How Change Happens

Front matter

DUNCAN GREEN

‘In this powerfully argued book, Duncan Green shows how we can make major changes in our unequal and unjust world by concerted action, taking full note of the economic and social mechanisms, including established institutions, that sustain the existing order. If self-confidence is important for the effective agency of deprived communities, so is a reasoned understanding of the difficult barriers that must be faced and overcome. This is a splendid treatise on how to change the actual world— in reality, not just in our dreams.’

Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University

Foreword

Ha-Joon Chang é-T he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various Te The point, however, is to change iť, said Karl Marx in

one of his most celebrated passages, which eventually became one of

his two epitaphs (the other one being, ‘Workers of all lands, unite’).

Marx was certainly right to argue that social theories should be not just about understanding the status quo but also about offering a vision for its improvement; but he was wrong to imply that no one before him had thought like that.

For the last several thousand years at least, human beings have tried to imagine a different world from the one they live in, and worked together to create it. Human history is littered with countless visions of—and struggles for—an alternative social order. These may have been large-scale social experiments based on elaborate theories, like Marxism, the welfare state, or neo-liberalism. Or they may have involved daily struggles for survival, safety, and dignity by oppressed and underprivileged people, even though they may not have had any sophisticated theory about their alternative world. However, the capacity to imagine an alternative social order and cooperating to create it is what distinguishes humankind from other animals.

Despite the fact that much of human history has been about attempting to create different realities, we do not understand the process of social change very well.

To be sure, we have grand historical narratives that describe social change as the results of interactions between technological forces and economic institutions, such as property rights; Marxism is the best xi

FOREWORD example of this. We know quite a bit about the way in which society is transformed because of the changes in political-legal institutions, such as the court system or international trade agreements. We have interesting and detailed accounts of how certain individuals and groups— whether they are political leaders, business leaders, trade unions, or grassroots groups—have succeeded in realizing visions that initially few others thought realistic.

However, we do not yet have a good theory of how all these different elements work together to generate social change. To put it a bit more dramatically, if someone wanted to know how she could change certain aspects of the community, nation, or the world she lives in, she would be hard pressed to find a decent guidebook.

Into this gap steps Duncan Green, the veteran campaigner for development and social justice, with How Change Happens, an innovative and thrilling field guide to—let’s not mince words—changing the world.

Many conventional discussions of how change happens focus either on technology (mobile phones can bring the revolution!) or a brutal account of realpolitik—how oligarchs and elites carve up the world. While not ignoring such factors, How Change Happens develops a far better framework for understanding social change by focusing on power analysis and systemic understanding; this is called the ‘power and systems approach’.

The power and systems approach emphasizes that, in order to generate social change, we first need to understand how power is distributed and can be re-distributed between and within social groups: the emancipation of women; the spread of human rights; the power of poor people when they get organized; the shifting power relationships behind the negotiations around the international economic system. While emphasizing the role of power struggles, the book does not see them as voluntaristic clashes of raw forces, in which whoever has more arms, money, or votes wins. It tries to situate those power struggles within complex systems that are continuously changing in unpredictable ways, affecting and being affected by diverse factors like social norms, negotiations, campaigns, lobbying, and leadership.

FOREWORD

Providing a theory of social change that is convincing is already a tall order, but Duncan Green sets himself an even higher bar. The book aims to be a practical field guide to social activism. More than that, it aspires to be a field guide not just for the kinds of people he normally works with, such as NGO campaigners or grassroots organizers. It is meant to be a field manual for activists in the broadest sense: politicians, civil servants, businesspeople, even academics.

This is certainly a hugely ambitious project; how can anyone write a book that can provide sophisticated theories of social change, while providing practical advice to activists?

