Do attitude changes using ABCD last?

Ian Cunningham
Ian Cunningham
@ian-cunningham
8 years ago
11 posts

My first posting and a possibly provocative discussion question.

I am in the process of PhD research focusing on ABCD particularly in the context of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects in emerging nations in particular. The WASH sector is quite self-reflective and constantly grappling with how to make change stick. Albeit often looking to technology, process etc rather than a human focus.

My 'lens' at the moment for looking at ABCD mainly revolves around power, how ABCD process is both a standpoint from which power is 'awakened/revealed' in us from which point action/change happens.

There is plenty of excellent practice based tools and manuals on ABCD although there is frustratingly little peer reviewed literature. Amongst the practice material and some of the academic material there are many inspiring case studies of change, innovation, enterprise etc that has come from ABCD. I am interested in research that examines how changes facilitated by ABCD lasts (or not). Do attitudinal changes sustain and continue to support existing and new outcomes in other areas 5 years later, 10 years later etc? Do the "I can" attitudes nurtured by facilitators continue?

How does the shift in power translate to other changes in well-being longer term?

Case studies are useful but for the purpose of the PhD at least some peer reviewed literature is also needed.


updated by @ian-cunningham: 10/24/16 05:49:29PM
John Hamerlinck
John Hamerlinck
@john-hamerlinck
8 years ago
50 posts

Hi Ian. I have spent time in the sometimes uneasy intersection of ABCD and higher education. Here are two quick, initial reactions to your query.

  1. ABCD is not intended as a strategy for the self-actualization of community members. ABCD is about organizing communities to lock arms, and get things done. The goal isnt permanently fixing peoples attitudes, or dispositions.
  2. Peer review is based on an expert model. It is almost the antithesis of ABCD the wisdom of the few having primacy over the wisdom of amateurs. The evaluation that matters is that of the folks who decided to organize, and produce a better future. Look at the literature around the problems with peer review, and you may find insights into your current dilemma.
Ian Cunningham
Ian Cunningham
@ian-cunningham
8 years ago
11 posts

Hi John

Many thanks for your reply, useful and thought provoking.

I am still pondering your first point, I'll reply to that later.

On the second point. I have my own (not very positive) thoughts on the restricted access of academic literature. I understand the contradiction between an expert model vs the philosophy of ABCD. There is some (but very useful) literature out there including Alison Mathie's write up of anevaluation that was completed by the community in question. It's a great article but one of the few that is around in journals.

There seems to be minimal critical review or ABCD or analysis. I have advocated for the approach and use ABCD a lot, train others in it.... but find there is a level of reflection in how or why the process is working (or when it has not) that is not documented. At least I haven't found much on it!

Regards,

Ian

David Week
David Week
@david-week
8 years ago
4 posts

Hi Ian

First, I've done international development work since 1980, so know something of where you're coming from.

I agree with some of John Hamerlinck's comments. ABCD is not about getting communities to do stuff decided by outside experts, but rather but rather enabling (or halt the disabling) of communities to set their own agendas, and then mobilise their own resources to get things done.

I'm not sure I agree with John's categorisation of ABCD as an "antithesis" of expert or institutional programs. There's a certain strand within ABCD which I think is hazardous is to become anti-institutional. (I'll save that argument for another time.) But I think institutions do valuable jobs, which can't be done well in other ways.

Possible implications for WASH:

The concern that McKnight and Kretzmann raised is that institutions have acquired some dysfunctions in the way that they operate with respect to communities, which can be summarised as: (a) they disempower communities, rather than empower them, (b) they see communities as collections of deficits, rather than as sources of knowledge, insight and power. These attitudes are driven by the economics of professionalism, which legitimises professional incomes through the marketing messages "we know better than you", and "you need us". A good text here is "Professionalised Service and Disabling Help", by John McKnight. Also, "Politicising Health Care".

In addition, there is a major critique of aid programming by A. O. Hirschmann which interlocks nicely with ABCD, which is that aid programs target weaknesses through "needs analysis". I read this in David Ellerman's Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Ellerman is a former WB economist. Hirschmann (whom you should explore further, BTW) suggests that they main reason for a community's weaknesses are that they are not really that collectively that interested in them. However, if offers of funding come, they will go along with it and take the cash and/or employment and/or benefits. So aid programs end up bribing communities to do the things that in fact that are what the aid program want done. This is not sustainable.

