To me, Steven’s point holds up a mirror to international NGOs as well, and cautions against the articulation of programmatic frameworks, organizational goals and performance metrics in a way that undermines flexibility and local knowledge.  As much as foundations can over-specify outcomes in relation to grantees, international NGOs can over-specify outcomes in relation to local NGOs with whom they partner – and local NGOs can do the same in relation to community groups with whom they work. This cascading effect happens because, at every level, organizations want to ensure accountability and effectiveness.  This is understandable and important.  The trick is to find the right balance, where shared accountability, enduring impact (which may not be synonymous with short-term impact) and empowered communities are possible.
 
Second, the search for impact in the short-term is not just a feature of foundations.  Many donors – from large multilateral and bilateral institutions to individual philanthropists – want to know, at a minimum, that their money is not being wasted.  Ideally, they want to know that their contribution is making a tangible difference in people’s lives.  In so many ways, foreign aid and private philanthropy are square pegs, and the problems they are trying to address are round holes.  Foreign aid and philanthropy typically flow along program or sector lines, and are organized around time-bound projects.  Underlying causes of poverty and social injustice, manifested in issues like hunger, disease, poor education, insecure livelihoods or bad sanitation, cannot be confined to sectors and are poorly addressed by projects. 

Increasingly, we are recognizing these problems can only be addressed by profound social change that might be assisted by donor-funded projects, but must be led by local constituencies and movements that find their voices and assert their rights – and by governments who govern responsibly and equitably.  Donors and international NGOs must be humble about their role in bringing about these changes – and be ready to work in ways that facilitate social change without unintentionally dictating terms or unwittingly encouraging a short-term mindset.
 
Finally, two important messages woven thought Steven’s series stood out. 

First, that setbacks and failures are par for the course when it comes to investing in ideas that could be truly game-changing. So the measurement systems we set up should not discourage responsible risk taking and learning from failure.  This is easier said than done.  Few grantees are willing to acknowledge failure (this is different from putting a very positive spin on a setback!) unless donors are deliberate about creating a climate in which very honest reflection is valued and embraced. 

Second, that investments in people and organizations might be more strategic than funding of projects and interventions.  Of course, this is not necessarily an “either or” proposition; it could very well be “both and”.  The tendency, however, is that both donors and international NGOs often focus more attention on project implementation than on building the capacity of people and organizations more broadly.

In Part IV of this series I argued that large, conventional foundations, staffed by highly-qualified and increasingly specialized professional staff, are over-specifying the solutions to poverty in-house and, in the process, are increasing the possibility that potentially breakthrough ideas coming from outside of foundations get over-looked and go unfunded.

New philanthropies, founded by living donors, are bringing another kind of hands-on practice to the field, based on principles of social entrepreneurship.  They are also bringing with them a critique of the nonprofit sector, including of traditional philanthropies, that questions whether nonprofit leaders are sufficiently bold or innovative to bring about real social impact. 

In some cases, this skepticism is warranted and can be healthy.  But it is more often than not accompanied by a kind of hubris that says success in business is a predictor of success in bringing about social change.  So while entrepreneurs have brought to the field needed attention to impact assessment, the horizon for measuring impact is too near and the impact questions asked too shallow.  As a result, work essential to bringing about meaningful change, such as building movements and knowledge, networking and advocacy, is less likely to get supported by the entrepreneur funder.

Funders who approach social problems as entrepreneurs often don’t understand the complexities of the lives that poor people lead, nor have they developed the knowledge of social and cultural resources present in poor communities necessary to placing good bets.  They tend to fund small organizations headed by smart people who come from social backgrounds and experiences similar to their own and, who like their entrepreneur funders, don’t have a lot of direct experience of poor communities (or political and social standing within them).

Some entrepreneurs have extended their critique of the failures of the nonprofit sector to the work of the large traditional foundations.  Sadly, some foundations have not mounted vigorous and nuanced defenses of their achievements as funders of patient, long-term approaches to complex problems, but actually embraced their critics’ analysis of their presumed failures.

