Multivocal Brokering: Translating and Decoupling for Results

Translation

As used here, translation refers to the process where aid organizations and their aid bureaucrats neither merely “adopt” requirements and results, nor “passively pass them on” to the next organization in the aid network but rather adjust or “edit” the requirements and communication for a better “fit” with particular situations and local conditions. In their study of how ideas “travel,” Czarniawska and Sevón (1996) formulated an influential theory on “translation of organizational change” and demonstrated that organizations do not blindly follow just any rule or requirement from their institutional environment but rather respond to the rule or requirement actively by “translating” and “editing” them to fit the interests, culture, and conditions of the organization (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996).

As demonstrated by Erlingsdóttir (1999), the form an idea takes or how it is “packaged” also matters to its chances to travel. If an idea is packaged as a rule, i.e., a written instruction for action with a known sender, it is easier to copy, which may increase its chances of traveling fast and intact over vast distances (see also Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000). There is, however, no guarantee that rule-following will occur as intended by the rule-setters since the rule-followers then also have the opportunity to translate and edit rules intended for them.

In line with our discussion in Chapter 3, an important part of successful brokering is the ability to change roles, to go from one logic and situation to another, and to play the game according to a variety of rules. In the translation process, aid bureaucrats can find opportunities that support the combining and aligning of different values or compensating or adjusting for values that they fear might otherwise be “lost in translation.” Bierschenk et al. (2002) argues along similar lines that a key to brokering is in-depth knowledge of the actors of the different “universa” in the aid system. This in-depth knowledge is typical of persons who have, over time, earned a “double membership” (feeling and acting at home in multiple roles and at multiple sites). ²

One example of “double membership” is having knowledge or previous personal experience of another institutional domain. This type of knowledge should, at least logically, have become increasingly important in the field of development aid since contemporary aid policies commonly state that aid projects are to be solved in multistakeholder settings calling for the inclusion of the private sector, public sector agencies, the research community, and civil society. One of our interviewees, who at the time of the interview worked as an aid bureaucrat at Sida but who had previously worked in the private sector, claimed that it would not have been possible for her to set up a multistakeholder project without her previous experience of how the private sector operates:

I don't think it would have been possible for me if I hadn't had this … experience there in between the [agency] experiences. I wouldn't have been able to understand it in-depth, I wouldn't have been able to do it without that experience. I don’t think so. [I mean] understand how the business world thinks and how we think about them.

Our interviewee from the Kommunal union also spoke about the importance of balancing her presence in- and representation of the “project world” and the “donor world,” in order to do a good job:

… I also feel that I had so much [experience] … that it was really valuable to have been a union chair before, because in that role I was constantly defending myself from influences. That is, defending [against them] and yielding [to them]. After all, you have to let yourself be influenced too. But I know that people try to fool me and manipulate me to get me in the direction they want. I’m a power factor in that role, so I’ve learned pretty well how to filter it and get to know what people want, and what the purpose is, and where things are headed. And I use that a lot in my role […] For instance, local union reps in particular can say straight out: “But we need a car, S. Can’t you get us one?” [And I just say] “No, I can’t do that. But we can work more with the women’s committees that you have.”

The citation exemplifies that brokering requires a lot of experience and an awareness of what one can or can't do in a particular role and context. We find that it is often the experienced aid bureaucrats who possess this competence to “navigate by judgment” (Honig, 2018), charting a path between formal and informal ways of coordinating aid projects. Along similar lines, an aid bureaucrat at Sida told us that time spent on getting to know the local context is a definite success factor for projects:

I spent so much time on just getting them to understand one another. That is, because the more I know, the more I want it to work. So I kind of… [in those situations] I’m not acting like a traditional client, placing an order. And I think it’s a really great principle [to be able to depart from the traditional role at times]. But it takes a lot of time, and a lot of engagement. If I hadn’t cared about it, it wouldn’t have worked out.

Thus, becoming an efficient broker-translator requires time, willingness, courage, and engagement to learn about the others and the particular contexts at hand.

Decoupling

The second pragmatic response of decoupling refers to the practice of superficially abiding by requirements, for example, by adopting new legitimizing structures or administrative processes (see Chapter 5), without necessarily implementing them in local practice as intended at the central level (Boxenbaum & Jonsson 2008; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). As discussed in the historic account in Chapter 4, Sida aid officials have often agreed to general results initiatives and management technologies in vogue at the time, without always applying them in practice.

Decoupling has been explained as a common way for organizations with complex missions to secure legitimacy from their social environment by adopting widely acclaimed structures and processes as “myths and ceremonies” in the organization (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). And when there is no fit between these general structures and processes and the local conditions for efficient operations, a pragmatic solution is for organizations to “decouple” their legitimate façade from the local particularities of their inner order (see also Oliver, 1991). In this way, organizations can secure both legitimacy at a distance and operational efficiency, while protecting efficient local variation (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Bierschenk et al. (2002) refers to this approach as “scenographic competence” and discusses how every aid project needs a “show window” likely to “entice the potential donor, and to delight the evaluation experts” (p. 22).

