Building on lessons learned in programmes funded by DFID Nigeria over the past decade, the State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI) is succeeding in supporting more responsive state governance. A sustained pattern of constructive engagement between citizens and state governments is beginning to emerge.
This paper has been written to share some of the working methods, lessons and insights emerging from SAVI’s experience to contribute to debates on effective governance programming within DFID. SAVI is achieving results through supporting partners to think and act politically to a far greater extent than previous programmes were able to.
Key findings:
- Nigeria is widely recognised as a challenging context for governance reform. Through taking a radically different approach to supporting it, SAVI’s experience demonstrates that external support can succeed in facilitating significant shifts.
- SAVI’s experience suggests that it is possible for official development agencies to have the quality of understanding, skills and management flexibility needed to be iterative and adaptive, building on locally established ways of doing things- through changing the modality of aid away from grant giving and predefined capacity building programmes, to hands-on facilitation and knowledge building.
- Changing the aid modality has a number of benefits. There are no grants of the usual kind, there is no call for proposals, no partners’ results frameworks or donor reporting requirements– and therefore none of the dangers of elite capture and diversion from locally rooted efforts that these complex procedures commonly entail. Direct support to citizens’ own initiatives is made possible without the danger of grant funding monetising citizens’ engagement with their government or distorting and weakening their incentives for engagement. The civil society partners who engage are those motivated by locally rooted concerns rather than by the funding.
- When partners have no results frameworks requiring activities and targets to be pinned down in advance, partners can plan in an iterative, adaptive way. Sustainability and working with the grain is embedded from the outset. SAVI encourages partners to recognise and draw on their own culture as a key resource, and develop knowledge, skills and networks – particularly between citizen groups, media and state legislatures – that they can continue to draw on, and pass onto others, without the need for external support.
- SAVI’s experience fully accords with the observation that the demand-side governance challenge is about institutional blockages – about ways of doing things – rather than funding gaps. Its approach to capacity building is on-going hands on, facilitative, and applied. It builds partners’ skills in the areas they prioritise through processes of self-reflection and learning and encourages an approach of learning by doing.
- The deliberately behind-the-scenes approach means that partners – rather than the SAVI programme – take responsibility for decisions and actions, and take credit for achievements. Small successes build confidence to take on bigger challenges. Partners’ confidence, credibility, legitimacy and sense of social responsibility are all gradually strengthened through a process of learning by doing and self-discovery.
- SAVI’s experience raises questions about the definition of a result in demand-side governance. Demand-side governance programmes frequently emphasise one-off and high profile policy change such as policy reform. Impressive short-term results can easily be at the expense of longer-term and more meaningful institutional change. SAVI’s experience is that effective citizenship and responsive governance are learned through action and build over time.