I worked for the Ford Foundation from 1992 to 2006.  I was lucky to be present at the meeting of Ford’s trustees in 1996 in Cape Town where the presidency of the Foundation was passed to Susan Berresford from Franklin Thomas.  Mr. Thomas had led the Foundation since 1979.  During his tenure, he changed fundamentally how this leading U.S. philanthropy saw its role in relation to the leaders and organizations it funded. 

At the Cape Town board meeting, a trustee M.S. Swaminathan read out a tribute to Mr. Thomas on behalf of the entire board.  One sentence especially stuck with me: “Franklin Thomas transformed the Ford Foundation from a technical assistance organization to a humanistic organization.”  

We can each attach various meanings to the word “humanistic,” but in the context of Franklin Thomas’s leadership of Ford, it came to mean something very particular to me.  It means that the important social problems, the ones worth attacking, are complicated and often deeply entrenched, our knowledge of them is imperfect and progress in addressing them will be hard, slow and fitful. So the long view and patience are essential.

Persistent poverty is, to a significant degree, the result of political and economic arrangements that deny poor people access to resources, knowledge and opportunities. So while technical interventions can have a role, access to rights and good governance matter tremendously.  And finally, the really powerful ideas are most likely to come from outside the foundation, from people living and working closest to the problems.

This last insight speaks most directly to the notion of a humanistic philanthropy.  But it is also the one that gives foundations working internationally today the most difficulty.  A large portion of funding meant to support anti-poverty work in the Global South goes to large intermediary organizations and universities in the Global North.  These organizations often do fine work, and given their proximity to contemporary intellectual currents in universities and reporting expectations of donors are better able to generate credible measures of short-term impact than their counterparts in developing countries. But local organizations and their leaders possess qualities of insight, persistence and legitimacy that will yield potentially greater impact, over the long term.

I argued in Part II of this series that foundations as private organizations are freer than public funders to get behind new and untested ideas for reducing poverty that show promise. Foundations are less subject to the political, economic and bureaucratic orthodoxies that channel public funds and for-profit investments to tried and true approaches that might work in certain contexts but which are not up to the task of helping people get out of deep poverty. In fact, essential changes in public policy and public funding can result from evidence generated by foundation-funded initiatives that doing things differently yields better outcomes.

I then went on to argue in Part III of the series that foundations, by insisting that grantees produce evidence of short-term, measurable impact as a condition for funding, were actually undercutting the very advantages they enjoy as private donors.  Foundations are sanctioned by society to support risky, complicated work—work that often only shows results over the long-term and is not susceptible to easy measurement, but which has the potential of reducing poverty significantly.

Experience has shown that private philanthropic funding is most impactful when grant support is put behind the ideas and work of leaders and organizations outside of foundations.  Communities and local organizations do the hard work of building capacity and knowledge over time.  They and their leaders do the work of holding public and private interests accountable to the needs and interests of the poor.   Their leaders are more likely to know how to bring about change in the myriad institutions that shape policy and allocate public and private resources.

Foundations are not in a position to lead change from the front lines, but they can put resources behind people and organizations that are.  Moreover, foundations, though ideally staffed with people of broad experience and tested judgment, are not think-tanks.  Or put differently, when they try to act like think-tanks, their ideas too often take the form of technical or overly-simple approaches to hugely complicated phenomena.  Foundation staff should rather focus on understanding major social and economic trends and identifying talented change leaders and effective organizations, which should be funded with the fewest possible constraints. 

US philanthropy is stepping away from making full use of its particular advantages to support the innovative and potentially breakthrough work of people who live and work close to problems. 

Managerial cultures are taking hold in some of the large, traditional foundations such as Gates, Ford and Rockefeller.  Increasingly more specific programmatic frameworks in these institutions run the danger of excluding consideration of good ideas that don’t fit their frames. 