In our data, we have found several examples where new results requirements have been completely decoupled from operations. One such example concerns a project implemented by KEMI and the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The project in question received the evaluation critique that it was reporting on too many achievements but not in relation to the logical framework presented in the initial project document, which the evaluators saw as a key criterion for understanding the results of the project. Responding to this critique, the organization in the recipient role chose to revise the targets. But when asked whether the revised targets had actually changed anything in the actual work “on the ground,” the respondent confessed that it had not:

No, not really, because I think we actually … The design of the project itself was adequate and good enough to be able to contribute to the sort of outcomes that we intended to work towards anyway, so …

This type of decoupling, obeying the rules and requirements of reporting superficially, without changing anything in actual practice, is a pragmatic response that we have noted in several cases. In an anecdote about the Swedish Association for Sexual Education's (RFSU's) role as a donor to local African associations, the goal was that these local associations, in the spirit of RFSU, would work toward a more open and well-informed approach to sex. It soon became apparent that the local association needed financial contributions from many different sources to keep its activities afloat, including from local religious organizations. Although these local funders shared RFSU's desire to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions, the local religious associations had a completely different idea of how this should be achieved. So, when RFSU's controller came to visit to evaluate the project, she was greeted by a large poster with the text: “Abstinence!” According to the anecdote, the experienced controller visiting from RFSU nodded discreetly toward the poster and asked for directions to the ladies' room. When she returned, the right poster was in place, the one with RFSU's message: “Always use a condom!” The controller explained that:

[As a donor], you have to understand that if an organization [in the recipient role] somewhere in Africa gets grants from us at RFSU, they maybe get grants from some local church as well. Yeah, they get grants from different places. So, when RFSU comes, the signs that promote condom use go up. And when the local priest comes around, it’s abstinence that’s up on the wall. But if they’re unlucky, they haven’t had time to take down the first poster when the other donor comes to visit. Quite a dilemma!

The RFSU story is a rather amusing one but also illustrates something important: decoupling may even be a prerequisite for survival. As the case also shows, a qualitative evaluation of goal achievements needs to take local conditions into account. And in order for this to happen, an understanding of those conditions is a prerequisite. Respect and trust in the relationship between rule-setter and rule-followers is vital, and representatives in the donor role who only consider their own formal requirements can raise the risk of suboptimization.

The RFSU example further indicates that attitudes toward management by objectives and results can be expected to be influenced by the bureaucrat's own social role (see also Chapter 3). When playing the part of donor (goal-setter and result-evaluator), it is easy to wish for more detailed follow-up reports and to think that that is what promotes quality and learning. When, on the other hand, an aid bureaucrat finds her/himself in the recipient role (being targeted and evaluated), one is more likely to find governance unnecessarily detailed and controlling, and perhaps even see it as an expression of distrust.

However, important to our purposes here is the fact that a person who has been in both roles and places and understands the system as a whole, like the controller from RFSU, has a better chance of acting more pragmatically as a broker and laying the groundwork for an honest broker dialogue about opportunities to balance formal requirements with characteristics and conditions of the local practice. For example, in our interviews with managers and controllers at RFSU, several people in both of these positions used the metaphor of a “fruit salad” when talking about the relation between their operations and their pragmatic approach to results reporting. As one of the managers explained:

We try to keep up the good, long-term operations that we believe in. If we liken these operations to a fruit salad, it’s then often the case that donor A wishes to know all about the bananas, only the bananas, while donor B may think that kiwis and oranges are important. So, we’re pragmatic and adjust our reporting according to their interests, though we try as far as possible to keep the same fruit salad, so to speak.

And not only persons in the donor and recipient roles take on brokering. Several of the RBM consultants hired by Sida that we interviewed similarly also explained how important they thought it was, and has been over the years, to strengthen aid organizations' understanding of what is at stake if they merely “blindly obey” and don't speak out against “stupid rules that don't fit.” In one of our earlier interviews from 2013, one of these consultants explains how a lack of multivocal competence, further worsened by Sida bureaucrats' own wish to obediently comply with in their recipient role (in relation to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs), puts pressure on the whole system to conform:

My impression is that it has often taken several back-and-forths, since there is often a language barrier between the Sida program officer and the so-called “implementer”, which is often a Swedish organization but can also be an international one. They simply don’t speak the same language and don’t understand each other. And then, we step in as translators essentially, and then you have to sit down [and talk about it]. The Sida program officer could maybe do this, but they don’t have that time. So then we [the consultants] have to sit down and talk about that this is what they [Sida] really mean, it’s not as complicated as [the recipient representatives] seem to think when they receive the matrix […] As a whole, it feels like Sida has received a mandate from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and that the Ministry for Foreign Affairs drives the results agenda and Sida falls in line and tries to come up with something that they push out to their program officers, who then push it out to the partner organizations. But the partner organizations may have a different methodology and different ideas, and there we see a tension, and this is where we [consultants] try to figure out a way… like we end up with this smash-up and we try to find practical ways to untangle it.

