Systems Change and Governments
You must have come across this word ‘Systems Change’ a lot during webinars, when reading any reports, speeches. A lot of people want to work on creating a systemic change in the development sector. But what is this systems change? What is a system? Who are the actors? What is the value relationship? What is the ultimate outcome we all want? These are the questions we must answer!
What is a system? What are the different types of systems around us? How do they intersect with each other?
A system is a group of actors/substances which interact with each other which produce different outcomes. These outcomes could be social, political, ecological, political, financial, emotional, etc.
I will try to classify systems into two parts:
1. Natural (which humans cannot change) 2. Man-made (which was being made through evolution by humans and humans can change it)
Natural systems are mainly ecological, biological, chemical — everything from the planetary systems to atomic systems. We can have an impact on the systems, affect the outcomes somewhat but cannot change the rules per se since we are a part of the design itself.
Man-made systems start from — money, law, land, democracy, religion, community, households, cities, states, markets, economies, knowledge, health systems, mathematic, languages, etc. — all of these evolved throughout the time and humans have shaped the way it is today. I will elaborate further more on this second type of system.
Today, we are faced with a ton of challenges ranging from carbon emissions, malnutrition, violence, corruption, suicides, unemployment, etc. — this needs no more introduction since at some level, there is a level of collective awareness of the problems we face. Yet somehow, we are all a part of this system and everyone has a spark to solve something, to be able to contribute, or to be seen as a good person, etc.
But to be able to ‘change’ something, we must understand the gears of the system, the actors and the levers we have to be able to change the overall outcomes which is, in most of the cases on a better ecology, social harmony, economic prosperity, freedom of choice and good health. Of-course there can be others as well but somewhere they align towards these. That is what most programs/policies/products/services point at.
Okay, let us begin. We will start from the small units/systems to bigger systems. The playing field is three types of institutions. These include the government, the markets/private organisations and the civil society.
Civil society can include a family, a group, a collective or a non-profit organisation. Markets include private for-profit companies and government is the main big daddy — a people’s institution where they choose their representatives, decide what is good for them and the nation and take the steering wheel.
If you want to make systems change, you should always consider influencing or steering the wheel. Without the big daddy government, there is no systems change because governments provide the very foundation of the man-made systems. Government can’t be defined by a single function but is a mix of these functions/thinking hats.
This image which I made shows how Governments wears hundreds of hats and has multiple functions. The root of a state is this notion of a collective identity or something which unites or makes us a part of something. Whether it’s geographic, ethnic, racial or anything. Remember, government is the ultimate steering wheel.
If we want to engage with the government whether as elected officials, public servants, consultants or partners, we need to be able to navigate the system and understand the levers we want to pull at different levels for the outcomes we desire.
In order to understand levers, we need to understand three things mainly: 1. The processes and cycles 2. The actors 3. Desired outcomes that we need. Everything else shall be defined after that whether it is value relationships between markets, governments or civil society, incentives for the actors to change something or information gaps in the system.
or a good way is to also understand in cycles!
Mapping our system is the first step if we want to navigate and do something about it. Here I elaborate on 14 levers for Systems Change in the context of Governments.
1. Collective bargaining: Say if your pipeline of water supply is broken and it only affects your household individually. So you go to the municipal office or file a grievance or connect with your corporator. The chances are that it is gonna take a lot of time since you do not have that bargaining muscle. Now, compare that with a issue like huge traffic jams in a city. The probability is likely that since a large number of people face this problem and experience it, they get frustrated and will find channels to solve it: maybe they will trend hashtags on twitter, meet their elected representatives, organise a protest, start petitions on change.org and push a solution- maybe a metro or a bus corridor. The truth is that if a problem affects a large number of people, the probability of it getting solved increases. But what about micro issues which face people who do not have social media, access to political representatives, etc? This is where collectivisation works. India has witnessed a strong collectivisation movement from SHGs to cooperatives and is now also seen in farmer groups, etc. I think the critical questions we need to ask ourselves is in the 21st century, how do we collectivise over the issues we all face? How do we facilitate collectivisation at a micro level? What channels should we leverage for collective bargaining?
2. Open data: Government collects tons of data on public services, budgets, socio-economic outcomes, economy, public infrastructure, etc. This has been traditionally used for internal governance management and policy design. However, we are seeing an open data wave where more and more governments are opening up huge administrative data-sets to the public. Opening up government data is a very very important lever to bring transparency and accountability into the system. This also provides meaningful data to citizens, researchers and journalists who can further engage with the system, give feedback, critique or watch the state in service delivery. There are innumerable ways in which we can utilise government data! In a few countries, infrastructure, nightlight and mobility data is used to estimate poverty. Data on demographics, disease, population density is now used to estimate vulnerability to the COVID-19. Opening up government data opens up huge opportunities for research and scrutiny.