The Ford Foundation’s office in Bangladesh did not have a program in financial services when Muhammad Yunus approached Ford staff for funding in the early 1980s.  Rather, Ford had a poverty program that recognized that the country’s poverty problems were vast and acute, and welcomed good ideas from any quarter.  Today, a number of foundations, including Ford, have large microfinance and financial services programs.  But funding for financial services is an almost ubiquitous element of poverty programming in much larger and wealthier institutions, including the World Bank and USAID, and increasingly among commercial lenders.  Foundations made distinctive and arguably essential contributions to the development of the field of financial services for the poor when mainstream donors and commercial banks still thought that poor people were unbankable.  This is no longer the case.  Shouldn’t foundations have their doors wide open to leaders and organizations that are testing new and unexplored ground for reducing poverty, regardless of sector or discipline?

Not enough funding is getting directly to leaders in developing countries who have the situated experience, intuitive insights and qualities of judgment that spawn good ideas, and the patience and local standing to see them to maturity.  The Gates Foundation does not accept funding proposals under its global Agricultural Development and Urban Development programs from organizations that are not registered under section 501(c)3 of the US statutory code.  Gates appears to accept proposals from non-501(c)3 organizations seeking funding from its Financial Services and Emergency Relief programs.  However, as a general rule, Gates does accept proposals not submitted in response to an RfP.  Would the next Muhammad Yunus with a potentially breakthrough idea, especially an idea that does not fit within Gates’ program frame, get a hearing from the Gates Foundation?   It would not be easy.   

While large traditional foundations are over-specifying the solutions to poverty in-house and reducing the possibility that potentially breakthrough ideas get the attention of program staff, new philanthropies, founded by living donors, are bringing another kind of hands-on practice to the field, inspiring a new kind of philanthropy based on promoting  social entrepreneurship.

This movement, despite its embrace of entrepreneurial principles, is failing also to give reign to the leaders and organizations with the best ideas and in the best position to have significant impacts on poverty.  I will return to this topic next week in my final posting in this series, along with some concluding reflections on how philanthropy can embark on a new era of innovation and achievement.

So argued John Gaventa, in a fascinating seminar titled “Seeing Like a Citizen: International Perspectives on Deepening Democracy.”  Gaventa is a Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and Chair of Oxfam Great Britain.

Gaventa has been leading an IDS effort – the Development Research Centre (DRC) on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability – that is a fascinating example of a research process grounded in a diversity of practical experiences and local perspectives.  The DRC is a partnership with research institutes and civil society groups in Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa. Gaventa was joined by Vera Coelho, Senior Researcher at the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP).

There are several reasons why the DRC’s research is important to the work of NGOs and the challenge of advancing development and social justice.

First, the focus here is on articulating new forms of citizenship that make rights real for poor people. Citizenship is seen as being attained by action, not bestowed by law.  It requires going beyond passive participation in elections to active engagement in decision making and democracy.

Second, rather than focusing on institutions (or in addition to doing so), the telescope is reversed – and focuses in on citizens as the key social actors. By looking at a variety of ways in which rights and entitlements of poor people are realized (over 150 case studies are being synthesized to draw out lessons), this research challenges one-size-fits-all institutional approaches to strengthening democracy.

Third, it asks how citizens perceive their own rights and how they interact with the institutions that affect their lives.  It posits that active citizens build responsive states by helping to shape democratic institutions, accountability and legitimacy.

Finally, it considers the central challenge of how to “build” active citizens, and how citizens most effectively mobilize to influence development policies and deepen democracy.  

Some of the lessons and implications emerging from this research have the potential to influence not only NGO’s community-based and rights-based approaches in developing countries but also to NGOs’ policy campaigning in industrialized countries.  For example:

Does global citizenship – in the form of global campaigns led by western actors targeting western (or global) policy makers – risk becoming a new form of social exclusion by marginalizing local voices?

Does a one-size-fits-all approach to institution building risk being replaced by a one-size-fits-all approach to participatory democracy?

