(Illustration by Anna Gusella)
In 2013 the World Bank published Inclusion Matters, a call to arms demanding that development practitioners improve global well-being by focusing on inclusion, broadly defined as the ability of individuals and population groups to take part in society.
Lack of inclusion, however, has only compounded in the years since. Development gains miss broad swaths of people. Countries too often operate parallel economies, with certain regions connected to modern production and others isolated and languishing. But such exclusion also presents opportunity: Incorporating historically excluded populations promotes growth as talent across geographic or demographic lines moves freely and productivity rises.
Development practitioners must build inclusion into initiatives to boost the welfare of excluded populations at scale. To do so, the development field must bridge an artificial divide that has emerged in recent decades. Too often, development initiatives work narrowly at the community or local level. Such concentration can invite animosity: Regional- and national-level practitioners can see community-level practitioners as achieving nothing more than photo ops, while community-level practitioners can view national- and regional-level programs as wasted resources without an on-the-ground sense of local areas, communities, or populations.
Inclusive growth at scale requires development initiatives to unite the national and local levels of engagement. Community projects achieve scale when connected to markets, capital, and sources of know-how at the national level. National programs, on the other hand, must prioritize genuine local needs, rather than treat a region as homogeneous. The community level, with its local contextual understanding, and the national level, with its ability to scale impact, have much to offer each other and can, if operating in isolation, fall short.
Two Models of Inclusiveness
Fortunately, organizations that bridge this divide do exist. An example of an initiative that works at the regional level but attempts to target policy to local contexts and stakeholders is the Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab, a research center led by Ricardo Hausmann based at Harvard University’s Center for International Development. The lab attempts to diagnose the unique constraints to economic development and income growth for a specific region or population. An economy may have many problems at first glance—poor roads and infrastructure, high informal employment, low education levels, and so on—but the Growth Lab’s work identifies which of these problems most affects day-to-day business operations and then formulates policy solutions based on local need.
The Growth Lab can apply many different strategies to understand a business ecosystem from the ground level. First, they can study whether historical improvements in a problem changed growth prospects. For instance, if a new road coincided with job creation, transport infrastructure may be constraining future growth. Second, they can examine the composition of businesses that exist or don’t exist to understand the core weaknesses of a specific business ecosystem. For example, a city in which all successful firms are nonintensive in electricity (or use their own generator) likely needs an improved electricity grid, as only firms that don’t rely on electricity survive and scale. Lastly, they can observe the peculiarities that separate one region from another. For instance, a town in which firms invest heavily in private security services is likely facing a public-safety problem that is constraining business growth. Such strategies improve on the practices of development organizations that observe various problems and in turn recommend a laundry list of policies without grounding analysis in what locals need.
Further, the Growth Lab works with local leaders to identify opportunities within existing comparative advantages and latent capabilities. This allows economic development to reach individuals often excluded from growth. The Growth Lab’s Metroverse tool, an online navigator that compares the business capabilities of distinct urban areas, helps tailor industry recommendations to existing business composition and capabilities. Such an approach stands in stark contrast to development practitioners who too often push preselected value chains ill-fitted to the unique context.
The Peace Corps offers another example of an organization that bridges the local and national divide. A US government agency that deploys volunteers overseas for international development assistance, the Peace Corps operates at the community level but leverages opportunities at the national level to effect broad transformation. Peace Corps volunteers commit to two years of service in villages and communities of both middle-income and developing countries. They learn local languages and live with local families to better integrate into traditions and cultural values.
The Peace Corps’ work is grounded in the Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) framework, which focuses on capacity-building initiatives implemented locally and driven by community needs. However, the Peace Corps does not rely on PACA alone. The organization also connects local lessons learned and community understanding to resources afforded by regional development initiatives. This second development model is the Logic Project Framework (LPF). The LPF articulates the overall objectives for country-level programs in spheres such as health and agriculture, as well as best practices for volunteers. The LPF is cocreated with both national and local stakeholders and includes rigorous monitoring, reporting, and assessments.
Crucially, the LPF incorporates lessons learned and data compiled from the PACA fieldwork to inform strategy at the country level. Rather than a centralized mandate driving on-the-ground work, community-level success informs the high-level program strategy. Further, the data and lessons learned at the community level are not only incorporated into the Peace Corps strategy but shared with US government agencies such as USAID and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), as well as other international development organizations and host-country government agencies.
Further, because USAID and PEPFAR work directly with Peace Corps volunteers, these global initiatives now have a direct presence in underserved communities, bridging the divide between resources and local impact. Communities benefit from the infusion of know-how and funds, while USAID and PEPFAR benefit from clear impact gains at the local level in a manner consistent with the communities’ own priorities.
Uniting the local and the regional requires trust, perspective, and partnership. Cocreation, communication, commitment, and a full continuous review process are essential to equitable partnerships and a continuous loop of development program adjustment and refinement. Trust—the core of partnership—builds when distinct organizations acknowledge the legitimacy of each other’s goals even if they differ from one’s own.
Steps for Inclusive Development
Organizations that exist on one side of the divide between regional and local scopes should aim for more inclusive development practice. Taking steps in this direction would not require a new mission statement or organizational structure. Rather, a new regional or local perspective would deepen existing development interventions.
Community-level organizations can promote more inclusive development first by contributing to wider knowledge sharing. Sharable reports with lessons learned (successes and failures) may contradict larger policies. Timely feedback is critical. Additionally, community-level data creates a body of sampling that adds richness to national data sets, often exposing community-level heterogeneities. National-level initiatives can adjust and tailor accordingly.
Second, local organizations should also take advantage of resources beyond funding. National programs can bring know-how related to new production practices, service delivery, and other approaches. Such on-the-ground experience is an easy opportunity for replication of successes and cross-community relationship building.
Third, local organizations should learn from existing evidence from the larger region. The flip side of sharing local data and lessons is to learn from similar organizations nearby. Community organizations should reach out to gather wider analyses and be aware of wider trends in the industry. Although not all national best practices may apply, the ones that fit local circumstances open perspectives on the larger economic and social context.
National-level organizations, for their part, can promote inclusiveness in development outcomes in several ways. First, development practitioners should be agnostic toward a specific intervention prior to engagement. Understand the problem and community needs before thinking how to fix it.
Second, national-level organizations should adopt reforms piecemeal and target them. Development practitioners should prioritize problem areas that cannot be resolved locally and allow local ingenuity to tackle less intractable problems. Problems with broader implications should be addressed first to not waste limited development resources on less meaningful initiatives.
Third, such organizations should remember that locally responsive national development creates new (and better) problems. Once one barrier is lifted, another will shortly arise. Economic growth, for instance, often generates environmental or social problems. Any development intervention must continuously iterate between reading the shifting reality on the ground and updating the policy package to address the next barrier to development.
Development practitioners should not limit themselves in how they conceive solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Top-down development must target excluded populations and geographies to ensure the full societal participation of underserved communities. Bottom-up initiatives, in turn, must take advantage of regional development platforms and opportunities. The next breakthrough in development just may come from listening to a perspective that has a slightly different scope.
Read more stories by Tim Freeman & Jody Olsen.