So the promise for WASH programs of this kind of analysis is that by getting rid of the dysfunction, WASH programs can achieve more of what they want to see (though over time, that will require changing their goals

So, what's the alternative to "we know what you need", and "you need us."?

One alternative is to see that WASH programs also have needs, which they need to have met. Thoughagencies no doubt believe that WASH is good, WASHagencies also have a great "need" to get WASH done. If you're a WASH organisation, you need to get WASH done, or you're out of job. It's a livelihood need. McKnight (who points this out) says that there's nothing wrong with this. But we have to approach the relationship between professionals and communities without covering this up. Objectively, there are TWO sets of needs in any program encounter with a community. The first, is the perceived needs of the community, and this should be voiced by the community, through their own internal institutions andsources of knowledge. And then there are the needs of the donor/agency/program to get more WASH done. Let's not conflate the two.

From this standpoint of equality and transparency, we can proceed differently.

1. What Hirschmann suggests is that rather than look for deficiencies and attempt to fund them, programs look at community strengths, and what groups within community really wants to do, and find areas of potential alignment. Then there's the space to negotiate a common program. This requires that a WASH program be more flexible (and humble) in its approach to communities, which involves developing an open dialogue about what the community concerns and goals are, and seeing how the WASH programs internal requirements and goals can be aligned to them to the benefit of both. It suggests that conventional expert-driven design and implementation are going to bump up against limits.

2. Programs might need to drop the marketing spiel that they are there for the good of the community, and accept that within the boundaries of the community, the community is sovereign, and they and only they get to say what is a community benefit. After all, they live with the consequences. So, the interaction needs to be negotiated not as a delivery of good from one party to another, but as an exchange. THEY get something they want and need, from their perspective (not, notably, something that we have decided is good for them), WE get something that we want and need, which is a successful WASH program, including all those conditions that we have worked out satisfy our need to be convinced that it is indeed good for them.

Note: this may seem like a torturous way to speak, but its important in the interaction between you and me, say, to distinguish between what I think is good for you, what you think is good for you, and not have them obscured in the agentless phrase: What IS good for you, which is objectively meaningless. It's interesting to see how the Western medical profession has evolved in this light, as it now common to insist on free and prior informed consent (FPIC) prior to any medical act. FPIC has also been adopted in one standard (some want weaker standards) in resource projects involving indigenous communities. FPIC is a legal standard for the validity of contracts, but might be useful in thinking about better program-community negotiations and relationships.

3. Programs, in seeing communities as co-equal program developers and implementers, need to learn to treat them as also possessing critical expertise, which has to be respected. This might not include pipe diameters, water treatment procedures, or knowing the relative germicidal properties of various soap products, but it almost certainly includes questions of community resources, priorities, relationships, social complexity, and politics. (Looking at this list, one has to ask: which is the higher expertise? In my mind, not the bit about pipes or soap.) This is knowledge is not there to be mobilised in the program's interests. But by sharing knowledge between program and community, the idea is to enable both parties to achieve their own separate goals.

Note: What I called the "marketing spiel" of professionals (and I am one) are often fully internalised by professionals themselves. You can get a visceral reaction to the suggestion that communities need WASH, or that WASH is good for communities. This gets inculcated in professional training and culture from the get-go. But more objective view is that any professional service can have negative side-effects, such as distracting the community from more important tasks, conditioning them to be service recipients from aid organisations, shifting power and privilege in ways that cannot be understood or predicted by outsiders, impacting overall social processes of which WASH activities are a part (the breakdown of communal communications when wells are replaced by pipes come to mind), and I think ABCD requires professionals to internalise the clients right to say no: and even more difficult, that when they say no, that is is the "right" answer because human autonomy is a deeper (Western) valuethan following technical rationality. Ultimately, good health is good because it enables me to have more control over my life than does ill health.

Thanks for helping me write a future blog post.

Hope this helps.








John Hamerlinck
John Hamerlinck
@john-hamerlinck
8 years ago
50 posts

Let me clarify. My point about experts was not to diminish the value of institutions, and the wealth of assets that they bring to the table. The production of goods and services (the primary role of institutions) is a critical function in the day-to-day life of communities, and can contribute greatly to the strategies communities create to address the challenges that they face.

My point was to call attention to the frequent disconnect between the goals of academia and academic practitioners (and other expert consultants), to the goals of communities. Pure research around the periphery of an issue, or validation of activities and outcomes by an outside entity, is only important if it is community-based participatory research, where the folks organizing on the ground have created the research agenda, and have a plan for its use to support community goals.

