Class theme was The Importance of Context

Table of contents

• Bryson - What to do When Stakeholders Matter (2004)
• Kindornay et al. Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Implications for NGOs (2012)

Bryson - What to do When Stakeholders Matter (2004)

• This article focuses specifically on how and why managers might go about using stakeholder identification and analysis techniques in order to help their organizations meet their mandates, fulfill their missions and create public value.
• The article argues that wise use of stakeholder analyses can help frame issues that are solvable in ways that are technically feasible and politically acceptable and that advance the common good.
• The term stakeholder refers to persons, groups or organizations that must somehow be taken into account by leaders, managers and front-line staff
• The decision about how to define stakeholders therefore is consequential, as it affects who and what counts
• Failure to attend to the information and concerns of stakeholders clearly is a kind of flaw in thinking or action that too often and too predictably leads to poor performance, outright failure or even disaster
• Figuring out what the problem is and what solutions might work are actually part of the problem, and taking stakeholders into account is a crucial aspect of problem solving
• Said differently, we are moving into an era when networks of stakeholders are becoming at least as important, if not more important, than markets and hierarchies
• meeting the mandates and fulfilling the mission should result from ‘producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what the organization is, what it does, and why it does it, which is also a definition of what strategic planning is
• people often need to be convinced that there is something that can be done about a problem before they will participate
• success for public organizations depends on satisfying key stakeholders according to their definition of what is valuable
• Because attention to stakeholders is so important, stakeholder analyses become important.
• strategic management processes that employ a reasonable number of competently done stakeholder analyses are more likely to be successful
• fifteen stakeholder identification and analysis techniques, grouped into four categories:
  • organizing participation
    • Stakeholder analyses are undertaken for a purpose and that purpose should be articulated as clearly as it can be before the analyses begin – while also understanding that purposes may change over time. The purpose should
    • purpose should guide the choices concerning who should be involved in the analyses and how
    • In general, people should be involved if they have information that cannot be gained otherwise, or if their participation is necessary to assure successful implementation
    • Five stakeholder identification and analysis techniques are particularly relevant to helping organize participation:
      • a process for choosing stakeholder analysis participants
      • the basic stakeholder analysis technique
      • power versus interest grids
      • stakeholder influence diagrams
      • the participation planning matrix
  • creating ideas for strategic interventions
    • Creating ideas for strategic interventions involves problem formulation and solution search, but also depends on understanding political feasibility
    • Six additional techniques are particularly relevant to creating ideas for strategic interventions. They are:
      • bases of power and directions of interest diagrams
      • finding the common good and the structure of a winning argument
      • tapping individual stakeholder interests to pursue the common good
        • Techniques discussed so far have approached problem or issue framing in terms of the “common good” searching for themes, concerns or goals shared among key stakeholders. The analyses have downplayed the significance of opposition. The techniques discussed next begin to highlight how opposition needs to be taken into account.
      • stakeholder-issue interrelationship diagrams
      • problem-frame stakeholder maps
      • ethical analysis grids
  • building a winning coalition around proposal development, review and adoption
    • Once stakeholders and their interests have been identified and understood, it is typically still advisable to do additional analyses in order to develop proposals that can garner adequate support
    • Three techniques considered here:
      • stakeholder support versus opposition grids
      • stakeholder role plays
      • policy attractiveness versus stakeholder capability grids
  • implementing, monitoring and evaluating strategic interventions
    • still important to focus directly on stakeholders during implementation
    • Technique: policy implementation strategy development grid
• policy analysis is a kind of art in which problems must be solvable, at least tentatively or in principle, in order to be understood and addressed effectively
• stakeholder analyses are a key to identifying problems that can and should be solved
• whether the practice really is smart depends on which techniques are used for what purposes, when, where, how, by whom and with what results.
• stakeholder analyses must be undertaken skillfully and thoughtfully, with a willingness to learn and revise along the way
• Stakeholder analysis never should be seen as a substitute for virtuous and ethical practice, although they may be a part of promoting such practices.

Kindornay et al. Rights-Based Approaches to Development: Implications for NGOs (2012)

