end of your own parliamentary cycle, booked in.

The converse is also true, and even trickier: if the host government won’t fund a sector or a geographical region, how do you respond without giving them a free ride? There are no good answers to this question, but a whole range of examples of the problem from across East Africa.

…and love

Some international partners rotate their staffing, particularly in FCAS places, at tremendous pace. They do themselves a disservice, by constantly reimposing ignorance upon themselves (as the White Review https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/220506/review_fincrisis_response_290312.pdf pointed out re HM Treasury in the UK more than a decade ago); but also a disservice to host government counterparts, who have a whole new raft of stakeholders to bring up to speed and engage with.

Others, notably Irish Aid, sustain staffing for longer (as @RoryStewart, among others, has pushed the UK to do), and/or make arrangements for rotating staff location that keep relationships intact (eg Medair, an NGO, which, for key FCAS places, has rotated the HQs desk officer and in-country Country Director roles, to retain knowledge without burning people out).

TLDR, if change champions and actors are as important to you, the international partner, as you claim they are, then it will be proportionate to invest in sustaining your relationship with them.

2. Paying to retain key talent; well-designed transition funds to clear the ‘wooden ceiling’

In some contexts – Somalia and Ghana being two examples – externals have funded key talent to remain in place, with remuneration rather closer to their market value: clearly, there’s fun and games on both Moral Hazard and Principal-Agent things to think about there, and it gets more complicated in a multi-partner context. Scholarship schemes have their place – Irish Aid is particularly thoughtful about them.

Indian Railways has run a number of ‘voluntary retirement scheme’ interventions (the current one as the complement to a soi-disant “Perform or Perish” policy) over the years to offer – or in practice impose – retirement on those making up a ‘wooden ceiling’, so as to allow higher performers to progress.

Clearly, the challenges of such funds include to ensure that you don’t lose your better performers, and that the scheme does not result in those who may have already eaten a lot getting excessively generous terms to return to the village.

3. Making good people’s lives easier: tools that neither break, run out of consumeables, nor walk off

Further to the basic operations point, one thing that does consistently seem to help capable people achieve is providing tools to make their lives less annoying: connectivity they can rely on, a laptop that isn’t virus-ridden, being able to print without having to go to a shop, solar on the office roof so they can charge their laptop and phone, a motorbike. Thinking around the point that always comes up about the sustainability of systems that need a credit card to sustain hosting etc, perhaps there are things that can be done in terms of:

• Hosting and tech arrangements that overcome the Tragedy of the Commons for the medium term – system hosted, licences paid for x years forward, open source in some cases
• The new world of virtual credit cards
• Tech hubs
• Funding communication and mobility services – eg direct top-up of bundles, a funded account on SafeBoda or its equivalent – rather than buying vehicles that get appropriated by Big People to go to matebetos and funeral, important as those are

C. Conclusion: Another Country

Like Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, when you get going on this topic, you quickly find you’ve written a lot and still missed out basics like “Sausage” and “Aardvark”. There are many reasons, all over the world, why capability does not always translate to outcomes, and many of them not readily understood or engaged on by those outside the system in question: the longer, and more empathetically you engage, the more you will see, and perhaps sometimes be able to contribute.