Managing Change in Development Research Institutes – Report from the 12th EADI General Conference
Simon Maxwell
Geneva in July was a hot ticket. That’s because it was unusually warm on the street and even warmer in the conference rooms at the EADI General Conference! Thank goodness for a breeze by the lake, and for a boat trip.
More seriously, the Conference was a hot ticket for many of us because of the quality of the papers and presentations. This was certainly the case at the one-day workshop on ‘Planning for the Future and Managing Change in Research Institutes and Think-Tanks’. The workshop was intended as a reserved session for Directors, but somehow became open. No problem, there were many good contributions.
Remember (see my article in the last EADI newsletter 1-2008), our purpose was to create a safe space in which leaders and change managers in our sector could share experience. There were ten contributions on different topics, ranging from how to ensure research quality and credibility, through managing mergers and major reorientations, to the question of improving quality and impact. In no particular order, some highlights were:
On bridging research and policy
· Paul Engel, Director of ECDPM in Maastricht, talking about ‘Influencing Without Lobbying’. ECDPM has no lobbying agenda and its principal objective is to improve the policy process, through long-term engagement with key stakeholders, facilitating partnerships and ensuring open communication. A key strategy is ‘knit-working’, connecting policy actors, practitioners and specialists in segmented policy arenas and balancing information asymmetries.
· Birgit Habermann, Coordinator of the Commission for Development Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, talked about the difference between ‘Research on Development’, ‘Research for Development’ and ‘Development Policy Research’. Her main focus was on bridging research, theory and development. She called for much better deployment of ‘soft skills’ in development research: we researchers should be ‘participative but not manipulative’.
· Ruerd Ruben runs the Centre for International Development Issues in Nijmegen. This is an academic centre which has its roots in activism, and Ruerd talked about the challenges of linking development research and development policy. He saw exciting new possibilities for new relationships based on principles like ‘mutual interests, separate responsibilities’. Should there be shared staff appointments between universities and development agencies? The creation of research positions with development ministries? Joint research and policy programmes with NGOs? Ruerd saw the possibility of ‘triple win’ strategies, benefiting practitioners, researchers in the North and researchers in the South.
On re-engineering institutions
· Louka Katseli, now a Member of Parliament in Greece, but until recently Director of the OECD Development Centre, told the story of how the DC was re-energised and transformed after 2003, to the point where it now has expanded membership, much better engagement with policy-makers and much better funding. Leadership skills are obviously crucial, with a strategy for quick wins, and careful constituency-building with a variety of stake-holders. An external evaluation played a key role in building trust and demonstrating credibility.
· Alberto Paloni provided another example of change management, this time at the Centre for Development Studies, University of Glasgow. How did the Centre rebuild it student numbers and develop a strong reputation for work in new areas like international finance? By re-organising from below, changing the structure of courses, working with new partners within the University, and tapping into new student markets overseas. All this made the University sit up!
· Ben Lamoree runs the International Water Centre in the Netherlands. Among the challenges he discussed was the significant change to the funding environment associated with the rise in funding for Southern organisations. In this context, North-South partnership became a key issue. As other presentations showed, for example by Birgit Habermann, this area was fraught with difficulty.
On managing for quality
· Desmond McNeill talked about his time as Director of the Environment and Development Centre at the University of Oslo. In that environment, research quality was a crucial bridge to positioning and funding – and a controversial topic for an inter-disciplinary and practice-oriented centre, surrounded in the University by specialist academic and disciplinary departments. A simple and dramatic change was to insist that all researchers should either have or be studying for a doctorate. Desmond identified a general management lesson, which was that ‘the initial decision was very clear and simple, was hard to dispute, and had consequences which followed inevitably thanks to forces outside our own control’. There was a clear improvement in the quality of staff and publications at the Centre.
· Robrecht Renard faced a similar problem at the Institute of Development Policy and Management at the University of Antwerp. As in many of our Centres, consulting work and more general policy advice can be seen as undermining research excellence in a university context – and yet provide essential opportunities for staff to engage with the real world. In Antwerp, there have been determined efforts to integrate policy advice with teaching and research. One option, for example, is that the division of labour between teaching, research and ‘service delivery’ should be 40:40:20. But should policy work be listed explicitly, with a 30:30:30:10 split as between teaching, research, policy work and service delivery? Robrecht also observed that we need better indicators for the quality of policy work.
On merging institutions
· Michel Carton and Nanna Hvidt both spoke about the merger of development and foreign policy institutions, Michel in Switzerland and Nanna in Denmark. Sometimes, mergers are driven by financial exigencies, sometimes by ideological imperatives about the relationship between foreign policy and development, sometimes simply by administrative convenience. Whatever the rationale, the institutional and personal politics require high levels of management skill.
This was a varied and disparate group of papers and presentations, with many common concerns expressed, but no over-arching theme. That was not the intention at this stage. We proved the hypothesis we started with, which was that Institute Directors in the EADI family shared preoccupations over and above the research agenda they work on – and also that they could learn from and support each other. Well, I learned a lot anyway, and now know where to find support!
I hope this will become an EADI resource and workstream in the future. It would be good to accumulate more cases, but also to cross-reference these thematic presentations to a set of functional questions about what it takes to lead and manage in our sector. Developing a vision. Managing relationships with external stakeholders. Building partnerships. Implementing change. Improving accountability. Marketing. These are just a few of the competences we need and can help each other acquire.