The external consultants also told us a lot about the dilemma they experience when they are contracted to validate Sida's requirements but have gained enough local knowledge to realize that these requirements both can and should be adjusted to the local conditions. In one interview, we discussed when and how measurements become counterproductive, and one RBM consultant told us that, contrary to intuition, increased measurement frenzies often come from organizations in the recipient role, rather than from organizations in the donor role:

Often it’s the partners who want more measurements… or are more inflexible and think they have to do it in a certain way. And that’s where we come in and explain: “No, but you don’t have to, it’s changed [the rules], these are the things you need to look at.” I think that’s more common. They think that Sida is a certain way when they’re not…

It could also be the case that the demand for more measurements (than are actually necessary) stems from a lack of knowledge or interest in measurement techniques and a belief that it is simply easier to “do the right thing” and to follow the social scripts for “how you do aid” – to cover all bases by wearing both suspenders and a belt (see Chapters 3–5):

I would say that there are very few who do it because they believe in measurements. I would say that no one really does. It’s more that people believe that this is how you do aid. You need a matrix and you have to follow up. […] So quite a few times, I’ve heard the partner organization we’re working with say: “We have to do this, that’s what Sida says." And then I say: “No, you don’t have to.” And then I get: “Yes, that’s what they say.” And then they refer to a program officer and say: “Yes, it has to be done.” And then what happens is I’ve had to participate in an annual meeting or in a dialogue meeting or something, and then I’m contracted to help out and become sort of a Dr. Phil between the two, and explain who is who and which rules apply.

This citation shows that partners often end up guessing what Sida representatives really require, often due to a lack of direct dialogue with them. In an attempt to somehow compensate for this deficiency, external consultants are called in to broker the relationship. The external expert quoted above is clearly very confident in his knowledge of the rules and regulations and of how they should be interpreted locally, at the partner organization. But external consultants in a brokering position like this can also create a dilemma, in that the consultants need to use their judgment, courage and relational capital (Bierschenk et al., 2002) to avoid creating distrust or disappointment in any of the parties. As one consultant explains:

Even if Sida is footing the bill, our primary task is to support the partner. But Sida is often inquisitive, which can sometimes lead to a dilemma. This happened to me the other day. You have a certain trust relation with the partner organization to be able to do your job properly. They need to be able to trust that we won't run to Sida and tattle on them. […] But we can also understand that Sida shows an interest, and rightly so, after all they’re the ones who are paying.

The consultants also discussed the need to stay true to their values and their belief in the need for implementing rules in a flexible manner and making adjustments for local needs and conditions. One consultant commented that trying to manage, communicate, and sustain in relation to the “main client,” Sida, was indeed an art since such a flexible approach cannot be packaged neatly:

As soon as we start to get too packaged or say “this is the method we prefer,” then it’s no longer good. […] I don’t want to find our model tucked away in some drawer four years from now. You don’t want to find a damn model. It should… you want to see that something happened [on the ground] … call it what you want. And that actually takes courage, I think, to not just spout methods jargon, but to ask questions like: “Are we doing the right things?” It can be just that simple.

Decisions to increase reporting requirements are often made on an individual basis by an aid bureaucrat at the organization in the donor role. This means that there can be a decoupling also internally at the donor organization, due to the fact that the decision-making capacity is delegated to the different positions and hierarchical levels. This can go either way. If the donor organization takes a central decision to strengthen its approach to control and measurement vis-à-vis recipients, individual aid bureaucrats in the donor organization may decouple to allow for a more flexible approach. However, it can also be the case where a central decision taken in the donor organization to ease the requirements is not followed as intended by the organization's own bureaucrats who want a stricter approach. One study on partners' experiences of their interaction with Sida stated that central decisions on increased flexibility around requirements had “not been a blessing for all partner organizations” (Gouzou et al., 2018). That study described how the lack of clarity often created confusion and more work for the partners. Several of our respondents talked about their experiences of such unclarity or confusion about whether Sida – as represented by one's particular program officer – would require a certain results technology or not. To add further nuance, one of our respondents observed that the frequent staff changes seemed to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in measurement requirements (despite formal central decisions to the contrary):

This may have to do with the fact that when you don't have clear directives on what the expectations for follow-up are, it all depends on the individual program officer handling your project. And that officer is often replaced over the implementation period. I’ve also experienced that – where Sida-funded projects have started out with one set of requirements and then at the end these have changed. Sometimes they’ve become less strict and more flexible, but other times they’ve become more complex and difficult, with higher requirements. And this is a difficult situation for the implementing organization too.

This respondent also reasoned that someone new on the job, who lacked brokering competency and was hence unsure about how much leeway there was for interpreting a central policy, may prefer to take a stricter line, following the reasoning of “better safe than sorry.” In such cases, measurements can increase.

When it comes to decoupling, as discussed in Chapter 5, it is also important to note that, since external evaluators often relate to “proper organization proxies” such as the logical framework and RBM practices, organizations in the recipient role often simply need to adapt to these practices, at least “in principle” and “on the surface.” This institutional pressure has forced many organizations to employ cadres of staff whose only task is to get reporting and procedures right to meet the required “proper organization” standard. Some decades ago, the professional label of “monitoring evaluation and learning” (MEL) officer did not even exist. Today, hardly any aid organization can operate without one.