Do partnerships between NGOs and social movements or civil society groups risk “projectizing” or “bureaucratizing” efforts that are more effective when they are contextual, emergent and authentic?

This research will certainly produce interesting and relevant findings for NGOs and other development actors – so I’m staying tuned for the synthesis and the debate it inspires.

One of the principal criticisms proponents of so-called new philanthropy direct toward old, or traditional large philanthropies is that old philanthropies, in assessing the merits of grant proposals, don’t require prospective grantees to provide sufficiently rigorous estimates of the likely impact of their proposed work. 

For instance, Paul Brest, Hal Harvey and Kelvin Low, in a recent article entitled “Calculated Impact” in Stanford Social Innovation Review, assert that, “Philanthropists grant billions of dollars a year without assessing whether their chosen strategies are likely to solve the problems that motivate their giving, and without attempting to assess the effectiveness of the organizations they fund.” 

Brest and his co-authors proffer a formula for estimating returns to philanthropic dollars invested (either through grants or loans) as measured in some social benefit.  For instance, they compare the number of person years of life protected per dollar by either investing in a factory that would produce insecticide-treated mosquito nets on a commercial basis or by producing and distributing mosquito nets as a traditional charitable activity.  Another example assesses the expected increases in income per dollar of grant funds invested accruing to poor people as a result of Hewlett Foundation funding for anti-corruption initiatives in Nigeria.  (I’ll return to these examples at the end of the post.)

I believe that philanthropy’s current focus on short-term, quantitatively measurable impact is distorting the practice of strategic grant-making and reducing the prospects for meaningful social change. 
 
Social change is complicated, and systemic social change is more likely to happen over the long-term and as a result of a variety of interventions, including securing changes in law that expand rights, changing public policies, and creating and strengthening vital institutions. The short-term impacts of these kinds of efforts are sometimes hard to measure but history and experience tell us that pursuit of ambitious goals is essential to meaningful change.

Susan Berresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, argues that new philanthropists, by insisting that grantees demonstrate short-term, measurable impact, run the danger of “miniaturizing the ambition” of foundations and grantees alike to work on deeply entrenched problems such as racism, poverty and inequality.  Berresford wonders if “decades of support by Ford and others for the world’s human rights movements, assistance to the U.S. civil rights movement or the anti-apartheid struggle would not have fit the short-term planning formula.” 

Seasoned grant-makers know that nonprofit leaders base their plans on evidence that they are likely to be impactful, and gather evidence along the way that things are working (or not), using a variety of methods and skills.  Tested leaders have learned from both success and setbacks.  Their knowledge, which is routinely informed by empirical evidence, has helped them shape sophisticated theories of change that guide their planning and decision-making.

Effective leaders possess qualities of judgment, intuition and political adroitness that are forged through many years of working close to the problems that bedevil their societies.  They know which levers need to be pushed and pulled in moving essential institutions toward more just and pro-poor policies.  These qualities of leadership are not given the kind of weight they merit, especially when donors are fixed upon knowing how things are going to end before they begin. 

To over-focus on measurable, short-term impact runs the danger of drawing foundation attention and resources away from ambitious and complicated problems, the kinds of problems that philanthropies are best suited to address.

Let’s return to Paul Brest’s and his co-authors’ “Calculated Impact.”  Take their mosquito net analysis, for example.  I would rather see foundations, as private donors better able to bear risk than public donors and traditional charities, investing in the development of the next generation of malaria prophylactics, whatever these may be.  This is the uncertain but pioneering ground.  Leave distribution and marketing of tested technologies to the public sector, private investors and charities. 

And to the extent that Nigerians will benefit in coming years from reduced official corruption, surely the groundwork laid by decades of anti-corruption work undertaken by Nigerian human rights and good governance groups would have been essential to whatever progress is ultimately achieved.  Many of these groups were funded over many years by foundations such as Ford and MacArthur with little expectation of social return in the near term.