However, amazingly, How Change Happens delivers on its promise. Those who are purely interested in understanding better how societies change will find a treasure trove of theoretical insights and empirical evidence. Those who want to change the world through formal politics will certainly learn a lot from the book in terms of how to establish political consensus and legitimacy, how to build coalitions, and how to use national and international laws to initiate and consolidate changes. Civil servants who want to make things better for citizens, or business leaders who want to do more than simply maximize profits will also find plenty of lessons to draw from the book in devising policies and corporate strategies that can make the world a better place in realistic but innovative ways. The book will even help academics, like myself, who try to engage with real-world issues, to grasp better the role that their research and outreach activities can play in bringing about (or hindering) social change.

Drawing on his impressive knowledge of the relevant areas of the social sciences, his thirty-five years of diverse experience in international development and many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world’s largest social justice NGOs, Duncan Green has produced a unique and uniquely useful book addressing a hugely important but largely neglected issue. Everyone who is interested in making the world a better place should thank him for it.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS nce again, I am indebted to the editorial dream team of Mark O Fried and Anna Coryndon. Mark’s unique combination of editorial skill, deep knowledge of development, and phenomenal patience helped steer this book from a messy first draft to (hopefully) something rather better. Anna managed the project throughout with her customary grace and attention to detail.

I would like to thank Oxfam for giving me the time and encouragement to write this book, but while I thank Oxfam for its support, I want to make it clear that How Change Happens does not necessarily reflect Oxfam policy positions—the views expressed are those of the author.

The book has been greatly helped by the financial and intellectual support of Australia’s Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade, including Kirsten Bishop, Helen Corrigan, Steve Hogg, Sally Moyle, and Sandra Kraushaar.

Colleagues at the Developmental Leadership Program have provided invaluable advice, notably Niheer Dasandi, David Hudson, Linda Kelly, Heather Lyne de Ver, Heather Marquette, Alina Rocha Menocal, and Chris Roche.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my long-suffering students at the London School of Economics for allowing me to test various iterations of the arguments in the book on them.

More generally, I am deeply indebted to a wide and supportive network of ‘development wonks’ scattered across academia, civil society, business, and government, including Jean Boulton, Francesco Caberlin, Nathaniel Calhoun, Robert Chambers, Paul Clough, Steve Commins, Stefanie Conrad, Paddy Coulter, Aidan Craney, James Deane, Alice Evans, Jaime Faustino, Robin Ford, Alan Fowler, Greta Galeazzi, John Gaventa, Calum Green, Finlay Green, Tom Harrison, Maximilian Heywood, David Hillman, Robert Jordan, Nanci Lee, Jeremy Lim, Matthew Lockwood, Siobhan Mcdonnell, Catherine Masterman, Masood UL Mulk, Arnaldo Pellini, Vicky Randall, Raul Sanchez-Urribarri, Ryan Stoa, Heidi Tydemers, Craig Valters, Jorge Velasquez, Steve Waygood, Frauke de Weijer, and Leni Wild.

The OUP team of Kim Behrens, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, Adam Swallow, and Aimee Wright have been a delight to work with throughout.

I would also like to thank the many, many people around the world who gave up precious time to answer the questions of a nosy visitor. Many are named in the text, unless they wished to remain anonymous.

And finally, if you helped with the book, have scoured this page, and not found your name, all I can offer is my groveling apology and a heartfelt thank you.

As ever, any errors in the text are mine alone and certainly not the responsibility of the many people who have helped me along the way. The research project ‘How Change Happens’ is funded by Australian Aid and the University of Birmingham’s Developmental Leadership Program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of DFAT/Australian Aid and DLP.

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Introduction

Part I: A power and systems approach 1. Systems thinking changes everything 2. Power lies at the heart of change 3. Shifts in social norms often underpin change

Case study: The Chiquitanos of Bolivia

Part II: Institutions and the importance of history 4. How states evolve 5. The machinery of law 6. Accountability, political parties, and the media 7. How the international system shapes change

8. Transnational corporations as drivers and targets of change

Case study: The December 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change Part III: What activists can (and can’t) do

CONTENTS

Part IV: Pulling it all together

12. A power and systems approach to making change happen xviii

INTRODUCTION was moved to write this book by a combination of excitement,

fascination, and frustration: excitement at the speed and grandeur of many of the social changes occurring today—continents rising from poverty, multitudes gaining access to literacy and decent healthcare for the first time, women in dozens of countries winning rights, respect, and power. Working at Oxfam gives me an extraordinary and privileged ringside seat from which to appreciate both the bigger picture and the individual stories of inspiring activists across the globe. I have also (miraculously) been given time to read and write, arousing undying envy in many of my colleagues. This book is the result of that dialogue between reflection and practice.