3. Data creation: So opening up data is important but with new emerging problems, without data systems to make sense of it, how can policy-makers even understand the scale of a problem? We cannot depend on the old statistical systems to make sense of new problems. If we cannot estimate and measure anything, how can we solve? How can we allocate resources? Imagine if we did not have an HMIS system, how would we report COVID cases, count the tests, trace the contacts, etc? Data systems have to evolve to make sense of problems real time. Imagine if we announced the economic package but had no way to measure the economic recovery. Data creation as a lever should be used to make sense of a problem at scale.
4. Citizen science and crowdsourcing: Citizen science taps into the collective potential of citizens who can generate data, create data and contribute in scientific research. We have seen the COVID trackers, hunger maps, open street maps and migrants data maps have been very useful for authorities and civil society organisations as well. We have somewhat felt the power of citizens in solving these problems. Traditionally, citizens science has been used in biodiversity projects but we have seen emerging uses last year. We need to tap into the collective intelligence of citizens through platforms where they can be organised, generate meaningful data and then multiple stakeholders can use it.
Civil society and citizens leveraged citizen science to identify and track migrant workers (CoAST India Data Collaborative) and the hunger map by KhaanaChahiye which delivered millions of meals to the hungry during the lockdown and even beyond. COVID19India.org has been an amazing crowdsourced information portal in tests, cases, deaths and other information which is maintained by a group of people from different backgrounds. The Upcode Academy’s COVID-19 SG dashboard is an amazing project as well.
5. Increasing State Capacity: Governments face a lot of capacity issues ranging from declining levels of human capital, diminished independence from the political executive, growing worries about malfeasance and corruption, a lack of specialisation, and weak incentives for professional advancement. India lags behind in terms of personnel, is overly bureaucratised when it comes to rules and regulations. Judiciary has multiple issues including poor infrastructure, personnel shortfalls, constant adjournment requests, and inadequate judicial planning. Parliaments need to increase legislative scrutiny, give more agency to MPs, etc. We have one of the lowest government employees at the local level compared to other countries.
Broadly, state capacity is an issue of resources, capacity of individuals and the extent to which individuals exercise their capacity to act in response to states of the world to further the (better) goals of the organisation.
Solving this is the hardest. This spans across Legislative, Executive and the Judiciary branches. This is not something which can be solved with data or technology. This demands political will and fixing our institutions, allocating more resources, designing incentives for frontline workers and local government employees, bringing in reforms, hiring more personnel, changing methods of assessments and up-skilling them.
6. Citizens, media and civil society as watch-dogs:
Who Monitors the monitor?
Citizens can engage meaningfully in the policy processes as I mentioned above through watching the state in service delivery and scrutinising the state. Media and civil society are an important lever as well in watching and tracking public services. A number of CSOs closely monitor PDS and MGNREGA to find out payment delays, quantity/quality frauds, transaction failures and they take the matters up with civil servants and local political leaders.
These three actors also should play an important role in holding elected representatives and civil servants accountable. The critical questions here are: How can they track public expenditures? How can they check the backgrounds of elected representatives? How can citizens access and analyse CAG’s state audit reports? How can they report corruption and frauds? What are the mediums and channels through which we obtain this information from government? RTI is one tool, parliamentary questions and answers is another, analysing MIS data of key welfare schemes, open data portals, etc. but how do we enable more and more citizens, media and civil society organisations to be the watch-dogs of the state?
7. Solving the information and communications problem: We know how tough it is find out about welfare schemes, file a grievance, find out about latest orders and acts, navigate through hundreds of apps, file an RTI or an FIR, etc. It feels like an overload of information if one citizen visits a government website and is clueless where to go. Government throws a lot of information daily on citizens and streamlining this is very crucial. Citizens should know where to go for what, what to do if the need it not addressed, whom to contact, etc. If the puzzle does not get solved, there will be huge information gaps where fake news will thrive and governments will fail to communicate.Navigating through the government information and communications maze is almost impossible for a common citizen. COVID taught us lessons. In the beginning, there were hundreds of portals and helplines but slowly we saw consolidation. Multiple states had made their own contact tracing and quarantine monitoring apps but slowly we had only 2–3 super-apps which were a window to other features.
8. Design for the citizens: All these questions brings us to the next lever which is design. How do we design better public services? better government websites? better apps? better information capture mechanisms?
How do we start? We start by letting governments experience a citizen’s pain points. This was one framework I used to understand citizen’s challenges. This builds a foundation for better design!
9. Sense-making, evaluation and course correction as core competencies: As we move to a data rich country, how can governments make sense of everything?
This is an illustration by Pulse Lab, Jakarta on how they make sense through various sources of data and how they’ve evolved over time.
Sense-making is an important lever for governments. It has to know how many children are born everyday, how many drop-out of school, how many farmers are poor, how much infrastructure it has, how many companies exist, etc to be able to govern, regulate and exercise different functions. If, for example, the construction workers are not registered on welfare boards, governments have no clue and cannot shoot in the dark. It needs data, it needs profiling, it needs tracking, it needs monitoring and it needs diagnosis.