Ian Cunningham
Ian Cunningham
@ian-cunningham
8 years ago
11 posts

I am really enjoying the discussion and thanks for your lengthy and very interesting reply David, I'll check out those references.

Just to clarify to both John and David I wasn't suggesting that ABCD is about experts getting community to do what they want. As you suggested David that is the 'wrongness' associated with many International Development projects and will form a big part of my PhD.

I wanted to revisit the point on attitude changes through ABCD. Perhaps it is a language issue (what I call an attitude), but when I have used ABCD approaches for myself and seen them in action they bring hope and possibility (attitudes) and action too of course. I would call this "hope" an attitude change that is part of ABCD and is part of a community moving towards their aspirations (the action component).

I've read some interesting evaluations/thesis which focus on attitudes of defeatedness and neediness, one of the negative legacies propagated by "Development" work as you highlighted David. And ABCD has been used to turn those attitudes around at least initially and resulted in an organised community that gets things done". I would see attitude change as part of the theory of change of ABCD.

Thoughts?

David Week
David Week
@david-week
8 years ago
4 posts

Hi Ian. Glad to see we're on the same page.

Cormac Russell calls ABCD a "lens" rather than a methodology, and I think so to. It's a way of seeing communities, out of which may come a whole range of outcomes.

Re attitudes of "neediness". I'm wary, again about any form of characterisation of poor communities as deficient, even if it lays the blame on us. Nor do I think its our job to turn poor communities around. I see it as follows:

1. Poor communities are (in general) very hardworking and astute. They have to be, in order to survive. We rich folk have the option of being lazy. We don't.

2. ABCD should not be used by professionals as a way of changing communities, but of changing institutions, including the institution of professionalism. ABCD might be used by communities to change themselves, but that's something different. This seems to me to be basic. It seems to me that in all the McKnight stories, the communities acted on their own motives, without benefit from outsiders.

3. All evidence is subject to interpretation, and there are ways of interpreting evidence "neediness". I was on project in Laos, and the government was saying that the communities were incapable of building good schools. We went to a village, and there was a school built by a community, and it was indeed leaning, and poorly built, and leaking. The government said: look, see? So I went wandering through the village and saw many houses that were strong and upright and well-built. So I said this isn't evidence of the capacity of the community to build. It's just the way that they build schools requested for the government. And it turned out the government was asking people to work for free. Then we asked the villagers if the government gave you money, could you build a school as good as those houses. And they said, oh no, we poor villagers, after our work is done, are incapable of building anything like a school. And we said: perhaps you don't understand. We won't give you some of the money, we'll give you all of the money required, and you can purchase the materials, pay yourselves, and keep any savings as long as you use those savings for educational purposes. And they said, in that case, we are perfectly able to do all that is required.

I think a good deal of observed neediness is not a psychological state, but a economic intelligence. They well know that needs generate cash. Want cash? Deliver "neediness". If you change the equation, the behaviour can change almost immediately.

BTW, the project above led to the construction of 500+ schools in remote rural Laos, all managed by communities who received lump sum contracts from the government. Of the 500+, only two failed to complete.

So why go this way? Because the villages also reported that in their entire history, no government had ever given them any money at all, and of the USD20k or so that each school community received, about $10k stayed in the community by way of purchase of local materials, wages, or surplus available for educational use. So not engaging the strength of communities is not disempowering: it's simply wasteful. But if we choose to be wasteful and that's the way they can get a school, they'll make all the appropriate noises in order to let us do it.

That's just them being smart.

IMO.

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@dee-brooks
8 years ago
0 posts

Hi Ian,

Have you connected with Alison and Gord at the Coady Institute?

They have developed some great ABCD material over the years and I think they could definitely point you in the right direction! Email me at dee@jeder.com.au if you would like me to e-introduce you to them...

Personally, I have found that once people start looking through the ABCD lens, they can't go back to looking for deficits...

Regards,

Dee...

Ian Cunningham
Ian Cunningham
@ian-cunningham
8 years ago
11 posts

Hi Dee,

I've tried to connect with Alison a few times, no luck yet! I'll email you about Gord, that would be great.

Ian

Ian Cunningham
Ian Cunningham
@ian-cunningham
8 years ago
11 posts

The Lao story is excellent! Very powerful example....

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