Emergent Thoughts on Emergence

Just finished ‘Aid on the Edge of Chaos’ by Ben Ramalingam, which applies ideas about complex adaptive systems to aid and development. Though ‘finished’ wouldn’t be quite the right word, as I reckon I’ll need about four more readings to get close to understanding the content. As the title suggests, this will be more a provisional set of conclusions.

Conventional development thinking: 'whoops'
credit www.drsalonen.com

I’ve already written about how Ramalingam critiques the current mode of thinking in development but it’s worth repeating the basic point: we need to stop applying simplistic analyses to complex problems. Ideas derived from Newtonian physics aren’t able to fully describe the totality of our social, environmental, ecological, political and economic reality. Who knew? Actually, the observation that the world is complex is so obvious that I can’t believe we’ve managed to fool ourselves into thinking that you can reduce REALITY to a few squares on a log-frame all this time. 

Upshot: as Abraham Lincoln says, "we must disenthrall ourselves" (one of many, many brilliant quotes in the book).

One part of this disenthralling is to stop looking for panaceas in development. Owen Barder recounts them nicely for us: more capital, more savings, more aid, more technology, better policies, better institutions, better politics. In fact, the desire for panaceas is itself part of the problem. And no, thinking in terms of complex adaptive systems is not the panacea either. This might seem obvious: accepting that there isn’t one solution to the problem of achieving development sounds easy, but actually our brains have a sneaky tendency to slip back into that way of thinking. This came home to me listening to a podcast in preparation for this post (it’s sad but I actually do prepare); Humanosphere editor Tom Paulson, when interviewing Owen Barder, asked him whether complexity thinking means that we need to look at tax havens to achieve development. Barder: that’s exactly the type of panacea thinking we are trying to get away from. Yeah.

So what are complex adaptive systems/systems of organised complexity? Let me throw some words at you that together constitute a vague approximation to an answer. Complex adaptive systems have large numbers of mutually interacting parts, are open to the environment, are self-organising in their internal structure, have ‘emergent’ macroscopic properties over and above the properties of their constitutive parts (think human consciousness as more than putting together feet and white blood cells and nerves and lungs). Complex systems are interconnected and interdependent and dynamic, constantly evolving and adapting. From all that I’m sure it’s apparent that I don’t totally understand either. Looking at the box might be helpful at this point. In fact Ramalingam takes pains to emphasise that complexity thinking is itself a work in progress even for people who research it, so don’t feel bad.

Comparison of conventional aid thinking and complexity-influenced ideas about development

Okay so that’s all well and interesting that clever people have found out why everyone’s been wrong for the last seventy years but what does it mean for development? Ramalingam provides some broad-brush messages on this: complexity thinking can’t tell you what to do on Monday morning, but it can help us understand the world around us better, promote more open debate about the challenges facing us, and help us think up new approaches to problems. It can help us “see through new eyes”. In this sense, development is more of an emergent property of a society/economy rather than a outcome of a process to be engineered. Aid in an ideal world then becomes “an open innovation network,” an “internal catalyst...[to] identify, expand and sustain the space for change,” a “fluid, dynamic, emergent” process. We stop looking for ‘the answer’ because, as the NYU Development Research Institute strapline goes, “there are no answers for global poverty. There are only answer-finding systems.” If nothing else, you can’t say complexity thinking isn’t good at snappy one-liners.

The thrill from this enormous potential is kind of feeding into my disillusionment with NGO work at the moment; the organisations I have experienced thus far are not embedded in the relevant 'system', not looking to foster small adaptive changes whilst accepting the underlying complexity of the problem they are trying to address. The organisations I have worked for have their ‘product’ with its own intellectual framework which is superimposed onto a given situation. They have their own thinking, activities and feedback loops which are only tangentially aligned with the problem at hand with all its complexity, non-linear characteristics and emergent properties. And most dangerous of all, they are self-sustaining, insulated from their own inadequacies by the current aid system.

Ramalingam shows us complex systems thinking in action: it’s all over the place apparently, from emergent leadership in Obama’s election campaign, to holistic range management in Zimbabwe, to conflict resolution in Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami, to the development of M-Pesa mobile money in Kenya. The book is filled with examples.

After the above whirlwind, I’m still left with a few questions though:

• How do you identify a system? What is the scale of a system?
• How do you know when something is not a problem of organized complexity?
• What would development institutions/donors/NGOs look like if you took them apart and rebuilt them to be equipped to face problems of complexity?
• What are the steps to changing aid in the right direction? Is it just that we read Ramalingam's book, realise we’ve been doing it wrong and change our approach? How do you change the system? (Ramalingam recognises the difficulties of this with the remark that “thousands of careers depend on sustaining certain ways of looking at the world”. That'd be politics again.)

Time to read it again I guess.