My daily excitement is laced with frustration when I see activists take steps that seem destined to fail. Within months of joining Oxfam in 2004, I witnessed two examples, one big and one small. On a field visit to Vietnam, I was taken to see Oxfam’s work with Hmong villagers in the north. As we drove to the remote home of this impoverished ethnic minority, we passed the first, more intrepid backpackers starting to arrive in the area. The Hmong produce wonderful textiles, and it was obvious that a tourist boom was in the offing. Yet our project consisted of training villagers to keep their prized water buffalo warm and well during the winter (involving rubbing them regularly with alcohol, among other things). There is nothing wrong with working on livestock, but what were we doing to help them prepare for the coming influx of tourists? When challenged, our local (non-Hmong, middle class Vietnamese) staff replied that they wanted to ‘protect’ the villagers’ traditional ways against the invasion of the outside world.

On a grander scale, I had growing misgivings about an enormous, global campaign Oxfam was then leading that implied global activism around trade, debt, aid, and climate change could somehow ‘Make Poverty History’. The campaign seemed to gravely downplay the primacy of national politics. I developed my argument a couple of years later in a book, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World. One of the inputs to that book was a paper we commissioned’ on the theories of change used by different academic disciplines. It turns out they each operate with separate and often conflicting theories of change, and there is no ‘department of change studies’ to sort it out. I was intrigued, and set out some rather rudimentary ideas about ‘how change happens’ in an annex to the book, marking the starting point for the prolonged conversation that led eventually to this book.

This book is for activists who want to change the world. A narrow interpretation would say that means people engaged in protest movements and campaigns around topics as disparate as climate change and disabled peoples’ rights, usually on the margins of ‘the system’, people who from the days of the abolitionists have been making change happen. But the list of ‘change agents’ (English is sadly devoid of non-clunky descriptors in this field) is much wider. I include reformers inside the system, such as politicians (both elected and unelected), public officials, and enlightened business people. And the civic world beyond formal institutions is far too rich to narrow down to a single category of ‘campaigners’. Faith groups, community leaders, and the many self-help organizations that women form are all often influential players. Even within aid organizations, those engaged

! Roman Krznaric, 2007, ‘How Change Happens: Interdisciplinary perspectives for human development’, Oxfam Research Report (Oxford: Oxfam GB, 2007) http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/how-change-happens-interdisciplinary-perspectives-for-human-development-112539.

INTRODUCTION in what we call ‘programmes’—funding or running projects to create jobs or improve health and education services, or responding to emergencies such as wars or earthquakes—are just as involved in seeking change as campaigners. When I use the word ‘activists’ I mean all of the above. (If that all sounds too exhausting, and you would rather be an armchair activist who just wants to understand change better, that’s fine too.)

How Change Happens also sheds light on why the relationships between such activists are often fraught. People bring their own worldviews to the question of change. Do we prefer conflict (‘speaking truth to power’) or cooperation (‘winning friends and influencing people’)? Do we see progress everywhere, and seek to accelerate its path, or do we see (in our darker, more honest moments) a quixotic struggle against power and injustice that is ultimately doomed to defeat? Do we believe lasting and legitimate change is primarily driven by the accumulation of power at grassroots/individual level, through organization and challenging norms and beliefs? Or by reforms at the levels of laws, policies, institutions, companies and elites? Or by identifying and supporting ‘enlightened’ leaders? Do we think the aim of development is to include poor people in the benefits of modernity (money economy, technology, mobility) or to defend other cultures and traditions and build an alternative to modernity? Do we want to make the current system function better, or do we seek something that tackles the deeper structures of power? The answer is ‘all of the above’—this book tries to show how these different approaches fit into the wider picture of change.