I am arguing in this four-part series that US foundations working internationally are not making full use of their freedom to support innovation and help people claim new rights—and that progress toward reducing poverty and extending essential rights and liberties may be casualties.  In my post of March 25, I offered three reasons for why foundations may be stepping away from risk and, in turn, innovation.

Today I write about the first factor:  confusion about accountability.

Indeed, foundations have public accountability requirements.  But these are different from those faced by public funders such as the World Bank and USAID.  I believe that the accountability frameworks governing foundations gives them greater rein to fund innovative and risky work.   

It may be useful to think in terms of two forms of accountability faced by donors, including private foundations and public donors such as the World Bank and USAID: operational accountability and programmatic accountability. 

Operational accountability refers to a set of legal obligations that foundations use tax-exempt funds and public agencies use tax revenues (and other publically-guaranteed financial instruments) to pursue bona fide charitable purposes.  Federal law further provides that foundations payout roughly five percent of the value of their endowments annually.  The law imposes restrictions on use of tax exempt funds to benefit personally contributors, trustees and staff.  US private foundations are required to file annually with the IRS a form 990-PF, showing a list of grants made. The great majority of grantees demonstrate their tax-exempt charitable purpose by virtue of qualifying as a tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of Federal law.

While the law is somewhat unclear with respect to granting and reporting on grants made to foreign organizations, many large foundations working internationally have developed 501(c)(3) equivalency standards.  In other words, if an organization is organized and registered in its own country to serve nonprofit purposes on terms broadly analogous to US nonprofits, then grants can be made fairly freely. These practices have so far passed muster with the IRS. 

Programmatic accountability is a different matter. Qualifying tax-exempt purposes for foundations and nonprofits as set out in section 501(c)(3) are broadly defined as charitable, religious, educational, and scientific.  The IRS provides a broad working definition of charitable.  The framers of the law have had the wisdom not to require foundations to demonstrate that, in addition to serving charitable purposes, the funds expended have resulted in tangible, indeed measurable benefit to society. To do so would introduce imprecise, uncertain, and contested social science analysis, and widely disparate political points of view, into questions of what interventions have been more or less impactful, and thereby worthy of tax exemption.  This would be a costly and unfruitful exercise and one almost certain to diminish the appetite of foundations to fund innovative, and inherently risky, work.

Once again, Congress has not proscribed that foundations be accountable to the public for programmatic outcomes.   Herein lies the freedom of foundations to support programmatically innovative work. They can do so while fully observing their obligations to demonstrate operational accountability—essentially that funds support bona fide tax-exempt charitable purposes. 

Public sector donors face their own sets of operational accountability requirements.  But they are also subject to high levels of public scrutiny and control over their programs. 

The World Bank’s board consists of 22 member governments.  World Bank staff members work to a set of orthodox approaches to development that will get board support and that will reliably generate results.  This pushes decision-making toward tried and tested approaches and discourages risk-taking on behalf of innovation. 

USAID is subject to intense Congressional oversight of its spending.  Project failure, and the presumed waste of taxpayers’ money, is the bane of any USAID administrator. This reduces the appetite of administrators for risky, untested ideas, even when they appear plausible and promising.

By virtue of the programmatic freedom enjoyed by foundations, I believe they are freer, legally and politically, to support new, promising but untested approaches to poverty reduction and social change.  Regrettably, foundations today are not taking advantage of this freedom.  This retreat from freedom is largely self-imposed.

Full disclosure: I have not read the book, so my impression of Moyo’s arguments is only based on her presentation at Harvard.

I’m glad that Dead Aid and the strong reaction to it (both positive and negative) help to stir the pot. We should be asking fundamental questions about the effectiveness and sustainability of foreign aid. So I was disappointed that Moyo’s sweeping generalizations missed the opportunity to use evidence of impact (or the gaps in such evidence) as a basis for critiquing important weaknesses in aid models. Instead, she seemed to assert that almost every failing in Africa - from inefficient bureaucracies to inflation and from corruption to Dutch Disease – was either caused by or directly related to foreign aid.

