In my experience, you would typically find the death of some policy intervention at the point of implementation, or inside a poorly conceptualised framework, or at the heart of a mismatch between the policy prescription and on-ground market reality, or inside the trap of picking winners and losers, and so on. What is seldom talked about relates to the less obvious but equally important – or even more important – reasons behind these failures, especially for the ones that never get off the ground. They are more social, more human, more reliant on personal judgment and relationships. I will talk about a few of them in my notes and use my own personal experience to narrate their workings. I will of course remove country and individual names, but I will leave faint clues regarding who and where, perhaps when even.
It is important to know what type of guest you are as early as possible and work to turn it around if you are the unwanted type. I learnt this early on in my career in the development game. We got a request for technical assistance from an African country to help with determining whether or not it was a good idea to build a petroleum refinery. The request came directly from the country’s president to our chief executive. So, all eyes were on it and on making sure we put our best foot forward. I had just come from a brief life of downstream petroleum sector analysis, so this was right up my alley, and I got paired with a more senior adviser for the legal advisory work, who would lead the project. Neither of us had an engineering qualification nor actual refining experience so we engaged the services of an expert who had worked in refineries for about three or so decades. And we went to work. We did as much as we could in London, and then went to the country for our mission. Everybody wanted to be involved. Even the country’s High Commissioner to the UK at the time made the trip. We were taken to see the crude oil facilities where discoveries had been made and shown as much information as the companies could show us without having to sign any confidentiality agreements. It was all great fun, and everybody was cooperative and in lockstep because Mr President had ordered it so. Or so I thought.
We made our presentation to the President, his energy minister, and some other key officials. This is where my lesson started. Our assessment didn’t land on the answer they were expecting. We didn’t think it was a great idea to build the refinery. The numbers didn’t support it at the time. We did realise that it would be an awkward conclusion to deliver, so we tried (and I thought quite well) to present it by showing the difficult conditions that would need to hold in order for the idea to make sense. This still didn’t work. It still landed cold.
We made a few mistakes here. Our consultation with the ministry folk was scant at best. Maybe we were carried away by the fact that the project was at the behest of the President (I certainly was taken by this). What we didn’t connect was that we had most certainly walked into territory where the guys in the factory (in this case, the energy ministry) did not consider that external help was at all necessary. And on top of this, we hardly consulted them in the process of preparing our analysis and recommendations. Our report was welcomed, and we were thanked, and there was media fanfare, and I got a photo with the president, and we all went home. I patted myself on the back for a job well done.
Nothing happened to our report or recommendations after that. Not a thing. Not a single thing. Our report likely got binned. Future projects with similar dynamics (i.e. where you were clearly an unwelcome guest) became easier to spot and navigate. From that first experience, I devoted a fair bit of my planning and scoping energy to getting a sense of who actually engineered the request for our assistance. Was it borne out of a genuine need to fix a problem? Was it ordered over the heads of the actual ministry or department you were going to end up working with? Did it come as a tick-box exercise, a necessary hoop to jump, for the government to access other assistance such as a development loan? There were many occasions in future where I would come across advisers from other organisations totally oblivious to these nuances, like I was when I said that African country shouldn’t go ahead and build the refinery.
It is also important to gain the respect and buy-in from senior leadership. A year after this refinery project experience, I worked on the revision of this same African government’s mining policy. The work included recommendations for institutional reform, recalibrating the regulatory framework for mining, and re-framing the fiscal regime for mining revenues. This is the kind of stuff I really looked forward to, for selfish reasons. Yes, it would enhance the government’s chances of increasing mining sector revenue and improving governance in general. But it would look great on my CV. I’d put in extra effort for this one. I really did see a window from this project to propel me, and I was going to seize the opportunity to knock it out of the park. I would one day write or speak about my success with the project, I thought. A valuable lesson I’d learnt from the refinery project was the importance of keeping everybody on side. By everybody, I mean the government ministry that requested the technical assistance in the first place, the department within the ministry that had particular oversight for the project, the revenue authority, the ministry of finance, the planning department, the law reform commission and office of the attorney general, the environment ministry, civil society, mining sector companies already operating in the country. There are so many permutations of actors you need to keep on side in these groups that sometimes it is down to pure luck that you progress things hitch-free.