The book takes as its starting point Amartya Sen’s brilliant definition of development as the progressive expansion of the freedoms to be and to do.” It discusses political and social change, as well as some of development’s economic aspects. It focuses on intended change, even though a good deal of change is unintended or accidental (the invention of the washing machine made a huge contribution to

? Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

women’s empowerment, even though that probably wasn’t in the minds of its inventors).

One of the curious insights I gleaned from writing the book is that the same categories of analysis (power, norms, complex systems, institutions, agency) seem to be helpful at all levels, whether considering change in a single community, a country, or at a global level. Like Russian Dolls, or fractals, the same features reappear at different scales as you zoom in and out. Those ways of thinking also help when defending good things from attack (resisting the wrong kind of change) and when trying to explain why change often doesn’t happen, the deep rooted resistance of institutions, norms, and individuals that often blocks the way.

How Change Happens is divided into four parts. The first sets out the conceptual underpinning of the book, an effort to understand change through the prism of complex systems, power, and social norms. Perhaps it is the legacy of a long-distant physics degree, but at times in the last few years, it has felt something like a unified field theory of development is emerging from these discussions. Part I also wrestles with the fact that books are inevitably linear creations: you start at the beginning and (if it’s any good) read through to the end. That seems terribly inappropriate for a discussion of non-linear complex systems, and runs the risk that readers give up before getting to the ‘so what’ conclusion. I have therefore tried to boil down the final message of the book into a one-page ‘power and systems approach’ in Part I, which gives a taste of what is to come.

Part II discusses some of the main institutions that are both the object and subject of most change processes: central government, legal systems, political parties and other channels of accountability, the international system, and large transnational corporations. Some of this may feel like hard work, and certainly a long way from a feel-good celebration of activism. I suspect many activists could use a quick refresher on the history, politics, and internal structures of the institutions they wish to influence if we are to find new ideas and possibilities for promoting change and seizing moments of opportunity.

INTRODUCTION

Part III discusses some of activism’s main players: citizen activists, advocacy organizations, and the role of leadership. And the final part explores the implications of my analysis for individual activists and their organizations, fleshing out the power and systems approach.

The book is not a manual. Indeed one of its conclusions is that reliance on checklist toolkits is one of the things that is holding us back. Instead it offers a combination of analysis, questions, and case studies, with the aim of helping readers look afresh at both the obstacles and the enthralling processes of change going on all around them, and to gain some new energy and ideas about how to contribute.

Like most change processes, this book emerged rather than being decided in advance. Hundreds of people contributed their ideas and experiences; when we posted a draft version for comment, more than 600 people downloaded it. I have made every effort to incorporate a range of voices and opinions, but in the end, this is a book written by a white, Western (and rapidly aging) male, and it inevitably echoes my experiences, networks, culture, assumptions, and prejudices. Please don’t forget that, while you're reading it.

Not that T am a fixed quantity. Researching and writing this book has changed me in ways I probably won't fully understand for some time. I have always felt a tension between the desire to be a “finisher — dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s—and the urge to move on to new ideas, to grab the next shiny shell on the beach. At university, I studied physics but moonlighted for lectures on Joyce and Eliot, and wrote truly execrable poetry. My personality assessments in things like the Myers Briggs test are a mess. Most of the time, I don’t know what I think or, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, I seem to hold entirely contradictory opinions at the same time.

Somehow, the act of writing made me acknowledge that ambiguity and grow comfortable with it. You would think that writing a book, with its words fixed forever and its pretensions to authority, would be anathema to ambiguity, complexity, and change. Luckily books these days are no longer tablets of stone, rather the more time-consuming part of a wider conversation. In this case, the conversation will continue after publication on my ‘From Poverty to Power’ blog and on the ‘How Change Happens’ website. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and arguments on all of the issues raised in this book—and to changing my mind, preferably several times before breakfast.