Moyo argues that aid has disenfranchised Africans, and that the celebrities who have embraced Africa routinely convey only negative images of Africans. Moyo is correct that badly-designed aid skews accountability of governments (away from their citizens and toward donors) and that fundraising for Africa more often uses stories of misery and desperation than narratives of hope and strength.

Ironically, the image that Moyo conveys of African leaders and citizens is extremely negative and disempowering. She paints a picture of helpless victims held hostage to a harmful aid model imposed on them by western donors. Moyo applauds President Kagame’s leadership in Rwanda and his efforts to establish parameters for donors. But she does not allow that Africans – from national leaders to community groups – have the agency and ability to articulate their priorities and exert some control over how aid is used.  Rwanda, being both a donor favorite and a perceived success story, is an interesting case study against which to interrogate Moyo’s thesis - but she did not do so.

In her introductory comments, Moyo stated that Dead Aid does not refer to humanitarian assistance or the work of NGOs because that was “charity”. I am not sure why Moyo took NGOs off the hook!  They are major implementers of aid from donor governments.  So why should they be less accountable for achieving positive impact?

One could argue that humanitarian assistance, to the extent that it involves rapid infusions of resources into crisis settings, is ripe for the kind of negative impact that Moyo points to. Also, in settings where disasters or conflicts unfold over years and people live in crisis every day, humanitarian assistance is part and parcel of the longer-term aid model that Moyo critiques.

It is clear that Dambisa Moyo’s message is striking a chord - and that she is tapping into a significant vein of skepticism about the current aid model. I hope that her arguments – whether or not one agrees with them – propel efforts to increase the effectiveness of foreign aid and expand the range of strategies (beyond aid) for ending poverty, advancing dignity and promoting economic growth.

Independent US foundations working internationally have advantages that other kinds of donors, such as the World Bank and USAID, generally don’t. As private funders, foundations are better able to bear risk on behalf of innovative approaches to social change and poverty reduction than are public sector funders. Where foundation-funded work yields promising results—in other words, where foundation investments are less risky—governments and public aid agencies may be more willing to provide funds to bring that work to scale.

Importantly, foundations are able to fund human rights initiatives. Human rights organizations tend to make national governments uncomfortable. Since most public aid money goes to governments, or when granted to local nonprofits is done so within the framework of agreements negotiated with host governments, foundations are among the few donors that can fund activist human rights initiatives directly. Foundations because they do not face the same level of external public pressure to demonstrate short-term impact are freer to fund work on complex problems that require refashioning of adverse policies supported by vested interests, or the strengthening of essential but weak institutions.

Foundations in my view are not making full use of their freedoms to support innovation, help people claim essential rights, and pursue complex problems over the long-term. In the process, they run the danger of becoming more like conventional, public-sector donors, and adding little that is distinctive to the funding mix.

In subsequent blog posts, I will explore three factors that I believe are contributing to philanthropy’s retreat from ambitious international funding agendas. These are:

Confusion about accountability Foundation boards and executives are understandably nervous about growing calls for accountability across all sectors of society. The tax exemption foundations enjoy for funding bona fide charitable work must be protected. But current law is clear about what qualifies as charitable work. And it is a broad definition, giving considerable scope to supporting innovative and risky approaches to poverty reduction and social change.

A misplaced focus on demonstrating short-term, measurable impact Poverty and inequity have multiple and complex causes. Solutions will be similarly complex and will often require significant re-ordering of political, social and economic relations. While measurement of impacts has great value in shaping and adjusting interventions, assigning causality for any changes will always be a fraught exercise. Good judgment, intuitive insight and tested experience are important and overlooked qualities that need also to guide decision-making.

A reversion to a technical assistance model in how foundations understand their role This approach assumes that foundation executives and staff have the greater insights into the nature of problems and how they should best be addressed. Grantees are being treated as contractors as opposed to innovators. In fact, grantee leaders and staff are often in a better position to define the problems and the most promising approaches to them. They are also much better placed than foundations to push and pull the levers of change within their societies over the long term.