I did not succeed with this project. Sure, I had all my stakeholder interactions. I met with all the right people, and I did it in stages, working my way from the shop floor up. Sure, I offered recommendations that would have at least increased the potential for the government to increase its revenue from mining operations in a progressive manner that responded to profitability. They never made it to new policy, nor did any legislative amendment emerge from them. Two factors derailed me. The first was confidence from the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, or the lack of it. I had not met him during the refinery project. I’d learnt, in the earlier project, of how influential he was in the ministry and government as a whole so I was determined to meet him for this one. We exchanged emails very often and had spoken on the phone several times prior to my first meeting with him. Each interaction was cordial, sometimes jokey, and overall, very professional. When we eventually met, the meeting lasted about 15 minutes in total. He spent much of that time staring at me, with some sort of surprised look. I gave my executive summary of the advisory report I’d prepared and summarised all the stakeholder engagement I’d conducted so far, as well as outline what was to follow. And then there was an unusually long period of silence, so long that it then got awkward for me. And then he eventually spoke. “Doctor. Doctor. Doctor, you’re very young!”, he exclaimed, but with a broad smile. I had just turned 33. Nothing in my expertise or experience prepared me for a quick enough response to his comment. I stuttered something along the lines of having finished university at quite a young age and being lucky to have gained some experience under my belt as a result. He didn’t say much after that, beyond gratitude for the work done so far. That was the last time I met him, received an email reply from him, or spoke to him on the phone. I would only deal with his junior colleagues from then on, and we all knew what that meant. The project owner had decided his consultant was too young to take seriously, and this fed through to the rest of the shop floor.
The second blow was just bad timing. The office holder with day-to-day responsibility for mining sector regulation (I have given this long-winded description to avoid clues) ran into a spot of bother with the authorities and was suspended from his duties. He was my link to all the stakeholders I mentioned earlier. For operational purposes, even though he got steer from the permanent secretary, he was responsible for ensuring the project got delivered. He offered me encouragement when he noticed my discomfort on realising that everybody knew I’d been shut out. You learn very quickly that the presence or absence of an individual in post makes a difference to how the duties of said post will be executed. Whatever project activity had not yet stopped as a result of me being frozen out by his superior was effectively squashed by this gentleman’s suspension.
And that was that. 0 for 2 in that particular country, as far as seeing my policy interventions convert into anything concrete. Years later, in another African country, my trip coincided with visits from other advisers from other organisations who came in for various other projects. I overheard many dinner conversations, particularly from the younger advisers, ranging from confidently not needing to engage certain officers because they found them problematic, to wondering why it had been so many days since their arrival and they had not been able to meet with certain key government officials. I cynically smiled in my certainty that none of their work was going to bear fruit. I probably should have told them.
In a future note, I will talk about vested interest, also using a personal experience. This is more serious, perhaps, than being given the run-around by government officials who do not want to deal with you for whatever reason (I once landed in a country to discover that most of the government officials I was scheduled to meet had all gone to the country's capital to execute a plan that locked out the opposition party while they swiftly passed new legislation. I was there to help make some key amendments to that same piece of legislation which was nowhere near ready to be passed at that time). It is also more subtle. But it is as similar in outcome as you not being able to win the ear of the decision makers in the policy game, no matter the quality of your work. This factor needs a much higher weighting when planning assignments of this nature.
"It is also important to gain the respect and buy-in from senior leadership." - a key factor at ANY stage of EVERY project.
That being said, your article sheds light on why I doubt that sub saharan Africa will ever 'get there'. Thanks for sharing your experience.
“Measures of policy are necessarily controlled by circumstances; and, consequently, what may be wise and expedient under certain circumstances might be eminently unwise and impolitic under different circumstances. To persist in acting in the same way under circumstances essentially different would be folly and obstinacy, and not consistency.” ~ John C. Calhoun