• The rights-based approach to development has swept through the global development assistance sector during the last fifteen years
• (NGOs) are increasingly committed, in theory, to implementing human rights
• commitment has dramatically accelerated the discursive and organizational merger of the global human rights and development policy communities.
• The “rights-based approach” (RBA) emerged as a new development paradigm in the late 1990s.
• Many view this trend with excitement, highlighting the normative and practical value of injecting human rights principles into standard development thinking and practice
• Skeptics, however, fear the emergence of yet another development fad.
• This article proposes five hypotheses about the likely impact of RBAs
• this article does not discuss rights-based impacts on actual communities, projects, or development aid recipients
• analysis is restricted to development donors, agencies, and implementing bodies, focusing in particular on the implications of rights-based policymaking for the local and international NGOs
• Five empirically and theoretically grounded hypotheses are offered, grounded in four evidentiary sources:
  • a review of the available English-language literature
  • a set of semi-structured interviews
  • an empirical study of the structure of organizations and issues in the transnational human rights network
  • Ron’s personal experiences from 1998–1999 as a consultant on rights-based programming for CARE-USA
• rights-based approach to development was first articulated in Northern development circles in the mid-1990s
• two previously distinct strands of foreign assistance and global policy—“human rights” and “development”— began to merge
• In theory, these new ways of thinking should entail a substantial shift in the development practices of Northern donors, international NGOs (INGOs), and local Southern NGOs
• The empirical reality, however, is still unclear and in flux.
• wide variety of UN conferences and initiatives in the 1990s must also have played a major role in disseminating, legitimating, and deepening the rights-based approach
• According to the UN Common Understanding, all UN development activities after 2003 were to be structured to advance the principles codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its associated conventions.
• Common Understanding has sparked a cascade of rights-based rhetoric across the UN system
• By 2005, several prominent international NGOs had all announced their commitment to the rights-based approach
• The rights-based sector, in other words, now involves substantial development aid monies.
• Five hypotheses:
  • H1: winners and losers: Rights-based donors seek like-minded NGOs
    • Existing NGOs will have to become familiar with a new language-“rights talk”-and gain at least a passing familiarity with international human rights
    • One unintended consequence of all this may be overloading recipient communities with too many demands
    • another may be overloading NGOs with excessive administrative and reporting commitments
    • (H1) specifies clear, quantifiable expectations for future researchers to investigate.
    • a clear pool of NGO winners and losers should soon emerge.
    • strongly correlated with the NGOs’ ability or willingness to adopt, or not adopt, the rights-based approach
    • organizations that have never before received development aid should begin entering the global development arena
    • most pronounced among the Tier 3–5 NGOs
  • H2: Increasing emphasis on advocacy: Development NGOs will increasingly boost their advocacy work while curtailing their service delivery efforts
    • Development NGOs, in this view, should abandon service delivery and focus instead on creating and strengthening local accountability mechanisms
    • In this view, NGO service delivery treats symptoms rather than causes
    • second school of rights-based thought is a bit more flexible, arguing that service delivery can empower groups and individuals, and lend rights-based groups the means to gain citizen trust and commitment
    • When rights-based NGOs had no concrete services to offer, they found it hard to persuade local communities
    • NGOs that provided direct services, by contrast, found persuading people to cooperate much easier,
    • In a lesson first learned by revolutionary organizations and radical social movements, rights-based workers are now discovering that service provision is a very useful way of building grass roots constituencies and relations
    • This debate suggests that both international and local NGOs will increase their advocacy activities, but will not dramatically curtail service delivery activities
    • second hypothesis thus posits a second set of clear and quantifiable expectations
    • expect development NGOs increasingly to boost their advocacy activities
    • overall levels of NGO service delivery are not likely to substantially decline
    • should see more efforts to combine advocacy and service together
  • H3: Growing challenges to Universalist Human Rights Discourse: As the rights-based paradigm expands and deepens, we expect more cultural pragmatism and discursive flexibility
    • merger of human rights and development
    • increasingly forces rights-based groups to interact with ordinary people
    • As a result, rights-based workers can no longer assume that they speak the same general language as their would-be constituents
    • must reach out to local people with words, concepts, and ideas that have local resonance
    • the further an NGO is located downstream, the more likely it is to engage in the up close and personal management of grass roots constituency relations
    • Tensions between the language of ordinary people and that of human rights were particularly acute, they said, when it came to issues of gender and family
    • As these learning processes unfold, alternative interpretations of rights will trickle up to higher-tier actors, infusing the international discourse with greater humility, nuance, and contextual knowledge. The understanding and use of contextually specific language will be most robust at the bottom of the NGO pyramid
  • H4: Increasing calls for Tier 1 and Tier 2 accountability: The rights-based approach insists that all global development sector actors be held accountable
    • Rights-based proponents argue that the paradigm will enhance accountability and reduce power differentials throughout the global development sector.
    • there are very few formalized mechanisms for holding non-state actors accountable
    • Lower-tier NGOs will be hard pressed to hold donors, international financial institutions, and upper-tier NGOs truly accountable
    • Few of these efforts are likely to trigger real change, however, as the sector’s fundamental political economy and power relations remain unchanged
  • H5: The Null Hypothesis: The development world is periodically swept by new paradigms and fads, and the rights-based approach will ultimately be no different
    • null hypothesis, which argues that there will be no real change among international and local NGOs.
    • rights-based approach is by now more than ten years old, and proponents are still struggling to demonstrate its value
    • there is little baseline data and the long-term nature of rights-based development makes monitoring and evaluation difficult
    • some empirical evidence indicates that the appropriation of “human rights” discourses by development NGOs has had limited impact on the broader human rights movement
    • conceptual confusion over what, precisely, “rights-based thinking” means
    • As a result, some donors will begin to lose interest
• This article has demonstrated that the jury is still out on whether the rights-based approach represents a fundamental paradigm shift for the global development sector.