I will conclude with some recommendations for setting international philanthropy on a pathway that makes fuller use of its advantages to support innovation in reducing poverty and extending human rights. I look forward to your comments.

In the spirit of connecting and bridging, I have invited Steven Lawry, Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations (where I am based) to write a series of blog posts that capture some of his thinking on the role of private philanthropy. Steven’s argument about foundations and their seeming retreat from risk taking is compelling and provides great fodder for an interesting debate.

Steven will be writing guest posts once a week for the next month or so. I hope his interesting arguments will elicit some reaction and comment. Do let us know what you think!

Over 2,000 pages, 500 contributors, and 20 reports: The Center for U.S. Global Engagement recently released a “report of reports” summarizing the various calls to elevate global development in U.S. foreign policy and modernize U.S. foreign assistance.  Given the activity over the past two years, it is clear that the changes instituted by the new office of Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and the “F process” in the last administration did not satisfy the development community.

If volume is any indication, political momentum for more fundamental change was reaching a tipping point, and indeed the Obama campaign pledged to double foreign assistance in ten years and streamline the various and fragmented funding mechanisms into one agency.  All that was before the advent of the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The new administration has yet to officially announce nominations for senior posts such as USAID administrator or put forward a blueprint for change.  While the commitment to elevating development as a strategic priority still seems apparent – witness Secretary of State Clinton’s public remarks and the president’s budget, which proposes a 9.5% increase for international affairs - the devil, as they say, is in the details.  The delay is raising concern, especially since differences remain about which structures and next steps provide the best chance, in practice rather than rhetoric, for making development the equal of defense and diplomacy, especially when decisions about resources are on the table.*

Is the best route to create a cabinet-level department or expand development’s influence from within the State Department – or something else?  There seems to be consensus about creating the first-ever government-wide strategy for global development, but should that be stand-alone or integrated with the national security strategy?  How high a priority should it be to rewrite and update the Foreign Assistance Act?

As the politics around these questions play out, it is important not to lose sight of the larger goals that provided the original impetus for reform.  Colin Powell’s comment during the USCGE release event that he preferred the term “smart influence” to “smart power” was a welcome re-grounding in the notion that human and community development is something we promote, support, help grow – not something we wield.  While the practice of defense and diplomacy are fundamentally inseparable from the national interest, development has a larger humane purpose - that, when done well, serves the national interest, and sometimes in ways more valuable than the other two.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, development’s effectiveness should not solely be equated with measurable, tangible results on identifiable individuals.  While that can improve political palatability, successful long-term development encompasses building the capacity of local leadership and governance structures; it’s sometimes messy and non-linear.

NGOs have much to offer as the government seeks to improve its effectiveness in reducing global poverty and providing assistance to those in crisis.  While now NGOs often play the role of contractors and implementers, their breadth of experience makes them well-positioned to be “thought partners” as the government shifts its approach and re-calibrates its structure.

Their own struggles to measure and articulate strategic impact may prove exceptionally useful.  They also sit at the nexus of the rapidly increasing private resources being deployed toward international causes, and could provide ways to increase leverage.

Such a role might mean being less focused on their own needs.  Expanding the pool of unrestricted resources, for example, could improve the impact of a reinvigorated USAID or a new development agency;  this also might mean reduced earmarks or moving funds into accounts that make NGOs less certain of receiving them.  This could be a tough sell in today’s economic environment, which is causing havoc to NGO budgets.

But as Marty Linsky has posed the question, “Will you reset or hunker down?” His point: this crisis, rather than being a one-time event, could be a permanent shift that requires examining all our assumptions.  It might be just the thing to take us past the tipping point and inspire significant change.  That would be good news, not only for U.S. foreign policy, but for those around the world living in extreme poverty.

* The 2006 National Security Strategy identifies development assistance, diplomacy, and defense as the three pillars of security.