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Editorial - Deborah Eade
This special issue on Development and the Learning Organisation has its origins in shared interests and serendipity. Laura Roper had submitted a paper to Development in Practice that reported on, and was itself an example of, academic-practitioner collaboration. She was clearly tapping into a very live issue, both for development agencies that seek to ground their work within a meaningful theoretical framework and get beyond the frenetic activism that so often drives them, and for academics eager to put their scholarship to some concrete use, and in so doing to deepen their understanding of development in practice. If collaborative research were truly mutual and multi-directional, the learning that resulted would contribute to lasting changes in working methods. Back in the 1980s, as opposite numbers in our respective agencies, Jethro Pettit and I would discuss issues arising from our work in Mexico and Central America, and reflect on how best to support democratic processes in the region, when most of our politically progressive counterpart organisations were far from democratic in their internal practices. Years later, we exchanged ideas on a similar concern, but from another angle. Jethro was by then at World Neighbors, nurturing a new Action Learning initiative that used participatory research to learn from programmes, improve practice, and influence policy. I was writing the chapter on capacity building and institutional learning for The Oxfam Handbook of Development and Relief, which Jethro reviewed. Something I recall in particular is his insistence that this approach was not about ‘scaling up’ the impact of an NGO’s work, but enhancing it; in other words, the emphasis should be on feeling the quality, not the width.
When I tentatively suggested to Jethro that he and Laura might jointly guest-edit an issue of the journal on development and learning, I little imagined that some such collaboration was something that they themselves had been discussing for some time. And so we embarked together on what has for all three of us been a rich learning process in its own right – not least because since we all live in different countries and all juggle the competing demands of work, children, and international travel, the sheer logistics of synchronising even our ‘virtual’ conversations, have been something of a challenge. But it has been a remarkable way to get to know and trust each other, and playing the role of midwife or comadre in bringing this project to fruition has been both a pleasure and a privilege.
Allow me, then, to introduce the true parents of this special issue of Development in Practice. Jethro Pettit works at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex as a member of the Participation Group. Before joining IDS, he served for seven years with World Neighbors in Oklahoma City, as director of international programmes and then as head of communication. Prior to this, Jethro was senior associate for Asia and Latin America at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights NGO, and was for five years Oxfam America’s representative for Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, based in Boston. Experienced in urban community development, social justice, environment, and peace movements in the USA and UK, Jethro studied Social Anthropology at Harvard, and also holds a BA in International Studies from the School for International Training in Vermont, and an MPhil in Development Studies from IDS.
Laura Roper has worked at Oxfam America since 1989, where she has held a range of senior posts, from being a key member of the team dealing with major foundation and corporate donors to heading the programme planning and learning unit, to serving as acting director of the global programme department. Laura’s work and publications have been characterised by her deep involvement in research and evaluation, and her experience in managing inter-institutional and multi-stakeholder projects of various kinds. Her recent focus has been on developing skills in participatory planning methodologies, facilitation, and mediation - all with the end of creating group settings in which to draw out and explore tacit knowledge, generate new ideas, and bring underlying assumptions and conflicts to the surface. Prior to joining Oxfam America, Laura worked for several years at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. She holds a degree in History from the University of Arizona, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught Latin American Politics.
Clearly, both Jethro and Laura have always been professionally committed to encouraging their organisations to learn. But why should learning be so important to development agencies? One obvious answer is that we should not be wasting our resources on re-inventing the wheel. Of course, every situation is unique, but not to the extent that we cannot draw on our own and others’ experience to inform what we do. To pretend otherwise, in what a former colleague referred to as ‘the fingerprint syndrome’ (1), is also to imply both that development agencies live only in the present, and that they are conceited enough to imagine that they can do it all themselves.
Second, we know that once a person loses the willingness or ability to learn, then senility is probably not far around the corner. Similarly, a development NGO that rests on its laurels or is stuck in its ways is likely to die on its feet, possibly continuing to limp on, but bereft of the energy and originality of its youth. On the other hand, an agency that repeatedly restructures itself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the Joneses is more than likely to lose contact with its past, and to end up suffering a form of institutional Alzheimer’s, reliant on others to be the guardian of its memory. On the other hand, while all creatures are born with the capacity to learn, our early years are very much about learning how to learn – not so much in the obvious sense of acquiring the building blocks of knowledge and the skills to use them, but how to tune in to what is relevant, what truly matters to us, while maintaining a sufficiently open mind to question received opinions and assumptions. A development agency also needs to learn how to learn, and to be willing to learn from many different sources, while also having a sure sense of its own values and raison d’être. Undirected change is the organisational equivalent of adolescent experimentation and mood swings, a tendency to respond to the trivial and the profound with equal intensity. By contrast, learning makes it possible for us to make conscious change as opposed to merely mouthing the latest development discourse, or falling for yet another management fad. The need for change is often recognised, but is also often resisted – hence, presumably, the new breed of ‘change management’ consultants to help guide the process and keep it moving.
Where change that is based on learning takes place, then new knowledge and energy are created, which in turn make deeper transformation and learning possible. And this learning is most likely to happen, as many of the contributors show, in the intersections between different layers or sets of actors right across the development spectrum. It is where diverse communities come together and find ways to interrelate, whether learning new skills or deferring to the other’s greater competence. It is about developing hybrid forms of knowledge and communication, rather than believing that any one player or discipline or culture has a monopoly over the truth, or, in the development context, that ‘development professionals’ necessarily have a deep or sensitive understanding of the complex issues with which they are grappling. International development agencies par excellence ought to be in a privileged position as learning organisations, precisely because they work across different cultural divides and operate in ambiguous multi-stakeholder environments. And since this kind of intersectionality is precisely what characterises Development in Practice, the journal is an ideal forum in which to explore the theoretical and practical questions this poses.
Notes
1 Bridget Walker used this metaphor in her role as a Gender Adviser in Oxfam GB.
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