Next comes evaluation capabilities of governments: Governments need to constantly evaluate whether their interventions are having any effect on the outcomes. They need to measure, measure and measure. Periodic assessments, base-endline surveys, RCTs, etc are very crucial to measure the impact. Ofcourse we cannot measure everything. Some reforms take a long time while some outcomes are visible over a shorter period of time. However, having the evaluation lens is important because it brings us to the third part.
Course correction: If governments know they messed up, they can acknowledge, accept and do something about it. Course correction capabilities are crucial in these times where everything is so uncertain but we take a nuanced approach and course correct constantly.
10. Creating markets and companies: The myth about private sector doing everything and innovating should be busted. Most innovations come because governments invest, create the necessary policy environment and provide access to public infrastructure including physical and digital so that companies can create on top of these aspects.
Government as a market-maker is an interesting concept. As Marianna Mazzucato writes, The usual critique that governments cannot pick winners ignores the fact that the internet was picked through such mission oriented investments, as were nearly all the technologies in the iPhone (including GPS, Siri, and touchscreen). And in the energy sector, solar, nuclear, wind, and even shale gas, were primed by public finance. Elon Musk’s three companies Solar City, Tesla, and Space X have received over $4.9 billion in public support. Sometimes these investments succeed (Tesla), sometimes they fail (Solyndra).
How do we build public institutions which act as investors, innovators and risk takers for the challenges we face today and help launch ventures which address these very challenges? How can the state provide incentives to develop public interest technologies? We need to move away from one time hackathons and awards to a more sustainable approach.
11. Building the regulatory muscle: As we start to privatise multiple sectors and remove them from the clutches of the state, it is important we develop the regulatory muscle. Government as a regulator is it’s one of the most important functions. We have seen frauds in publicly listed companies, monopolies being formed in certain sectors, corporate exploitation, patent and copyright infringements, etc. These will keep happening but we need to develop our regulatory muscle. Every crisis breaks this muscle and also gives the muscle a chance to grow further (We have learned the lessons from the micro finance crisis).
Regulation of emerging technologies is quite tricky since legislators do not understand it fully, regulators do not have more powers, there is an absence of legislation or there is not reporting/auditing mechanisms for the regulators. Every important industry gets regulated and it should be done in a way which does not hamper the innovation happening.
12. Creating public digital infrastructures: Governments have built a lot of public infrastructure over-time such as roads, reservoirs, ports, railways, etc. These are not typical businesses but are public goods. Recently, there has been a huge focus on creation of public digital goods. India has experienced the journey with the inception of the India-stack (Identity, Payments and Data layer). It did wonders by providing identity to more than 90% of our population, providing bank accounts to more than 80% of the adults and lowering the cost of e-KYC. The payments layer UPI is one of the world’s best. We were able to leverage this infrastructure to send cash transfers to millions of people.
There are some systems which have adopted this approach but we need to build such public digital infrastructure in multiple sectors such as social protection, agriculture, health, judiciary, public finance, etc. Can we build a universal digital architecture for welfare delivery? Can we build an open digital platform for education and skilling? Can we open up administrative data by tagging every administrative unit and department? Can we build an Agristack combining data of farmers, land records, weather, Agmarkets, transport providers, processing units, etc? We sure will, in the future. Developing open digital ecosystems will help address our large public problems at scale.
13. Crowdlaw and advocacy: Most of the above levers were on the policy delivery side but we also need to think about the policy-making lever. India has a pre-legislative consultation policy but citizens at large do not know about how to provide feedback on draft bills. Governments need to communicate draft bills in a plain and local language to the citizens and build channels for them to provide feedback effectively. Parliaments also needs to listen to issues which citizens face at large and citizens should be able to petition parliaments on issues they feel are important.
We have a lot of civil society organisations who do fantastic work on the ground and are constantly engaged at the last mile of public service delivery and know about multiple issues and nuances. How can legislators tap into such organisations and know about the gaps in the policies? How can civil society orgs form collectives and advocate for better policies and rules?
14. Power of networks: Building networks of like-minded people is very central to systems change. The principle here is that if we can connect the decision maker, the experimenter, the researcher and the implementor, we can do wonders. There have been a few instances of small district level initiatives but there is no effort at scale to connect these players. For the cross pollination of ideas to happen, for interventions to get documented and replicated, networks have to function. We have seen the power of networks whether it’s a job sharing group or a group where people just help each other with any issue or where people buy and sell things freely, it has always reduced the friction.
In the case of governments, administrators and politicians do have their internal networks but how do we connect them with citizens, civil society and entrepreneurs? If we can build channels for these players with a minimum friction and the lowest barrier to interact, we can make change happen!
These were some of the powerful levers which anyone choose to work on for advancing systems change in government.
What do you think are some of the additional/other levers we should look at? Let me know in the comments!
References: https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/07/02/transforming-state-capacity-in-india-pub-79411/ ; https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/09/01/indian-administrative-service-meets-big-data-pub-64457 ; https://hbr.org/2016/10/an-entrepreneurial-society-needs-an-entrepreneurial-state
